Event Review - Under Their Thumb (June 2018)

[Dr. Moran]

Thank you so much to the shapers, NPCs, photo ninjas, marshals, and everybody else who put their time and effort into this event! Site might suck but you guys still provided a great game and it was nice to see everyone.

Pros/Fun Memories:
• The song 'So Ist Es Immer' is cursed and whenever I try to sing it there are either shattered elf attacks or false Mortigeist alarms.
• The fight with the Gem Bear. I forgot nearly all of my defenses, nearly died repeatedly, hopped around on one leg while flailing my swords and also burned through a stupid amount of potions but IT WAS SO MUCH FUN! It was like Dark Souls: Ralinwood Edition. The scariest hits were telegraphed, we had to learn the sort of "dance" to kill the thing and it took FOREVER but damn, that group fist bump at the end was worth it.
• The Mortigeist was great this year. At least he was for the like... 10 seconds I saw him. I'm sad that I missed his apparently horrifying/amazing entrance but the moment the Shattered Elves vanished I wasn't interested in sticking around.
• Nature walks/ritual shenanigans with Janos. One part hilarious, one part feelsy life talks and sound advice.
• "Stop poking my horns."
"What are you going to do, oblit-"
"Want to find out?."
"Nevermind that then."
• The Quail Einher are forever and always the only people in town with any backbone. RP was top notch and that Energized Quail Milk kept me up all night, as advertised.
• Fights seemed well balanced, some of the shattered elves sure gave me a run for my money but when the larger saturday night group hit we had NPC support and it was one of my favourite fights that event. Shoutout to Rio, Will H, Cat and Jen for having especially spooky elves (Jake and Bre's were also fun, they let me get so close), I really like it when people make the shattered elves scary and compelling and tragic rather than just another high statted monster.
• Please stop letting Cat be a rogue type while NPCing it is doing horrible things to my blood pressure.
• Hearing everybody's Morty horror/survival stories the next morning was really fun. I kind of hate that most of the times elves are stuck hiding in the woods for hours twiddling their thumbs (or running for their lives) but hearing how some people interacted with him/barely got away was nice. RIP Maxi.
• "You feel like you're being watched."
"I guess I'll just die then."

Cons:
• pacing Saturday felt a bit slow. I am very adept at zoning out and missing mods as the hooks come and go but a lot of the day was spent milling around and socializing.
• the amount of OOG talk from NPCs is getting really frustrating. Either come out on an RP role to chat or keep it for when the PC is by the NPC camp door/some other obviously OOG place. Infernalism we can at least deal with in game, this we can't.
• a lot of NPCs seemed confused by their own skills/how PC skills worked and weren't asking for clarification, they were just doing things incorrectly. I think many of them were newer and I know the learning curve can be steep but when in doubt about how something works it's better to ask between pops than just try and guess while PCs wonder what's happening
• this is a small one but if a mod is going to use a rather niche/complicated alchemy (cough ambrosia cough) it might be good to have the rules for it on hand for the people who get affected so they don't realize they've been RPing it wrong halfway through the duration.

Thanks again, everybody, great game. RP was top notch, I can't wait for next event on the new site.