Kites, birthday party, roleplaying, asado

Quite a lot of things to report, so I'm doing it in order.

First, the kite festival seems to have been very interesting, only I wasn't there to enjoy it. As it turned out, the whole weekend was extremely cold and windy, quite possibly superb to fly kites, but not good for fragile humans. Since the festival's schedule said "Friday, Saturday and Sunday, starting 10 AM", I went to the Parque Scalabrini Ortiz on Saturday at about 11 AM hoping to find the festival raging. There were only a few people trying kites, setting up tents, and watching. The blue-ringed octopus was impressive, but there wasn't much to see apart from it.

When I was starting to leave, an hour later, someone announced over a loudspeaker that "in a few minutes" they'd be starting to open the festival, formally, with an exhibition of some sort. My head hurt and my nose was already a half-melted icicle, so I left. Saturday afternoon was overcast and I had to go out at night because it was my brother's birthday and he was going to celebrate it with pizza in a bar, so took an aspirin, a long siesta, and a very hot shower, in that order, thus regaining a measure of consciousness.

I couldn't go to the festival's last day either (you'll see why soon). So I only got to take a few pictures on Saturday morning, but one my photography mates was covering the event and took more than a hundred, so please check them out: 7º Festival Internacional de Barriletes.

Saturday night, I ate with my brother and his friends and a couple of mine, and the ones left after that went to another bar and had a cup of coffee. My friends and I then split and went for beer elsewhere. The last place was as crowded as it was warm, fortunately.

Sunday started at noon for me. Again it was very cold, but I had already arranged a roleplaying meeting. The place was new, though — the home of one my players, where none of us had gone before, in Granadero Baigorria, just outside Rosario. Easy enough to go by bus, but not nearly as advisable to return from at night in winter (both weather- and safety-wise). The house resembled, at parts, a cross of a junkyard with an untamed garden, plus living spaces with touches of several decades of the 20th century: alcohol burners, a collection of dark glass bottles and flasks, a lava lamp. Very interesting indeed.

There was a dog too... a Giant Schnauzer, an adorable black-haired monster that alternatively amused and bothered us, tirelessly jumping around, trying to make us, cold humans, into one of his own. He had to be confined to a neighbouring room behind a couple of chairs to stop him from assaulting the asado we made in the evening. Dogs will be dogs!

The RPG session went fine. Our host's character was just entering the story and he made a good job of it as an older, experienced leader of men with a dark past, supposedly "retired" but actually under the command of powers beyond his comprehension. So far I've only prepared the characters for a more direct encounter with those powers, which they'll run into, violently, very soon. Mwa ha ha!

Roleplaying on a Sunday afternoon

First roleplaying session yesterday, after a long time, was quite OK. I'd say a success, but that would sound prideful, as it was me who directed the thing, and it's the players who should say, at the fullness of time... There were four of us, counting myself, two friends and a guy who used to work in my office. We stayed in contact and, when I learned he was an active roleplayer, I invited him over. Three players are enough, but not plenty; if someone cannot make it to one session, you have to cancel, since it's a bother to direct only two players. That's for me, at least. The new guy was to bring along another player, but she couldn't make it this time.

The game is World of Darkness, the players play regular human characters (for now!), and the setting is present-day Rosario (with a couple of supernatural touches, obviously). This is the second time I use this setting, and I'm re-using some of my previous notes, but the characters are all new. I find it easier to play this way, and the sense of familiarity with the surroundings allows the players to move more naturally than if I were to stage the game in, say, New York or London or an unspecified Gotham-like city, as others do. With everybody pinned down on the real map of Rosario, we all know (and need not argue over) how much time it takes to go from character A's house in the suburbs to character B's downtown apartment.

I'm not really into roleplaying activism, but I do believe it's a good pastime. In some cases it may be a form of improvisation theatre, and it sure is relaxing, when all goes well. (There are many, many ways in which it may go horribly wrong, but you can see them coming.) So try it if you can.

And, since we're at it, I'll recommend a website... It's a group of RPG fans who try to raise awareness of this hobby, which is still unknown to many in Argentina, and viewed as strange by others, and organize game sessions in events such as Leyendas and (recently) Cinecomix. (My brother is in the group.) They're called Sierpes del Sur and they've just opened up a forum. It's all in Spanish, but there's a chance some of my bilingual readers may find it useful.

Outdoors mind-clearing

I've heard (somebody will correct me if I mis-) that we Argentinians are among the most gregarious and outgoing folks in the world. Going out to a park by the river in large numbers when there's a noticeable breeze and a freezing cold must surely count.

Anxious to escape the monotony of a Sunday at home was the motivation; the fact that Sunday actually honoured its etymology (not a cloud in sight) was the excuse. You simply can't stay home when there's such a nice day outside, and if you're sick and tired of staying inside waiting for the "polar wave" to subside, you'll do anything. (If you live outside Argentina, consider this: temperatures just above or below freezing every other morning and evening for two months. That's not a wave, that's a flood.)

Parque de las Colectividades, Rosario

I caught my second cold of the year more than a week ago, doing the second afternoon trip on the Barco Ciudad de Rosario I with the Rosarigasinos, and I'm still rather rough, but I couldn't resist the sun and went with a couple of friends to have mate by the river. Silly us, for some reason we were sure we were the only ones to be so clever, but alas, the coast of Rosario (all the 7 km of it) was full of people, young, old (with additional scarves), middle-aged (with kids), and dogs fighting, barking at, or trying to copulate with other dogs, when not sniffing around people's legs and belongings looking for yet another place to soil with the byproducts of their metabolism.

It was quite OK, though. It's always fun to talk nonsense over mate for a while. That is, until the sun starts to go down and the cold bites you again. In the meantime, I managed to do some boat-spotting. There's a Flickr group that collects pictures of ships in the Paraná River, and I'm always happy to contribute. Being part of the (soon-obsolete, I guess) last generation of people who were born and lived a good part of their life without the Internet and globalized communications, I'm still amazed when I realize I can spot a cargo ship off the coast of the city and, mere hours later, learn everything about it just by googling its name.


(If you're curious, it's the Jag Rishi. It's an Indian drybulk cargo, and from an online report I found and promptly misplaced, it appears to be taking cereal from the terminals that Cargill has here in Rosario and in San Lorenzo, to the UK. Seems like a nice boat, though actually they all look the same... The name in devanagari was a nice touch.)

Well, besides nonsense and some politics (on which I won't allow to get started), the boys and I discussed and decided to start role-playing again after an overlong hiatus. The direction, or more properly the storytelling, will be done by moi. Should be fun, unless I get nasty like one of those stereotypical stage directors when dealing with "incompetent" actors, which I tend to do... sometimes. Ahem.

Roleplaying again!

The gang returned to roleplaying last Sunday. It was sunny and clear, becoming cold, with gusts of wind that blew away the clouds that had been pouring down rain during Saturday afternoon and the whole Sunday evening; a relief, even as I don't like cold. I'd rather roleplay when the weather is hideous; a bright Sunday motivates me to go out in the sun instead. Anyway the chances for that are fewer and fewer every day that passes; after the rains and weird weather of April, this is high time for winter to begin insinuating itself.

So it wasn't an afternoon well-suited to roleplaying, especially Vampire: The Requiem. I'm not freaky enough to force my players to wear plastic fangs or dark capes (which Vampire, well played, isn't really about), but I do like playing at night or during grey days, with candles and motif music. I'm not mastering this table, though, so I can't choose the environmental details, but the GM did at least provide a classical musical background, and topped it off with mate and facturas. It was a nice session, if a bit too focused on combat — near the end it felt like an old-fashioned dungeon scenario. And there was a guy with a chainsaw as well.

The RPG scene is not terribly popular in Argentina, as it is (for example) in Spain. I mean, there are probably a lot of occasional hobbyists and more than a few full-time freaks, but 95% of the people you run across in the street wouldn't know what a role-playing game is if it hit them with a +4D bonus. There are no big RPG conventions or people wearing Dungeons & Dragons T-shirts (in public, at least). There never was a tradition of university students gathering in someone's basement to roll dice behind a screen ornamented with swords and pseudo-runes. A few RPG-themed websites and forums exist, as well as some small fan organizations. It's difficult and extremely (extremely) expensive to get RPG rulebooks, least of all newer games, least of all in Spanish — so you can imagine how we manage to acquire them.

I met roleplaying when I was just entering university; my brother introduced me to a group of fellow players, mostly acquaintances from highschool, and we played Lord of the Rings squatting in the shade on the school's yard during the summer break. After that our sessions were irregular and spaced.

I started playing seriously only a couple of years ago, upon meeting a truly wonderful game master — the only person, so far, that's been capable of actually scaring me in a face-to-face fictional encounter. The GM would reinforce our fictional ignorance of story facts with actual ignorance, taking us individually aside for questioning, torture or startling revelations, or handing us pieces of paper; his non-playing characters (i.e. the ones he himself portrayed as part of the plot as necessary) were well-thought, precisely drawn, and as horrific or bizarre as needed. We'd play for long hours, ending up mentally exhausted.

When those sessions stopped, after a hiatus I got the idea of directing. It shouldn't have been too much of a problem, but I was a little afraid. I soaked myself in rules and tips for plot creation, and slowly wrote a basic story. A group of players that had vowed to attend the session postponed it, and then again, and so on — until I decided I'd only deal with people who had an actual interest and a minimum of commitment. I ditched them and, as the occasion arose, I began directing for another group — a couple of friends, a girl I knew from Japanese school, and my brother.

I feel pretty satisfied about those games; I consciously adopted and adapted the style of my previous GM to provide the players a detailed environment for their characters to move in, and requiring them to be actual characters with depth — rather than the standard two-dimensional cardboard stereotypes that populate most RPG sessions thanks to over-tolerant GMs and to players unaccustomed to deal with personalities above those of videogame characters. I even used pictures of actual places and partially fake newspaper clippings.

Roleplaying is a fascinating experience, and mastering a game is especially rewarding for me. In the old times I made languages and wrote about fictional scenarios; having actual people living and acting in those settings, when they work OK, is like seeing your own work of art develop before your eyes. When they don't work OK... well, we still have mate and facturas!