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Fermius Firefly

A Dream Log, whenever I remember the dreams I've had.

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Location: San Marcos, United States

Fermius is a pen name drawn from a series of short fiction I wrote when I published the small press magazine Stellanova (on paper.) I play RPG games to escape from my daily grind as a technology wage slave for the state of California. I eat out a lot in order to do my part in supporting our increasingly service level economy. I am butler to 2 feline masters. If you ask them they will tell you I'm not very good at it, late with dinner, don't have enough hands with brushes in them, and sometimes I even lock them out of their office.

Sunday, January 07, 2007

Ship to Shore for Dinner, Gaming Test


     I dreamed of being on a boat on the water again. Not sure where we were along the coast, but we were sailing North and the coast was on the starboard side. We stopped across from a small coastal town that didn't have any docks. We took a small launch up onto the shore and then walked into town for dinner.
     Nothing weird happened. The dream ended as we made our way back down to the shore to sail out to the boat for the night. I can't tell now who was with me, only that there were four of us. Neither of the boats was gasoline powered, the launch was rowed ashore, though it did have a small mast and a rolled up sail, the larger boat had wind turbines and solar panels, a huge rack of batteries ran along the keel of the boat. The wind turbines could also be used as sails. There were a couple of propane tanks for cooking and heating shower water, we also had our own small de-salinization system, and a garden watered by the greywater. It was a sort of floating biosphere experiment.

     After feeding the cats I fell back to sleep. This time the dream was here at home. A bunch of us were sitting around the front room table, playtesting one of my games on a battle-mat with two inch hexes. We were using the small drugstore plastic army men and the small aliens I'd bought one at a time from the vending machine at Killer Pizza from Mars. You could tell how powerful a figure was by the thickness of the poker chips underneath it.
     Movement was interesting, you placed one white chip in each location you moved through, then if there were no interception actions you move your figure and the whole stack on to each space in line. You could be interrupted by anyone with as many white chips as you had to yet move plus what you left on the top of your stack. When you stopped moving, the white chips on the top of the stack were the reserve action points you had left to attack or defend or react to the next players. At the end of a game turn all players put their white chips on top of their stacks and initiative was rolled for the next turn.
     Players had to spend a white chip as they moved to fire a weapon or use a special effect, or to attack an adjacent figure in Hand to Hand combat. I could see the system being a little bit cumbersome if you had more than a dozen figures, but since the number of white chips anyone had was between 2 and 6, the game seemed to flow fairly well.

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