Ruin has come to our families
2019-Feb-25, Monday 09:06![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dorchadas
Today I'm exhausted after even more insomnia. I went to bed early after a string of bad nights where I slept fitfully and woke up from nightmares--I called in to work on Friday because I woke up from nightmares feeling awful--and then I had serious insomnia. I went to bed forty minutes early and fell asleep two hours later, and then woke up an hour before my alarm from nightmares that I can't remember anymore.
I could really use something to drive away all these nightmares.
Saturday was going to be character creation for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mutantur's upcoming Masks of Nyarlathotep game, but due to various circumstances we decided to delay it for a few weeks and play another game instead. I voted on The Quiet Year, a game of building out a single peaceful year in the hardscrabble life of a post-apocalyptic settlement, and when I arrived, mutantur mentioned that he had acquired Betrayal Legacy, the legacy game version of Betrayal at House on the Hill, for Christmas from ![[facebook.com profile]](https://www.facebook.com/favicon.ico)
fin.emery and maybe we could play that. Betrayal is one of my favorite board games (I've owned it since 2006), and I've always wanted to play a legacy board game, so I immediately and enthusiastically signed on. So mutantur, fin.emery, and I sat down to play.
Betrayal at House on the Hill is about a haunted house where the players build the house as they explore, finding items and spooky occurrences, until they accumulate enough "Omens" and then the "Haunt" happens. The Haunt ranges from a werewolf to a cult ritual to doppelgängers trying to take the characters' place to the house itself falling into Hell, fifty in all. Betrayal Legacy keeps this basic structure, but starts the house off as a small colonial farmstead in New England and tracks its inhabitants through the ages.
The first thing we noticed is that there's an outside! The first scenario heavily involved the outside, actually, and we found the Chalice of Insanity underneath the hanging tree there. That triggered a witch panic among the three of us, and the people who came to explore the house turned on each other in a frenzy. My character (age 23) beatmutantur's character (age 9) to death in an unfinished crawlspace beneath the house, and when fin.emery's character (age 19) stumbled on the aftermath, he killed my character and buried the bodies in shallow graves in the woods, taking possession of the house. We then revealed our witch cards and...none of us were witches! It was paranoia the whole time!
What a resonant message even today.
The other two scenarios we played through were more classic Betrayal, with a Haunt revealer, a traitor, and various scenarios. In the second Haunt,mutantur found the Brooch of Rage buried outside, past the blood fields and the creek in the woods, and massacred everyone else in the house. In the third Haunt, when the house was much larger and there were also servants living there, we learned that the house was the headquarters of a cult and fin.emery was revealed as a cult enforcer. The cutlists killed the nonbelievers and succeeded in awakening "Him," but what effects that has remain unclear.
Here's a shot of the board, pre-first Haunt:
Visible on the left is the pond, with mysterious glowing lights spilling from a crack in the earth:
It was a ton of fun! I'm not sure how much branching there is, but we lost every Haunt. Maybe if we had won some, or if there had been a witch in that first non-Haunt scenario, we would have had different outcomes. Or even if we had found Omens in different rooms, just like in the base non-legacy game. Some Omens have spots to write in adjective descriptions--we found the Chalice of Insanity, but maybe someone else would find a different Chalice? Maybe there's a different Brooch? I don't know. I only know what happened in our house.
A comment on the internet said there's 65,000 total combinations of Haunts and scenarios through the 13 different time periods of the house. I look forward to charting our own path through the game.
At the very end we unlocked the Helm, and the rulebook said that many players recite a mantra when removing it from its envelope at the beginning of each game. The manta I immediately suggested was, "Ruin has come to our family."
After we finished our three scenarios, it was the time when we would have normally quit anyway, so I stopped by Whole Foods and picked up some ingredients before heading home to make dinner. Last time I went to my parents' house, they loaded me down with fish, including some fish they had gotten fresh from the local farmer's market. They told me one piece of salmon was sushi-grade, so there was no way I was going to salt that and make breakfast shiozake out of it. Before I left to play Betrayal Legacy I put the salmon in the fridge to slowly thaw, and when I came back I made some dashimaki, shaved some carrot, chopped up some shiitake, sliced the fish, added some vinegar to the rice, and put it all together:
It was incredibly good. Not as photogenic as I might like, since I'm not sushi chef and I'm no good at cutting raw salmon so it looks smooth and uniform. I added too much soy sauce to the dashimake and so it's all brown instead of a nice mottled golden-white. Whole Foods inexplicably stopped carrying daikon right when I finally actually needed it for something. There's obviously no way I can find shiso without scouring Asian markets. I should have overlapped the cucumber and not just dumped it all in parallel. But none of that mattered because it was delicious. I'm really sad that I had to cook the rest of that fish because it was already thawed and I couldn't just have it sitting around, and I was too full to eat like a pound of sushi fish.
Well, mostly thawed. Even after 10 hours in the fridge, the center was a tiny bit crunchy from ice. Maybe I should have taken it out the night before.
Still, this is the first time I've ever made chirashizushi and the third time I've ever made sushi (once when I lived in Ireland, once at a cooking class in Naperville withschoolpsychnerd, and now), and I'm happy with how it turned out. Next time I might wait until I have someone else to eat it with me so I can use the entire fish, though...
Today is the all-employee company meeting, and it's already had its running time cut in half. It's usually two hours but this year it's one hour, so that's a little concerning. On the other hand, maybe they're making the meeting more efficient to avoid the usual large meeting problem where most of the attendees don't care about any particular part of the presentation. And if we get cookies 🍪 like last year, then all is forgiven.
And hopefully I don't fall asleep with how tired I am...
I could really use something to drive away all these nightmares.
Saturday was going to be character creation for
mutantur's upcoming Masks of Nyarlathotep game, but due to various circumstances we decided to delay it for a few weeks and play another game instead. I voted on The Quiet Year, a game of building out a single peaceful year in the hardscrabble life of a post-apocalyptic settlement, and when I arrived, mutantur mentioned that he had acquired Betrayal Legacy, the legacy game version of Betrayal at House on the Hill, for Christmas from mutantur, Betrayal at House on the Hill is about a haunted house where the players build the house as they explore, finding items and spooky occurrences, until they accumulate enough "Omens" and then the "Haunt" happens. The Haunt ranges from a werewolf to a cult ritual to doppelgängers trying to take the characters' place to the house itself falling into Hell, fifty in all. Betrayal Legacy keeps this basic structure, but starts the house off as a small colonial farmstead in New England and tracks its inhabitants through the ages.
The first thing we noticed is that there's an outside! The first scenario heavily involved the outside, actually, and we found the Chalice of Insanity underneath the hanging tree there. That triggered a witch panic among the three of us, and the people who came to explore the house turned on each other in a frenzy. My character (age 23) beat
mutantur's character (age 9) to death in an unfinished crawlspace beneath the house, and when What a resonant message even today.
The other two scenarios we played through were more classic Betrayal, with a Haunt revealer, a traitor, and various scenarios. In the second Haunt,
mutantur found the Brooch of Rage buried outside, past the blood fields and the creek in the woods, and massacred everyone else in the house. In the third Haunt, when the house was much larger and there were also servants living there, we learned that the house was the headquarters of a cult and Here's a shot of the board, pre-first Haunt:
Visible on the left is the pond, with mysterious glowing lights spilling from a crack in the earth:
Me: "It's some kind of mysterious...color."The left cluster is the outside and the right cluster is the ground floor. The basement and upper floor are out of the shot, to the right. In the front is a Calling, a new mechanic that adds a new ability to each character. Well-to-do let me trade in a freshly-drawn item to restore two points of a stat, a mechanic I never got to use because I never drew any items before being murdered by a berserker.
It was a ton of fun! I'm not sure how much branching there is, but we lost every Haunt. Maybe if we had won some, or if there had been a witch in that first non-Haunt scenario, we would have had different outcomes. Or even if we had found Omens in different rooms, just like in the base non-legacy game. Some Omens have spots to write in adjective descriptions--we found the Chalice of Insanity, but maybe someone else would find a different Chalice? Maybe there's a different Brooch? I don't know. I only know what happened in our house.
A comment on the internet said there's 65,000 total combinations of Haunts and scenarios through the 13 different time periods of the house. I look forward to charting our own path through the game.
Me, during the second Haunt: "I feel like I'm having some kind of dream. Maybe in some sort of...witch-house."I wonder if whether there's a witch in the prologue is based on player count, or if some copies of the Betrayal Legacy have an actual witch and some don't? It's one of the things I love about games like Dragon Age or Mass Effect, that two people can play the game and come away with completely different experiences not because they interpreted the same events differently, but because different events happened. One of the best parts of video games and tabletop RPGs, now brought into board game format. It's amazing.
At the very end we unlocked the Helm, and the rulebook said that many players recite a mantra when removing it from its envelope at the beginning of each game. The manta I immediately suggested was, "Ruin has come to our family."
After we finished our three scenarios, it was the time when we would have normally quit anyway, so I stopped by Whole Foods and picked up some ingredients before heading home to make dinner. Last time I went to my parents' house, they loaded me down with fish, including some fish they had gotten fresh from the local farmer's market. They told me one piece of salmon was sushi-grade, so there was no way I was going to salt that and make breakfast shiozake out of it. Before I left to play Betrayal Legacy I put the salmon in the fridge to slowly thaw, and when I came back I made some dashimaki, shaved some carrot, chopped up some shiitake, sliced the fish, added some vinegar to the rice, and put it all together:
It was incredibly good. Not as photogenic as I might like, since I'm not sushi chef and I'm no good at cutting raw salmon so it looks smooth and uniform. I added too much soy sauce to the dashimake and so it's all brown instead of a nice mottled golden-white. Whole Foods inexplicably stopped carrying daikon right when I finally actually needed it for something. There's obviously no way I can find shiso without scouring Asian markets. I should have overlapped the cucumber and not just dumped it all in parallel. But none of that mattered because it was delicious. I'm really sad that I had to cook the rest of that fish because it was already thawed and I couldn't just have it sitting around, and I was too full to eat like a pound of sushi fish.
Well, mostly thawed. Even after 10 hours in the fridge, the center was a tiny bit crunchy from ice. Maybe I should have taken it out the night before.
Still, this is the first time I've ever made chirashizushi and the third time I've ever made sushi (once when I lived in Ireland, once at a cooking class in Naperville with
schoolpsychnerd, and now), and I'm happy with how it turned out. Next time I might wait until I have someone else to eat it with me so I can use the entire fish, though...Today is the all-employee company meeting, and it's already had its running time cut in half. It's usually two hours but this year it's one hour, so that's a little concerning. On the other hand, maybe they're making the meeting more efficient to avoid the usual large meeting problem where most of the attendees don't care about any particular part of the presentation. And if we get cookies 🍪 like last year, then all is forgiven.
And hopefully I don't fall asleep with how tired I am...
