Recap - Events of the past couple of weeks

[marsden_online]

Last weekend we hosted a major Red Cross casualty retrieval and site remediation exercise at the Hall. This was set up by B & B, two of our volunteers. The scenario was that another major earthquake had struck and a University hall had people trapped and injured inside. Many of the "casualties" were drawn from our volunteers with extras from Red cross staff, Civil Defence (who held a similar exercise last month) and some of the make-up team doing double duty. The make-up was done by students from the Design and Arts college currently campused around the corner from the Hall, and the full-on injury make up kits were provided by the Red Cross.

I was was neither organiser or casualty, as an "invisible man" my job was to keep up contact with the people who hadn't been found yet and supply them with hot chocolate and tomato soup (soup provided by another of out volunteers). In this I had expected to have another person helping me but that wasn't actually the case until I shanghaied the first couple of casualties to be "sent on" from the triage point. What that meant was that between getting around everyone the first time then going of site to get the soup and run an errand for B it was some time (and properly cold and dark) before anyone got around a second time.

This stage of the exercise was completed earlier than expected (from our perspective, I dropped the last of our casualty volunteers home about 11 which was when I'd been expecting them to be finishing at the Hall). There was room for improvement though and several casualties perished from their wounds/inattention -after- they had initially been located.

The Red Cross and B & B stayed at the Hall overnight , "slept" would probably not be accurate as along with security duties there was also an earthquake drill. I went home to my own bed.

On day two the exercise covered in clearing hazardous areas, and as a result of this we had some of our trouble spots, "heavy lifting" taken care of. Here the teams did an excellent job.

Photos

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The Hall chewed through my time this Friday as well, with one group scouting the location for a music video in the morning and another using it as the setting for a live action game of Mafia in the evening (about 20 players), which required a familiarisation tour by the organisers in the afternoon. B & A kindly provided assistance in herding this group, actually B did most of the herding :) I was very glad not to be trying to keep an eye on them all myself. However thsi took about 6 hours out of my day, which I actually desperately needed to work on ....

... the Arcana Unearthed scenario I was writing to be run first session on Saturday. I've had the entire thing in my head for a over a month and have been putting pretty much every spare hour into character pre-gen and character sheet production but other things just kept getting in the way. I even considered skipping out on the Tuesday/Thursday gaming nights for the last couple of weeks but settled for taking the work with me. So despite having even taken the day off work to do it (only to have most of the day eaten by other things) come the night before I hadn't even finished creating printable character sheets / spell lists for all the characters and NPCs. The final boss and minions hadn't been statted at all.

So I did something I've never actually done before - pulled a literal all-nighter. Finally got home and settled in front of the computer about 10 pm - finished shortly after 7am.

Then feeling surprisingly awake despite having been up for over 24 hours it was off to BoD to actually run the game. I wasn't entirely happy with how it went - to be expected for the first run of a scenario especially one where the players potentially need to assimilate a lot of information about the system/their character beforehand. I've certainly run worse games - what really held it up was having multiple players at the table who had to think hard about every action. Fortunately I designed the scenario with a couple of drop in / out encounters to manage pacing but we still finished late and that was with declaring that the PCs were obviously eventually going to triumph in the final fight. (I do need to re-jig the final boss's spell load - and the environment of the fight to let her use some spells more effectively.) Still, everyone said they enjoyed it even though it was pretty much a one-track ride.


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After that I stayed around at BoD for as long as I could, but started feeling the lack of sleep and reluctantly decided that rest was the better idea. Although I hoped for more of a nap - 2-3 hours - I actually went out for about 6. So I have missed evening board gaming and taking photos of the Grand Strategy this year which is a bit disappointing. Instead I washed the laundry and dishes while heating a late dinner, caught up on a bit of reading (I'm falling behind on that as well ... really hoping for a quiet week next week) and as an indication of where by body clock is at I'm writing this between midnight and 1am despite being quite tired. Diary entries like this are one of those things where if you don't sit down and do them they just keep building up, and I've been wanting to start this one since last weekend.

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The other thing that took time out of my day on Friday was getting the car warranted and serviced. Normally I'd get it back mid-afternoon but this time they found a coolant leak (strong suspicion who is to blame for that.) They were able to fix it without getting in parts, but it still doubled the cost of the exercise. Again I find myself being really grateful to life that I am in a position to be able to absorb these unexpected expenses. (Keeping a firm grip on this philosophy partially offsets the negative emotions raised. In theory.)