Sunday Night Nerdgames

If I had a badge, I'd wear my Nerd Proud.

Aside from other occasional get-togethers, I reserve Sunday nights for nerdgames at Ian's with him, Paul, Phil and Dusty. Since I started with them in July, we've been playing the game Deadlands, run by Ian (I also play/run a nerdgame on either Friday or Saturday alternating weeks, and then go out for young guy partying the other weekend nights, for those keeping a tally; the family gets me weekdays and weekend mornings/days). I liken Deadlands to 4 parts Dark Tower, 2 parts Road Warrior and 1 part Unforgiven.

Now, it should be noted, that we use the term "nerdgame" with love. We're proud to get our gaming dork on every week, and it doesn't hamper our ability to have fantastic non-nerdy fun with non-nerdy people any other time. We aren't 300 pound, 30 y/o, hygenically challenged social misfits who still live in their mothers' basements.

The character I play there, C.J. Chambers, is a 17-year old female gunslinger who disguises herself as a male (leave it to me to play a member of the GLBT community in a nerdgame). She's illiterate and hiding it, comically clueless, absolutely afraid of dogs and vindictive as hell. And she's death walking with guns in each hand. I like cowboys.

In the eight months I've been playing there, maybe two weeks have passed, close to three at the absolute tops. In that time she's had her first drunken lesbian experience, fallen in love/been hopelessly smitten twice: each with gruff, taciturn men (one was mute). Each time the man died before she could reveal her feelings for them. All of her friends keep dying (only one from the original group she met when I joined remains alive--Dusty's Templar, Helena) and in some ways it's broken her spirit a bit (eg she's refusing to become friends with Paul and Phil's replacement characters for their dead ones--especially since Phil has been on a huge dying streak lately).

Every time I start to think she's getting to be really cool, Ian puts her in major life threatening crises (the worst was when he poisoned me and left me still dying at the end of the session to wait two weeks before finding out if she'd recover. Saving her cost me many fate chips). This week she was given the blessing as a companion to Helena's Templar in a big ass ceremony at the Templar mothership in Boise. It was really moving for her and got her back on track for wanting to open up to people again. And then Ian killed her. Well almost. She held on by the skin of her nails while being ambushed and beaten the f out of by some nasty acid spitting tunnelling monsters, held on 'til the baddies were all smoking corpses and then collapsed, one breath away from dead before the others were able to save her. It was a very nail-biting session for me.

Part of me thinks Ian did it on purpose, because I joked with him while we were out the night previous about how CJ was never going to die, but just in case I should probably start a back-up character in the unfortunate event I have a run of Phil's luck.