photo saturday: three stages of bo

In a related set of images from last week's post... I've never wanted to play a family member of a character I'm currently playing quite as much as I want to play Quill's son with all the names. His daddy named him Kipper, Quill calls him Bo, he gets to choose between either of their surnames depending on his mood... because, as the section on Gnomes in the Player's Handbook says...

Gnomes love names, and most have half a dozen or so. A gnome’s mother, father, clan elder, aunts, and uncles each give the gnome a name, and various nicknames from just about everyone else might or might not stick over time.

Anyway... this week's DnD Character Colouring Book is the three stages of Kipper "Bo" Bafflestone-Silverthread... the happy-go lucky boy I first created... the post-destruction of Ten Towns/death of his father goth phase... and his final Ranger form, now with an artificial leg. I'll probably update him again when and if Heroforge updates the site with actual prosthetic leg options.

Also the fact that I'd decided that those tattoos in the final form were to mark the death of important people in his life. Which means that the first tattoo to honour his father will have been done a lot younger than I would have otherwise assumed.

What I think has caught my attention the most is the fact that this is a character who I've envisioned a possible future for, but I'm currently playing through events that influence and alter his past, changing that possible future. And that's not something I've ever done in a game. I have thought about it after games, but never to the extent where I want to actually play them. 

I don't think I explained that properly, but you kinda get what I mean.

Moving on...

This week was... a series of events that happened in a linear fashion. Yes, because that's how time works you fucking moron.

I made chicken noodle soup this week. Perfectly serviceable, even if the weather itself couldn't make it's mind up between Summer heat the first couple of days... then, just, on Thursday, I get woken up by tiny hair at 6:30am, then, by midmorning, you know a thunderstorm that dropped 70,000 lightning strikes across the state by mid afternoon... followed by more giant hale (which didn't fall here thank fuck) and actual gale force winds that evening that fucked up a bunch of trees. So there's that.

Tuesday was the first episode of Campaign 3 of Critical Role... well, actually, the first episode was Thursday last week (Friday our time), but the video only drops on Tuesdays our time, so that's when I watch it. Thus far, with one episode behind me, I'm less excited than last campaign, but possibly more intrigued. 

As I didn't watch their first campaign (other than a variety of clips on the YouTubes), Campaign 2 was the one I started from the beginning, which I think made it more exciting. And this time they're all starting at Level 3, but they didn't reveal full details about their subclasses, so that's definitely a source of the intrigued. Mostly, I was to see how they manage to bring together what feels like a much more disparate group of characters. Like, some of them don't even really feel like they belong in the same universe. But we'll see what happens.

I'm mostly just happy they've started the new campaign. Plus, Liam's playing a halfling, and we all know how I feel about halflings.

Thursday was... a fucking day.

And given that everything was actually fine and I was basically having a freak out, I'll try and keep this brief.

Because of the aforementioned storm/hail I wanted to check in and let Ma know what was coming, generally check in... I sent her a message, didn't get a reply, called her mobile, no answer, called a few more times, no answer... so, you know... I started to get a little freaked out. I continued to call a number of times, fully expecting either a call back or the phone to finally connect because she had it sitting somewhere in the house that somehow wasn't talking to the network. And then the freak out settled in in earnest, because, you know, none of us are getting any younger... and as far as I knew, there was no reason why she shouldn't have been picking up the phone.

So, a number of unanswered phone calls and a few messages left later, I was out the door, in the car, and had just turned the engine on... when Ma called me back.

She'd been at a funeral, so obviously, she'd turned her phone off. And I chose that particular period of time to call her.

So, maybe I had a tiny bit of a breakdown in the car park of my apartment block. I was fine shortly after, but, yeah... big freakout, little breakdown, better now. And everything is fine.

Then Thursday night was finally DnD night... and my turn at DMing again. With guest star, Fluffy, as an actual player instead of DM. It was a good session... didn't exactly go how I thought it might... and because it's the fucking Thursday night group, the monsters who were supposed to fuck them up didn't hit... anybody... at all. I think.

Which is annoying. But, you know, they were having a good time. And I was okay with that.

Friday was our actual 2 year DnD anniversary. Two years of Friday night games, except those weeks we didn't play and the time we all had to play from inside our own houses. Ahh... those were the days... I mean, they were definitely days, I never said they were good.

And to celebrate, I made three cheese and chive bread. Which was pretty good... mostly because I put a lot of cheese and a whole pack of chives in it. I mean, everything is better with cheese.

Also, leading off from last week's discussion about fictional husbands and fictional sons and fictional trauma... we had the tail end of that this week. But we also had some of those roleplay narrative moments that you couldn't script more perfectly if you tried.

But I was very happy to leave my fictional son in the hands of the wonderful himbo that is the leader of the rangers he's apprenticed to. I have to give it to DM Fluffy... he made that himbo just exactly the right kind of character for Quill to put her trust in.

So it was, mostly, much discussion, many decompressing, such catharsis. Very talky... but we loves us some talky DnD. Overall, a good session though.

Today was fine.

We did the supermarket thing... I'm making Tuna Noodle Do again this week... because the weather can't decide what season it is. And that's good, hot or cold.

Afterwards I did a little Tech Support on Ma's computer, because she called me yesterday and trying to talk her through what should have been an incredibly simple thing turned into me wanting to bang my head on things. I suspect the problem is that Ma's computer is getting on a bit, for some reason doesn't seem to want to download updates and is now being asked to do 2021 things and doesn't seem to like it.

But I did what I could, which was mostly resetting up her browser because it had shat the bed. So at least there's that.

Then we did the Spotlight/Officeworks shuffle. And, honestly, going to Spotlight on the Saturday/day before Halloween is possibly a horrible idea... but I did find a couple of fun things that were marked down, including a giant plastic battlehammer for less than $6, that I in no way need, but also couldn't leave without.

And, honestly, the looks I got from several small children (they were thoroughly confused/delighted) and the comment I got from one dude in his 20's when I went to price check it ("that's cool") made it more than worth it.

We mostly just had a look at display books and laptops once we got to Officeworks... and is it me, or are laptops really fucking tiny these days. Like this beefy boy I'm using right now is a decent size and has a decent sized screen... the ones we saw all look titchy by comparison. Weird.

That's it really... we did the Officeworks wander, came back here, and that was it.

Current mood:

photo saturday: graph paper grief

So... my graph paper husband is dead and my graph paper son was dead, got brought back to life off screen but has lost a leg and two fingers...

Well, I say MY... what I really mean is my Friday night character Quillamina. And thus we have some modified character art to commemorate the occasion. Memorialise? Eulogise? I think commemorate is the right word here honestly.

In any event... one dead and one amputated DnD Character Colouring Book. Yay? More on that later in any event.

And yes, the wheelchair is really only artistic licence because Hero Forge doesn't allow for the removal of legs or the addition of a specific prosthetic leg... not yet anyway.

So, moving on.

I made really basic vegetable soup this week. I didn't want anything heavy, but I did augment it by making myself some bread. Just the regular recipe, but I formed it into two "mini loaves" that ended up sticking together and doing that lovely pull apart thing while in the oven.

Otherwise, a very flat week.

Once again Thursday night's DnD game was on hold... because Player/Host Flatmate Flu became Player/Host Flu. Hopefully we can finally get back to normal this coming week. But we'll see what happens.

Friday night's game... yeah... We took a much needed rest, travelled back to my characters home town, fought a bunch of weird fungus dwarves and then, finally, descended into the mine that gives the town it's name. And found... a lot of dead people. Up to and including my character's husband.

For a second there, I thought it was a two-fer and DM Fluffy had also chosen to wiped out her son. But no... he made it. Barely. And missing his leg below the knee and two of his fingers. Clearly when Fluffy rolled for their fate in the last game, they were not good rolls. I'm sensing some definitely Natural 1, possibly 2, vibes. Like, 5 at the most. But I don't know exactly, because I don't want to know how badly the dice fucked me over. Because, really, it's not important to the story.

So I got a grieving widow scene, I got a traumatised mother scene, I got a rallying the community scene and I got a eulogy scene.

