Sunday, November 3rd
Stupid hotel. I woke up at 5:00 am in the morning, new time (or so I thought, but the room clock hadn't flipped over, despite the hotel's assurance that it would, so it was actually 4:00 am!) to make use of the loo, and went back to bed. The wake-up call that
Needless to say, I couldn't fall back to sleep, so I just lay there on the bed and waited for an hour. They called again with the wake-up call! So I had about 4-1/2 hours of sleep, instead of getting an extra hour or two. That's not enough, the way I felt at the time. I was... cranky. I had already showered, and was waiting for
I went down with
I brushed my teeth, and then had an accident. I wanted to get something of the carry-on luggage, and accidentally dropped it on my ankle; the bad one, of course. I gashed myself on the carry-on luggage about four inches above the ankle, nothing serious but it hurt like hell. I wanted to see a bit of the convention before having to run the afternoon game at 1:30 pm, so
[The rest of Sunday is something of a blur for me, so I hope I've got it right.]
From what I could tell, there wasn't a lot of stuff going on gaming-wise, so I wandered into the Victoria room, where I saw that Andrew Valkauskas was just in the process of setting up stuff to run a game of Fate of the Norns: Ragnarok at 11:00 am. He and I talked for a good long time, and

Fate of the Norns: Ragnarok Prop
I spent around 45 minutes trying to recruit some people to play in the Yggdrasill game, and managed to convince a couple of guys, Michel and Armand, to play, and they told me that their friend Darcy would also arrive soon, and she'd play as well. That meant I'd have four players! Terrific! Andrew (of Fate of the Norns: Ragnarok fame) said that he would make a call and see if he could play in the game as well, so that was pretty cool.
Without going into any real detail about the plot, the Yggdrasill scenario, "Mist Over Storforshei", takes place in a community in the north of Norway, in which the long thought dead Jarl of the town of Storforshei returns, and what seems a simple quest to find out what happened to the rest of his missing expedition turns into a tale of revenge, retribution, and the possibility of seeing Storforshei destroyed by two age-old enemies. The player characters for the adventure are Audun Leiptrsson, the son of the missing jarl and the current Jarl; Bera Domarsdottir, a young, impetuous and willful Danish skald; Egil, a former slave given his freedom by Audun, who now serves him as a hirdman and counselor; Gunnvor Styrsdottir, the 45-year-old volva, with ties to the presumed dead jarl; Kjallak Ingolfsson, the berserker; and a sixth character that I shaln't discuss here. I started off with only three players (more details on what happened in a bit), and they chose to play Audun, Egil, and Kjallak, with the fourth player (see below) playing Gunnvor.
How did the players do with their characters? It was a mixed bag. Michel played Audun, the current Jarl, and to be honest, while he played the character authoritarian and as the leader of the community, he didn't let his people do things without his approval. He got on well with Egil and that character's player, but he didn't really give the fellow a chance to shine. Michel's friend, Armand, played Egil, and did a good job with the opportunities to play the character that he did, but was very much a "yes man" to Michel's Audun and didn't really exert himself all that much.
Some of the adventure highlights included: Having Andrew playing Gunnvor for the time he did. He had superb knowledge of Norse times (that I took advantage of, I have to say), and played the character well. He even confirmed the presumed dead Jarl's identity through the mole on his rear end! Darcy's playing of Gunnvor was quite refreshing. Her reaction to realising that Gunnvor's prophecy had come true was priceless. :) Steve's reaction of "What am I doing?" when he put his berserker between two dokkalfar and Gunnvor was very nice. Darcy had the best line of the night, when she said "I got to cast a spell at Hel and live!" after she had to counter her own spell at an ST of 56. She ended up burning 8 Furor dice, 4 at the casting and receiving end of the spell.
I thought that "Mist Over Storforshei" went as well as could be expected, but it came off with mixed results. The four players chose characters relatively smartly for the adventure, given the number of players, but the personality of Michel didn't mix well with the others, taking such an authoritarian figure, and the four characters didn't work well together (regardless of who was playing Gunnvor). Armand changed characters with
After the Yggdrasill session came to an end,
We bundled up against the winter chill outside, and head over to O'Neko Ramen for supper. We had decided to try the ramen dishes this time, rather than the hot pot. Upon descending to the lobby of the hotel, I was rather shocked to see the hotel restaurant was actually closed! It was a good thing that we had planned to eat out, even if I couldn't walk that far to a Chinese restaurant or some such. It was a doubly good thing when I noticed the odour of pot permeating the entire lobby area. I don't know who was smoking the stuff (and can only assume that it was for medicinal purposes), but it wasn't pleasant and not the sort of thing I expected to find in the hotel.
After braving the weather, we settled in at O'Neko Ramen for supper. The miso ramen bowl was excellent, though not as hot (warmth wise) as it could have been, and I wasn't crazy about the taste of the soup base, but the meal was fine and it was relatively cheap price-wise. After returning to the hotel, we went up to the room and had some apple with Edam cheese for dessert, and then some hot tea. Definitely soothed my throat, which was a bit raw by then.

Around 10:00 pm or so,
And that covers the third and final official day of HammerCon 2013. I'll share a few thoughts in a Final Thoughts post about the convention itself, but will just say for now that I had a relatively good time at the convention all things considered. The next blog post about the convention will concern the trip back to Ottawa.