****Warning: this entry is loooong****

I haven't been updating my blog for a week or so because to be frank I haven't been doing an awful lot of interest - I've gone out dancing for most nights of the past week and tried to do some coursewrk, and that's about it apart from an OK skirmish on sunday. Last night, however, I joined a new roleplaying game group, and I have to say it's some of the most fun roleplay I've done in a disturbingly long time. I had so much fun I almost needed to be sedated to make me go to bed!

The game is SLA Industries: future world, run by an all-seeing totalitarian Nazi regime so it's a bit 1984/Equilibrium/AeonFlux/generic totalitarian regime movie, but with a bit of a twist because the city we play in is mainly based on Glasgow. Without getting too much into the actual details of how the regime works (it's kinda complicated), basically the world is governed by the SLA Industries corporation, who see and hear everything. If you say or do something 'subversive' ie. against the government, you die. Simple.

My character is a bit of a departure for me, since I've always played highly intelligent mage type characters, all of which have been female. My new character is Hack, who is a Stormer: a 10 foot tall, gentically engineered killing machine designed and owned by the government. I have dark green skin, luminous green hair, I'm incredibly muscular and have a head that's shaped somewhat like a horse's, with big red eyes and no lips - I have a permanent grin of huge, sharp fangs. I also have no genitals, since I'm non-gender specific: being engineered the stormer has no need for sex. Hack is quite intelligent for a stormer, which isn't really saying much - the racial maximum (which I have) is the same level as is absolute minimum for a human character. As a result, the rest of the team think Hack is extremely dense, but fortunately our Squad leader (Bain) is a re-engineered stormer of above average intelligence, so he recognises that Hack isn't so much dense as having very simple thought processes.

The story for this particular 'run' is quite simple: we are a six-man op unit being sent out to investigate a government research facility outside the limits of the city (people don't go outside the city walls all that much unless travelling to the two other cities on earth, so none of us have ever seen outside before). Contact with the research facility was lost about 6 months previously, shortly after reports that a strange artefact had been found. We need to find out what's wrong and retrieve the artefact if possible. This facility has been manned for several centuries and has a community of about 500 to 600 people living around it - though the government never saw cause to give it any name other than a code, apparently the community had been calling the place 'Quiet Incline'

As you can probably guess from that oh so subtle hint, our GM has based this game very much on Silent Hill. Rich, the GM, has been brilliant in trying to set the mood; the lights were dimmed and he was playing the Silent Hill OST throughout the game as well as throwing in other creepy soundbites for added effect. It's impressive how he's managed to keep the soundtrack for the game going whilst also concentrating on running the game and keeping up with a large and very active group.

Quoteable highlights

1) This had Ghost in stitches for the rest of the night, I don't think he's ever going to stop finding this funny. It's a bit visual so I'll do my best to explain it:

We're about to head off out of our APC into thick fog, so Bain has linked everybody at the waist at three foot intervals with a piece of strong rope so no-one gets lost.

Bain: Right, we're about to go. Everybody grab a shoulder.

Everyone puts their hand on the shoulder in front, apart from Hack, who puts his right hand on his left shoulder.

Bain, straight faced: Someone else's shoulder, Hack.

Hack, slightly perplexed: Oh, OK.

Cue group wetting themsleves laughing.

2) One of the party is Bullseye, a big mental Irishman who looks more or less like Bullseye from Daredevil. Currently our APC is floating in a ditch full of gore, and appears to be sinking nose first. Bullseye gives the other end of the rope around his waist to Bain, gets on his Motorcycle which is also tied to a pole on the inside of the APC and revs it up, attempting to get back up the slope we just came down. The bike sinks with him on it - we manage to reel him back in, but the rope connected to the bike reels in a child's severed head with a horiffic grin carved into the face. Bullseye is most displeased at losing the only thing he loves. If he was a sensitive man, there'd be tears.

Bullseye, to the head:GIVE ME BACK ME *fruitcage*IN BIKE!!!!! throws the head at the wall, where it turns into a pumkin and shatters

There's not much point to this update rather than raving about how much fun I had, if you've managed to read this far, well done and I thank you for your patience