By John “Gordon Lightfoot” Rescigno
Hi everybody! It’s your friendly neighborhood Gordon here with my very first What You Missed. Be gentle. Where to begin? The awesome night quests? The fantastic food? The bardics? The tournaments themselves? Or some awesome people being honored for awesome things? What? The Beginning? And you want me to stop using fragment sentences? Fine. The beginning it is!
I arrived on site on Friday night later than I normally would, but not late enough to have missed too much. I always like slow, relaxing first nights. It gives people a chance to get all set up, say hello, and prepare themselves for the weekend. I’ve been to Blackwood Tournaments three times now, and each one has been better than the last. This was my first time on the PC side of the event, so I knew that I could expect some epic goings-on.
After a nice quick Reading of the Rules, we all gathered in front of the tavern to make plans and see how our fighting force was going to look. At first, it looked like we had three fighters. Thankfully, more people trickled in, and we were off!
I’ll be honest with you all. I know very little about this plot aside from Time Rifts and doppelgängers from alternate timelines. My focus was and always is get in, try not to muck things up too much, have some awesome fights, and make sure my friends all make it out. We did not have a lot of healing Friday night. If I am counting correctly, over the course of the night, I was raised six times. One of those was a combat raise, and the rest of them were Cries of Life. Another cool reason to try out regional magic! Folkewood has some awesome regionals where you get points per level of spell slot where you can do magical hoobyjoo with those points. There were five pillars in the big tourney field and LOTS *ahem* LOTS of undead and also some wraiths. We rolled through the undead as quickly as possible to get to the pillars, which were either pillars that looked like people or some kind of statue. Like I said, I don’t know a lot about the plot. Yet.
Under these pillars were runes that I couldn’t quite decipher at first. I was studying the second pillar when I heard this ear-piercing screech from the woods, and suddenly, every one of the undead that we had just cut down were coming for us again. This was the kind of awesomeness I expected when I came to Blackwood Tournaments, but oh boy does it get better! Voraniss set up a corner of the field to defend while the thinkiest of us attempted to decipher the puzzle. Luckily, we were defending a corner where one of the pillars was set up, with a rune under it that I recognized! It turned out to be the Teng-Huanese character for Fire! I tracked down Tallon and showed it to him. He took out his pocket dragon and “put fire on the fire” until the wards around the pillar broke. Awesome! We had a solution! To make a long story short (too late), we matched the elements Fire, Water, Earth, Metal, and Wood to the corresponding pillars and got out of there!
I spent the rest of the night as I spend most of them: playing poker with my friends and losing to the ONE OUT on the river. For those of you who don’t know too much about poker, just hop into a time rift and find a reality where my opponent didn’t hit his out. Hint: there aren’t a lot of them. Never lucky.
The next morning began the Tournaments portion of our program. For those of you who have never been to Blackwood Tournaments; first of all stop that and correct your horrible, terrible choices and come hang out with me. I probably miss you or something. Second of all, the tournaments are team war maneuvers mixed with some single combatant OOTL style tournaments. It began with grand melees to determine the General for each team. The generals were Shandar, Tempest, Enlon, and Kyara. Then, we all got to re-live high school for a few minutes while each general picked the members of their team from the pool of combatants. The tournaments were as follows:
4-way field battle
Senchukulous/Wheel of Death
King of the Hill/Point Defense
4-way bear pit/queens war/color battle
I never said I was a poet or a tournament-namer, alright? All I know is that it was a hot day to be wearing leather and chain, and there were some awesome fights and some interesting strategies employed. Unfortunately, I don’t remember which team won each tournament and I wasn’t able to stick around on Sunday for awards. What I do know is there was a good amount of time between each tournament where we could cool off, get a drink, and get ready for the next one. The timing was so perfect that once the tournaments were done, it was straight up to the tavern for the best part of the weekend.
I can’t speak for the KoEF, so I won’t even try. What I can tell you all is my perspective of the events that transpired. The first order of business was the conferral of a Fireball to Aiden. As most if not all of you know, Arthur Granger makes some amazing chainmail and chain jewelry. Every one of the knights was displaying some of his work, and every piece was a work of Art. Get it? No? Moving on. But seriously, if you need chainmail and you want something absolutely beautiful and affordable, talk to Arthur!
I can’t even begin to describe how awesome and deserving Matiya is. I don’t know even half of the extent that she has given back to this game of ours. My experiences with her have always been positive. She is an honorable fighter, a wonderful NPC to work with, the first place I go when I need clarification if I am NPCing, an amazing person to talk to, and I’m sure I’m not alone on this one or this will be very embarrassing, a great shoulder to cry on. You all have your own experiences with her just like I do. All I will ask you to do is to think for a moment on a moment you’ve had with Liz Butler. I bet all of you thought of a very positive experience, and you all agree with me because there is no argument against it. Liz, congrats on the white belt!
Whoof this review is getting long. I’m only on Saturday evening, and I haven’t even told you about the epic journey of a night quest we went on! For those of you still reading, thank you for sticking with me. Those of you who aren’t, you can’t even see this. I could be making faces at you right now and you would never even know. What’s next? Food? FOOD! One of the things that drew me to this event was the inside information on the food. Two words people: Pulled Pork. Ally “Ryverstone” Cunningham made so much pulled pork for this event! It became the topping for burgers, hot dogs, nachos, and for the especially brave, pasta salad. Even on its own it was amazing! Smoked and seasoned perfectly, I could go on for another few pages of review about how much I loved the pulled pork, but I would probably lose the six of you still reading.
After dinner I played in another poker tournament. For results, see the section above. #neverlucky
There were some fireworks in Danbury to the south of us, so I missed the start of the night quest. Woops. Luckily, Dame Twenaria was there to yell at me and get me moving. Everybody had a favorite part of the night quest. The best way to describe it was Nostalgiafest 1018. As it turns out, in these alternate timelines, we lose a lot more than we would like to admit, and we had to fix that! I didn’t even recognize two of the four plots that we revisited! The first thing we encountered was a castle gate surrounded by a moat. I don’t know how long we fought on that bridge. I don’t WANT to know how long we fought on that bridge. The constructs guarding it were backed up by more constructs that could heal and repair them, and replenish their power with a magical well behind them. I found out later that there was a way to poison the magical well to kill all of the constructs, but we did things the brute force kind of break down the door method. Eventually it worked!
Past the well we discovered a table that had four outlines of ash on it. Three of these could be filled with items we already had with us, and gave us hints to the adventures to come. We already had a vial of blood, Predator’s Sword, and a Shard of Narsil. We were missing a helm, which we eventually discovered was the Helm of the Northern Paladin. We broke through the wall of rocks in front of us and started running the gauntlet of Time Rifts ahead of us.
In the first Rift, I ran into Neil Cook, but not OUR Neil Cook, and walked with him for a while. We met some Acolytes of the One True God from Verai. No, not NEW Verai. Verai. We decided to keep looking for the Helm of the Northern Paladin, and kept moving. Before I move on with the story, I want to applaud the event staff for masterful use of glow sticks. While we were all in the first Rift, they were hard at work lighting a path with the glow sticks on the ground for us to discover once it had been solved. Super cool! When we got to the next Rift, Voraniss was already on top of things and solving the Rift using the vial of blood. This was one of the plots that I had never heard of and it wasn’t explained to me before the time of writing this. Seeing that that Rift was all but solved, I moved along the glow stick path towards the next Rift. I’m sure most of you know, I was not playing this game 18ish years ago when Lord of the Rings plot was going on, but the next Rift allowed us newer players to cash in on some of that nostalgia, and it was awesome fighting against the minions of Sauron. Swoop even lent me Anduril to beat the goblins up with! I’ll check that one off of the nerdy bucket list! The way to solve this Rift was very counter-intuitive. Remember when I said that in these alternate timelines we lose more often? To solve this Time Rift, we had to give the Shard of Narsil back to the goblins! Very scary concept to some of us.
We stumbled back into the first rift that we encountered and discovered a path that was definitely no way not there before. Okay, we missed it the first time. There was a lot of hissing down this path as the Sneeple attacked us. Once more we fought our way through to a stone table with a carving of a dragon on it. The table had a hole that fit the Predator’s sword. When it was inserted into the table, Predator came and retrieved it. He helped us to defeat the remaining Sneeple in the area, and we followed him back to the first Rift. As it turned out, the eggs in the area were not dragon eggs with cute baby dragons that Twenaria and I were going to steal and cuddle. They were filled with Sneeple both big and small. There was a very big, very fast one, two poisonous ones, and countless regular Sneeple. The eggs kept hatching, so we kept fighting. The big one was messing a lot of us up, so Lako gave me some insight into how to defeat it with Fighter’s Intuition! We learned that its armor was very thick, and we needed to pierce its hide to wound it. Mogar started swinging, and we brought it down! I’m not actually sure if we ever collected the Helm of the Northern Paladin, but after that rift had been solved to our satisfaction, we left the way we came and began the night’s festivities! I went to bed earlier than I’d like to admit, and in the morning left earlier than I normally do, so I’m going to let Saegan pick it up from here. If you’re lucky he might tell you about the Beer Pit!
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by Keith "Saegan" Cronyn
The Beer Pit is a small tradition that takes place after the night quest at Blackwood Tournaments. It's exactly as irresponsible as it sounds, mixing fighting, and drinking, and I will say we had a record breaking year. The people who participate in it have a certain fondness for it that keeps it around, and it's just a good time that you'd have to experience for yourself. I'll leave it at that, but I won't say you won't hear some stories if you ask around.
The revelry went far into the night, and I'm happy to say we were able to convince Aiden to do some fire dancing for us just before blue o'clock. It was a good light hearted night for a lot of people, and I think some memories were made.
Sunday, we were able to roll into tournaments right around 12. We, the event staff opted to finish up the singles tournaments first to make sure that the event would qualify for Order of the List for all our participants.
I was a combat marshal, so I got to see all the fights first hand, and I have to say that this was one of my favorite unlimited single competitor tournaments to have witnessed. We had several casters step up and try their hand, which isn't always the case. We had some really epic slug fests, that were just true examples of how fighting should be done, and we even had some really just clever moves that changed the outcome of fights in general. I'm a real fan of heavy combat, and this was a display.
We rounded out the day with capture the flag. The sun was being relentless, and just beating down on us, and it seemed a lot of the competitors were exhausted with the weekend of festivities. It was obvious. The players took advantage of the rules, and played smart. Personally I think it was a nice light way to end the tournaments, which was perfect because we needed to move onto the awards.
The results were in, and the Purple Team had claim the overall victory. Blackwood celebrated the finale of the event with cake, trophies and certificates.
Thank you all who made it out, we hope to see you next year.