A couple of weeks ago the Sunday D&D group was heading into a session that, as a Gamemaster with a few years under my belt, I came into with a small degree of trepidation. It wasn't a situation I've never faced before or something that I was unsure if I could handle. They weren't headed into the cataclysmic final encounter with an enemy that I've been building up to for some time now. They had, in fact, just finished up that particular type of game our previous session, two weeks prior. No, this particular snowy Sunday, as we drove down I-80 to Pat and Jon's apartment for the biweekly "Adam tries to be more entertaining than the NFL game going on behind him" session, I faced a different kind of beast all together. This was the session that no one really fears but no one really looks forward to, either. The kind that if it works out at its best, you can probably assume everyone will just walk past it and not remember most of what happens and, at its worst, could be the start of the game break-down that causes the whole thing to evolve to the awkward "...so...who wants to run the game next week?" conversation.
The Bridge Game.
For the uninitiated, the Bridge Game is the game session that comes between adventures in an RPG, when your party is travelling and doing the things that make up the daily lives of people like you and I (except, you know, with more wizards.) Some GMs flow through these like they're nothing. Others will actually set their game up particularly to avoid these, perhaps by doing them in an episodic Star Trek-type format. I, at the beginning of this campaign, had made the choice to challenge myself by essentially running the game as a "sandbox," or a game wherein the plot is driven by the players exploring an open world rather than by me driving them from one adventure location to another in a linear plot.
In this particular case the party had just finished "saving" the homeworld of a group of High Elves called the Eladrin and, in doing so, one PC had basically finished his complete descent into evil. The rest of the group had not thrown him out at this point, but over the course of the adventure it was becoming more and more painfully apparent that there was an elephant in the room, in this case the character's complete lack of empathy or morality, that was going to lead eventually to a break, particularly given three of the characters being of a religious background. The group was back in their own world again, and needed to make their way home to the city of Thorvar that they had previously saved from a massive flood. The game, intentionally, was pulling them in two separate directions at this point, as there was a war in the south with blood-crazed Undead creatures broiling and, in the meantime, a vault of the world's most dangerous evil artifacts was currently being plundered by an organization of evil monsters. The party would need to make a choice, and I would need to spread the wrap-up material from the previous events and the intro stuff from what was coming out to fill 5 hours of gaming with players experienced enough to tell when I'm just stalling for time because I've got nothing.
The answer for me, in this case, was to do something that I have previously not spent a lot of effort on, to my game's detriment: rewarding the characters and giving them some time to unwind. Up until very recently, the storyline of the majority of my games very closely resembled an episode of 24, in that it consisted of a ton of action in a very short range of time with not a lot of downtime in between. After all, we're playing Dungeons and Dragons, not dress-up tea party. These are warriors and mages and priests of ancient gods. But I noticed in a lot of games, particularly those that tended to drift towards darker themes, the longer I waited kept them running through the gauntlet, the harder it became to make them actually care about anything or anyone that they ran into. They just kind of get numb after a while, and the edges of their suspension of disbelief will slowly but surely wear away until eventually they reach a point where the game becomes a slog from one fight to the next and your players are looking at you and honestly asking "Why does anyone stay in this terrible place? Why wouldn't they just leave?"
This session, I did something different. After finishing up some business in the Feywild, they came home and, upon making their way through the gate, were greeted with the closest thing to a ticker-tape parade the damaged city could put together. They had saved the town from a Katrina-esque flood prior to their previous departure, and though the city was still in bad shape, the group was recognized as the heroes they were. A street party broke out. People in the town were falling over themselves to offer them discounts in their shop or free items to help them out on their next mission. A couple of Succubi were waiting in Bakari's room for him at the end of the night to "reward" him for his efforts on the behalf of the Nine Hells. Even the normally rigid, cold Captain of the Guard let his guard down for a moment to share a drink with our party paladin. It was a chance for them to let their hair down, and I could tell from the amount of actual engagement from the players that it was welcome. I wasn't having to fight with the Packers game behind me for people's attention. The players volunteered suggestions on where their characters wanted to go and what they wanted to do when they got there. It was, to put it plainly, much better than I could have hoped it would have turned out, a well earned rest for the party that everyone seemed to enjoy. It wasn't all fun and games, but when it came time to drum up new tension between the church in the city and the people who practice Arcane magic (regrettably leading to the final departure of Bakari from the party into the ranks of the "almost certainly going to come back to menace us later" NPCs) and at the same time prod the group to head south and deal with an army of the dead heading relentlessly north to face them, people seemed to actually be relishing the opportunity to make a choice and get back out to defend a world that, suddenly, seemed like it actually had real people who were worth defending.
I really can't explain enough how much of a swing this was from the session two weeks earlier, where it looked like the group was just slogging along with their heads down through an (admittedly harsh and tedious) dungeon more to get it done than out of any real desire to see it finished. That, plus an off-the-cuff sermon from the dying former head of the church about the evils of the Arcanists and the look in everyone's eyes as they realized that this old man, with his final breath, may have just fired the opening shots in a holy war inside the city, made this one of the most memorable and frankly enjoyable gaming sessions in my memory.
Good Gaming,
Adam
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
Monday, July 4, 2011
6/18/11 Malifaux Tournament
A few weeks back I conducted the first of (hopefully) many Malifaux tournament events at the local gaming store, Gauntlet Games. Titled "Into the Breach," this was to be an introduction to competitive level Malifaux events here in Nebraska. We set the competition level for 35 SS scrap games using the expanded scenario chart and the "only use a scheme one time per tournament" special rule. I didn't really know what to expect in terms of turn-out, but was pleasantly surprised to find that I had 8 players registered at the start and another two that showed up early enough in round 1 I could add them to the fray without disrupting pairings too much. The break-down looked something like this.
2xRessers
3xArcanists
2xNeverborn
3xOutcasts
So no Guild presence to be seen, since we had an even number and they didn't need me to join in as a ringer. Lawlessness and disorder would be the word of the day, it seems.
Some highlights of the event:
-Discovering that Zoraida is extra unfair in treasure hunt, particularly against a slower crew like McMourning. The Z player snatched the treasure counter and was gone before any of the Doctor's minions had gotten within 12" of the center point. Only ended up a draw in that game due to smart scheme work from Dr. M.'s player and Zoraida forgetting that part of the 4VPs of Treasure Hunt is having the token in hand in her deployment zone at the end of the game.
-Time limits were not as harsh as I initially was worried they would become. Most rounds saw at least 2 of the games completed and the rest at least to turn 4.
-Marcus doesn't suck: the Marcus player performed quite well in the event. He was, of course, somewhat assisted by playing on a large wooded board in two games where his Waldgeists could do some big-time terrain rearrangement.
