character saturday: how many feathers

At some point I want to play another tabaxi character. I've played a couple, albeit one of those for a very short period of time. And when we were potentially playing a different adventure on Friday after I finish DMing, I had a different idea for the type of character I wanted to play.

So this week's DnD Character Colouring Book was a potential version of that character. Nine Feathers, the tabaxi archaeologist who was also a warlock.

Because if the game you're going to be playing involves a very powerful undead creature, why would you not accidentally either link yourself to that creature OR to some other force that is in opposition to that creature.

And if you're going to be wandering through abandoned buildings and ruins, why wouldn't you be an archaeologist.

But then the adventure changed, so poor old Nine Feathers just sits in the tray of abandoned characters for the rest of time.

Anyway.

Dinner for this week was tuna mornay. I still don't think that I've completely found the balance between "very spicy" on the day it's made vs "does this actually have spice in it" by about the middle of the week. It's a hard nut to crack.

However, everything about it was pretty much perfect. I do need to buy some breadcrumbs before next time though. Or abandon the crust altogether.

Hey, guess what. We finally had Thursday DnD. After not having had it for a month. And it wasn't bad. We are headed off to all points "not my backstory", which is something of a relief. Right up until the other half of my backstory rears it's ugly head. Because it will.

It's also interesting that various bits of my boy Dax's personality became clearer to me this game. Well, more so after the game when I was thinking through some of the "why". But that's the case with real actual people also. It also became very clear that he's something of a horndog. Not overtly, but definitely at his core.

Friday was... much.

Because the Norwood Christmas Pageant blocked my access to the supermarket (without going all the way around), I did my shopping at 7:30 on Friday morning. Which was actually a good time to do it and I got everything done in under half an hour.

Then it was back here to unpack, have actual breakfast and then kill some time before heading out for this month's chiro appointment. And thankfully my appointment was 15 minutes later than usual, so I had enough time to go to Greenlight Comics for their Black Friday sale, where they had 50% off DnD book and dice. So I grabbed one of the books and three sets of $3 dice. Woo. Because I'm a dice goblin. Shut up.

Friday night DnD was good... not least of all because, just like last year, Mrs (and Mr) gave Fluffy and I the same dice advent calendar she got us last year. I will admit, I'd looked at it earlier in the week, and I'd wondered. With no expectations you understand. But when we walked in and I saw two identically wrapped boxes on the dining table, I knew.

So, yay! And this year I don't need to hook one piece of technology up to a different piece of technology every day in order to actually get the photos of the dice onto my Instagram. Which is nice. So look forward for that daily update Instagram followers.

They've just made it to the final section of this chapter. I mean, there's enough content left to keep them occupied for at least a couple of weeks, but I feel like we're definitely going to be done by February. Probably.

Depends on how much they screw around I guess.

I did pause the game right before the third and final hag made her entrance. Well, her speaking entrance. Because it gives me an extra week to work out what the voice is ACTUALLY going to be (I mean, how do you voice someone who looks like dried out beef jerky in a veil and a big skirt?) and how I'm going to handle them. I have a plan, but I don't want it to be... too easy for them.

My biggest worry as we start to enter endgame territory is just sticking the landing. I want the things that I've added (and the things that are part of the actual game) to be impactful or interesting or mean something to the characters. The worst case scenario is for me to go "hey, a thing" and the table to go "oh... ok I guess".

I mean, I very much doubt that will be the case, but I also hope I haven't built things up too much. Especially with Fluffy's character.

Time will tell.

Anyway...

Today was... weird.

Because I didn't do anything. No going shopping super early. No Ma coming down first thing (she came down in the afternoon to drop some stuff off/pick some stuff up though). No anything. And I got to relax and have actual breakfast with last night's leftover bread. So that was nice.

And then listened to that one bagpipe band that is in every single Christmas Pageant ever. I mean, sometimes there's more than one, but there always has to be at least one.

And then I put my Christmas decorations up. By which I mean I tried and failed to put the big red glittery bow on the screen door and ended up tearing the, admittedly cheap and old, plastic. And then I put up my Not Lego wreath on top of the bookcase by the door and put out my "Oh my god, how the fuck has it lasted for this many years and nobody tell it how old it is or it might stop working" Neon Christmas Tree and hung up the ribbon that has my Christmas Piglet, Tigger and Eeyore hanging from it.

Oh, and I put the vibrating pull toy reindeer on the table behind my chair and then I called it a day.

Because why would you want more than four Christmas decorations?

Current mood:

character saturday: twosome

One of the very first instances of DnD Character Colouring book was this post... when we finished our Out of the Abyss campaign with the Thursday group. Back when I was still colouring things by hand in Photoshop.

A lot of both literal and figurative water have passed under the bridge since February 2020, but this week Hero Forge released their "two figure" models to everyone. They've been available to premium members for a while now, but this is the first time I've gotten to dig into it.

