Five of the last five bands I’ve seen live have had a trombone player. The latest group was Panic! at the Disco at Nassau Colosseum. I’ve never seen them before but have been a fan for a while. It worked out well cuz my daughter wanted to go see them with her cousins, so I went with my sister-in-law. Modern pop music has been getting back into my head for a while now, driven mainly by the fact that my kids are now old enough to have interesting taste in music and are turning me on to new bands. From the first time I heard them a few years ago P!atD stood apart due their over-the-top manic sensibilities and Brendan Urie’s incredible talent as a singer and a showman.
The show did not disappoint. In addition to the core band of guitar, bass and drums, he had a string section and a horn section, for a total of ten musicians on stage. Plus alot of tracks were piped in so the mix sounded very much like the record. Man, Brendon has a incredible range! Alot of his songs start off comfortable for me and go way to high! Like Freddy Mercury he mostly just sings but likes to sit down at a piano sometimes. The highlight of the show for me was Brendon actually had a grand piano on a flying saucer and rode from high above the mixing board station back to the stage. The rig give Keith Emerson’s famous upside-down rotating piano a run for it’s money. The other highlight was toward the end of the show P!atD played Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. It sounded pretty much completely live, although I’ll be they piped in some reinforcement on the vocal harmonies.
The next day we all went on cruise to the Caribbean, all the siblings and nieces on Jeannie’s side of the family, and of course Jeannie’s parents. I’d been on a cruise once before (not to the Caribbean) and found being trapped on a boat with basically nothing to do not very much fun. Unlimited food and drink gets boring by the second day or so, and there’s usually little to no access to musical instruments or that kind of thing, not to mention the tiny cabins and low ceilings. So this time I planned ahead. I started a D&D campaign.
Playing Dungeons and Dragons was actually Michelle’s idea. We had a family D&D campaign a few years ago but the two of us were the only ones really interested, so it kinda petered out. Michelle recently got the 5th edition rules and has been trying to get an adventure going with her friends from school. Then she told me her cousin Abby wanted to play. Then Abby’s sisters and brother wanted in too, and their dad Lou. Lou and I were in a party together back in the early ’90’s. Apparently they all watched Stranger Things and now D&D is popular among high school kids. Who knew?
So suddenly there was a party of six players, with me as DM. Of the group, Michelle, Lou and I were experienced players. I read up on the 5th edition rules and picked a module. The module was one of mine from when I was in high school: The Isle of Dread. This was so old it was written under the “Advanced” rules. But it fit thematically because the adventure was about traveling to a faraway island. We rolled up characters the weekend before. The party consists of a human Cleric (Michelle) whose god is Thor, a halfling Rouge (Abby), and Elvish Wizard (Phil), an Elvish Druid (Val), a human Ranger (Katie), and a Dwarven fighter Carmine the Invincible (Lou).
Another things I did to make the voyage tolerable was to go to the gym in the mornings. The boat actually had a pretty nice gym, including free weights and a bench press set up with a rack so the weights wouldn’t fall all over the place in storm. I must say lifting weights on rocking boat provided and extra level of challenge. Also I watched the last half of Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood with Michelle in the evenings. Totally mind blowing. Who would’ve guessed that Selim was a humonculus?
Anyway, I honestly had no idea how the D&D would go but I did what I could and hoped for the best. It turned out great. Our first session was on the first whole day at sea. And we basically played the whole afternoon. Everyone was into it, and eager to get into character and learn the riles and play and have fun. We were in a big lounge in the stern of the ship with view of the ocean on three sides, in a cluster of chairs and couches, coffee tables and end table.
The campaign started with the characters meeting for the first time at a tavern in some medieval seaport, listening to an old pirate tell a tall tail of treasure and danger on some haunted island far away in the sea, in order to recruit a crew of adventurers. The party escaped the tavern as a brawl erupted, found a ship and set sail. They reached the island and met the natives of a local village, then trekked off into the jungle in search of the lost temple. Soon enough they had their first encounter with a phalanx of undead skeletons. Then the real excitement began…