7 Arena Fights, 1 Quest and a fairly late night...

2011-08-15T14:32:00+01:00

..have left my a little weary this morning. I spent this weekend at my first full length Odyssey event which gave me a fuller impression of the world than last years quick visit.

The arena is still my favourite part of the experience. Certainly as I don't get much LARP combat these days it's nice to get several guaranteed mass-battles as day. I was still playing my Roman archer and had a very good day on Saturday notching up some rather nice shots which I was complemented on later in the day. I'm hoping those battles were videoed by somebody because it would be nice to see what they looked like from the bystanders point of view.

Although I went to bed before midnight on the Friday I made an extra effort to wonder about on Saturday night and caught up with the NE brigade and their Greek faction. It was lovely to see them as well as lots of interesting in-play discussion. Having someone mention the presence of the "Roman spy" every few minutes didn't seem to stop the Greeks talking to me.

I got peripherally involved with the "Philosopher" game on the Sunday while indulging in a little cryptanalysis to verify the approach to the solution of one of the puzzles. If I tire of the fighting I might try out philosophising for my next character.

All in all a fantastically fun weekend. I look forward to returning to it when I'm able to LARP again.

Odyssey, in 60 seconds

2010-08-16T11:24:00+01:00

We went to the new PD LRP fest game Odyssey this weekend. Although we didn't stay for Saturday evening as we had wedding planning to do we did get a good feel for the game. Instead of Maelstrom's Play-by-(e)mail game of Civ Odyssey is very much rooted in the events of the weekend. The generals get to plan their stratagems, assign limited resources (Warbands) to defending and taking lands decided by battles in the Arena. Going as a grunt it was nice to have the certainty of 2 battles a day where the results were meaningful to the game. The battles tended to be of the order of 10-30 people per side depending on the forces at the disposition of the commander. This neatly solves the large scale balancing act the Gathering had to do to ensure the mass battles weren't too skewed. There was plenty of name calling and taunting going on (our response to "All the way to Rome" was "in chains!"). The atmosphere was very much of competing nations unlikely to "degenerate" into a nice civilised political consensus. It was fun :-)

I didn't get much of a feel for the other roles although the priests were by far the most visible playing a part in the preamble to each battle. They also had the unenviable job of keeping the capricious and cruel Gods in check.

I didn't get a chance to do one of the many linear adventures but heard generally good things about them. Certainly the game provides a great change of pace to the relative civilisation of the Maelstrom setting (which I still enjoy BTW). I shall be trying to persuade some of my more sword jockeying friends to join us next year when we hopefully return for the whole event.

Alex's Adventures on the Infobahn - odyssey

7 Arena Fights, 1 Quest and a fairly late night...

Odyssey, in 60 seconds