And while this isn't the first couple pose I made, I did very quickly circle back to my favourite charming little shit, Peregrin and the half-elf husband he picked up in the epilogue. Hubby (aka Nathaniel... I have no idea if I had a different name for him at some point, but really, the only viable answers were either Nathaniel or Jack, because of reasons) got a makeover... I'd designed a version back when we finished, but looking at it again, it looked clunky, so I just did it over. 

And the Pery model got a bit of a redo of the colours, because back when I made it I hadn't quite got my head around the colour options in the way I feel like I do these days.

What's interesting is that some of the choices I made in reposing Pery led to unintended consequences. There seems to be a slight nervousness or a sense of waiting for the other shoe to drop in the way his left hand sits on Nate's shoulder. I mean, I mostly did that because there's no open hand pose where the hand didn't actually clip through the shoulder, so I settled on that as an appropriate compromise, but it also fits. Because I think that there was always a sense with Pery of "waiting for the other shoe to drop". Good things happened, sure, but he was always waiting for the universe to balance out and drop a bad thing on his head to make up for the happiness he was feeling. And I don't know that that ever completely went away.

It's also very probably me reading way to much into it, but I just get a sense of how he feels from this, you know. It is very sweet though, and everything I could want for my favourite little charlatan.

I also realised that the only possible name for Nate's tavern is "The End of the Road". Because of course it is.

Anyway...

I made shit up for this week's dinners. I have vague memories of being a kid and having something we just called "savoury mince"... which was about as complicated as it sounds. So I made my own version this week. And it wasn't bad. Weirdly, I could kind of tell that I'd used the cheaper cut of mince than I usually buy, but at the same time, there was more of it because of that.

It was good tho.

One to keep in the back pocket for sure.

Otherwise, this week was all kind of me in a holding pattern for the rental inspection on Friday. I did the minor clearing up earlier in the week, hit the kitchen on Wednesday and then did the bathroom and the floors on Thursday. And, I'll be honest, it doesn't look THAT different. But at least I know I've given everything a big old clean.

The annoying thing was the inspection itself was between 3pm and 5pm on Friday. I mean, rude. But, as usual, I cleared out, went down the road to the Burnside Library and did my DnD prep. Mostly because the Norwood Library down the street is too fucking small and doesn't really have space for hanging out for two hours.

I also had to go back to that library earlier in the week when I discovered that a) the book I borrowed last week wasn't as interesting as I thought it was going to be (I expected biography, I got self-help), and for some reason it was also showing up as "overdue". Turns out the woman at the library hadn't ticked a box in the computer, so my card expired on the day she gave it to me.

Firstly, why is that even a feature? I'm very confused. Also, why doesn't the computer just do that shit automatically when it's a new number/card?

But we got it all fixed with pretty much no fuss. And I wandered around the three or four shelves in there and found a couple of more interesting novels.

Going back to Friday... of course the time when I needed to leave the house was the time it started to pour with rain. But it was all good.

I do need to remember that since my land agent sends me an email when she's finished with the inspection, I can just check my email on my phone to see when she's gone. In this case, she was out by 3:30. It's not like I was wasting time given that I was doing DnD prep, but it's still good to remember that for the future.

No Thursday DnD... we were all good to go until someone else reported the spicy cough. So, we're officially cursed. And we generally end up taking a break over Christmas, so at this rate it's going to be January before we come back together.

Granted I can't be too salty about it give that I was the one who pulled the plug last year due to moving related mental trauma.

Friday night DnD was good... our first time back in... three weeks.

No great developments... they're just getting where they're going. The real stuff is going to happen when they get to the main area in this region. We'll see how that all goes.

Anyway...

Today was... a non-event.

We did the supermarket thing, we came back here, Ma had a thing to go to this afternoon, so we didn't really bother doing anything, she just toddled off home.

Also... just for the record... and not that I'm complaining... but why the fuck am I deciding whether or not I should put a jacket on in the middle of November? Again, better than the alternative, and we definitely need the rain... but still.

I just hope that March isn't going to be a little punk ass bitch and drop a heatwave on is.

Anyway...

Current mood:

character saturday: the friendly skies

You know how they say that time is a flat circle? Yeah, I have no fucking idea what that really means either. But I do know that at a certain point in DnD character creation, I got all the way around and start coming back the way I first approached things...

Which is why today's DnD Character Colouring Book is a return to the idea of an artillerist artificer. But instead of a smart little goblin raised by dwarves, I started playing around with an aarakocra... or bird person. This one based around a number of different sea eagles. Which is where the name comes from, because it's the Latin name for the group. Only without the apostrophe in it. But more specifically, a mix of the White-bellied Sea Eagle and the African Fish Eagle. Or as close as I could get with the Hero Forge colouring options.

I've played with the idea of aarakocra before... and also owlin, the owl version, but never for very long because, honestly, the original version can be a little overpowered and Adventurer's League didn't allow flying races up until recently.

I'm not completely settled on "sage" for his background. That's one of the issues I generally have with artificers... there are like three "good" backgrounds for them. Sage, Cloistered Scholar (which is basically "librarian" and Guild Artisan. I mean, there are others, like Clan Crafter, Noble, Acolyte... but it always feels to me like you're not going to make a sailor artificer or an urchin artificer. I mean, maybe you can... I just can't find my way there easily. So the background is the thing most likely to change.

And yes, that's the same armour set I've used for about... 3 dozen characters at this point. Including a previous artificer and two other characters sitting on my desktop. It had all those straps and details and it just looks really fucking cool.

What I do know about Hali is that he is more of a hermit/loner than the previous artificers. He's much more going to have been somewhere isolated, with only a small collection of other people. Maybe a temple, maybe a monastery or something small, high on a mountain somewhere. I don't have a full backstory worked out yet, but he's brewing in my back brain as we speak.

I also like the idea of him using the hand held Eldritch Cannon from above, or swooping down, dropping the larger walking version into battle and then flying out of range. I just wish that Hero Forge had more things that were interesting enough to stand in for the cannons. That aren't just, you know, guns. Because that's boring.

Anyway.

Can I just ask a quick question? What the actual fuck was up with the weather this week? Last weekend was thunder and potential hail and rain and whatnot. Then it was all hot and ick and then we got massive thunderstorms and rain and whatnot in the middle of the week... and we're back to thunder and storms and the like now. And it's November. What the fuck?

So, food was weird this week also. I made a quiche, I also made what might be one of the best potato salads I've ever made... and because I had eggs and milk left over at the end of the week, I made pancrepes. Of course, that means that many eggs were consumed during the week.

Otherwise, the week was about as much of a non-starter as last week. In that there was no DnD. Because of Fluffy and the Spicy Cough.

I did go and pick up the book I requested from the local library. Which, it turns out, is fucking tiny. It's cute and sweet, but really, really tiny. And, now I have officially borrowed a book from the library for the first time in more than 20 years. Woo.

And it turns out that certain libraries also have an arrangement with certain websites to let you access movies for free using your library card. So, there's also that. If only I'd done this shit earlier.

Anyway...

Today wasn't much of anything.

We did the supermarket thing... bought a metric fuckton of Bundaberg's Spiced Ginger Beer because a) that stuff is liquid fucking Christmas, and b) it was on special.

And we were possibly going to do other things... but then the big black clouds rolled in and then it started raining... and we kinda didn't bother even attempting to go anywhere.

So that's that about that.

Current mood:

character saturday: fugitive recovery agent

Remember how I said that I was only going to be making a single backup character for the Thursday game...yeah... that didn't last.

I mean, it's partly the fact that we already have two arcane casters in the group, both of whom took Find Familiar, so adding a third familiar to the group just feels like overkill. And the fact that I've been musing about the setting specific Pallid Elves with their pale skin, white blonde hair and totally black eyes for a while now... even before I realised that they got advantage on two skills that I like using a lot.

So... today's DnD Character Colouring Book is my (mostly final) Thursday backup character, Ranya Duskgrove. And I have a way to link her into things if it comes to that... or at least a number of hooks that I can present to DM Fluffy and say "these are all possibilities, tell me which one you wanna work with". The easiest of which is "she's a bounty hunter, who has she been told to track down?".

Also, I really do want to play a rogue. Even if my current rogue dies. There is also a secondary Cleric character somewhere in the background, depending on how dire things get along the way, given that we don't actually HAVE a cleric. And she does have a hook... I'm just not quite as in love with her as I am with Ranya right now.

It's weird, there's often just something about the visual of a character that clicks for me. It then helps if the character build speaks to me, but if the visual isn't there, I often don't get much further than that these days. Oddly enough, she did start life as a tiefling. And I liked the tiefling version but something just wasn't clicking. So I tried out a pallid elf. That was, as they say, a bingo. I did pay slight homage to that aspect by putting a male tiefling in as part of her backstory.

Fingers crossed I never need to actually bust her out. But it's good to be prepared.

Anyway.

I made chicken cacciatore for the first time ever this week. I mean, I've made it out of a jar before, but that's not the same thing at all. And it was really, really good. Definitely a possibility of turning it into one of those rice based soups next winter, or just a soup in general really.

I did manage, somehow, to slice my finger open while chopping onions. I don't even really know how, because the cut is on the hand I was using to hold the knife... I think I dropped the knife or the knife slipped out of my hand or something, and I went to grab what I assumed was the handle, only to have it turn out to be the bottom of the blade.

On the plus side, it was a very shallow flesh wound. Which did mean that it bled like a motherfucker. But at least a small collection of band aids sorted me out, and while it's still visible, it's closed up and on the mend (barring the edge of the flap of skin, which will wear away eventually, it's just not there yet).

