Great Botches I Have Known.

Inspired by a recent post by cadhla, here's a few of the really wunderbar incidents that can happen when someone's dice turn on them.

Great Botches I Have Known:

1. Feng Shui: After being sent a container of 'cleaning supplies' - with the words 'Whoop Ass' clearly written on the sides in English - thirty eunuchs multiple-botch their intelligence rolls and spend the next hour arguing over whether the Master ordered the cleaning supplies for the ship they're on, what the supplies actually are, who gets to use them, and where the Whoo Pass is.

2. Feng Shui: One hour later the Master also multiple-botches his intelligence roll, and starts fiddling with the container as he remarks that he doesn't remember ordering cleaning supplies. About thirty seconds later the occupant of the box, a demon in the shape of Gojira (long story), erupts from the container and makes krispy kritters of the thirty eunuchs, then comes real close to doing it to the Master.

3. Mage: First tabletop game I ran, an Etherist child character managed to roll three ones on his Arete roll to use his jet backpack in the middle of Manhattan. I ruled he lost control of the backpack and slammed into the side of the Empire State Building in front of a busload of Japanese tourists. We presented the player with a 3-d sculpture puzzle of the ESB next week, with a rubber figure of The Rocketeer protruding from the thirtieth floor.

4. Feng Shui, again: At the teahouse owned and operated by my character, a sorceress, the characters were often attacked by our various enemies. I guess they thought it was easier for them to wipe us out in our own well-defended territory or something. We'd taken to carving little silhouettes of defeated enemies in one of the roof beams - ninja outlines, monster claws, and firearms (those last represented Triad guys). The ninjas came one night and tried attacking. One went after my character, who dove behind a table in the main drinking/eating area and got off a Blast spell (Light, I think, a variant called The Last Thing Diana Saw - the idea was to cause catastrophic blindness for a few seconds). The ninja rolled to dodge. This was supposed to be 2d6; a pair of 6's is a horrible thing to see, 'cos it means you've botched and have to roll again to see how badly. You only have to roll again after that if you get another 6. All the points on these rolls count as negatives. By the time it was over our friendly neighbourhood ninja had successfully gotten himself into -30 territory... the GM, who was shaking his head in disbelief over this, ruled that the ninja had staggered backwards, crashed into the fish tank, broken the glass, released the aquatic life therein, and stepped on the lionfish.

Will let you know if I think of any others.

VicMage.Asia and friend groups

I've tried to set up a friend group for people who ain't involved in VicMage.Asia but might potentially be interested in the game and its setting, just so I have somewhere to parade the monkey pirate evil. Trouble is I can't remember who planned on playing in the game and who didn't. If you want to hear about it, please let me know, so I can put you on the friends group and start locking posts about it to you, ok? Thanks.

This is how you know you're me:

You're born to an Irish/English/Scots/Italian family, and yet you're happier about getting tofu for lunch than you are about onion rings from Burger King.

You have no pictures of family or friends in your office, but you do have three puppet animals in Disaster Services vests and a photograph of a server room suffering a plague of frogs, plus one photograph of a pigeon on the Empire State Building looking at the Twin Towers. (Bonus me points if you remember not only that it was taken the second-to-last weekend of August 2001, but that the pigeon was trying to get away from the lunatic h00man who stuck her head out through the safety bars on floor 86 to get the picture.)

The only reason you didn't jump up and go 'ooo! Sure!' when asked to go into a poverty-stricken, high-crime urban area to deal with people at the scene of a three-alarm fire is because you forgot to put your workboots in the car this morning.

You open your trunk to check for a first-aid kit and not only find it, but slam the trunk shut immediately because you forgot to take your sword out and that bugger's as long as your arm.

You've got a full set of non-six-sided dice, a toothbrush, an archery glove, and a rolled-up tube of Tom's of Maine (With Fluoride) in your purse. No pictures of family members in your wallet, and your own photo ID, which is not issued by any governing body in the U.S., comes in three varieties: Neutral Expression, Happy Expression, and Bosnian War Criminal Expression. Bonus points if the purse is capable of carrying either the hardcover of book 4, or the paperbacks of books 1 through 3, of the Harry Potter series.

You don't drink Coke or Pepsi, but know three or more different places to buy espresso soda. And do so on a regular basis.

... that's about all that comes to mind at the moment, I've mostly been thinking about the sword incident. Must remember to unload the trunk whenI get home. I've only ever been asked to let law enforcement look in my trunk once, and that was November 12 of 2001, but no sense taking chances. (Even if the sword is a darn-dao made of wushu steel rather than anything sharp or otherwise combat-worthy.)