The Future of the Sense of the Sleight-of-Hand Man

I've been going to a lot of theatre lately.

On Friday, lisekatevans invited me to see Prometheus Bound, the show she's performing in, but I had to tell her that I had already bought tickets to another show, so after going home and devouring my curry leftovers, I walked out and took the bus down to Wicker Park to see Future Echoes.

It was...hmm. Spoilers from here.

( Future Echoes plot spoilers )

I liked Wildclaw's production of The Shadow Over Innsmouth better, but it still had the same problem with failing to stick the ending. It maintained the creepy aura for much longer, though, and that counts.

After the play, I came home and went to bed. Some people were going out for drinks, but I never heard back.

On Saturday was the first session of mutantur's new Call of Cthulhu campaign now that we're done with Horror on the Orient Express. This time it's The Sense of the Sleight-of-Hand Man, based on, or at least named after, the poem by Wallace Stevens. The PCs all started out as opium addicts in dept to the Tongs in New York, and we were all collected and driven to a meeting with one Mr. Lao. He offered us his hospitality and a special kind of opium which he said came from his homeland of Leng, and after smoking it, the PCs were transported to new bodies in the Dreamlands. My male Irish poet woke up in the body of a South Asian woman (played by Shruti Haasan, at least in my mind), and after escaping Sarkomand, we made our way overland to Inganok, where we got equipped--I picked a spear for my character, since swords are so overrepresented in fantasy warriors--and were told by the Inganok council to go to the Oracle on the Plateau of Leng and ask whether Inganok should expand to the east. When we were attacked by ghostly warriors in the wilderness, that's where we stopped for the day.

I like it! It's a lot different than the paranoia and frailty of our characters in Orient Express. We're a bunch of well-armored warriors now, and while Call of Cthulhu's system doesn't encourage high-flying heroics, the Dreamlands makes it easier to survive since magic points become a secondary reserve of hit points. It's also not on rails (), and a lot depends on what we want to do and where we want to go. I think it'll be a nice change!

I mentioned that I wanted my character to become the Queen of the Black Coast, but no one got the reference.

I'm not going to write about it as extensively as I did Horror on the Orient Express, though. That took a lot out of me.

I was originally going to see L.I.V.E. Entertainment's show tonight, but I think I'm going to stay in and get some coding practice in instead. I haven't done a lot of it since Wednesday when I finished the last project I was working on, a random quote machine. I've been focusing a bit more on Japanese since then, like with my article translation. It's not going to be easy trying to learn both of these things at once, but, well. What choice do I have?

Hope everyone else is having a good weekend!