It could, however, have been worse.

Anyway.

This week was... a non-starter.

The weather was predominantly Wintery. And both DnD games got cancelled. Thursday through a missing player, Friday because Fluffy finally caught the spicy cough. Granted, he found out Thursday, so if Thursday hadn't been cancelled for other reasons, it would have been cancelled because of that.

So, yeah... nothing really to report on for the whole week.

Anyway.

Today was fine. Given that the weather is going to be warm I kind of ended up getting ingredients to make about four different things. I don't necessarily know what I will be making, I think I'm going to just see what happens during the week, and what I feel like. Which, of course, will mean that I have to cook on more than one day. And that's why I much prefer soup season. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

After that we finished the errand we started a couple of weeks ago and took something back to IKEA to exchange for the same item that Ma hadn't fucked up by not following the instructions.

So that was it really.

Current mood:

character saturday: pumpkin jack

I do enjoy making some odd stuff for certain holidays and then being able to tie it back to DnD.

In this case, it's a little something for Halloween... Hans Kurbis... or to translate his name from the German, Jack Pumpkin.

I'm also slightly kicking myself, because last weekend I went though all my saved builds on Hero Forge and deleted a bunch of models that I didn't need anymore, including an original version of a scarecrow character... which I think was basically the same model, but I think the colour scheme on that one was better.

And yes, that is a marshmallow stuck on his wand.

Anyway...

Relatively speaking, I made goop this week for dinner. By which I mean I added vegetables and meat to a jar of a vaguely Asian style sauce. And it reminded me that... actually... I don't like goop that much. Which led to some slight improvisation later in the week.

Also on Monday the final episode of the current iteration of Doctor Who aired. And while I have had many opinions about Doctor Who in the past, I will admit that I'd mostly given up on the most recent Doctor because the writer/showrunner is supremely untalented, except on those rare instances when he pulls something out of his butt or is basically copying ("paying homage") the work of previous parts of the show.

His run has also been the most disliked and the least cohesive (partly affected by things beyond his control... like 2020) of the modern era. And while I think that the actress portraying the Doctor is a good actress, I don't think she's the RIGHT actress to play the Doctor. Part of that is the writing. Part of that is her. And not because she's a woman, because the other "Doctor" portrayed during this run is also a woman, and she commands attention every time she steps on screen.

Having said all of that, the season finale was uneven, rushed, disjointed but at the same time, there were elements relating to Doctors from years past that were actually pretty good. Including the Doctor that I consider to be MY Doctor (being the very first Doctor I really watched... if you don't count Tom Baker, because I think, somehow, everybody's first Doctor is technically Tom Baker, but that might just be because they used to repeat his episodes more than anyone else's), being Sylvester McCoy and his companion Ace.

Would I have preferred that they'd shown up in an episode/season written by a good writer? Yes. Was it overly emotionally manipulative? Yes, but I teared up anyway. Did it completely ignore pretty much every unanswered question that has been posed in the entirety of this Doctor's tenure and raise a few new ones that it likewise didn't bother answering? Yes, but also some of those questions were intensely stupid and didn't make any sense, I was okay with that. I'm just glad that the "lesbian kiss" that's been being hinted at in the last few episodes, after literally materialising out of fucking nowhere, didn't happen. Because literally nobody needed that.

Sadly though, just after that episode aired, the news broke that Disney had acquired the "worldwide" streaming rights to Doctor Who, which includes Australia, where the show has been airing on free-to-air TV since 1967, only three years after it first started airing, although it did screen at the same time across the whole country until 1978. But 54 years of history don't mean fuck all when you're staring at Disney money... so now Doctor Who will be behind a paywall.

In a word. Fuck that, fuck you Disney.

And even if a former showrunner is taking over and even if they're brining back my favourite Doctor briefly for the 60th Anniversary Special, leading into the regeneration of the next Doctor... I could also just leave it here. We'll see what happens, but let's just say I'm not pleased about the fact that Disney has very deep pockets, very long arms and no apparent conscience.

Anyway...

Thursday night's DnD was accidentally All About Me... by which I mean my character. Like I said last week, we're deep in part of my character's backstory at present... wasn't intending it... didn't expect it to go like this... but here we are. I also manufactured some moments so that my character wasn't around for certain things, to give everyone else a chance and not to totally hog the spotlight.

I've also already talked to DM Fluffy about having a one-on-one session to cover some private conversations my character wants to have with people so that I don't eat into the next game with stuff that only concerns my boy.

Friday night's DnD was pretty good. New area, new companions, new vibes. And I'm always very pleased when the group reacts to certain things in ways above and beyond how I anticipated. Usually when they see things as creepy... because, honestly, I'm so deep in this story now that I don't necessarily see any of it as that creepy. Plus, you know, I'm a little twisted.

Anyway...

