Renaissance Festival photos

I'll keep tonights post short so that you can just enjoy the Ren Fest pictures. It was a short, but fun Ren Fest experience this year. We got there early enough to do a little walking around. We first went into the Secret Garden, which I swear was new (but I'm probably wrong). It was a little walk in a wooded area with characters and little things to look at. We stopped and saw the jugglers and some guys in the stocks being made fun of.

After that we headed over to Bad Manor for our 7 course meal. The food was great and the entertainment was fun. Not as interactive as I had figured, but fun non-the-less. I snapped some pictures of the belly dancers. :-)

Then right before we left, I was able to catch the Jousting which is obviously one of the main highlights (and my favorite thing) each year.

As for the rest of this weekend, it was exactly as I predicted: way fun and way too fast! Our party was a nice success. It's always interesting to get all these different people together and see how they mix. :-) I'm not sure how well I did with my Fantasy Football draft, but I did get Daunte Culpepper so I'm pretty happy about that.

Roleplaying on Saturday night went pretty well, considering we started at Midnight. We went until 4am like I had also predicted, mainly focused on an important combat session. We all had a lot of learning to do with the combat system, so future combats should go quicker. It's funny that in 4 hours of gameplay, the actually in-game time moved probably 1 hour? In the 3 sessions I've done, the characters have been through 30 hours of actual in-game time. I'll have to find ways to speed that up. Everyone is having fun though, and I'm being told that my storylines are interesting. But really, we need more meat and potatoes (i.e. combat, XP & rewards) for the next few sessions. We are adding one player to round out the group to 4 players. I'm pretty sure I can handle that, but one of the players also says his girlfriend wants to join too. I'm not so sure about that - she has never played, and I was hoping to keep this group to only the hardcore players. Will have to wait and see on that one...

I also managed to see the movie, 40 Year-Old-Virgin on Sunday, the first one I've been to in a long time. There just aren't that many good ones at this part in the summer, although there are still a few I would like to see that I haven't. (Four Brothers, Transporter 2, Brothers Grimm to name a few) Maybe I'll get around to them this month.