photo saturday: wild magic ladies

Urgh... everything hurts right now. More on that later.

However, this week's DnD Character Colouring Book dips once again into the land of "Characters who have yet to be". In the new Tasha's Cauldron of Everything book, one of the new barbarian subclasses is the "Path of Wild Magic" (or whatever name they finalise for the book), a warrior who feel the surges of magic from places like the Feywild. And it's one of the subclasses I'm possibly the most excited about. As usual, that excitement resulted in me developing a couple of concepts, a couple of characters.

And I never like to do the expected thing...

So we have Lady Rava, former Moon Elf noble, who got lost in the Feywild, and emerged lacking most of her memory, but a wicked feymetal (which is a thing I made up) sword, a shoulder full of scarred symbols, a lack of eyebrows and fey magic coursing through her being. What I will say is that this piece was where I properly learned how fucking effective masking layers are in Photoshop... so I will be using those forever from now on. It's also the first time I've really relied on a print to do most of the heavy lifting in a design. Her outfit is super boring if not for the giant print.

Then there's Vanwa... because I haven't, as yet, played a half-orc. Full orc, sure, half-orc, no. Vanwa wandered away from home when she was tiny, following a fairy/sprite, ended up in the Feywild, couldn't get home. Now, she defends the Feywild and has stumbled back into the Material Plane. She picked up the wings somewhere along the way (I haven't thought that all the way through yet), they aren't big enough for flight, but I figure they'll come into play when she gets the barbarian speed boost. It's not that she's running faster, it's that the wings finally work enough to propel her further.

Will I get to play either of them at any point given the current state of everything. Who the fuck knows. But they were fun to design/colour.

This week I made... stoup... stewp... basically somewhere between soup and stew. Perhaps too thick to properly be soup, too thin to really be stew. But it was beefy and full of vegetables and pretty damn yummy.

Wednesday's DnD game was decent... looooong, but decent. It was an adventure I'd played before that went badly for my character that time... this time it went pretty well overall.

Friday's game was cancelled due to reasons, but I said to Fluffy that he could still come over and we'd play board games. Then our DM said she might join us, sadly she cancelled at the last minute because she wasn't feeling well. But Fluffy and I still did the board game thing. Complete with chocolate stuffed bread.

But because I was expecting more company than usual at my house, I did some vacuuming on Thursday, which included moving some furniture around, which my body didn't appreciate. I then wanted to find my pack of Phase 10 cards (which I don't think I've actually played with since they got soaked when my roof leaked), and I knew that they were in one of the bottom two drawers of my dresser, but those two drawers are crammed full of CRAP, so on Friday I pulled both drawers out, emptied them, tossed away a fuckton of random shit I just didn't need and packed everything away again. I was tired by the time I finished, and my body didn't appreciate it.

It was this morning that my body was all "fuck you", which I didn't appreciate.

However, I feel better for having sorted out all my crap, and I found a bunch of stuff I didn't even remember I had. Like an actual photo (well, cut out of the free gay newspaper of the time) of my first boyfriend. That fucking took me back. And things that made me think of Lownee and Raury...

It was good to throw a bunch of stuff away though, and reorganise the drawers. I just wish it didn't come at the expense of literally everything hurting. Well, my back mostly... but that makes it feel like everything else hurts.

Today wasn't much of anything once again.

Supermarket and the makings for some form of chowder, unpacking and YubTubs, a wander over to the Village to pick up a book, and that was about it really.

Current mood:

photo friday: the dumb boys

Someone said to me recently, during a conversation about my DnD characters, that they liked "my dumb characters".

I didn't take any offense to this for two reasons... firstly, the person doing the saying, and secondly, because I also love my dumb characters. I couldn't do dumb all the time, it would do my head in. But I do enjoy my two "dumbest" characters.

So for this week's DnD Character Colouring Book, we're exploring the Dumb Side.

For the record, yes, one of these characters has a lower Intelligence score than any of my other characters and low Wisdom on top of that. The other has Int as his dump stat, sure, but his Wisdom is pretty decent. This is about how they're played, rather than what their stats are. At the end of the day, dumb is a roleplay option.

Firstly there's Vrak. Vrak is a fighter/rogue/ranger goblin who likes to lick things. He licks things he doesn't understand, in an effort to understand them. He licks things that may or may not be food. He licks things he absolutely should not lick. Vrak is a licker. It's what he does.