Plus, it seems that my spell from last week that I homebrewed myself did actually save a bunch of people. Or at least get them into the mine earlier and therefore deeper than they would have been before.

But it the midst of all that we got more clues to a wider mystery or rather a mysterious NPC who has shown up now in two dreams and at the side of my dying graph paper son to save his life. Is she the avatar of a god? Is she the softer, gentler aspect of the god who caused the perpetual winter in the first place? Is she a time travelling version of my character from the future? Is she just a really fucking old crazy gnome druid? Is she part of the book or something invented by Fluffy to drive us all crazy? Only time will tell.

It was a big session though... much emotions, many stress.

It was only on the drive home from dropping off Fluffy that I realised that, given the potential subclass I had envisioned for the future version of my graph paper son, what Fluffy had actually done was turn him into Hiccup from How To Train Your Dragon with the missing/artificial foot.

And, you know what, not mad at it.

Also, just quietly, I would have been totally okay if he'd killed the kid. As well as the husband, or instead of, honestly. Any variation would have made for great roleplay, so I can't be mad at any of it.

It did lead to me having a moment in the supermarket this morning when I realised they were playing a couple of sad songs back to back, which is all kinds of stupid... but I'm always down to feel the feelings. Even the pretend ones.

The rest of today was... nothing much. We did the supermarket and that was it.

Oh, and by the way, I am aware that this week's post image looks a teeny bit like a really awful 80's album cover.

Current mood:

photo saturday: ghost

Meet Ghost. Today's DnD Character Colouring Book entry.

Ghost is what happens when I try to answer the question "what would my version of that subclass look like". And then design it mostly from the outside in. 

In fact, the (originally) blonde hair/black eyebrows and stubble ended up being the catalyst for his whole backstory. Which also is probably one of the darkest/most edgelord ones I think I've put together to date (and weirdly, created him before I started reading the Mistborn book). But he also gets a little mouse friend (on his shoulder in the image), who I gave narrative plot armour to, so we don't have to worry about dead mouse friend after the first encounter with an area of effect spell.

It was also one of those cases that even though I wasn't intending to fully spec him out and give him a backstory, it all kind of just fell into my head fully formed.

He would also be a really different character from a roleplay perspective. Not completely sure it would be an interesting roleplay for me, but it would be challenging.

Plus who doesn't love a psychic chakram. There just aren't enough chakram in things these days.

Anyway...

This week I made... savoury mince again. Nowhere near as good as last time. But serviceable.

Other than a sore arm and a general feeling of blah for the first half of the week, there were no issues after my second vaccination shot last Saturday. Not that I expected any, but I had heard talk that the second shot generally had a more intense reaction... but this was like a 10% up from 6%.

Thursday's DnD game... didn't happen. Perfectly reasonable reasons, but weirdly, given that we finished the last adventure in one week instead of two like all the others, this puts us back on the original timeline. Or it does until we take another week off for reasons.

Friday's DnD was... a lot.

We fought a big old dragon. Which, honestly, was not as stressful as it sounds. We'd been stressed about it since it showed up at the end of the game before last, but, while it... you know, narratively speaking... destroyed basically all the towns in the region and killed a bunch of faceless NPCs, it was all a bit m'eh from a "threat of imminent death" perspective.

When there are only three of you and you, as the druid, cast two spells, a cantrip, do a total of about 9 damage and no combat healing... irrespective of the fact that the rest of your party are a monk and a rogue respectively, hence that's where all the damage lives, and the entire dragon combat takes, I think, three or four rounds split across two different combats.

But then, I think the dragon is more of a Deux Ex Machina/narrative threat more so than a party killing machine. You're supposed to believe, as a party, that it's a massive danger, and, in the right circumstances, it could be. But I think that it's role is to fuck up the locations and characters that the party have spent the last five levels falling in love with. 

And, you know, maybe it's just that I felt ineffectual during the actual fight, not least of all due to the aforementioned 9 damage and basically after setting off two things that would last for the rest of the battle in the second half, I got one instance of a spell effect off... and then the dragon was dead.

Cool, glad I used my last third level slot and my second Wildshape for 6 seconds of in-universe time.

Sure, I did a bunch of stuff outside the dragon fight, and actually wrote my own spell during the week... which, theoretically, saved a bunch of random NPCs by sending a warning, I don't actually know yet how effective it was as we only just finished the battle by the end of the game. And there was a bunch of roleplay stuff for my character this session.

So it wasn't a bad session, by any shape of the imagination, and I'm not calling out DM Fluffy in any way... I'm just overthinking it.

And on top of all of that I still don't know if Fluffy has murdered my graph paper husband and/or son. I mean, technically, the bad evil dwarf guys did the murdering, but you know what I mean. Rolls were made behind the screen for their fate, and in an extremely Schrödinger's cat kind of way, one, both or neither of them are alive, injured or dead, and until we open that particular box, who knows what we'll find.

Moving on.

How is it the middle of October and I'm still basically in soup season? Who the fuck knows, but it is and I am.

Suffice to day, I bought the makings for generic vegetable soup this week. Otherwise, the supermarket was the supermarket.

Afterwards we took a little trip to Cheap as Chips mostly for the Looking At Things. But also, because Ma is always with the knitting these days. Making blankets for charity things I believe. So, wool.

And a bit of poking around the combined Halloween and Christmas section. And while I was tempted by skeleton arms... what do I actually need a pair of skeleton arms for?

But that's that.

Current mood:

photo saturday: pigeon and the jetty

I don't have anything for the Colouring Book this week... I mean, there's stuff, it exists... I'm just not feeling it.

So instead we dip into those leftover photos from March last year... Señor Pigeon and Glenelg Jetty #327.

This week's soup was CHOWDAH! Well, technically it was chunky potato soup with choirzo... but essentially, that's just chowder. Tasty, tasty chowder.

Thursday's DnD game was something of a record for our Candlekeep adventures... we got through a chapter/adventure in a single session. A very fun session, guest DM'd by Fluffy, but short. There wasn't, as they say, a lot of there there. But fun enough while it lasted. And, honestly, it gave my character a perfect excuse to leave the party for a little while and for me to be absent as a player next week, because it's my turn to DM again.

*insert evil genius cackling here*

Which, honestly, is some bullshit, because I'm the least Evil Genius Laugh DM ever.

But it'll be interesting to dive back into the chair again. Especially since I basically picked the... only two adventures thus far (and at all I think) that take place entirely inside Candlekeep.

Friday night's DnD was ARGH followed by Fuck Yeah followed by ARGH. The first ARGH was left over from last week... big bad dragon heading for civilisation, which was also too many hours away for us to get there quickly, while we're on the doorstep of a bad guy lair we really want to explore. Then the fuck yeah of us wiping the floor with the first room of the lair, then having the most interesting conversation with a very nice lady and finding out that the dragon was 100% going off to fuck up all our shit and we needed to haul ass back to town real fast. So a big ARGH there.

Fun, once again, but also ARGH.

Also, if Fluffy kills off my graph paper husband or graph paper son, we will have words. I mean, if that happens, I will have the most fun roleplaying it, and it might be a severe psychological reaction, I don't know. But he still better not.

Today wasn't anything. Well, it was... bit wasn't.

We did the supermarket... I bought stuff, with which I'm going to make a food item. I dunno... it's probably stew of some sort... stew vs savoury mince vs whatever. Stuff. That is food. And that I will eat. All week.

Then we dicked about at my place for a bit, before Ma headed home and I headed off to get my second vaccination shot.

Interestingly the experience could not have been more different from the first time. In so much as a) I knew what I was doing this time and b) all the staff I interacted with were much less personable than the first time, and the nurse who gave me my shot could not have given LESS of a shit. Like literally... her giving a shit gauge was fully empty. Which made it less fun. I mean, not that it was FUN... you know what I mean.

But that's done now.

Current mood:

photo saturday: fairy rogue

So, because this has been... a fucking week... let's just say hello to Rook for this week's DnD Character Colouring Book.

Rook was half an idea and never meant to make an appearance, but, weirdly I kinda know exactly who he is. Maybe because he's a rogue. And I love rogues.

He's a fairy, because I will continue to be obsessed with the new fairy race until I actually get to play one... or, you know, until I run out of ideas for fairy characters. But he's a fairy who is very good at sneaking around and getting in and out of places and finding shinies that nobody has physically nailed down or that can be easily pried loose, and therefore, clearly belong to him now.

Then one of the thieves guilds introduced him to the idea that people will give him shinies in exchange for ensuring people stop breathing. And he likes shinies.

In a perfect world, he'd probably he wielding a rope dart, but those aren't actually a thing in 5e, so he just has daggers that look like part of a rope dart. And a metal mask that used to be someone else's shiny, but they didn't nail it down.

I also enjoy that his name is equally a chess piece, a bird in the same family as the raven and crow as well as an Assassin's Creed: Syndicate reference.

I will say that if I was actually going to play him, I'd probably make him a Soul Knife, since the later Assassin abilities are kind of trash for any of the exotic races.

And no, I'm not avoiding talking about this week by waffling on more than normal, what are you talking about.

Moving on.

I made some version of chicken soup this week. I say some version because I basically threw everything but the kitchen sink in. For the purposes of soup anyway.

After last Friday's unexpected tradie visit, I expected to hear from them again early in the week in order for them to come and finish off the job, do the painting, that kind of thing. What I didn't expect was a message at 9:45 saying that one of their tradies had just finished a job and could them come finish off in about half an hour.

To which I said, yes, yes you can. And then spent the next 20 minutes taking a bunch of shit down off the top of my bookcases, move other stuff around and shift one of my chairs into the bedroom along with the lap top to let him do his thing.

It wasn't the same guy as Friday, it was an older guy, and after I explained the dealio, I just went and fucked around on the laptop with my headphones on, listening to YouTube videos I would normally half watch while doing other things on the laptop.

Tuesday. Tuesday was the problem.

Tuesday morning I checked my email, only to find a message from my land agent with the subject line "vacate". Not going to lie, my blood may have turned to ice.

Yes, turns out that my landlord has decided that she wants to sell the apartment. Which means that I have to move out. And for those of you with deja vu right now. Yes, that is why I had to move out of my last two apartments. I mean, in the case of Childers Street, the whole building had to move out because they were gutting the place, but it amounts to the same thing.

But, yes, that was unexpected and unwelcome and really the last thing I wanted or needed right now.

And even worse that the landlord really wants me out ASAP because she offered me a month of free rent if I could move out within the month. To which, I said in the nicest possible way, go fuck yourself.

I'm staying for the rest of the lease, because I'm not doing this shit in a panic again like last time.

I mean it's not without a whole, vast, interconnected and array of issues that are, for the most part, beyond my control to actually resolve as they rely on other people making decisions.

And as much as I've complained about this place, especially when I first moved in, I now have my routines and I love the ridiculously huge oven and it's basically in the perfect spot for any of my DnD trips.

Speaking of which... Thursday's DnD was, this week, for reasons, on Wednesday.

The second half of that adventure was pretty good... and everybody lived and we killed the bad guy and uncovered the mystery and all that good stuff.

I will also say that when I told the group about the aforementioned Tuesday issue, there were immediate offers to help me when it comes to moving day, so that was genuinely lovely and unexpected.

Friday was also Chiro Day... so I went into town, did the chiro thing, stopped off briefly at the Games World that recently moved to a much bigger store, then jumped on the bus home.

I was the only person on said bus and so when the old guy driving the bus went the wrong way through down because he usually drives the OTHER bus that gets me home and not this one, he felt compelled to keep talking to me, even though I was clearly wearing headphones and am, for the most part, too polite to just actively ignore him.

Then Friday night's DnD game was kind of a lot of "little errand, little errand, little errand, little errand, MAJOR FREAKING PLOT DEVELOPMENT AND TERRIFYING MONSTER THING LOOSE IN THE WORLD".

Which made DM Fluffy a very happy Fluffy and the rest of us regret our life choices. On the plus side, we levelled up, so that's nice. Good to be level 5 before a giant dragon wrecks all of our shit.

Today wasn't much of anything.

We did the supermarket, came back here, futzed around a bit, and because I wasn't in the mood for much else, we did a little trip to Haighs, then called it a day.

Current mood: