The Road Trip Part 3. Animals and Archimedes

As seen on TV

So I rolled into Eureka at a pretty reasonable time. The town was alright. I was hoping it'd be full of geniuses and wacky hijinks but it turns out the actual Eureka is pretty normal. There's a coastline nearby and some pretty neat woods. But all in all, Eureka turned out to just be the largest Californian city north of San Francisco.

I guess I was just really expecting a bunch of nerds or something.

This seems so safe.

Oh, wait. There we go.


North Coast Role Playing. A store that looked like something between a dive-bar and a regular bar. Well, far be it from me to not give it a shot. I get to ramp up my grass-roots indie-gamer-cred. Oldschool!

Anyway, I went inside and it was actually pretty sweet. (Look! text-links!)

The place actually specialized in tabletop RPGs rather than the Tabletop section being secondary to comics/board-games/card-games.

Not Pictured: My dignity.

BE WARNED. I AM GOING TO TALK ABOUT NERDY RPG STUFF NOW. I will not begrudge you if you just move on to the non-threatening image of a cheeseburger where I see an Emu. 

I managed to find some pretty sweet stuff while I was there, too. I decided that I was going to pick up a few non-standard RPG systems that I don't often see in stores.


I picked up a copy of Burning Wheel, which is the base system that the Mouse Guard RPG uses. Basically it's a system where the Roleplaying aspect of the game is emphasized over the tactics elements. You can probably find a few interesting articles about that, but I think the most telling is the PA Report article about Mouse Guard here.

The other game I picked up was PARANOIA, an RPG system that's a little on the weirder side. Basically it's a black-humor distopia game where players gleefully attempt to sabotage and execute their friends in order to please Friend Computer. It's sort of the RPG equivalent of Mau with more disintegrations.

Also, as per my tradition, I grabbed a set of dice. I always make it a point to buy a set whenever I go to a new gaming/comic store. So yeah. That happened.

I'm not kidding about
the Nascar

I spent the night just outside of Eureka and grabbed pizza with a friend from the internet.

I hit the road later, and eventually ran into a cool little diner off the edge of the road. Seems like the thing to do when you're on a road-trip, right? Go to diners with truckers where people watch Nascar? is that culturally insensitive? We'll find out next time I get my ass kicked. This felt pretty Americana.

Yep.

Then I went outside and there was an Emu.

I didn't ask.



ONWARD! TO PORTLAND!

~Jon Ying