Well, we had our Halloween party here Friday night. It went pretty well, although people didn't really start showing up until nearly an hour and a half after the stated time.

None of my friends from the old game group came, but that's OK because I never actually got around to sending formal invitations (informal invitations, however, were sent and recieved).

I picked up Games of Divinity, which has got me back in an Exalted frame of mind. The upcoming Lunar book is sure to make that worse.

Of course, I'm also floating back into an Amber frame of mind, which rereading Doyce Testerman's Things in Heaven and Earth doesn't help at all.

On the plus side, I think we are going to start a round-robin system for the Friday games to replace Huntington. That should let us get some of these other games out of our system (or at least give them a fair chance to build a following).

The system works thusly:

Every five sessions, we take a vote. One of the options on the list is to continue the current game (as long as the GM is willing to continue running).

Each person can, if desired, propose one game that they are willing to run. These are automatically eligible to be voted upon. They may also offer up one game that they are hoping that someone else will run. Those are only eligible for voting upon if someone else will claim them. (Thus, if you want to be sure a game gets a chance to be run, it's really best to offer running it yourself).

Once the list of options is complete, each person in the group ranks the candidates according to their order of preference. This is basically a popularity vote: you do not have to vote for EVERY option, just the ones you are actually interested in. So, if there are four games offered, but I only really care about two of them, I can prioritize only those two entries and leave my last two entries blank.

Then, you add up the votes using what amounts to a Borda Count system. (It looks complex, but it's really simple. In my example, if I ranked a certain game first place, it would get four points, and the game I ranked second would get three points. The other two games would get no points from me because I omitted them, but if I hadn't, they'd have gotten 2 points and 1 point for third and fourth place respectively.

The proposal that gets the most points, when all of the players votes are added up, wins.

I I have placed what I think is a pretty nifty new image up in my art gallery.

Feel free to post comments, etc.

The current phase of Huntington is now ended (as of Friday) and I managed to leave my character on an interesting development...

There are a couple of points here:

* When the gang went into the Umbra to talk to Jasmine's mom about the prophecy, Kerry was told that he needs to "bring her in" (Tenna). The original prophecy talked about the twins that represented Death and Life, which presumably meant Angelyn and Alex Cabrell, the Medium and the Werewolf.

Since the HALF gang are forced to uphold the prophecy instead, the Gilman kids got that particular role. The only problem was, both Kerry and Tenna were about Life. We knew this about Tenna from the Future Reunion Movie session we had during the previous cycle of Huntington awhile back, wherein Tenna was an awakened Verbena. Not that we felt constrained by that, but it seemed appropriate given their bond that both twins would gravitate towards the same primary sphere, and unlikely that Tenna would be joining the Euthanatos anytime soon.

* Kerry subsequently discovered that Thaddeus Smythe was, in fact, his Grandfather ... the very same Thaddeus Smythe whose sister Penelope was bizarrely transformed into his Avatar in the most recent incarnation of Ascension by Gaslight.

* Tenna was never left anything in her grandfather's will; it has always referred to Kerry alone.

* The twins have always had a bizarre tendency to reverse personalities, Kerry becoming the emotionally perceptive one, Tenna becoming analytical. This has been compared to Quantum Mechanical concept of entangled particles.

* Kerry and Tenna were always said to be identical (monozygotic) twins, despite this being impossible by any known mechanisms of biology.

* Kerry has always had a bizarre and apparently unhealthy interest in his sister.

The stage was now set for Kerry to add up 2 plus 2 and get the natural logarithm of negative 3i. Kerry has taken these factors and more to mean that Kerry and Tenna never should have been two people. (I may yet write up a bit where Thaddeus' time magic indicates as much explicitly.)

Guess he should have gotten some coaching from Jasmine on math at some point...

In any event, there was a big showdown with Julia Dornfeld, psychotic transgendered evil uber-ho, during which Kerry was alone, gravely wounded, and unable to heal himself (four aggravated damage, no Q left to heal it with, and the BSD that caused it still snarling in his face).

Faced with near-certain demise, he took a cue from Julia, and began converting his own body into microorganisms. His theory was that these organisms would force the BSD's own DNA to rewrite itself to produce more microorganisms ... in effect, the BSD would become a carrier for a BSD-seeking plague (Kerry didn't want to kill just this BSD, and anyway, the microorganisms would need more time to wear down the BSD's natural regeneration than Kerry apparently had available.)

Kerry's body was totally converted into microorganisms, effectively killing him. But he didn't cease to exist. His mind was pulled into his sister's body across their bond.

Although it was intentional on my part, my notion here is that Kerry didn't actually do anything to cause this. It was a natural consequence of one of the twins dying.

So, to summarize, Kerry is dead, and inside Tenna's mind. Tenna's roommate is Mary. Mary was Kerry's girlfriend. Tenna is a lesbian. Hilarity ensues.

Never let it be said that I can't generate love polygons ... ^_^

I suspect that viewing the world as both Female Verbena and Male Etherite Life-mages simultaneously should be ... interesting.

Tenna is presently hoping that someone will find a way to take Kerry back out of her head, and place him in a new body being grown for that purpose. But she has a strong suspicion that, once in such close contact, they won't be as easily separated.

At the very least, this method of joining the twins is a bit less ... discomfiting ... than the more mystical/alchemical process that I originally came up with. Heylel would've had nothing on a emotio-rational, self-impregnated Gilman Rebus whose offspring would later prove to be ... the Gilman twin's missing Grand-aunt, Penelope Smythe.

As described in my earlier entry, Huntington has ended. This presently means that we will be starting my Exalted game, Obsidian Requiem, the Friday after Thanksgiving weekend (December 6th, I believe).

I have been working on a page for Obsidian Requiem, though there's not much campaign-specific information there yet (just general interpretation stuff I've been writing about the Underworld).