Deathfest Fun with Excalibur

Unfortunately, I have no idea when this is from. I am guessing it was April or thereabouts 2008.
I died a horrible death. A bomb exploded, and I was engulfed by a fireball. My reflexes simply were not good enough.
Deathfest, like usual, was a great success. There was somewhere between 80 and 100 participants, nearly all of whom expected to die. They did not die in real life, of course. Deathfest is a huge roleplaying event that happens every semester. The rules are similar to Dungeons and Dragons, but even if you never played that before, you could catch on quickly. The event is broken down into three tiers, or levels. For the first tier, one was supposed to choose an option by its number, go to the place in the Main Lecture Hall that was labeled with that number, and meet the group that accumulated there. Some of the options were, “Around the River Bendis,” “Lambda the Ultimate,” and “Library of Congress B.S.”
I joined up with “Around the River Bendis.” My dungeon master (or DM for short) was Mike Rozycky. He led us to the East Lecture Hall and started writing on the white-board there. He wrote down a number of comic/graphic-novel names like Superman, Batman, The Green Lantern, Leonitis, and Maus. We all rolled our D20 (a die with 20 sides, used a lot in table-top role-playing games) to see who would be first in choosing a character. Whoever had the highest roll got to choose their character first. I chose “The ?”, an obscure comic book hero whose comic I have actually read (one of the few). I was given a “character sheet” which had my character's attributes, abilities, and items. Some of these items had “modifiers,” which means that if I were to roll a D20 to see how successful a given skill was, it would add on (or take away) a certain number of points toward that skill.
It turned out that our tier 1 (or the world that we were to role-play for tier 1) was a scary comic-book world gone bad. We all found ourselves in a place called Metropolis (Superman's home city), but very few of our characters would have been aware of such a place; in fact, the Superman character was not even chosen. There were explosions in the distance, and a horde of zombies marched up one of the side-streets near us. We found Arkham Asylum (an asylum from Batman), and it sounded like people were being tortured and raped inside. Being comprised mostly of heroes, our group naturally went inside. There was a big, fairly empty room and in it, the Joker. Joker, the arch nemesis of Batman called on Carnage and Venom (villains from Spiderman) to help him defeat us. This epic battle went on for a long time and we had almost killed the Joker, but the others were made of hardier stuff. The Joker, in a last attempt to take out as many of his enemies in one go, staggered toward us holding a cartoon bomb, fuse and everything. The Green Lantern, with quick thinking, made a bubble around the bomb so as to save us. The bubble was strong, but not invincible. It lessened the power of the ensuing explosion, but did not totally nullify the bomb. We were told to make reflex saves. We all rolled our D20, and needed a 10 or more to be safe from the bomb. I rolled a 3 plus my modifier for reflex, 4. A seven. I was engulfed in flame, and died.
Being dead really is not so bad. I followed the bright light to a room filled with tasty food-stuffs. There were chips, soda, Twizzlers, and various other wonders. New arrivals were told to sign their name on the white-board to join a “dead game.” A dead game would be instead of being in tier 2. Whoever survives the dead game, gets to rejoin the main game and be in tier 3. The goal of each tier is to kill of as many players as possible. This may or may not end with a final survivor at the end of tier 3. Surviving is not really the point at deathfest. There are a number of other prizes issued at the end. These include a prize for leadership, where the player somehow convinced their party to agree with them to some end; a prize for the Ultimate Badass, whosoever demonstrated overall excellence in that category; and a prize for “creative morality,” whosoever does something completely outrageous according to our normal morality compass, but who could justify it completely. Deathfest is run by Excalibur, a student group that has movie viewings and other events with sci-fi/fantasy relevancy. The next deathfest is next semester, look out for info on how to get involved.