Vrak also put his armour together from whatever he could steal, scavenge or otherwise acquire, so none of it matches. And when tasked with an adventure that would take him onto the high seas, his only stipulation was that he wanted a "boat hat". Later he turned said "boat hat" into a magical boat hat that he can make produce a frog up to three times a day. This, obviously, involved him licking the inside of the hat, amongst other things.

And as far as I can tell at this point, Vrak's main aim in life is to Be Useful. So he's the character who will not necessarily attack the enemy, but instead go and assist one of his new friends. His ranger spells aren't the premier choices (Goodberry and Speak with Animals), but they suit him.

Then there's Khurg.

I've mentioned Khurg before. Khurg is my dumbest boy, my baby orc and I could not love him more.

He's also fiercely loyal to people who are kind to him, or most of anybody under 4 feet tall. He never remembers anybody's name and usually comes up with some visually descriptive name for them. Unless they're under 4 feet tall, then they're all called some variation of Squishy. Loud Squishy, Pink Squishy, Mr Squishy.

I do let him have the odd moment of brilliance, usually only when nobody else at the table is doing anything and the correct answer is blatantly obvious. Or I've played the module before and everyone else is going off in the wrong direction.

Speaking of DnD... Adventurers League dropped their new "rules" for Season 10. And once again, they are totally unable to get out of their own way. In fact they may very well have been laying in bed, thought their butt was hanging out, got up to check if it was, discovered it wasn't and got back into bed.

I'll be honest, I kinda get it. I get why you would think that putting certain restrictions in place would somehow be a good idea. But at the same time, it's yet again giving us something that NOBODY ASKED FOR. Nobody was screaming for this to be the way the rules worked this season, I don't believe, nobody was asking for restrictions on the types of characters we can make. And I can't even remember them doing the sensible thing and putting out some kind of survey, asking the community what they wanted. I know they've done surveys, but they're always very badly written and don't actually ask any questions that they'll be able to really do anything with. And I've written a few surveys in my time. You ask questions you actually want to know the answers to. Things that are going to be important later. You don't ask sideways questions with generic, unspecific answers that are going to give you some kind of information, but nothing that is going to be useful going forward. And if you're just putting out the same survey over and over so you can compare results, that only works if the questions are still relevant and they were any good in the first place.

In fact it's not just the AL surveys, it's all the ones they put out, Wizards of the Coast, call me... let's talk surveys, yeah? While we're at it, let's talk the whole way you convey AL information too.

Not that I'm actually playing any "game store" AL games at present. The Wednesday game is still AL legal, but only because it's just fucking easier to run it that way. The Friday game has never been AL. And I haven't played outside of those two groups since March. I also haven't played anything other than the intro adventure for season 9, and probably won't be playing any of the season 10 adventures... mostly because I'm more interested in playing the hardcover book that season 10 is associated with... and while I wasn't really interested in the season 9 hardcover in relation to AL, that's now our Friday night game.

Anyway.

Wednesday's game was decent. The best moment though, was after the official end of the game, when another character asked my character if he knew anything about a specific thing that's been happening to his character for a little while now... and I just replied that I didn't, but that it was only happening under this one specific circumstance... and the 5-10 seconds on silence on the voice chat as the penny finally dropped for the player was 100% gold.

Friday's game was actually pretty good. It'll probably go down on that list in my head of the best moments where my character just talked their way to what they wanted. Our DM did a very clever thing, she had the bad guys separate us and talk to us individually (I don't know if that's what's supposed to happen in the book or not, but in either case, it was a great idea). And she started with the character who's not great with the talking. Which was 100% the right idea, but also slightly physical painful to me.

Then it was the character who really didn't know much of anything because he hasn't been with us that long. And all the while my drow bard is sitting on the floor of a locked room, practicing with her violin (which I've decided she does pizzicato, but laying on her lap, rather than like a guitar)... and putting the puzzle pieces together in her head.

And so, by the time she was called in to see the boss, she was more than ready to go. I thought of it like the raptors in Jurassic Park... first, you test the fences, see where there are weak spots, see the places you absolutely should not go. And you give away information that has absolutely no value to you... and if it has the added benefit of completely screwing over one of the many horrid denizens of Hell you've encountered, that's all a bonus.

You flatter when appropriate. You never lie though. You might embroider things a little at certain points... embellish when necessary. But never lie. And don't stop talking. Never stop. Because you can tap dance on a sheet of thin ice provided you never stop and you don't stay in one place too long.

When you've been tap dancing long enough, you take a chance. As far as I was concerned, there was a 50/50 chance of what was going on... and I was pretty sure (given how stories generally work... which is also something that a bard would understand) what was going on... and so, you just throw it out there. See if the fish are biting under the ice. Turns out, I was completely right.

And when you go from the NPC potentially wanting to kill you through to him being perhaps a little flirty, or at the very least, we were moved from the holding rooms into the guest wing.

It was definitely one of those moments where I start out in the driver's seat and at a certain point my character just taps me on the shoulder and says "I got this", and takes over. Those are the moments I fucking live for. Honestly, I don't remember half of the things I said, I just know it was all pure Nightingale.

The most fun.

In things that aren't my friends and I telling each other stories...

I used the oven a fuckton this week. I made tuna mornay on Sunday, then finally baked some fish that I'd had in the freezer since the start of May on Tuesday, did more fish for lunch on both Wednesday and Friday.

And then Friday evening I baked a cake for Fluffy's birthday, which was also this week. As well as the regular Friday bread. I did not manage my time quite as well as I might otherwise done, but even though we were about 15 minutes late leaving my place, everything was cooked and pretty damn good, if I do say so myself.

Sadly I forgot to take photos of any of it before we demolished it. Ah well.

I also had a chiro appointment yesterday... which other than being my monthly trip into the city at present, was pretty much business as usual.

Today was... uneventful. As weekends mostly are these days.

We did the supermarket thing. I bought generic beef soup ingredients, we'll see what the fuck I cobble together tomorrow. Also, slightly sad that we're coming to the end of soup season and I'll have to actually make food on a regular basis again, which sucks. I'll have to come up with a plan of some description.

Then we came back here... and did the usual, unpacking, YubTubs... and nothing. Eventually we went and did a wander around the Village shops, just so we could stretch our legs. But that was officially it.

Current mood:

photo saturday: those wascally wizards

Wizards man... possibly my least favourite class... definitely my least favourite of the three big arcane spellcasters, which also includes Sorcerers and Warlocks. It's because they have access to a lot of really cool spells, and they have those spells in their books, but they can only prepare a certain amount per day, and while Druids and Clerics (and Paladins) have the same mechanic, those classes don't bother me as much as wizards do.

But here we have my two wizard characters for this week's DnD Character Colouring Book.

Firstly Lady Ovelia Opalfist was my first... and totally not optimised. I did very much enjoy her though. I always described her by saying "if dwarves had supermodels, she'd be one". Sadly she did at the hands, or possibly that should be the eyestalk of a zombie beholder... disintegrate eye for the win. She might have survived had one of the party not set off a lightning trap about five minutes before, leading to her having about 40 less hitpoints. So when the damage hit, she was a small pile of ash and some random magic items including the Bag of Tricks, one of my favourite.

When I discovered that a wizard's spellbook doesn't count as a magic item so it can be destroyed, and if it is, the wizard only remembers the spells that they prepared that day and have to start again from that basis, I said "fuck that for a game of dice" and decided not to get her resurrected, and just quietly retired her.

I've tried to make a HeroForge model for her a number of times, but I was never completely happy with most of them... there just aren't anywhere near enough options for female costumes, but once the high heeled shoes dropped a little while back, I had another go at it, and I don't half mind this version.

The Morning Star was my desire to go completely the other way and was my first (and to this point, only) full elf character (well, surface elf anyway). He comes along with a ridiculously crappy French accent, and while many of my characters are verbose, he takes the cake even within the Venn diagram. He was also the first design I did where I really properly played around with patterns, something I've done a ton of since then.

His familiar is supposed to be a barn owl, but there's only one owl model in HeroForge... I do like the colouring job on the owl though. Made with real barn owl photo.

*extended two hour pause while I go for a nap*

This week I made chilli... perhaps not as spicy as I've made it in the past, I only had a couple of packets of chilli powder, but as always I made a lot of it... and then had it with either rice or potato or corn chips (or some combination of same) for the rest of the week.

Wednesday's DnD game was decent... nothing special honestly. I recommended these adventures to the DM, because they were a series that went across Tier 1 and Tier 2, but it turns out they're not as good as we may have wanted them to be. But then, really, what DnD non-hardcover adventures are.

I also got a call on Wednesday, the call I've been waiting for since the end of May when the tradie finally rocked up to look at my oven (after I submitted the job at the start of May). The parts were now finally in to fix my oven door. The tradie was on his way (on Friday).

And Friday afternoon, he showed up with his little offsider and the two of them took the door off the oven, replaced the seal, split the door in halves and added the new hinge (or hinges, I'm not completely sure). They were here for a total of about 15 minutes and left me with a fully functional oven.

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY

*picture the "It's been 84 years" gif*

Actually it was 126 days. But it felt like longer. Probably because with one thing and another, it's been almost six months since I last made bread for Friday night's DnD.

And yes, you know that I had already made bread dough before the oven got fixed (and if things had gone wrong I would have just taken the dough with us and cooked it there). It wasn't perhaps my best dough, not quite enough water so the dough was a little stiff, but tasty none the less.

As a consequence, everyone at Friday DnD was very happy to have bread back on the menu.

The Friday game was pretty good... my bard got to put on a performance, which is always good. But then we got into the proverbial unmarked van in the parking lot. So who the hell knows what will happen next week. I have a theory about what's going on, but I don't know if I'm right or not. Time will tell.

Today was nothing special.

We did the supermarket thing, neither of us bought a lot of stuff... I'm intending to make tuna mornay, because oven. And because I'm been wanting to make it for weeks now.

And then we came back here, I did the unpacking thing, we did the YubTubs thing... and then I made sausage rolls. Because Ma had said that she wanted me to make them for her birthday back in June, and neither of us thought that my oven would be out of commission for four months. And they're a faff to make, so it's always good when other people make them for you.

So I did all the things, and once again thanked the culinary gods for providing me with an oven that allows me to put 36 sausage rolls in all at once. However I did make the mistake of putting the leftover pastry in on a separate tray under the main tray. This had the effect of pulling a lot of the heat away from the big tray, so they didn't cook as well as they might have otherwise done. It meant that I had to end up putting them back in the oven for another fifteen minutes. Which was, once again, a bit of a faff, but honestly, worth it.

I mean they're all gone now... because I sent Ma home with half of them and I had what was left for dinner.

Current mood:

photo saturday: town and country boys

Have I mentioned I have a slight obsession with halflings? I mean, honestly, they're my favourite DnD race. And while I've only played five thus far, I do have at least as many in the "maybe" character pile. Which brings us to this week's DnD Character Colouring Book.

Mielo Thornhill did kind of see the light of day as a sidekick when I ran the one on one DnD game for Ma a couple of Christmases ago, and given that the new DnD source book has a ranger class I'm interested in, a bunch of racial changes AND default beasts for the Beastmaster that can be reskinned into anything you like, Mielo may very well get repurposed into a functional character at some point. I very much like the idea of him running around with a little parrot-feathered velociraptor (you know, the actual, historical, turkey sized ones, not the fictitious people sized Jurassic Park ones). And he was one of the first times I tried proper freckles... or at least more effective freckles. So he deserves another chance at some point.

Colton Wildheart was a character I put together initially for a future campaign, but then decided that as much fun as he was, I was more excited to play a race I wouldn't normally get a chance to, and a class that would possible be more fun. But Colton was me pushing the envelope on fabric texture and seeing what would work inside an urban DnD environment that might not make any fucking sense for an adventurer who travelled around. He's another character that might either get repurposed or reinvented at some point. He'd make an interesting wizard, if wizards were really a class I cared very much about.

Plus I love that these two are using the same facial model and the same expression (more or less) but feel like completely different people/characters/whatever.

Anyway...

This week I made Basic Bitch Chicken Soup. Cube everything, add stock, use some chilli so it's not completely bland, enjoy.

Wednesday's DnD session was... one four hour combat session. Which wasn't bad, just a lot. Our DM dumped a bunch of the adventure that was badly written or seemed like pointless busywork... and we can make a two hour adventure last four hours at the best of times, so it was fun.

Friday we had another games night instead of DnD and played another game of Disney Villainous... which, you would think, as the true Disney villain at the table, I would win... but alas no. Not yet anyway. We followed that up with highly competitive game of Love Letter... because it was late and we were already feisty. Which I love... more so when we turn totally chill and zen games into feisty fuckfests, but any time really. And I think we did like 16 rounds of Love Letter, including some amazing first round guesses.

Fun was had by all concerned.

Today was super fucking simple. Ma was getting her hair did, so I did the supermarket thing on my own. I forgot stuff, because of course I did, but it wasn't too bad overall.

Then it was back here for unpacking and general whatevers before Ma showed up. And then it was basically a bit of chat and then a drive to Big W because I keep dropping my wireless mouse on it's head, which leads to dead mouse. Or at least dead mouse buttons. Which is incredibly irritating.

So one new mouse later and that was that.

Current mood: