As moving looms on the horizon, and settles from a “god-I-wanna-move” into a “thank-god, we’re-gonna-move” state, as the u-hauls get reserved and I start eyeing boxes with the predatory air of a wombat eyeing a particularly tasty nugget of Purina Wombat Chow, joy is not unmixed. Now that we’re moving, we have to face the inevitable–our Shadowrun group of 6+ years is splitting at last. My beloved, humorless samurai Mouse, and James’s stumpy dwarven rigger Kashi (and Lazlo, the semi-NPC he inherited, and whom he refers to as his “flesh drone”) are about to be banished into that hinterland of characters not-currently-in-play, which is too bad, because they had a good long run, lots of toys, (the rigger actually lives in a renovated garbage truck called “The Womb”) and I’d finally gotten Mouse to the perfect balance of psychotic, remorseless killer vs. guilty good samaritan.

To send them off with a bang, our GM is setting up a glorious last month of adventure, which started off yesterday, and included the best bit of teamwork ever. I’ll spare you all the gruesome details, since I know nobody likes to hear about other people’s characters, but suffice it to say that my samurai managed one of those lovely cut-the-head-off-without-the-head-falling-off slices, and thinking that the slice had missed completely, Lazlo punched the victim in the face, causing the head of a six-armed thirty-foot-long naga creature to fly across our local bar and land in someone’s popcorn. Then they had to stand over the body yelling at each other about who actually killed it, while bullets, undead, and–for reasons too complex to get into–small mechanical crickets flew about the bar. Say what you like about RPGs needing to get back to role-playing and storytelling, there’ll always be a place in my heart for gruesome, gratuitious violence.

I’ll miss this Shadowrun crew. We had fun. We accidentally inhaled shoggoths, bribed fairies with cases of Pop Rocks, goblins with prosthetic breasts, mages with magic doohickeys, and practically everyone else with money; once assembled a siege engine out of a couch and an old stewpot, accidentally turned our boss into a vampire (hey, we needed him for a meeting in an hour, and we thought blood would revive him. How were we supposed to know he hadn’t yet turned into a vampire and we were completing the job?) which led to a lot of really unpleasant feeding schedules and the filling of 44oz Big Gulps with blood; once subsisted for a week on oatmeal and elk tallow while attempting to track down an Elder God in Alaska; got trapped in a cave-in and had to drink our own urine while digging out (“Roll willpower to get through another day without killing your compatriots…”) orchestrated gang wars between groups with names like “The Lactating Mules,” assisted a dwarven uprising, quelled a dwarven uprising; went through convoluted quests to get magic items to stop subplots that we would then decide didn’t need to be stopped, (Woops! Shouldn’t have sold those NPCs into slavery, then, huh?) acquired specialized and useless powers, bought stock in a company bottling hallucingenic seaweed beer (Kelpenbrau!) and generally slaughtered, conned, and bribed our way across the continent.

And that’s really all you ask out of a good campaign, and I’ll miss it. *sniffle*

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