Today wasn't much of anything.

Basically supermarket and that was it.

Current mood:

character saturday: poisoned apple

There have been three times where I've created a DnD character with the noble background, and, honestly, somehow they all kinda ended up being assholes. In varying degrees anyway.

I mean, I can't say for certain with Hemlock... since he's this week's Artificer DnD Character Colouring Book entry... but, honestly, the more I started to build him in my head, the more of an asshole he seemed.

Or at least a problematic yet lovable asshole. In my head if nobody else.

I mean, that's what happens when you combine a noble background, the alchemist subclass and the poisoner feat. And then give them an outfit in black leather and my favourite colour of acid green. Plus a homunculus made from a potion bottle (well, once he's able to make one anyway).

I'll be honest, I think he's probably in second place behind last week's Battlesmith.

His backstory details will really depend on the game we're actually playing and where we start out... but it would be a different vibe than any of the others. But he's from Waterdeep, and I actually picked a name from a list of Waterdavian noble families, one of the ones that is very light on details to give me all the leeway I want.

Anyway...

I think we're kind done with soup season, which is sad, because it's so much easier than the alternative. But this week I made a big old pot of bolognese pasta sauce which was totally just me making shit up. But it was actually pretty tasty and simmered for like three hours.

I basically lost all of Tuesday because Ma dropped her car in for a service, and rather than her plan, which was to just sit in the dealership for what would have turned out to be six hours, I went and picked her up, we went to breakfast, wandered around the bookstore on the Parade and then came back here and... basically sat around for like five hours essentially. But it was better than her just hanging around on her own.

Thursday night DnD actually existed... which was an improvement on the last two weeks where there was none.

And my character fell face first into elements of his backstory, and, honestly, not mad about it. Because I did tell DM Fluffy that basically he's Fate's bitch... but it's interesting, initially I thought that meant that he would do things that he was fated to do without complaint. No, because that's so not him (or me), he will absolutely object to the things fate has in store, but at the end of the day does them anyway. I mean, right now it seems like his overall vibe is just headbutting elements of fate without realising what he's doing, which is also fun.

I also very much had to tell the rest of the party off (in character) for wanting to stick their noses in his business. Will Dax do that when other people's backstories pop up, oh absolutely, but this is the first instance of that we've really had, so everyone kind of just got very over excited.

Friday was Chiro Day... so, the usual journey into town, complete with Wandering About and Looking At Things.

Then Friday Night DnD was very good. I got to spring some things on the party that I've been waiting to do for a while, but otherwise it was mostly one of those "mopping up loose ends and having big conversations" kind of sessions. I also got to leave them on a cliffhanger (and also they levelled up)... and I love that shit.

Plus I didn't have to drive Fluffy home, as he drove himself to my place... so bonuses all around.

Anyway...

Today was... not much of anything really.

We did the supermarket thing, and then we did an errand that resulted in a big fat nothing and basically did a wander and called the whole thing a day. So, yeah, nothing to report really.

Current mood:

character saturday: making a friend

Remember a little while back where I posted about 67 different variations of rogues while I was trying to find my next character.

Yeah, we're doing that, but for Artificers right now. Or at least for the three Artificer subclasses I actually like (the first of which was Orval from a couple of weeks back). And it might just be three characters total. I'll have to see how I go.

I'll admit, it's a class I struggle with concepts for, because it seems very specific and generally speaking feels less "fantasy" and more something else. Not "steampunk" per say, although that's very much how people seem to think of it. But it's definitely one that probably fits better within the world of Eberron, which is more pulp detective novels meets "non-traditional fantasy technologies" like magically powered trains and skyships. So I kinda went around and around on some of these.

But we ended up with Hasim... also known as Haze. Honestly, the name is the most likely to change. It's a place holder right now, but I do definitely want a Persian/Arabian style name for him.

I've also never played a male tiefling. And I've only ever played one other tiefling, Mama Lullaby, who was my... second ever character I think. Which is odd. You'd think I would have played a bunch of them, since I really do enjoy tieflings... and I've made a few, they just never made it through to a table at any point.

And for some reason I have a tendency to gravitate towards tieflings with human coloured skin rather than the traditional red or the very internet popular tones of purple. I did go back to the official tiefling description though and saw that their eyes can just be white, which is not a direction I would normally go, but felt right.

What's interesting is that at a certain point Hasim actually had a completely different colour pallet and name. He was originally Knack and the colours were all shades of blue. But then I went looking for some kind of art for a Steel Defender (since you really can't make those in Hero Forge right now) and ended up finding this amazing looking "Automata Quad" by Graey Erb. 

After that the colour pallet got a bit of a tweak to bring it more into like with the Quad's colours (I might, at some point, go in and make the armour metal a little closer of a match to the illustration). And I very much dig it right now. There's always a hierarchy to these things, and I think that Hasim is in the lead of the three designs I'm currently toying with. I think, very possibly, the Defender is what pushed him over the edge. I love the slightly non-specific big cat/sabre-tooth creature/jewellery vibe of it along with what is very clearly an artisan's eye.

I don't really have a backstory for him yet, although I did suddenly realise that there are probably more tieflings working as blacksmiths that you might otherwise expect, if only because they're resistant to fire, so, to paraphrase, the heat wouldn't bother them anyway.

Anyway...

I made Toona Noodle Doo this week... I don't know why, but sometimes it's amazing and sometimes it's... m'eh. This time around it was just fairly average. And I never quite know what makes the difference. Should I have thrown in an extra can of soup? Should I just not bother adding in boiled egg? No idea. If was fine though.

Otherwise... this week was kinda m'eh.

No urgent trips to Service SA, no issues with anybody's internet... and no DnD. Yeah, there wasn't supposed to be a Thursday game, that I already knew, but Friday's game got pulled at roughly 4:15pm on Friday. And Fluffy had stuff going on at his end... so... yeah, nothing there either.

So that's it really.

The weather was fucking nuts, but otherwise, nothing to report.

Anyway...

Today became a semi-Christmas related excursion.

We started with the usual supermarketry... and then headed off to look for some specific bits and pieces, which led us to both Big W and Kmart... and mostly their Christmas stuff. It should also have included more of their Halloween stuff, but the stuff I liked was either too expensive for what it was, or they just didn't have what I was looking for.

But a good trip overall.

Current mood:

character saturday: spooky boy

It seems that I'm somewhat slightly obsessed with the Undead Patron Warlock at present. Which is something of a shame, because it's going to be a hot minute before I get the chance to actually play one. If that ever actually eventuates.

But given we've entered the Spooky Month, it seemed like a vibe for today's DnD Character Colouring Book... even if the colour is basically black.

It also came together nicely with a number of pieces from the outfit that was released the week before last. Which I quite like, but they're a little specific or at least have a less general vibe, at least when it comes to the spiked kneepad. At some point it would be nice if they got really modular with some of the stuff, but I suppose that's a little hard to do with everything.

Zherne started out as a redhead with stubble. And then I basically covered his face and head, so it didn't seem like there was a ton of point to it all. But the stubble kind of stuck around. It's probably something I would ditch if I was really going to play him.

I also really dig the armoured glove. And his dead, yet functional, eye.

I haven't quite pieced together a backstory for him... I feel like he was a member of a cult of one of the evil gods of death, but was sacrificed, probably against his will. Or maybe not, he certainly didn't expect to come back. And suffice to say, it's less pleased about the cult he used to be a part of.

So I don't quite know who his Patron actually is, but he does take on a bleeding, gaunt, rotting visage for his Form of Dread. And his is covered in healed scars in his day to day existence, they just start to ooze thick dark ichor when he transforms.

And yes, his name is a variation of Chernobog, the Slavic god of misfortune.

Anyway.

This week's soup was yet another minestrone I made up based on what I remembered to buy last week. And it was pretty good... with the bacon and chorizo goodness and whatnot.

Otherwise, we're mostly filing this week under "unexpected problems".

The least of which was the fact the fucking weather couldn't make up it's mind all week... first it's going to be sunny and warm, then it's going to be cold and windy, then it's going to be temperate with a lot of rain.

So Thursday, I got an email from the nice folk at Optus, following up from the previous "yeah, sorry, your data definitely got leaked" email with a "yep, definitely leaked, and it was definitely your drivers license, so now you have to go get a new one".

Which we can now file under "things I didn't expect to be doing at 3pm on a Thursday afternoon"... driving to Service SA to get a new license number.

On the plus side, while a large amount of the people who were there were also in the same boat, I think I was there for a grand total of maybe 15-20 minutes, tops. And the line was longer when I left than when I got there, which is always the correct state of affairs.

But now I have no license until they get around to sending out the new one. Well... no physical card. Me and the other trillion people who were making their way through Service SA that day.

There was also no Thursday night DnD. Because something something people had other things happening. And no Thursday night DnD next week either, for similarly associated reasons.

Then Friday, my internet just cut out for no well explained reason. I think it might have been a more localised neighbourhood issue rather than just being me specifically, but I still called the ISP and got them looking into it, but fortunately, it came back about half an hour later while I was busy doing other things.

And then Friday night DnD was also cancelled, because Mrs was interstate. We also didn't end up doing board games, so Fluffy and I just did movie night instead. Which was pleasant. Nothing particularly to write home about, we watched the Great Mouse Detective and then I introduced Fluffy to Empire Records, which went over very well.

Because of course it did, it's a great fucking movie #DamnTheMan.

But that was our evening. Finishing up much earlier than normal.

Today was mostly about average, supermarketry, then back here to do some bits and pieces and then off to Bunnings for pick up various things, including some more potting mix for my, inexplicably, twenty year old parlour palm, after I realised how much the soil had compacted/disappeared while putting the supportive plastic cage around it last Saturday night.

And a couple of other stops, all in the general neighbourhood, but again, nothing exciting.

There was another brief moment of panic this afternoon though when the electricity went out... just what I didn't need after the internet outage earlier in the week. Fortunately it only lasted a few minutes and then came back up.

But that's it for the week really. Nothing groundbreaking, but a lot of "really?".

Current mood:

character saturday: professor

So what do you do when it turns out that the next DM for the Friday game doesn't want to run Adventure A, as assumed by last week's DnD Character Colouring Book, but instead, wants to run Adventure B.

You make a different character.

And I figured, if I'm doing this... why not actually play the one character class that I've never actually played before, albeit, one that I've struggled to actually get a handle on making an interesting character for.

And this is also not one of the subclasses I thought I would ever want to play. But somehow little Orval just fell into my brain pretty much fully formed. And he kinda knew who he wanted to be. So those are the characters I just run with, because, as a wise woman (by which I mean Barbra Streisand in What's Up Doc) once said... "Listen, kiddo. You can't fight a tidal wave."

So I don't try.

And yes, the look and the outfit are basically a mashup of two previous characters that I will never actually play, but I liked the look then, and I like the look now. I did try out a blue variant, but, honesty, the orange/golden yellow and purple combo is pretty much where it's at.

Like I said, he dropped in pretty fully formed, so I know a bunch of things about him, but there's also other stuff that will depend on where we start out and you know, other stuff. But I'm kind of digging it. And it should be a different kind of character to play, so that'll be good.

I mean, between now and then I fully expect to change his outfit 12 times based on what new gear appears on Hero Forge, but the core will remain.

Anyway.

This week I tried out a new soup recipe, for Easy Creamy Chicken Rice Soup, and mine came out pretty much the same as the photos with the recipe, which is always nice. Although I think I had more celery than carrot in mine, which is fine, because I like celery more than carrot anyway.

But it worked really well. And while I might not lean into this specific recipe again, I will definitely adapt some of techniques to my own soups in the future. And this soup actually taught me the proper way to use cornflour, so that was nice.

I spent various portions of the week sorting out my whole external hard drive situation... copying things across, deleting things, getting shit organised. And then I realised that when I was taking things off my laptop last week, I actually forgot to pull all of my photos from my digital cameras off the laptop. I thought I had, but then I couldn't find the folder... and realised I had been "saving it until last" and then forgot to get to "last".

Tuesday Ma lost her mind. Well, she had a stress out because her internet wasn't working, and I walked her through the things I knew that might do something (switch it on/off, stick a thingy in the reset hole, etc) but it turned out it was the NBN box and she would have to call the ISP and get them to look into it. And she just worked herself up into a tizzy about it.

I thought she'd be fine, but then I didn't hear from her for a while, so I called her back, only to find that we'd hit Peak Tizzy.

So I spent a while talking her down off that particular ledge, and basically got her in a state where she could call and have a coherent conversation with them.

Of course the upshot was, she called, they couldn't fix it over the phone, they arranged to send out an NBN tech on Thursday, he was basically there for like five minutes and it turned out that some previous work on the junction box or whatever had fucked up the connection.

So a whole storm in a teacup in order to get him there, he was there for like 10 minutes and it was all fixed before 9am.

Bless her little cotton socks.

It did partially stress me out during the week, not knowing if the problem was an easy fix. Although assuming that it probably was.

But, once again... Storm. In teacup. I will admit though, it's my preferred kind of storm. Both in size and location.

I also made apple cake... the downside is that I ended up looking at a bunch of different recipes trying to find one I'd seen the week before, and so now I can't find it. But it used oil and Greek yogurt and it was really fucking good. Admittedly, I went off the rails a little on the butter, sugar and cinnamon topping that was supposed to form like a crust on the top... too much butter, which soaked into the cake as it was cooling and was not in any way bad, it did just make the cake fall apart a little and end up kinda sticky and very sweet... although less greasy than I was expecting. It was pretty good actually. Especially with a little vanilla ice-cream.

If I can hunt down the recipe (and remember to bookmark it this time), I'm definitely going to try it again.

Thursday night DnD was good... we lost a drinking contest and therefore lost being able to rub our victory in the face of the shitty NPCs we kept encountering before that. But my boy did manage to hook up with the lovely elven NPC, so that was nice.

But now we're on the road, finding out things about each other... keeping secrets and feeling each other out. And having prolonged dream sequences. And discovering that you're having a shared dream sequence with another character... which is a bit of a shock when there was no pre-existing relationship established between the two characters.

Good though. Fun though. Something to dig into later though.

