photo saturday: fey buddies

You call forth a fey spirit. It manifests in an unoccupied space that you can see within range. When you cast the spell, choose a mood. Fuming, Mirthful, or Tricksy. The creature resembles a fey creature of your choice marked by the chosen mood.

My halfling bard, Harland, the one I built in a previous blog post, got the Summon Fey spell when he got his magical secrets spells as a bard... and of course, since he sat out the last game (which I won) in the Feywild, I had to make the spirits be creatures that he'd met while he was away. He finally got to use the spell in this week's game (and, sidebar... it's a good spell)... so I can finally reveal his three Fey buddies he calls on, one for each mood.

We have Yako... my Tricksy fey friend, named not for the Animaniac (his has two K's), but in honor of a type of kitsune, although he does get summoned by using a line from the Animaniac's theme song.

Then Oleander, because who better to name the Fuming spirit after than a poisonous plant... she's straight out of A Midsummer Night's Dream, so gets summoned likewise.

And lastly Bassam, who is absolutely just the Genie from Aladdin... but technically a slyph, or fey wind spirit. He didn't get summoned last game, but he, obviously gets the Disney movie reference.

He's also the only one that didn't go through about four or five reboots. Yako had a black and white version, an all dark version, then a regular fox version, before I settled on the purple... and Oleandar got completely redone when Hero Forge dropped a full fairy/nature outfit. I also like that she looks like a cute little fairy but instead is the angriest of the three.

Also, I had fun overdesigning the background of the image... with the rainbow and the border and the text of the spell along the border.

Anyway.

I made chilli this week. Well, mostly. I forgot to buy more tinned tomatoes, so it was a little lacking. At least it was better than the last time I attempted it.

I had my appointment with Lovely Physio Man on Thursday... I'd done my exercises for the previous week and a half, and he poked and prodded me appropriately, only to decide that it may not be a Frozen Shoulder after all, and that he wants me see a rheumatologist... which, not gunna lie, I was a lot more chill about until I just looked up what they actually do/are.

I mean, I'm here for the fact that he wants to be sure, and I want to have a functional shoulder again... but it's never, ever fucking simple is it.

*le sigh*

Thursday night's DnD was good... I mean it was basically exploring things and murdering other things. Even though a lot of the other things were kind of already dead. Ghosts, dontchaknow.

But it all worked out well, we did all the hero things, killed the bad guy, and I was the deciding factor in making us all forgot a memory because of reasons. DnD man... you can't script this shit.

Friday before DnD, Fluffy came over as per usual, but we watched the movie, Klaus. And I'm not doing a full review, for reasons that will soon become apparent, but... I hated it.

Okay, maybe that's a little on the strong side. 

It was a very beautiful looking movie for the most part. The backgrounds are stunning, but there was just something about the 2D animation made to look 3D with lighting and texture... but also with some 3D elements in there... more power to them for, you know, forging a new path and doing something new with 2D animation, but I just feel like it may have been a bridge too far.

Also, Looney Tune was 100% an inspiration for a large number of the character designs... there were some characters who were so very much extras out of old Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck cartoons that it just felt like... Space Jam: A Christmas Movie. That's not quite the right analogy... but it definitely had the "you've pushed this too far into 3D" feeling to it.

And the main (yet not titular) character. The postman. Fuck him. I hated him the whole movie. They started out with him being a thoroughly unlikeable, whiney, entitled manchild and did not make him likeable by the end. Oh, they thought they did, with their sappy musical timelapse and the addition of a small child character who has no personality besides "doesn't speak English". They were very wrong. I also didn't care about him, or his pointless and unearned love interest or the stupid townsfolk (including the plethora of children who get neither names nor personalities beyond "child"). 

Not to mention some very uninspired villains, who barely get names or personalities, and who get neither their comeuppance nor any real explanation for why they're the way they are. Oh, because "tradition" in that one scene... cool. Fuck you movie. 

And as for the titular Klaus. He has a painfully obvious tragic backstory and no real personality.

The movie just went down the list of "we need this reference to the Santa mythos" without stopping to actually create characters or tell an interesting story. And no, because it's "a children's movie", doesn't mean that you are allowed to get away with that.

As I said after it was over... fuck this movie.

Fluffy, who has seen it before, did not agree with me.

Friday night's DnD was... pretty okay. Certainly less stressful than the previous couple of sessions. We did some exploring, killed a beasty that might have turned us to stone without that happening, and a new mystery to be solved. So, good times.

It did end up as a late night though, with one thing and another.

Also, Mrs bought Fluffy and I a Dice Advent Calendar each... and I won't lie, slightly harder to resist than one containing chocolate. But I also feel like 90% of the ones I had when I was a kid were just the flat cardboard ones without anything fun in them. But, that doesn't kick off until next Wednesday, so stay tuned.

Today was... the supermarket.

Given that the weather still seems to think it's roughly September or October, I decided on making a quiche this week... nothing fancy. And probably not until Monday night.

Otherwise, we did the usual supermarket thing and then came back here.

And that was it really, because, as much as I honestly do not care about doing it, Ma wants to put the Christmas tree up. So, come tomorrow morning, off up the road to parts more north than me I go. Urgh.

But that's it really.

Current mood:

photo saturday: huntress

The moral of the story I'm about to tell is that if you suggest that you might run a particular DnD adventure for me/my group in the vague, nebulous future, I will possibly already be designing a character for it before you've finished talking. Or at the very least I will have one put together in the following 24 hours.

Rewinding a little... this week's DnD Character Colouring Book is Huntress Aryz, and, like I said up top, she's what happens when someone from the Thursday group says that they might want to run something in the future.

Honestly though, I'm kind of torn between her and Ghost from a few weeks back. I really, really, really want to play a rogue again right now. I think maybe I've been looking at too many DnD Reddit posts about rogues.

But I've never played a full ranger. I've had characters who multiclassed into Ranger, but never very much. And it's the only original class I've never played (I also haven't played an Artificer, but they only got released in 5e properly last year).

And I've dabbled in the idea of a Swarmkeeper a few times, because I like the flavour and mechanics, but I've also been slightly obsessed with the human form of the dragon god Bahamut since I started seeing images of him as a pretty, pretty monk boy... and his human forms travel with seven canaries (which are supposed to be the seven gold dragons who serve his dragon god form)... or seven other creatures. And making one of the new metallic dragonborn as a Swarmkeeper who is descended from one of the gold dragons and also worships Bahamut and believes that all of her magical class and subclass powers come straight from him, works for me.

Also, I played around in Photoshop to take the relatively enormous little birds into much more realistically sized canaries. Plus putting them into places that you can't in HeroForge. And my idea would be that in certain situations the birds basically merge into a single bird, because they're just "intangible nature spirits".. and in other situations the seven birds split into 14 or 21 or whatever.

My idea for her personality basically boils down to "Southern Belle Morning TV Host". How much of that will survive first contact with the table, I don't know.

Anyway... this is all for a campaign that is currently an idea. So into the hopper she goes until I actually know for sure, and then I need to decide between her and Ghost.

Moving on...

I made very lackluster soup this week. Vegetable with kransky... and some random pasta. Not my best work honestly, but I also wasn't really feeling it when I was making it, so there's that.

However, midway through making the soup, while it was simmering, I randomly checked my Instagram, only to discover that Owlgirl is having a baby. Woooo! It also made me feel really fucking old when I realised how old she is, how old she was when we met and how much water has passed under the bridge since then. And now she's making a whole-ass human being.

I couldn't be happier for her and her baby-daddy. Oh, I should not every use THAT phrase again... but, you know, still accurate. Also, literally her husband, but whatever.

I went to see Pretty Physio Man on Tuesday. The shoulder isn't any better but it also isn't any worse, which is something.

He gave me a bunch of exercises which are simple enough but just take five-ever to do. Because three exercises, three sets, ten reps each. So that's 90 for those of you playing along. Fortunately the last one is the easiest.

But I'd like my shoulder back, so we doing them all.

Thursday's DnD was interesting... we normally do a whole roleplay round robin at the start of a new adventure, but this one kind of went off the rails a tiny bit. My character came back from the Feywild and was basically stoned out of his mind for a couple of days, one of the other characters decided to summon devils and went temporarily insane. So there's that.

We did make Guest DM Fluffy weep behind his DM screen a little bit... because this party is just fucking overpowered. And that's me saying this about this group, but even by that metric, this party is a lot.

We didn't really make it all that far into the adventure itself... or it didn't feel that way anyway. But we also murderised all the enemies, so swings and roundabouts.

Friday I got woken up to a surprise... tradies finally fixing the leak in the roof. Yay. Of course, nobody bothered to tell me they coming, they didn't knock on the door or anything and had I not been here, I wouldn't even know that they'd been and gone.

But I finally got to put things back where they're supposed to be after 1000 years. Woo.

Friday night's DnD was delayed due to Mr and Mrs doing things. So Fluffy came down and brought his laptop and we watched some Pixar shorts on Disney+ (Ciao Alberto, excellent... Twenty Something, very sweet... Nona, cute... Loop, odd but lovely) and then watched the first of the Marvel What If? shorts... yeah... it was kinda bad honestly. The animation was pretty enough overall, but the story and some of the voice acting was rough.

We didn't bother beyond the first one.

So the DnD game was a little later than usual, but I made cheese and pepperoni bread, so, once again, swings/roundabouts.

As far as the game itself, we Ocean's 11'd the enemy vault (by which I mean Mr rolled a very bad persuasion check, but the guard rolled even worse and we just walked in the front door of the vault. And walked out with every single item in the vault... except for the statue that caused madness and the gem covered in body dissolving mould. Thankfully it dissolved the really dumb guard and not us... and the madness only affected me and it turned out to be... bittersweet.

Because of course DM Fluffy likes to torture me, the hallucinations my character started having were of her dead husband. And even though she mostly knows it was all in her mind, she got to say goodbye properly and it kind of hurt more when he was gone than when he was there.

And then we did some magic item shopping, trading in the non-magic things we found in the vault for magical shinys.

Then we tried to work out a plan for what comes next. Because we have like half a dozen things we COULD do next. Any one of them will give us a level up, but then that's it for those particular tasks. But we kind of still want to do a large number of them.

We have half of a plan... we'll see how we go.

Today was Second Verse, Same As The First.

Supermarket, shopping, ingredients for chilli of some sort, back here, then off to Spotlight because Ma wanted some cross-stitch thread and I wanted to look at some wool for ideas for things for later. Baby blanket, obviously, shhh.

And that was that.

Current mood:

photo saturday: dread boy walking

This week's DnD Character Colouring Book is what happens when you take an idea, base it around a pre-existing character, then at a certain point, turn left.

It started with the new Critical Role campaign (I think I mentioned that, maybe I didn't... Campaign 3 has started, I'm enjoying it quite a lot). One of the cast, Marisha, is playing a creepy Undead Patron Warlock. Which led me down the "how would I make one" path.

Which led me straight to my favourite FF7 character, Vincent Valentine... he's the best, and he's my boy, and once I worked out how to get him in the game (when I played it back in the day) I went and got him every other time (which I think was like... twice, maybe just once, it's been a few years).

But to my 20-something heart, he was just gothy enough, just tragic enough, just too fucking pretty even as a blocky sprite enough. And he also, spoilers for a 24 year old game, transformed into monsters as his Limit Break move.

For some reason... a reason I don't quite understand, I had thought that one of those forms was a werewolf. But not. He does transform into a demon beast thing which is the closest... but also a Frankenstein type monster, a Texas Chainsaw Massacre type man/monster, and finally a big winged demon monster. In my memory though... definitely a werewolf. But my memory, very wrong.

But I threw him into the blender with the creepy Undead Warlock, it's Form of Dread and Vincent Valentine, his shapechanging, the Gothic Lineages where one of them is the Reborn, a dead thing that didn't stay dead.

And ended up with... Vinsento Varentain. Which, I think is the transliteration of the Japanese version of his name (it's on his Wiki page, but doesn't specify what the name actually is). A dead man who didn't stay dead and now draws his power from the dead thing that brought him back. Also, his Form of Dread is basically the dead version of him.

I did have to do some Photoshop jiggery pokery in order to get the raven up on his shoulder (ie, just make the raven in a completely different character, screenshot it and add it in). And yes, for any Critical Role fans, the raven does have the same name as one of the Campaign 1 characters, but not named for them, it would be short for "vexation". I might also just change the raven's name to Hex. But then, that's a Warlock spell, so, confusing that way too.

I quite like him from a character design and visual perspective. Warlock isn't my favourite class though... the Invocations are great, but I get bored with the lack of spell slots and the reliance on Eldritch Blast. He could be fun for something short though.

Moving on...

Otherwise this week has been... *facepalm*. Yeah, that's the best way to describe it. Facepalm.

I made pretty decent pasta sauce this week... just mince and tomato and basil and onion... it came out pretty well. I did slice my finger open on a tomato tin lid though... because those fuckers is sharp.

I didn't mention it last Saturday, because it wasn't anything yet, but my should was a little weird. Like nothing I could put my finger on, just felt weird. And by Sunday it was worse, and by the end of Sunday I couldn't raise my arm on the left side past a certain point. That continued on into Monday. So by Tuesday morning I made an appointment with my chiro, because basically it all started, as far as I was aware, after my chiro appointment on Friday.

Saw my chiro, explained everything to her, realised that I'd been having some shoulder pain the previous week, but hadn't connected the two, she suggested that I should probably go and see a physio... and there just happened to be one down the corridor from her office.

I've been going there for... years. And I've never noticed or realised that before.

So I wandered down the corridor, made an appointment, wandered around for 15 minutes and then went back for my appointment.

My chiro is not a handsome 20-somthing man. My doctor is not a handsome 20-something man. My physio though... my physio is a handsome 20-something man. Which is fine. He's doing a job, I'd like a functional shoulder. But, you know, I noticed.

He seems nice though. And hopefully I won't have to see him for too long. But I left there with more peace of mind and a very simple exercise to do. And an appointment to see him next week.

The shoulder didn't get any worse throughout the week. But, yeah, facepalm seems to be the mood that most accurately sums it up.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, you never realise how much you use a particular limb or body part until it stops working properly. A pain in the ass... but not a pain in the arm. So at least there's that.

Moving on...

There was no Thursday DnD this week. There could have been, but it would have been Wednesday, and Fluffy is our Guest DM for the next couple of weeks and he can't do Wednesdays.

So, no Thursday DnD.

After last week's Friday DnD Three Stooges escapades, we buckled down and started murdering some fools. Enough running around and sticking pitons in doors. And in the grand tradition of Dumb Luck, I accidentally ended the effect that would have allowed the Big Bad guy to really, really fuck us over. Don't get it twisted, he fucked us over enough. Me specifically. I went unconscious, I think, every single round of combat once we got into the big battle.

And now, I have no spell slots left, a single class ability left and about a third of my hit points. So, now we just need to escape the enemy fortress without everybody dying. Fun times.

Actually, with all that being said, it wasn't a bad time. I just hate having characters repeatedly knocked unconscious... it's annoying. It's part of the game... but still annoying.

Today.. rinse and repeat. We did the supermarket thing. We came back here, watched the beginning and then the end of what may be one of the worst movies I've encountered in a long time... The Eagle Has Landed. It's a World War II movie, made in the 1970's, where the movie is constructed in a way that tells you that the Germans are the heroes. And that we should want them to succeed. While the cast is all English and Americans, pretending to be from countries they are not from. For example, Sir Michael Caine as a German. And Donald Sutherland as an Irishman. It is... horrendous.

It was like a disaster you couldn't look away from. But we did miss, like, the middle hour of the movie. I don't think it would have improved things. I did get to keep going "oh, it's you, from that other movie". For example, Queen Bavmorda from Willow, Kenickie from Grease, the nurse from American Werewolf in London, JR from Dallas... among others.

Anyway...

We did that... when Ma went home.

Current mood:

photo saturday: amethyst acolyte

Another "what would this look like" DnD Character Colouring Book this week...

I like dragonborn. I've played a few before (three technically, but the third one never got much past second or third level), but I very much enjoy them. And now they've had a bit of a makeover and we have a third type... not just metallic or chromatic, but now there's gem dragonborn.

There is 100% going to be one of those in my future somewhere. Right after I get to play a Fairy character.

Given that the new book is all about dragons in all their forms, it also contains two dragon related subclasses. I've mentioned the Drakewarden before, the other is a Monk subclass, Way of the Ascendant Dragon.

And given that the god of metallic dragons also spent some time dicking around as a very pretty human monk (based on the art they keep using for him) from the Monastery of the Yellow Rose, which also featured in the second DnD adventure I ever played, that seemed like a logical place for the origin of a gem dragonborn monk.

And honestly, if you're going to choose a gem dragonborn type... Amethyst is the way to go. Mostly just because there's no other way to be a purple dragonborn... and most of the other gem types have an equivalent colour in the metallic/chromatic.

I do wish that there was more actual gem dragonborn art in the new book. There's one piece but I would have liked some more, plus a better description of what they're supposed to look like. But, until that happens, I'll just have to make it up for myself.

Which is mostly what this was... an experiment to see how I could make a version of the gem dragonborn given the tools at hand. And I like the results.

Moving on...

After a second trip to the supermarket on Sunday to pick up some eggs, I made Tuna Noodle Doo again this week. It's a good standby because it works just as well reheated as it does cold. And because I couldn't give a fuck this week, okay, mostly because the weather couldn't make it's mind up, I just had it cold all week and it was just fine.

I was vaguely unimpressed with my anti-virus software this week when it demanded that I delete the version I had installed and install a brand new version... for some reason. So I did, and then issues with both the computer in general for several days before a message came up on Thursday saying that there was an error and I needed to do it all over again.

Sort your shit anti-virus company. To be fair, it does seem to have been fine since.

Then I tried to contact them on Thursday for some slightly related reason, and there's no way to just email them... no, you have to do their stupid "automated chat" thing. Which started off saying that there was a high level of demand and it would be 40 minutes before I got to talk to a real person. Over two hours later... and the chat just shut off or otherwise did something. I was doing something in a different window at the time, flicked back and, yeah, nothing.

Again, sort your shit.

Thursday night's DnD was good... my last time running for this particular set of adventures. It wasn't a super excited adventure, but it was fun. And they did well even if it wasn't a super challenging or lethal adventure. They enjoyed themselves, that was the main thing.

Friday was Chiro Day... so off I went into the city, did the chiro thing, came home again.

Then Friday night's DnD was... chaotic. People overthinking things, stupid choices were made... piton were hammered into doorframes, people (meaning me) transformed into bears... and right now, instead of dealing with the preceding three sets of enemies one at a time, we just barrelled on forward, triggering more and more enemies but not dealing with them.

And now we're kind of screwed. I mean, not completely. I've used a single spell at this point and I have ideas about what to do next. But yeah, weird times ahead.

Today was a right off. I slept really badly last night, I woke up a few times and didn't sleep terribly well. So... we went to the supermarket, I got the makings to construct some kind of pasta sauce thing for this week.

Then we came back here, didn't really do fuck all... then Ma went home before it was even noon.

Current mood: