My friend Chris has been running Space: 1889 for our Sunday night gaming crew for about a year now, and it seems to be the first roleplaying game that’s managed to dislodge the mindset of Sunday Night Cthulhu that dogged our weekly sessions after…well, about three straight years of Call of Cthulhu gaming. A few weeks back we kind of bullied persuaded Chris that we should do a Christmas Special, and he somewhat hesitantly agreed despite the fact that he thought we were crazy.
So we gathered and we played and there was…well, quite a lot of Christmas references thrown around. More than you’d expect, given the vast majority of us are bah-humbug types who aren’t all that fond of the Holiday season. I won’t go into the details, since there’s nothing quite so dull as listening to an enthusiastic RPG player waxing lyrical about how awesome their game was, but we all had a blast. I bring it up because the climactic moment of the game (whereupon our mad steampunk adventurers broke the rules of time and space to deliver presents to thousands of Martian orphans) hinged upon the singing of The Little Drummer Boy.
Which immediately led me to Bing Crosby and David Bowie singing a Christmas duet. Truly one of the weirdest video clips I’ve ever seen
Sadly, we’re running out of time on our Sunday night gaming. Half the group is moving to Melbourne in March, and despite the fact that we’re going to try moving the game online, it’ll inevitably miss some of the things that have made Sunday nights a tradition – gathering together every Sunday, sharing dinner and a metric buttload of junk-food, catching up on one-another’s weeks. While I doubt I’ll get the chance to miss the people thanks to the wonders of modern technology, adapting to the change in the weekly social ritual we’ve built up is going to be tricky.