-The championship game coming down to a game of shared supply wagon on a board with a river and a bridge in the middle, resulting in an epic massacre on the mid-board with both sides scrumming for control of the bridge while Hans and a Friekorps Scout engaged in an epic sniper duel on the outside of the board.
After three rounds of fierce competition the results came in:
1st Place - Friekorpsman
2nd Place - Marcus
3rd Place - Leveticus
Everyone seemed to have a great time, and hopefully we've got some momentum rolling for the next event on 7/30th.
Photos from the Event can be seen here.
Friday, June 10, 2011
Thursday, June 2, 2011
An odd thing happened this weekend. Jen, having previously succumbed to my lures to get a passing interest in Malifaux (hey, look at the artwork in this book. Isn't it cool?), suggested that we have people over to do a painting/miniature prep day at our place. This works out well for me, as Gencon is rolling along here in a handful of months and I've ambitiously signed up for this event where I need to have not one, but three different crews from three different factions to compete for full points. This is a doable objective, to be sure, but it does leave me needing to get off my ass and get painting/assembling, particularly given that the third crew currently exists entirely in hypothetical, half assembled pewter form. As such, we invited over friends who similarly need motivation from time to time, as well as one of Jen's girlfriends, for a sort of geeky sewing bee/Game of Thrones marathon.
Partially by kismet, I needed to work on modeling for most of the afternoon/evening (gluing spaghetti to bases for simulated bamboo. Yaaay. Sigh,) and as such my painting supplies were available for common use. Mike and Jon were working off to the side, but the girls, out of nowhere, suddenly found themselves interested in my models. There was a particular attraction to the..*ahem*..more scantily clad female models, and the next thing you know they were off. Paint was slung. Models were colored. Khal Drogo was drooled over (seriously, the dude could be wearing a nighty with eyeshadow and blush and would still be 10x the man I and my male friends combined sum up to) and all of a sudden, I found myself with a painting partner.
The next night, we sat down together and painted some more. Then, the next day, we were driving to the game store to get more models for her to paint (again, wearing very little clothing). The next night, there we were again, her painting and me putting more spaghetti bamboo to bases. And it occurs to me now that I have a partner in this hobby, potentially for life. And that is basically amazing.
If you've never painted a large scale army for a game like 40k or Warhammer Fantasy, you don't quite have the complete picture of just how draining it can be to have to sit down and paint minis alone. Note, I didn't say want to paint them. There is always the people who just can't get enough sitting down and painting thousands of greenskin orc footmen, but tragically I'm not one of them. I like the story. I like playing the games. Getting from point A to point B, however, involves an awful lot of sitting down, squinting at something 25mm tall and cursing because I just put a black spot in the middle of their white dress, resulting in me coming up with excuses for why I need to do something else besides continue working on them. Don't get me wrong, I very much enjoy painting models when I have a strong feeling for I want them to turn out, but somewhere around the 21st space marine holding his bolter and chainsword in the air and shouting I tend to lose interest. This is one of the many reasons I enjoy Malifaux, actually, since the point of the game is to play small model count scraps based more on a gang rather than a full army. Still, there can even be a measure of fatigue to painting on piles of, say, piglets for my gremlin crews that needs overcoming.
The cure to this fatigue, from what I've experienced, is having someone to work with. I know this from the amount of time my friend Jon and I spent painting and working our way through the early seasons of 24 one episode at a time. There's just something about having someone there with you that makes it all very tolerable. Maybe it's just knowing that people are going through it with you. Maybe it's the availability of immediate feedback when you can show off your newly painted model to your paint partner and get some quick gratification that yes, in fact, it did turn out well. Regardless of the reason, 1500 points of Black Templar marines were born from those hours upon hours of Jack Bauer murders (I liked to think of them as training videos for the Astartes I was working on,) a labor I've really never managed to replicate, at least for anything in the gaming hobby.
Now, something even more special has come along. Now, I have this to share with someone I love. We can experiment together (on painting techniques, you pervs.) I'm the one who knows a little bit more about what we're doing, so I can show her tips on how to dry brush. In return, her enthusiasm for the hobby has re-sparked my enthusiasm for the work, resulting in the fact that I'll likely have the models painted and ready to go for the tournament at Gencon (well in advance, actually, at the rate I'm going.) She's not really interested in playing the game yet, but perhaps some day maybe that will change. For the time being, she's content plow through the back-catalogue of minis I have available and getting them at least up to table-top quality so they can be used in games. And, perhaps even more exciting, this doesn't seem to be a passing fancy. Should things work out in the long run, maybe we'll be working together on this sort of geek stuff for quite a long time to come.
Yeah I know. Guess at some point I must have done something right.
Partially by kismet, I needed to work on modeling for most of the afternoon/evening (gluing spaghetti to bases for simulated bamboo. Yaaay. Sigh,) and as such my painting supplies were available for common use. Mike and Jon were working off to the side, but the girls, out of nowhere, suddenly found themselves interested in my models. There was a particular attraction to the..*ahem*..more scantily clad female models, and the next thing you know they were off. Paint was slung. Models were colored. Khal Drogo was drooled over (seriously, the dude could be wearing a nighty with eyeshadow and blush and would still be 10x the man I and my male friends combined sum up to) and all of a sudden, I found myself with a painting partner.
The next night, we sat down together and painted some more. Then, the next day, we were driving to the game store to get more models for her to paint (again, wearing very little clothing). The next night, there we were again, her painting and me putting more spaghetti bamboo to bases. And it occurs to me now that I have a partner in this hobby, potentially for life. And that is basically amazing.
If you've never painted a large scale army for a game like 40k or Warhammer Fantasy, you don't quite have the complete picture of just how draining it can be to have to sit down and paint minis alone. Note, I didn't say want to paint them. There is always the people who just can't get enough sitting down and painting thousands of greenskin orc footmen, but tragically I'm not one of them. I like the story. I like playing the games. Getting from point A to point B, however, involves an awful lot of sitting down, squinting at something 25mm tall and cursing because I just put a black spot in the middle of their white dress, resulting in me coming up with excuses for why I need to do something else besides continue working on them. Don't get me wrong, I very much enjoy painting models when I have a strong feeling for I want them to turn out, but somewhere around the 21st space marine holding his bolter and chainsword in the air and shouting I tend to lose interest. This is one of the many reasons I enjoy Malifaux, actually, since the point of the game is to play small model count scraps based more on a gang rather than a full army. Still, there can even be a measure of fatigue to painting on piles of, say, piglets for my gremlin crews that needs overcoming.
The cure to this fatigue, from what I've experienced, is having someone to work with. I know this from the amount of time my friend Jon and I spent painting and working our way through the early seasons of 24 one episode at a time. There's just something about having someone there with you that makes it all very tolerable. Maybe it's just knowing that people are going through it with you. Maybe it's the availability of immediate feedback when you can show off your newly painted model to your paint partner and get some quick gratification that yes, in fact, it did turn out well. Regardless of the reason, 1500 points of Black Templar marines were born from those hours upon hours of Jack Bauer murders (I liked to think of them as training videos for the Astartes I was working on,) a labor I've really never managed to replicate, at least for anything in the gaming hobby.
Now, something even more special has come along. Now, I have this to share with someone I love. We can experiment together (on painting techniques, you pervs.) I'm the one who knows a little bit more about what we're doing, so I can show her tips on how to dry brush. In return, her enthusiasm for the hobby has re-sparked my enthusiasm for the work, resulting in the fact that I'll likely have the models painted and ready to go for the tournament at Gencon (well in advance, actually, at the rate I'm going.) She's not really interested in playing the game yet, but perhaps some day maybe that will change. For the time being, she's content plow through the back-catalogue of minis I have available and getting them at least up to table-top quality so they can be used in games. And, perhaps even more exciting, this doesn't seem to be a passing fancy. Should things work out in the long run, maybe we'll be working together on this sort of geek stuff for quite a long time to come.
Yeah I know. Guess at some point I must have done something right.
Thursday, March 31, 2011
GMing for a Huge Group
For a number of years now, a group of friends assembled from the remainder of the UNL Gamer's Association, a club which had been going for many years to get undergraduate rpg-ers together here on campus and which has, sadly, now passed into the beyond. As tends to happen with groups of friends as time passes, many of us have moved and others have joined. However, a number of my friends are currently split between Omaha and Lincoln, NE, a one hour drive that makes it difficult to get together regularly for a game but leaves it slightly more practical to have an every-other-Sunday game with all of us together. This makes for a fun, reminiscing, meandering game session on a fairly regular occasion but, as I've discovered since becoming the gamemaster for this group, creates a unique and difficult challenge: the group is about twice the size that most rpg's are built for.
The standard gaming group size has a lot of things going for it. First of all, it's the size that they actually build the mechanics of the game to work with. Dungeons and Dragons assumes that you have a group with four players and a GM, and the underlying math of the game as well as the actual game mechanics keep this in mind. Many other RPGs contain some version of these same assumptions. It really just goes back to basic communication theory, where a group larger than 5 people tend to have difficulty maintaining continuous communication without some of the individuals drifting off and establishing their own conversations. We can see this often at our gaming table, and frankly I'm one of the most egregious offenders despite my own efforts to avoid this. Combat in a situation like this can be especially draggy, as players essentially get their combat turn and then have to sit for fifteen minutes before they get to participate in the game again. I don't think anyone can really be blamed for drifting under those conditions, and it's essentially the enemy I have to face when I'm doing my planning for these sessions.
The answers, thus far, have come from a different type of gaming all together. When I plan out combats for these folks my framework tends to be "If I was designing this as a raid encounter in World of Warcraft, what would I do?" The reason is relatively straight forward and involves some of the assumptions and realizations that Blizzard's designers have come to over the course of the last several expansions. Very, very rarely are raid fights designed as a "tank and spank" anymore, as these are essentially boring fights where only the tank actually interacts with the monster being fought while the rest of the group just sits in whatever the safe spot in the room is and mash their buttons until the boss falls down and loot falls out. Now, any kind of fight in a raid, even including the trash pulls before you've even reached the boss, include some mechanic that everyone in the raid must deal with INDIVIDUALLY. Whether it be the always infamous fire/void/poison/poop on the floor that we aren't supposed to stand in, changing terrain, trash adds that show up and have to be dealt with in ever-increasing ways, and so on and so forth. The objective is to make sure that at all times everyone in the raid is DOING SOMETHING. This, while personally fueling my personal anxiety level at all points in the combat (heals, heals, heals, OCRAPIMINTHEFIREMOVEMOVEMOVE) it is infinitely better than the snore-fest tank and spank combats.
This is, I've found, even more important during D&D, if that's possible. The longer the players sit with no part in what's occurring during the fight, the more likely it is that they will drift. If, however, during the middle of the round they're continuously being assaulted by enemies, affected by terrain that is shifting, and/or dealing with surprise attacks, suddenly Chris isn't falling asleep in his chair and Rob maybe puts his computer down to watch intently. I threw a lot of these things into the big arena-style combat I threw at my group last week, where the party was facing an epic scale combat with the lycanthropic leader of a demon-worshiping cult and his water demon servants in an arena that would routinely shoot areas of the floor into the air, forming impromptu towers, drop away into pits, or even fire spear traps up at them. That, paired with the cult leader being built to move around all over the map as well as doing a ton of things that players hate (Hurray, we've got him pinned d-wait? How the hell did he get over there?) and the escalating threat of smaller water monsters being killed and forced to combine into gradually larger and larger threats, led to a very dynamic, very involved combat that the group seemed very enthused about the whole time. I paired this up with a unique, one time mechanic wherein the group was rewarded for using their flashier, more limited attacks to appease the god of strength and combat in whose arena they were fighting and included a mechanic whereby the priest of the aforementioned god could call on his power to refresh the group, a measure that was necessary since I had basically lumped three encounters into one massive fight, and I was pleased with the results. It was a fight that was essentially impossible to balance given the way the rules for the D&D4e system are written, but it all worked out in the end with a good fight and only one party member death (which, given the epic-ness of the encounter, the group seemed fine with.)
Now, the only trouble is figuring out what to do next to improve.
The standard gaming group size has a lot of things going for it. First of all, it's the size that they actually build the mechanics of the game to work with. Dungeons and Dragons assumes that you have a group with four players and a GM, and the underlying math of the game as well as the actual game mechanics keep this in mind. Many other RPGs contain some version of these same assumptions. It really just goes back to basic communication theory, where a group larger than 5 people tend to have difficulty maintaining continuous communication without some of the individuals drifting off and establishing their own conversations. We can see this often at our gaming table, and frankly I'm one of the most egregious offenders despite my own efforts to avoid this. Combat in a situation like this can be especially draggy, as players essentially get their combat turn and then have to sit for fifteen minutes before they get to participate in the game again. I don't think anyone can really be blamed for drifting under those conditions, and it's essentially the enemy I have to face when I'm doing my planning for these sessions.
The answers, thus far, have come from a different type of gaming all together. When I plan out combats for these folks my framework tends to be "If I was designing this as a raid encounter in World of Warcraft, what would I do?" The reason is relatively straight forward and involves some of the assumptions and realizations that Blizzard's designers have come to over the course of the last several expansions. Very, very rarely are raid fights designed as a "tank and spank" anymore, as these are essentially boring fights where only the tank actually interacts with the monster being fought while the rest of the group just sits in whatever the safe spot in the room is and mash their buttons until the boss falls down and loot falls out. Now, any kind of fight in a raid, even including the trash pulls before you've even reached the boss, include some mechanic that everyone in the raid must deal with INDIVIDUALLY. Whether it be the always infamous fire/void/poison/poop on the floor that we aren't supposed to stand in, changing terrain, trash adds that show up and have to be dealt with in ever-increasing ways, and so on and so forth. The objective is to make sure that at all times everyone in the raid is DOING SOMETHING. This, while personally fueling my personal anxiety level at all points in the combat (heals, heals, heals, OCRAPIMINTHEFIREMOVEMOVEMOVE) it is infinitely better than the snore-fest tank and spank combats.
This is, I've found, even more important during D&D, if that's possible. The longer the players sit with no part in what's occurring during the fight, the more likely it is that they will drift. If, however, during the middle of the round they're continuously being assaulted by enemies, affected by terrain that is shifting, and/or dealing with surprise attacks, suddenly Chris isn't falling asleep in his chair and Rob maybe puts his computer down to watch intently. I threw a lot of these things into the big arena-style combat I threw at my group last week, where the party was facing an epic scale combat with the lycanthropic leader of a demon-worshiping cult and his water demon servants in an arena that would routinely shoot areas of the floor into the air, forming impromptu towers, drop away into pits, or even fire spear traps up at them. That, paired with the cult leader being built to move around all over the map as well as doing a ton of things that players hate (Hurray, we've got him pinned d-wait? How the hell did he get over there?) and the escalating threat of smaller water monsters being killed and forced to combine into gradually larger and larger threats, led to a very dynamic, very involved combat that the group seemed very enthused about the whole time. I paired this up with a unique, one time mechanic wherein the group was rewarded for using their flashier, more limited attacks to appease the god of strength and combat in whose arena they were fighting and included a mechanic whereby the priest of the aforementioned god could call on his power to refresh the group, a measure that was necessary since I had basically lumped three encounters into one massive fight, and I was pleased with the results. It was a fight that was essentially impossible to balance given the way the rules for the D&D4e system are written, but it all worked out in the end with a good fight and only one party member death (which, given the epic-ness of the encounter, the group seemed fine with.)
Now, the only trouble is figuring out what to do next to improve.
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Thursday, March 3, 2011
3-3-11 Update
I've been a bit out of touch for the last few weeks, making the usual mockery of my efforts to "get back in the swing" of writing for the blog, but to be honest I've certainly done enough in the meantime that I feel I should be forgiven. I'm living with Jen now, having escaped my abysmal living situation in the apartment on 48th street (and oddly enough moving into a house close to NW 48th street, so literally jumping to the other side of town.) My friends, as usual, came through huge in getting the move done. Additionally, there was this funny comprehensive exam thing I've been working on for the last three weeks or so, ultimately ending in my submitting it and then immediately having to go redo it to include all the paperwork one typically has to include with an R01 Grant application (which I can only infer is the department's effort to talk us out of going into acadamia at the last minute.) This of course helped to remind me again what a monolithic, unwieldly beast the American bureaucracy has become in a number of ways, as at one point in the table of contents I was required to input the page number for the table of contents into the table of contents, just to cite a ridiculous example.
Now, I've got the document in my committee's hands, which of course leads to the crippling uncertainty of not knowing what they think of it and if it is sufficient to get me through into the next phase of the process. However, in the much more immediate future, I'm leaving tomorrow for New Orleans, to see dat Mardi Gras up close and person. How crazy it will get, and just how crazy things are going to get should help to offset a lot of the stress I've been under (most of it, admittedly, self-imposed.)
Hopefully, some good pictures/posts to come soon.
Now, I've got the document in my committee's hands, which of course leads to the crippling uncertainty of not knowing what they think of it and if it is sufficient to get me through into the next phase of the process. However, in the much more immediate future, I'm leaving tomorrow for New Orleans, to see dat Mardi Gras up close and person. How crazy it will get, and just how crazy things are going to get should help to offset a lot of the stress I've been under (most of it, admittedly, self-imposed.)
Hopefully, some good pictures/posts to come soon.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
I've mentioned my home brew campaign world, Thorvar, previously. Here's a link to the Obsidian Portal home page.
I realized that I had 3 players that were using one of each of the three elven races, so one early motivation for me was to go ahead and write up the article about how they went from one elven race to three. Here's what I came up with.
The Sundering of the Elven Nation
The first, greatest rulers in the lands of Arek were the elves. At the end of the dawn wars, when the world was scarred and wounded by the bloody remnants of the war between the gods and the primordials, only three of the Gods were exempted from the compact struct during the peace accords creating the Primodial Veil which surrounded the world. These three were tasked with repairing the damage inflicted, and thus were chosen the three sibling gods, Corellon, Lolthana, and Eladrineth. Born of the world itself, it was felt between the gods that they would have the best and most neutral of the gods interests’ in mind.
The ancient ancestors of the first races had already spread throughout the lands, but the caretaker gods’ decided they needed servants which were more closely related to their interests to aid them in their task. Towards this end, they took a subset of these early mortals and infused them with a fragment of their own immortal essence, helping them to ascend and giving them a fragment of immortality. These newly elevated servants, the elves, were then given to the world to remake, and glorious were their numerous works. They planted and tended the forests, filling them with animals and helping to shape the natural world. To the seas they gave fish, and to the air they created the birds. It was said that the very wind echoed with the joy of their laughter and the world was filled with the simple energy of their love and care, and above all ruled by the elves. The crown jewel, upon deeming their works in the world complete, was the construction of the magical Kingspire Citadel from which to reign across the world, built both as practical seat of government and tribute to their divine progenitors.
This, however, was not to last. Emboldened by their favored place amongst the gods, the elves began to rule the world more openly. Arrogance took the place of humility in their hearts. They began to treat the world more as their subjects, and this bred discontent amongst the people. Moreover, the elven race began to drift into separate directions, factionalizing along lines of loyalty to the individual elven gods. Sensing that their subjects loyalties were waning, the youngest of the triumvirate, Lolthana, suggested a competition amongst the elves, believing that if the growing factions were motivated to come up with great works on behalf of their patrons, that the subjects would be inspired to become more loyal to them. Eladrineth, always the more creative of the group, agreed at once. Corellon, however, had reservations, but eventually relented at the behest of his two sisters. The three factions, tasked with this new goal, set to work immediately.
The follower of Corellon sought to improve the world in which they currently lived, and did so by granting the worlds peoples each a great gift. They taught agriculture to some, mining and craftsmanship to the others, in the hopes that the world would be a better place for it. As per Corellon’s typical MO, it was a subtle but generous gift to the world. Lolthana, inspired by the pristine works of some of her favorite creatures, sought to build her own magical fortress to rival the Kingspire, one which possessed all the strength and fragile beauty o the web of a spider. It was elegant, beautiful, and possessing of an underlying strength, just like the goddess that designed it. The greatest of works, however, was produced by Eladrineth, who took the brightest and best parts of the world and molded them into her own plane of existence, the Feywild. It was bright, filled with primal energy and life, and every mote of dust and blade of grass seemed charged with arcane energy. Corellon, laughing, had to accede that her works were the finest of them all and a fitting tribute to the world, and chose Eladrineth as the victor. Lolthana, however, having poured her heart and soul into the creation of her webbed fortress, could not handle the defeat.
Jealousy immediately crept into and blackened her divine soul. In a fit of passion, she stuck a blade of mystical energy between the ribs of her sister just as Corellon chose her as the victor, striking her dead immediately. Corellon was horrified and, in a fit of rage, seized the webbed fortress Lolthana had forged and, trapping her within it, cast it into the depths of the Abyss forever. The followers of the slain Eladrineth wailed for justice upon Lolthana’s followers, but Corellon denied them. Sensing that civil war was coming amongst the elves, he forbade that any Eladrin should strike a blow against their kindred. Towards this end, Corellon banished the followers of Lolthana to the Shadowfell, the plane of the dead, and branded them forever as “Drow,” the elven word for outcast. Denied their vengeance, the Eladrin withdrew from the world to the plane created by their slain goddess, their to rule and remember her in their grief. The remaining elves, the followers of Corellon, were left as stewards of the world, vastly undermanned and no longer strong enough to maintain their tenuous hold. Emboldened by this fact and embittered by the resources the hungry gods had consumed in their contest, the barbarian tribes rose up and overthrew their rulers, storming the Kingspire which was destroyed in a flash of magical energy. In this moment, Corellon knew that he had failed. His time as caretaker of the world had ended, and it was time for him to return to the Astral Sea to live amongst the rest of the gods and leave the world to mortals.
His heart filled with grief, Corellon turned to his remaining followers and bade them to go out into the world and live amongst it, no longer as rulers but rather as a part of the world they had created. Sorrowfully, Corellon took his leave and rose up amongst the stars, leaving his people behind.
Since then, the elven people have divided into three very distinct nations. The elves remain in the shadows and fringes of the world, taking the lessons of their failed empire to heart. They rarely stay in one place, preferring to be on the move and look for new places to guide the hands and fates of mortals. The Eladrin ruled the Feywild as they ruled the lands of Arek long prior to their departure, their arrogance only having grown over the eons of uncontested rule. Only now that their lands have been invaded have they deigned to rejoin the mortal world. The Drow, having endured in the lands of the dead for this amount of time, haven grown isolationist and distrusting of anyone outside of their society. Though torn with the internal strife and competition that their patron, now known simply as Lolth, had inspired in them, their understanding that there is no one outside of Drow society who can be trusted.
I realized that I had 3 players that were using one of each of the three elven races, so one early motivation for me was to go ahead and write up the article about how they went from one elven race to three. Here's what I came up with.
The Sundering of the Elven Nation
The first, greatest rulers in the lands of Arek were the elves. At the end of the dawn wars, when the world was scarred and wounded by the bloody remnants of the war between the gods and the primordials, only three of the Gods were exempted from the compact struct during the peace accords creating the Primodial Veil which surrounded the world. These three were tasked with repairing the damage inflicted, and thus were chosen the three sibling gods, Corellon, Lolthana, and Eladrineth. Born of the world itself, it was felt between the gods that they would have the best and most neutral of the gods interests’ in mind.
The ancient ancestors of the first races had already spread throughout the lands, but the caretaker gods’ decided they needed servants which were more closely related to their interests to aid them in their task. Towards this end, they took a subset of these early mortals and infused them with a fragment of their own immortal essence, helping them to ascend and giving them a fragment of immortality. These newly elevated servants, the elves, were then given to the world to remake, and glorious were their numerous works. They planted and tended the forests, filling them with animals and helping to shape the natural world. To the seas they gave fish, and to the air they created the birds. It was said that the very wind echoed with the joy of their laughter and the world was filled with the simple energy of their love and care, and above all ruled by the elves. The crown jewel, upon deeming their works in the world complete, was the construction of the magical Kingspire Citadel from which to reign across the world, built both as practical seat of government and tribute to their divine progenitors.
This, however, was not to last. Emboldened by their favored place amongst the gods, the elves began to rule the world more openly. Arrogance took the place of humility in their hearts. They began to treat the world more as their subjects, and this bred discontent amongst the people. Moreover, the elven race began to drift into separate directions, factionalizing along lines of loyalty to the individual elven gods. Sensing that their subjects loyalties were waning, the youngest of the triumvirate, Lolthana, suggested a competition amongst the elves, believing that if the growing factions were motivated to come up with great works on behalf of their patrons, that the subjects would be inspired to become more loyal to them. Eladrineth, always the more creative of the group, agreed at once. Corellon, however, had reservations, but eventually relented at the behest of his two sisters. The three factions, tasked with this new goal, set to work immediately.
The follower of Corellon sought to improve the world in which they currently lived, and did so by granting the worlds peoples each a great gift. They taught agriculture to some, mining and craftsmanship to the others, in the hopes that the world would be a better place for it. As per Corellon’s typical MO, it was a subtle but generous gift to the world. Lolthana, inspired by the pristine works of some of her favorite creatures, sought to build her own magical fortress to rival the Kingspire, one which possessed all the strength and fragile beauty o the web of a spider. It was elegant, beautiful, and possessing of an underlying strength, just like the goddess that designed it. The greatest of works, however, was produced by Eladrineth, who took the brightest and best parts of the world and molded them into her own plane of existence, the Feywild. It was bright, filled with primal energy and life, and every mote of dust and blade of grass seemed charged with arcane energy. Corellon, laughing, had to accede that her works were the finest of them all and a fitting tribute to the world, and chose Eladrineth as the victor. Lolthana, however, having poured her heart and soul into the creation of her webbed fortress, could not handle the defeat.
Jealousy immediately crept into and blackened her divine soul. In a fit of passion, she stuck a blade of mystical energy between the ribs of her sister just as Corellon chose her as the victor, striking her dead immediately. Corellon was horrified and, in a fit of rage, seized the webbed fortress Lolthana had forged and, trapping her within it, cast it into the depths of the Abyss forever. The followers of the slain Eladrineth wailed for justice upon Lolthana’s followers, but Corellon denied them. Sensing that civil war was coming amongst the elves, he forbade that any Eladrin should strike a blow against their kindred. Towards this end, Corellon banished the followers of Lolthana to the Shadowfell, the plane of the dead, and branded them forever as “Drow,” the elven word for outcast. Denied their vengeance, the Eladrin withdrew from the world to the plane created by their slain goddess, their to rule and remember her in their grief. The remaining elves, the followers of Corellon, were left as stewards of the world, vastly undermanned and no longer strong enough to maintain their tenuous hold. Emboldened by this fact and embittered by the resources the hungry gods had consumed in their contest, the barbarian tribes rose up and overthrew their rulers, storming the Kingspire which was destroyed in a flash of magical energy. In this moment, Corellon knew that he had failed. His time as caretaker of the world had ended, and it was time for him to return to the Astral Sea to live amongst the rest of the gods and leave the world to mortals.
His heart filled with grief, Corellon turned to his remaining followers and bade them to go out into the world and live amongst it, no longer as rulers but rather as a part of the world they had created. Sorrowfully, Corellon took his leave and rose up amongst the stars, leaving his people behind.
Since then, the elven people have divided into three very distinct nations. The elves remain in the shadows and fringes of the world, taking the lessons of their failed empire to heart. They rarely stay in one place, preferring to be on the move and look for new places to guide the hands and fates of mortals. The Eladrin ruled the Feywild as they ruled the lands of Arek long prior to their departure, their arrogance only having grown over the eons of uncontested rule. Only now that their lands have been invaded have they deigned to rejoin the mortal world. The Drow, having endured in the lands of the dead for this amount of time, haven grown isolationist and distrusting of anyone outside of their society. Though torn with the internal strife and competition that their patron, now known simply as Lolth, had inspired in them, their understanding that there is no one outside of Drow society who can be trusted.
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
Why Is Everything Broken?
Some days I curse the fact that I'm currently living in the future.
There was a time when things were much simpler. You went through your day, and in the background there were television programs that came on, and maybe you watched them, maybe you didn't. Either way, the time that it came on was the time that it came on, and that was that. There were VCRs when I was a kid, so I suppose if you could figure out how to program the damn thing (which was supposedly impossible, if television sitcoms were to be believed,) you could record a show and watch it later...assuming your clock was right, the tape wasn't so old that it fell apart (anybody remember that particular joy?), or some other thing went wrong, you could perhaps watch that episode of Alf or Family Ties that you always wanted. But, some time or another things didn't work out and it wasn't a big deal.
Now, we have the magic of the DVR. Now, don't get me wrong, I adore this thing. As someone who occasionally is still at his office at 7 o'clock on a tuesday (as I am while writing this) occasionally I miss things when they run live. And when I say occasionally, what I of course mean is every time a show is on TV. The last thing I watched live on television was the Super Bowl, and the only non-football related thing I've watched live on TV in recent memory was the season premiere of The Walking Dead, which aired Halloween last year. But now, praise the gods of tech, we have this invention that can sit at home and record everything digitally for you. You just tell it "Hey, I watched an episode of Chuck once and found it vaguely amusing. Could you do me a solid DVR and record every episode for me?" And the DVR, being the accommodating device that it is, eagerly performs this function for you. Every single time a new episode of this program you fancy gets recorded safely away on your DVR disk, ready and waiting for your viewing consumption. But then, time passes. Television shows change. A show about a witty kid in way over his head in the world of spies jumps the shark, and the witty kid turns into Neo from the Matrix, spawn of the guy from Quantum Leap and Sara Conner from the Terminator (she actually said "I'll be back" once, which elicited a loud, verbal groan from me.) You lose interest. You get busy with other things. Next thing you know, you come back and there are roughly a dozen episodes of this television program still waiting for you on the list, staring at you with their accusing, sad eyes, whispering "Hey buddy, we had fun once, why don't you give it another shot? Maybe things could be better this time? I swear we'll show more of the hot Russian chick's cleavage in some of these upcoming shows." And now you're stuck between your DVR guilt and the amount of time it would take to actually go through and heartlessly delete every episode individually.
But maybe you do take the time to give the show another shot. You turn on "Chuck versus Spy Agency of the Week," and settle in for a nice episode of make-up-sex-like TV viewing. But, oh, what's this? The DVR's jammed up? Sometimes if the disk is full or it's an older DVR box, the damn things get scratched up. Or, (and this is entirely my armchair cable guy view of things) you live in an ancient apartment that gets crap cable signal, and the result is the show skips. Sometimes the sound cuts out. You get to a commercial and the fast-forward button for doesn't work anymore. Now, just the fact that this convenience exists beats the hell out of the VHS days, but that almost makes it worse, because it suggests a level of expectation to the viewer. "This gadget works," they tell you. "All the shows you want, at the touch of a finger." And you buy it, because for a time it all works out. This, of course, makes everything worse when it eventually fails. It's a paradox, in a way. The more successful a device is, the more intense the aggravation is created when it inevitably fails, as all things do. You get used to things just working, and then they don't. It's like a betrayal in a way. "You worked yesterday?" you tell the DVR. "You recorded that episode of House just fine. What the hell happened?" And all it gives you is the little, uncaring, mechanical shrug. "Error 404." Blue screen. Static. And there you stand, your broken expectations in one hand and your proverbial genitalia in the other, and no one to blame but yourself for how ridiculously dependent you let yourself become on something that shouldn't matter at all.
And that's just a simple thing like the damned TV.
What about the internet? I can remember playing Rampage off of a floppy disk on our Tandy 1000, and it was the hottest thing you could imagine a computer doing. Now, I go home some days and turn on World of Warcraft or DC Universe Online, that allows us to interact real time with people on the other side of the world in an environment where more than half a second's lag from keystroke to showing up on the other guy's monitor is borderline unacceptable. I'm typing this on my laptop while, next to me, my IPAD is streaming season one of Damages from Netflix with similar visual quality to what I would have gotten from the television (leading me to question almost daily why I'm paying so much for cable in the first place, but that's another blog post.) It's a digital world, as old people who don't really live in it are fond of saying, and we're all rushing along with it. Really, it's quite miraculous, and makes me feel every day like I'm living in an episode of Star Trek.
Until something breaks.
Currently my modem at home enjoys dropping it's connection to the internet randomly. It doesn't matter if I have one device or three running through the router. It doesn't matter if I'm running WoW, looking something up on the iPad, and talking to someone on Skype or just checking my email. Time of day, usage hours, none of it seems to make any difference. Occasionally something goes wrong, and then the internet shuts off. It only takes a moment of my time, but it's infuriating, as my fractured headset from the other night's attempt at running heroic Stonecore can attest. It's a thing beyond our control, once again the loss of a basic convenience that we've come to take for granted and even depend on, and ultimately this is where it gets us.
There was a time when things were much simpler. You went through your day, and in the background there were television programs that came on, and maybe you watched them, maybe you didn't. Either way, the time that it came on was the time that it came on, and that was that. There were VCRs when I was a kid, so I suppose if you could figure out how to program the damn thing (which was supposedly impossible, if television sitcoms were to be believed,) you could record a show and watch it later...assuming your clock was right, the tape wasn't so old that it fell apart (anybody remember that particular joy?), or some other thing went wrong, you could perhaps watch that episode of Alf or Family Ties that you always wanted. But, some time or another things didn't work out and it wasn't a big deal.
Now, we have the magic of the DVR. Now, don't get me wrong, I adore this thing. As someone who occasionally is still at his office at 7 o'clock on a tuesday (as I am while writing this) occasionally I miss things when they run live. And when I say occasionally, what I of course mean is every time a show is on TV. The last thing I watched live on television was the Super Bowl, and the only non-football related thing I've watched live on TV in recent memory was the season premiere of The Walking Dead, which aired Halloween last year. But now, praise the gods of tech, we have this invention that can sit at home and record everything digitally for you. You just tell it "Hey, I watched an episode of Chuck once and found it vaguely amusing. Could you do me a solid DVR and record every episode for me?" And the DVR, being the accommodating device that it is, eagerly performs this function for you. Every single time a new episode of this program you fancy gets recorded safely away on your DVR disk, ready and waiting for your viewing consumption. But then, time passes. Television shows change. A show about a witty kid in way over his head in the world of spies jumps the shark, and the witty kid turns into Neo from the Matrix, spawn of the guy from Quantum Leap and Sara Conner from the Terminator (she actually said "I'll be back" once, which elicited a loud, verbal groan from me.) You lose interest. You get busy with other things. Next thing you know, you come back and there are roughly a dozen episodes of this television program still waiting for you on the list, staring at you with their accusing, sad eyes, whispering "Hey buddy, we had fun once, why don't you give it another shot? Maybe things could be better this time? I swear we'll show more of the hot Russian chick's cleavage in some of these upcoming shows." And now you're stuck between your DVR guilt and the amount of time it would take to actually go through and heartlessly delete every episode individually.
But maybe you do take the time to give the show another shot. You turn on "Chuck versus Spy Agency of the Week," and settle in for a nice episode of make-up-sex-like TV viewing. But, oh, what's this? The DVR's jammed up? Sometimes if the disk is full or it's an older DVR box, the damn things get scratched up. Or, (and this is entirely my armchair cable guy view of things) you live in an ancient apartment that gets crap cable signal, and the result is the show skips. Sometimes the sound cuts out. You get to a commercial and the fast-forward button for doesn't work anymore. Now, just the fact that this convenience exists beats the hell out of the VHS days, but that almost makes it worse, because it suggests a level of expectation to the viewer. "This gadget works," they tell you. "All the shows you want, at the touch of a finger." And you buy it, because for a time it all works out. This, of course, makes everything worse when it eventually fails. It's a paradox, in a way. The more successful a device is, the more intense the aggravation is created when it inevitably fails, as all things do. You get used to things just working, and then they don't. It's like a betrayal in a way. "You worked yesterday?" you tell the DVR. "You recorded that episode of House just fine. What the hell happened?" And all it gives you is the little, uncaring, mechanical shrug. "Error 404." Blue screen. Static. And there you stand, your broken expectations in one hand and your proverbial genitalia in the other, and no one to blame but yourself for how ridiculously dependent you let yourself become on something that shouldn't matter at all.
And that's just a simple thing like the damned TV.
What about the internet? I can remember playing Rampage off of a floppy disk on our Tandy 1000, and it was the hottest thing you could imagine a computer doing. Now, I go home some days and turn on World of Warcraft or DC Universe Online, that allows us to interact real time with people on the other side of the world in an environment where more than half a second's lag from keystroke to showing up on the other guy's monitor is borderline unacceptable. I'm typing this on my laptop while, next to me, my IPAD is streaming season one of Damages from Netflix with similar visual quality to what I would have gotten from the television (leading me to question almost daily why I'm paying so much for cable in the first place, but that's another blog post.) It's a digital world, as old people who don't really live in it are fond of saying, and we're all rushing along with it. Really, it's quite miraculous, and makes me feel every day like I'm living in an episode of Star Trek.
Until something breaks.
Currently my modem at home enjoys dropping it's connection to the internet randomly. It doesn't matter if I have one device or three running through the router. It doesn't matter if I'm running WoW, looking something up on the iPad, and talking to someone on Skype or just checking my email. Time of day, usage hours, none of it seems to make any difference. Occasionally something goes wrong, and then the internet shuts off. It only takes a moment of my time, but it's infuriating, as my fractured headset from the other night's attempt at running heroic Stonecore can attest. It's a thing beyond our control, once again the loss of a basic convenience that we've come to take for granted and even depend on, and ultimately this is where it gets us.
Sunday, February 6, 2011
Life, as of 2-6-11
It's been a long time since I posted on here, and maybe inspired by Amanda Baker's recently reinvigorated blog, I'm wanting (for probably the third or fourth time) to start posting more and getting some more of my ideas put to paper. What form that might take will vary significantly from one moment to the next, but I hope at the least to entertain.
I'm at a point now where my career is ultimately in my hands. as I'm a month out from my comprehensive exam (presumably, I don't take anything for granted where this process is concerned) and I finally, at long last, after much fumbling about and not getting anything worth a damn in the lab, have found an interaction between one of our virus's proteins and a host protein that could prove to answer a problem that has existed in the HPV field for some time now: how exactly the virus tethers itself to host chromosomes during mitosis to ensure segregation. It's been a long road, and there's a ton of work left to go before anything conclusive can be determined from the work, thus far, but it was definitely encouraging to finally get a little light at the end of the tunnel. In the meantime, we're entering an important time for determining in the Angeletti lab. I don't think it's any kind of secret that we've had some issues with funding. Hell, the entire scientific community is reeling. PIs in my building that have never had funding problems are suddenly getting their grant applications rejected for the first time in decades. A couple of years ago, the keynote speaker from our annual Flyswat meeting, one of the leaders in his field, had a grant get the highest score he'd ever received on one of his grant applications and had it end up NOT FUNDED. And that's in a situation where the NIH budget has simply failed to increase from one year to the next. Now, this year, the NIH budget is going to be reduced possibly 5-10%. This could be a horrific set of years for the science business, which admittedly puts us in the same place as a large number of other workers all throughout this country.
That's the bad news. The good news, however, is that ultimately that doesn't make a difference to whether I get out of here or not. It's on me now. Hell, the budget problems are just a reason for my boss to want to get me graduated and moved on down the road. I've got no one to look at but myself at this point, and I think that's finally starting to settle in. It's a humbling feeling, having your future in your hands, but it's also empowering. I know, in some part of my heart, that this is it, make or break time. Time to stand up, time to get moving, time to get WRITING.
That's where I'm stuck now. Those who spend time doing any kind of writing under stand what I'm talking about when I talk about the daunting feeling you get when you sit down and try to start writing. Californication's Hank Moudy refers often to the blank page, ultimately ever writer's best friend and greatest nemesis. I really don't know what it is about starting out that is so difficult. Ultimately once you get writing it just seems to flow (for me at least) but it's those first words that are always the hardest to put down. Maybe that's part of why I'm posting this today, trying to prime the pump. Here's hoping it works out.
Another bit of writing I've been doing of late is a return to my homebrew campaign world in an effort to repair the trouble that I've set in motion there long ago. It's a great feeing being behind the GM screen again, to be honest. I like creating a D&D character and putting him out in someone else's world, but it's really a special occasion to be in charge of the whole thing. It's indescribable to someone who hasn't done it before. It's creative writing. It's improvisational theatre. It's game design. It's being responsible for not just your fun but also the fun of the other players (I have 7) that are sitting around the table with you. When it works, it's just flat out magic. My GMing Hall of Fame is filled with moments like scaring the hell out of one of my friends with a little girl's ghost, instantly turning an otherwise jovial game session into a night where my party was quietly angry and determined to beat the fictional nemesis I had placed before them, and my all time favorite campaign, the truly special Dragonlance game that has filled our memories with gaming stories that have endured for years. And it all started once again, with my party waking up in a mass grave and fighting desperately to escape from a zombies, grave robbers, an ettin, and the rain waters slowly flooding the cemetery.
It's good to be back.
And last but not least, I'm with a wonderful woman with two great kids. No one should be too surprised that I'm not supremely comfortable publishing my personal life to the world via the intranets, but I'm happy. Very happy. It's not every day you find someone who can take a day that has been awful from top to bottom, leaving me ready to just lay into somebody or sink into myself and just wallow in self-misery for the rest of the day and, just by seeing her, make it all go away in a flash. It's something I never really thought I would have again, let alone find myself in the position of wondering if I've ever actually had it previously. Any time my apartment building gets sold to a new owner, my car gets a parking ticket for parking on a street two days after it snows, or things are falling apart at work, I can think of lucky I am to have found what I've found with Jen, and all the rest of it seems inconsequential.
So that's me, as of today. Now I'm off, to resume celebrating a certain World Champion football team. Go Pack Go.
I'm at a point now where my career is ultimately in my hands. as I'm a month out from my comprehensive exam (presumably, I don't take anything for granted where this process is concerned) and I finally, at long last, after much fumbling about and not getting anything worth a damn in the lab, have found an interaction between one of our virus's proteins and a host protein that could prove to answer a problem that has existed in the HPV field for some time now: how exactly the virus tethers itself to host chromosomes during mitosis to ensure segregation. It's been a long road, and there's a ton of work left to go before anything conclusive can be determined from the work, thus far, but it was definitely encouraging to finally get a little light at the end of the tunnel. In the meantime, we're entering an important time for determining in the Angeletti lab. I don't think it's any kind of secret that we've had some issues with funding. Hell, the entire scientific community is reeling. PIs in my building that have never had funding problems are suddenly getting their grant applications rejected for the first time in decades. A couple of years ago, the keynote speaker from our annual Flyswat meeting, one of the leaders in his field, had a grant get the highest score he'd ever received on one of his grant applications and had it end up NOT FUNDED. And that's in a situation where the NIH budget has simply failed to increase from one year to the next. Now, this year, the NIH budget is going to be reduced possibly 5-10%. This could be a horrific set of years for the science business, which admittedly puts us in the same place as a large number of other workers all throughout this country.
That's the bad news. The good news, however, is that ultimately that doesn't make a difference to whether I get out of here or not. It's on me now. Hell, the budget problems are just a reason for my boss to want to get me graduated and moved on down the road. I've got no one to look at but myself at this point, and I think that's finally starting to settle in. It's a humbling feeling, having your future in your hands, but it's also empowering. I know, in some part of my heart, that this is it, make or break time. Time to stand up, time to get moving, time to get WRITING.
That's where I'm stuck now. Those who spend time doing any kind of writing under stand what I'm talking about when I talk about the daunting feeling you get when you sit down and try to start writing. Californication's Hank Moudy refers often to the blank page, ultimately ever writer's best friend and greatest nemesis. I really don't know what it is about starting out that is so difficult. Ultimately once you get writing it just seems to flow (for me at least) but it's those first words that are always the hardest to put down. Maybe that's part of why I'm posting this today, trying to prime the pump. Here's hoping it works out.
Another bit of writing I've been doing of late is a return to my homebrew campaign world in an effort to repair the trouble that I've set in motion there long ago. It's a great feeing being behind the GM screen again, to be honest. I like creating a D&D character and putting him out in someone else's world, but it's really a special occasion to be in charge of the whole thing. It's indescribable to someone who hasn't done it before. It's creative writing. It's improvisational theatre. It's game design. It's being responsible for not just your fun but also the fun of the other players (I have 7) that are sitting around the table with you. When it works, it's just flat out magic. My GMing Hall of Fame is filled with moments like scaring the hell out of one of my friends with a little girl's ghost, instantly turning an otherwise jovial game session into a night where my party was quietly angry and determined to beat the fictional nemesis I had placed before them, and my all time favorite campaign, the truly special Dragonlance game that has filled our memories with gaming stories that have endured for years. And it all started once again, with my party waking up in a mass grave and fighting desperately to escape from a zombies, grave robbers, an ettin, and the rain waters slowly flooding the cemetery.
It's good to be back.
And last but not least, I'm with a wonderful woman with two great kids. No one should be too surprised that I'm not supremely comfortable publishing my personal life to the world via the intranets, but I'm happy. Very happy. It's not every day you find someone who can take a day that has been awful from top to bottom, leaving me ready to just lay into somebody or sink into myself and just wallow in self-misery for the rest of the day and, just by seeing her, make it all go away in a flash. It's something I never really thought I would have again, let alone find myself in the position of wondering if I've ever actually had it previously. Any time my apartment building gets sold to a new owner, my car gets a parking ticket for parking on a street two days after it snows, or things are falling apart at work, I can think of lucky I am to have found what I've found with Jen, and all the rest of it seems inconsequential.
So that's me, as of today. Now I'm off, to resume celebrating a certain World Champion football team. Go Pack Go.
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