photo saturday: grey watchers

So, last week was the roll out of my next character for the Thursday game... but there was a lot of potential DnD Character Colouring Book energy that got expended before we got to Dax...

This week is two of those cast offs. I doubt I'll keep either of them even as a back up character, but I don't hate the designs, or parts of the designs anyway.

Firstly there's Grey'baste, who's name translates to "ghost path" if I'm reading my source material correctly. Which makes sense given that he's a Reborn, and I used the potential origin from the book of "your body hosts a possessing spirit that shares its memories and replaces your missing appendages with phantasmal limbs"... which seemed cool to me. Grey is a little too "I'm dark and brooding" for me though... I am also obsessed with those tiny sunglasses though.

Rukh went through some gender changes, and honestly, looking at the face, I don't honestly remember where I landed. Is it just "orc dude with too much eye makeup and a little bit of lipstick"? Is it "butch female"? Is it "they/them pronouns? I have no idea.

The tattoos and the face are the parts I like the most though, especially given that I've used a variation of, or this exact outfit on like three dozen characters at this stage.

Honestly, I have no fucking clue who my backup character is... I mean, I have the easy option of making it somebody connected to Dax... but I guess it will depend on where we are and how I feel. I'll probably keep messing around with ideas... after all, there are a ton of other rogue subclasses I haven't explored, not to mention other classes entirely.

Anyway...

Soup this week was of the minestrone variety... and, honestly, pretty damn good. I could have done with cooking the carrots (I think) a little more, but overall, one of my better efforts.

Thursday night DnD was technically not actual DnD. It was a full on Session Zero for the new campaign which lasted... almost as long as a lot of our DnD games. It was good though. We got a bunch of stuff out on the table, that, honestly, after five years of playing together (for the most part), included some stuff that we should have done way before now.

But it was all good productive stuff. And I'll be honest, I think any of the issues I'm currently having with where we ended up are squarely based on the way the adventure is written and designed to be played. And having a character with a foot on both sides of two civilisations currently at war was not my intent... but honestly where we've ended up.

I also know that in order to get to the main adventure, DM Fluffy needs to get us across that border... so it shouldn't be THAT hard.

And if we get to the end of the adventure and my character hasn't spent any time in a jail cell, then we've done vey well indeed.

Oh, and it turns out that I'm (very probably) the only one with (very limited) healing magic... so that's going to... be something.

Friday was Chiro Day... basically the usual, rinse and repeat... although I did do a big wander in town afterwards, which was nice.

Friday night DnD was great.

Not the most original title, but I'm calling this week's session "Welcome to Thither"... because, unsurprisingly, it was their first session in Thither.

But I got to traumatise them with imaginary pies, give them golden magic items, reintroduce them to an old (four-legged) friend and then just sparked off a bunch of roleplay where I got to sit back and metaphorically prop my chin on my hands and look at them all with big sparkly anime eyes.

Because they properly got into it during his session. I've said it before that some of my favourite moments in playing DnD are when you pretty much ignore the DM and just riff on roleplaying with the other characters. Turns out, that's my favourite moment as a DM too... who woulda guessed? Yes, I also get that the correct answer is "everyone"... everyone would have guessed that.

I'm very much looking forward to next week's session though. Which I think I've said every time, and, you know, that's a good sign.

Today was another non-event. I mean, we did the supermarket as usual, but that was basically it.

Current mood:

photo saturday: private eye

Honestly, I thought my inspiration was all dried up... I just needed a better reason to create this weeks DnD Character Colouring Book.

So... Lucky has gone back in the toy box. He will come out at some point, I want to play a character who is deeply connected to the Feywild quite a lot, plus there are a lot of things about him I still love.

But I also knew that the rest of the Thursday group would, very likely, not bother creating a backstory that is connected to the world. Which is fair, they're not as connected to the world we'll be playing in as much as I am. However, that left me with an issue. As much as I loved Lucky, he also wasn't connected to the world.

And I wondered what my version of that character would look like. I'd messed around with a couple of ideas previously, but none of those were sticking in my head.

Which brings us to Dax Oreva, an Eye of the Raven.

I also still really want to play a half-orc... it's the only race out of the Player's Handbook that I haven't played (as I've mentioned before), so I'd like to get them all in at least once before the new edition of DnD comes out in 2024.

He also had to be a rogue, because I still want to revisit a rogue with this next character. And the Inquisitive Rogue is interesting.

The rest of him kind of came out of putting his costume together. Using the top that has the raven skull baked in led me down a particular path, which resulted in the pauldrons (which is an element I ignore pretty much 80% of the time), and then led to changing his colour scheme from dark brown to dark blue.

One of the issues I have with half-orc characters, even with the general softening of all things orc in recent years is having that human parent/orc parent thing... so I did what I've done in the past with half-elves. A half-elf as a product of two half-orcs. At some point in his lineage there was a human and an orc... but for some time it's been half-orcs. Which nicely sidesteps the whole issue.

Weirdly, the personality really came into focus when I started playing around with the posing and tried to find a "hands resting in front" pose. When I got that right, I got more of who he was. Talking to DM Fluffy about him on Friday brought more of him into focus.

And, of course, a PC's personality never survives first contact with the table, but I see him as someone who never completely fit in anywhere... not in his family, not in the wider religion of his people, not in his country, and then when he left that, not even if the path he thought he wanted to follow. But now he's found a place, has made himself comfortable there, so now it's time to start thinking about the next step.

But of course, because story and drama, he has to go back to his country for this adventure.

I feel like he's quite dry and a little deadpan/sarcastic in his humour. But not unintentionally. He's just dry. That's going to be harder to do in the moment, although I can be a little deadpan at times.

I also went a slightly different path with the name this time... rather than an existing name that just means something, I went for words in another language that mean what I wanted them to mean, and then followed that up with his parents' and sister's names. All similarly related terms.

I'll do the final polish on him after next week when we do our Session Zero (more on that shortly), but I'm liking this new direction.

Anyway.

I made a pretty decent tuna mornay this week. Spicy without being obnoxious... and I discovered that dill is an excellent addition.

Tuesday was something different... Everything Everywhere All At Once is back in theatres for a limited run, and I wanted to see it on the big screen, plus I wanted Ma to see it. But it was only screening in the afternoons and evening for the most part. So, instead of doing it on Saturday, Ma came down on Tuesday morning and we went to a lunchtime session.

I was more aware of the length of the movie this time around, honestly... and maybe the end part is a little long... but it still made me cry and I still love it.

Thursday DnD we finally finished off the book/series of adventures that we started back in May last year. So, 1 year, 2 months, 20 days. If you discount the two months between Christmas and February that we didn't play because of my moving drama. And the weeks we've missed because people were sick, or otherwise engaged or somebody was a close contact or something.

Basically for the most part, the adventures have taken us two weeks to complete, and there are 17 adventures. So out of just over 63 weeks, there were 34 weeks-ish of actual game play.

We bid farewell, for now, to Canadia, the guy who joined us from my former Monday group, which brings us back to a more sensible six players. And to Dax. Given that he's the character for the new campaign. And, provided nobody gets sick or has to change plans at the last minute, we're doing Session Zero for that next week. 

Friday night DnD was... somewhat short and sweet. And I'm subtitling this one "Bargains with Bavlorna".

I wasn't sure how long things were going to actually go... they were at a potential crossroads, but they rolled well and made short work of things. So, they got to bargain with Hag #1, she also gave them a little bit of information... and a little bit of prevarication... and a little bit of obfuscation. Because, obviously, hag.

It was also fun giving them little bits of information and then watching them wildly theorise possible outcomes and narratives.

They also got some respite at a travelling inn (with feet), before we ended the session with a round of dreams for everyone (not going to lie... it's some of the most fun stuff... especially Fluffy's "lucid dreams") and then they got to the next major location and levelled up. Again. After levelling up last week.

Yeah, the levelling scheme in this book is weird. But I wasn't sure how much fluffing around they were going to do, so I thought that possibly I might have been able to make another session out of it. But no.

I'm actually pretty excited about this next area. It will mean a bunch more prep this week, but it's something very different from where they were.

Anyway...

Today we went to the supermarket. 

Then I made fun of the Royal Show magazine that we picked up at said supermarket for... entirely too long. Seriously, though, it was so very badly written.

And then Ma went home. Full stop.

Current mood:

photo saturday: fancy boy

Am I obsessed with tall boys in high heeled boots? Maybe. Shut up.

Also, I've never played a male tiefling. In fact, to date I've only played one tiefling. Although I've had ideas for a few others. Once again though, Rasim is me fucking around with the idea of different rogues.

I need to play an Inquisitive Rogue at some point, I really do. And, probably, an over-the-top male tiefling. Generally speaking I like the "virtue names" for tieflings... 

And some younger tieflings, striving to find a place in the world, adopt a name that signifies a virtue or other concept and then try to embody that concept.

But, this guy felt like a tiefling from a line of tieflings, to whom his birth name was more important than some random name he'd pulled out of a hat.

I didn't dig into his history very much, beyond an idea that he was from a noble family who were winemakers and/or winegrowers... basically the entire business from grape to bottle.

Also, fun fact, in a very "mashing the words together" kind of way, the surname Dhu'Deneb means "possessor of tail", which seemed like a cute tiefling surname. And his first name means "planner". Which is also apt.

I do kind of get the gist of his personality just from the way I posed the character and how he's dressed. He feels about 50% The Scarlet Pimpernell and 50% The Man in Black from Princess Bride.

Anyway...

First up, I'm much improved from this time last week. I still have a little bit of a stuffy nose, but at least it's not the sinus-y thing that absolutely reduces my brain to mush.

Next up, this week's soup of choice was, unsurprisingly, chicken noodle soup... that I may have put a tiny bit too much pepper in... but then, it was probably useful for clearing out the sinuses.

Otherwise, big news... we actually had a Thursday D&D session. And started the final adventure of the book. So fingers crossed it doesn't take another month and a half in order for us to actually finish it.

I will say though, and it's no reflection on DM Fluffy... but I don't like the way the adventure is put together. Because throwing a bunch of status conditions at players and debuffing them or just inflicting damage on them arbitrarily is a poor substitute for making an adventure that's actually challenging or interesting.

So, I'm just gritting my teeth and waiting until the end of the adventure/we actually get to something interesting.

Not really the way I wanted to finish this particular series, but, it is what it is.

Friday night's DnD was fun. And I'm calling this session "Hello Bavlorna", because they finally met one third of the antagonists in the book... and I think it went better than they were expecting it to go. I mean, they took on a sentient tube of goo and survived.

It's also been fun that for the last two games, I've been able to end on a cliff hanger.

Anyway...

Today was much of a muchness.

Supermarket, then we did a little trip to Spotlight so Ma could get more wool for things. And I could look over the Halloween decorations that I don't much care about as Halloween, but they're otherwise my vibe. Or at least bits of them are.

And that was it really.

Current mood:

photo saturday: hogweed

At some point there will be an Artificer character that actually sticks with me and that I really want to make. And I'm fairly sure that that character will be an Alchemist. But it hasn't really happened yet.

It doesn't stop me from making the characters... they just don't seem to latch onto my psyche in the way other characters do.

Which brings us to Professor Hogweed... a very smart goblin. with very big boots. And possibly not a real professor... but don't tell anyone.

He'd also be a character for a specific campaign in a specific place. That's about all I have, honestly... like I said, none of these characters really dig into my brain enough to get past the surface level or the opening idea.

Anyway...

Fun fact: The last time I was "sick" (at least enough that I referenced it in the blog) was May 2019. Which makes sense, given the world, and all the masks and hand washing and staying away from people.

Which may indeed be why I went down like the proverbial bag of shit this week. Yeah. But backing up a second...

Ma mentioned she'd had "a cold" last week, and while it was front of mind when she mentioned it, I didn't think about it when we shared snacks at the movies. So, when I started feeling a little flat on Sunday as I was making a functional if uninspiring vegetable soup, I didn't really think much of it... but by Monday, yeah, I was sick.

And I always know that I'm definitely sick if I go and nap. Because there was definitely fully clothed napping.

Just to be completely sure, I went and got a PCR test on Tuesday morning. In my car... because, honestly, that's just easier. And I think that I spent more time giving my details to the woman with the iPad than I did waiting for the test itself. Got the results back later in the afternoon... negative. Which was as expected, but I just wanted to be sure.

So, instead, I went down to the chemist on the corner and bought a big box of Codral. Because that always makes things better.

Otherwise, I cancelled the rest of the week, so no DnD for anybody this week. And then my back decided to really play up (which may well have been from the fully clothed napping or else from dozing more than once in my chair), which made a couple of the mornings more of a challenge than they should have been.

But otherwise, I'm on the mend, each day is a little better than the previous day, and at least today I'm the least sinus-ey that I have been all week.

Today we literally went to the supermarket, came back here... and then Ma headed home.

So there's that.

Current mood: