Northeast Wars X

Welcome, chrononauts, back to linear time and the third annual Pretend You’re a Time Traveler Day!

Invented by Dresden Codak, a forum user over at Koala Wallop, and promoted for a second year last December, Pretend You’re a Time Traveler Day invites people to spend a little time today acting out the part of a visitor from another era getting their first glimpse of late 2009. Dresden Codak gives lots of examples of what you might do, including giving random strangers a phone number they must call in thirty years’ time, being a Victorian inventor scandalized by contemporary fashions or dressing as a warrior from a dystopian future amazed to find other living human beings.

Those wondering just how they might have come to arrive in 2009 may find this instructional film of use.

Ahoy, matey! This nineteenth day of September be a celebration of International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Scrape the barncles from yer tricorner hat and sail forth into the day, bestowin’ salutations of a generally scalawaggy nature on all the lubbers ye may encounter.

If you’re not confident in your ability to cut a piratical pose with your vocabulary, check out the official International Talk Like a Pirate Day website. They offer not only handy glossaries and lists of key phrases, but photos and accounts of pirate-oriented doings all over the world in commemoration of this happy day.

Happy Towel Day, everyone!

Today, people all over the world celebrate the life and works of author Douglas Adams (1951-2001) by carrying a towel in his memory. Yes, a towel.

It all started with that wholly remarkable book Mr. Adams wrote, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It chronicles, among other things, the trevails of Arthur Dent, an Earthman as he tries to make it as an interstellar hitchhiker with his friend Ford, who comes from somewhere near Betelgeuse.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide, which happens to be a book within the book of the same name, has many useful nuggets of information about getting around the cosmos on less than thirty Altairian dollars a day, including that “[a] towel . . . is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have,” going on to list some of its many uses, including “avoid[ing] the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you . . . )” and convincing non-hitchhikers that if you know where your towel is, you’ve got all the more important stuff taken care of as well.

Stay hoopy, froods.

There comes a moment in every game when one player is shifting antsily in their chair, one or more’s gaze has begun wandering around the room and perhaps a stomach gurgles, as well. Or maybe the GM just needs a smoke. Such moments are clearly time for a five minute break from the game.

For such occasions, the Geek Heretic brings you GM Hold Music. Your players will thrill to neutral background music as anonymous dulcet tones reassure them that yes, their game is important to you and imparts such pearls of wisdom as, “Don’t sweat the small stuff. Gnomes, for example.”

Wordle is a web application that generates a collage out of a mass of text, like, say the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, or the Call of Cthulhu corebook. In our case, this word cloud comes from the Northeast Wars IX convention book — which, by the way, you can download here if you want to see what was on offer last year. Just click on the image to the right to see it in greater detail.

The bigger a word is, the more frequently it’s used in the text. Going by our wordle, events scheduled in the post meridian seem pretty popular; so few gamers are morning people! These word clouds can also be customized, in that you can select the font type, color palette and even general orientation of the words.

There are forum threads of people who converted roleplaying game books into wordles, over on RPG.net, ENWorld and Storygames.

Let’s run the numbers, shall we?

• 105 games on the schedule.
• 53 GMs making this the best convention yet.
• 32 pages in the conbook.
• 12 hours until the first slot kicks off tonight.
• 3 (anna half) months in the making.
• 1 place to be this weekend: Northeast Wars IX!

With the region being held tight in the grip of a seriously PO’ed Old Man Winter (and according to the source of all knowledge, Wikipedia, he is known in Russian folklore as Morozko, which now brings thoughts of MST3K’s take on Jack Frost, my favorite Russo/Finnish movie ever!) I thought I would toss out some thoughts as to how gaming can help one survive (even when it is -17F, as it is now this morning) until NE Wars which will bring Spring to the land and joy to the hearts of the people!

1. Play a very authentic version of Ticket to Ride: Nordic Countries. You may need extra large pieces so that you can move them about even while wearing mittens.

2. Take out all your eurogames with their wonderful and charming wooden pieces out of storage. . .

   . . . and burn them for warmth.

3. Take out all your Avalon Hill games with several pounds of flammable cardboard tokens . . .

   . . . and burn them for warmth.

4. Take out all your boxes of CCG cards that you have spent many happy hours (days, weeks..) at a time playing . . .

   . . . and not burn them for warmth, instead pulp them to make warm cellulose insulation for your house.

5. Play an exciting new variant of A Game of Thrones where whenever the ‘Winter is Coming’ card is drawn everybody has to go outside and run around the house once. Anyone who doesn’t contribute to fending off the Wildings will have to do three laps.

6. Break out all those games that are set in the siege of Stalingrad or Napoleon’s campaign in Russia to make a few days of sub zero weather seem like nothing.

7. Knit meeple cozies for all your meeples.

8. Why stop with meeples? Knit fetching little jackets for all of your Space Marines, Dark Eldar, Orcs, Skaven, Daemons, Zulu, Union and Confederate Regiments, Jacks, Pirates, and of course Trolls.
   

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