Carnage 21

Okay, so, there were some bad spots and, to top it all off, I think I came home with con crud. All I want to say about the bad spots is that they had nothing to do with Carnage or the resort. Most of it is on me.

On the good news side, I got to hang out with friends I don't see often and made one or two new ones. I even reconnected with a friend I hadn't talked much to in a few years. I got to spend a long weekend on the mountain and stay in a nice room.

I missed my role-playing game session, but the other game I was running was Dungeon! and it was awesome. I had forgotten how much fun that game could be. I'll definitely be doing that again.

Oh, and there was lots of fog. Fog is cool.

And I got some writing done on the way home. I don't have any pictures for that.

The Dreams in the Red Roof

Here's a dream I had Wednesday night when we stopped in Syracuse on the way to Carnage.

We were in kind of a Suicide Squad thing, at least in that nobody trusted us. We hadn't been in jail or anything, just sort of a variation on jury duty selection. There was even a reference to the fact that I had already served and something else about me having missed several phone calls about this and hearing about it on TV or something like that. There were several other people on the team but I don't remember anything significant about most of them.

Jerry was appointed the leader. I don't remember whether this came down from above or was a team vote. Either way, I missed the process because I joined up late. There was also this big monster kind of dude. His name was Groot, but he wasn't anything like the movie/comics Groot. He looked a little like the lanky, shambling trolls in first edition AD&D, but with short tendrils coming out of his temples like Man-Thing. He had kind of a sullen, cranky demeanor and spoke a little like the 80's Marvel Hulk.

There was a lot of sitting around at first, and most of the team avoided Groot. For some reason I had the idea that I was going to want to go all supervillain at some point, so I went out of my way to befriend Groot because he'd be pretty useful for that. The rest of us all had some kind of gimmicky gadget, but no real super-powers. I had this retractable metal whip thing that I could do an assortment of stunts with. This was fairly typical. Nobody had any advantage as formidable as being a giant green monster. So I started hanging out with Groot, making sure he didn't get chased away at mealtime and stuff (Groot was big and scary, but usually not all that aggressive).

I think the reason I was planning to go rogue was that it was kind of a dystopian Hunger Games world. The leader was called President, but was really a dictator who had seized power in a military coup. He had a name in the dream but I can't remember it. Definitely a dude, though. I remember going on patrol in the city and talking about options with Jerry and Tom. The general consensus was that the only way to really change things was to take out the President, but we didn't know how to accomplish this because he was well-defended and had easily anticipated and crushed similar attempts before.

Then we got the news that Groot had gotten into the narcotics cabinet and was now on a rampage. Why was there a narcotics cabinet in our headquarters? I don't know. So I decided that I could use this to further my plan by talking Groot down and making sure he was treated well or maybe helping him escape if things went wrong. Why did I think I could talk down a drug-crazed troll? No idea. I kinda liked Groot, though, so maybe I really was being a little heroic.

Anyway, Groot was up on a bridge decorated kind of like the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge in Cleveland and we arrived below. I used that whip thing to pull myself up, only to find that Superman (yeah, doesn't seem to fit the setting, does it?) had arrived on the scene and was dealing with Groot. I was trying to figure out how best to handle this when I woke up.