***BZOTT!***

That was the sound of the death knell of Sid (short for Siddhartha,) Curt's Cthulhu character, last weekend. I run a very low-fatality game, really, I try to keep the deaths to a minimum because I prefer a pulpy sort of approach to horror. Funnier if you keep them limping along, not-quite-dead but nearly-dead-and-more-than-half-mad. But there was no way around it for Curt, he was staggering along on a couple of hit points and he walked right into the alien techno force field and got hit with 3d10 points of damage. He got cooked. And his death was barely mourned because the force field turned out to be retaining a horrible, conical, rugose and betentacled creature which immediately captivated everyone's attention. No one even tried to bring poor Curt back from the dead (not that they could've, I draw the line at -2 HP) because they were all shooting at the Thing and trying to insert fuses into dynamite and such... Fortunately the Thing managed to make mind-to-mind contact with someone before Andy's character threw the dynamite into the force field, as I really don't know what happens when dynamite gets hit with a powerful jolt of electricity. I can guess, of course! But I'm just not sure. They did have the presence of mind eventually to drag Curt's body out of the lab building and...er...abandon it behind a pile of rocks. Maybe they tried to build a cairn over it, I can't remember, but it did all seem rather hasty. That's the nature of Cthulhu, though, time and hideous rugose beings wait for no man!

Lady Anastasia has hooked up with two of her fellow competators in the Grand Ellipse; at least I'm no longer toiling across the tundra solo. (Well, solo except for a small cadre of Russian guides and servants.) The sheer volume of correspondence from Dorothea and Alise is amazing, I feel rather as if Lady A. has not been maximizing her role-playing potential all this time! But then again, Damascus incurred a flurry of email, and since then my declared personal focus of bringing Mr. Addison to justice has been waylaid by the fact that someone else caught him before I did. Though I think he's escaped again, the nefarious evil-doer that he is! If we meet, he'll be sorry.

Back to the toil and strife of finals; had to call off Runequest this week, how wrong is THAT?