Friday night DnD was equally good. Not least of all because I got to drop the needle on various things that I've been waiting to do for a while. And finally got to reveal to them what happened to the things they'd lost. And reveal to Fluffy's character what his mother looks like. And retell a story I'd already told from a different perspective now that they know that it's important and to pay attention to it.

What's interesting is how much stuff just rolls off my tongue without pre-planning it. There are whole chunks of this adventure that go a little off book that have just gone straight from brain to mouth. And I very much dig that. Even just pivoting in the moment based on dice rolls and things they do.

It's also all very good fun.

Next session will be a little more back-tracky as they head back to see the first hag, not knowing whether or not she knows that the second hag is dead.

So that'll be a fun time.

Anyway...

Today wasn't much of anything yet again.

We did the supermarket thing, didn't buy a huge amount, but then afterwards we were basically going to call it a day until we decided to head down to see if we could find some kind of trellis/support for my twenty year old parlor palm... yeah, that bitch is old. And a touch top heavy these days. So we'll see how this goes.

There were a few other things we grabbed, nothing overly exciting, just useful stuff. But we then discovered that they'd overcharged us on a couple of items. So back in I went to make them sort it out. Yes, it was less than $10 but it was the principle of the thing.

And that's about it really.

Current mood:

character friday: grey man

Welcome to the new laptop. It's... fine. The phrase I keep using is that it's "worth the price"... which is less of a compliment than you might otherwise think. It's not great, but then again, it didn't have a huge price tag on it. Most of the issue I'm having is with Windows 11, because it seems like they're added a bunch of bullshit features that I can't really see anybody ever caring about or wanting to use, and they've removed a ton of features that were actually useful.

And the amount of times I've search up an issue in the past week, only to discover most of the answers online are "nah, there's no way to turn that off" or "nah, it doesn't do that any more" or "nah, there's no way around that". Which is frustrating.

Case in point. On the taskbar, there's a spot where it tells me I'm using the ENG US keyboard. Specifically the Australian one, obviously. But that's just there. And fucked if I can think of any time any single person in the world would really, really need to know that so much that it's on the fucking taskbar. But there's no way to remove it.

And, of course, there's so many little weird bits and pieces, either new stuff I don't have any clue what the fuck it does, or things that I'd set up the way I liked them some 8 years back, under a completely different operating system.

I just keep remembering to breathe.

Anyway.

Moving on to today's DnD Character Colouring Book...

We'll call this one a sketch. It's liable to change 50 times and become a completely different character by the time it hits the table. But there was a brief conversation on Friday night about What Happens Next, after I'm done running this current adventure, and based on that, this character kind of swam forth in my brain this afternoon.

And it's a wood elf, which I've never played. I've done a high elf, a dark elf and half-elves, but never a wood elf. He's also an acolyte of the most recent version of the God of Death (or perhaps, the most recent god to have that title is a better way to say it), and an order of monks who have some healing abilities. Which felt like it all just fit together nicely.

I did have a go at a Mercy Monk once before, and it's very probable that some of the proto backstory that was swirling around in my brain for that character might get transferred over to this one. There wasn't a lot, honestly, just a few little ideas. I do know where this character is from originally though, before he set out on his grand adventure.

It's also one of the most basic/least interesting costumes I've made in a good long white. I mean, I like the fact that now, with layering of clothes, I can put pants under the robes, but I also like that this is really, really basic. Canonically, there would be holes on the sides of the hood for his ears... and yes, he can see through the mask... I'm going with the age-old answer of "a wizard did it", at least until I come up with a better idea. I mean, I could just shade the eyes black, but I like the fully metal mask (which, yes, is just his face, with no expression, painted silver).

But honestly, this is the first in what will probably be a number of ideas. I mean, look at how many different rogues I made, and that was me being settled on a class. This could literally go anywhere from here.

Anyway.

This week was... a lot. Relatively speaking.

We started out with Tomato Soup... basically the first time that I've gone really off-script with the Halfling recipe I've made several times now. It came out fine, but honestly, not really all that much better or worse than the original.

Monday I spend a large chunk of the day setting up the new laptop, installing programs, uninstalling things, setting things up and essentially getting everything the way I wanted it. Or at least the first iteration of that. It's an ongoing process, that, honestly, is still ongoing.

Tuesday, the car was booked in for a service. So I headed down the road at about 7:30am, getting to the mechanic much earlier than I was expecting, but thankfully, he was in the store, he just hadn't opened yet. So I went off to meet Ma, who came down to pick me up and run some errands while we killed time waiting for the car.

Well, actually, the FIRST thing I did was accidentally headbutt the rear vision mirror while grabbing something on the floor of the passenger side, knocking it clearly off the window. And then had to drive to the mechanic with no rear vision mirror. On the plus side, there's no better possible time for me to have done it than right before driving to the mechanic.

First stop after Ma picked me up was North Adelaide for some breakfast. Which was oddly nostalgic. I mean, if one can be nostalgic about an empty, underground, supermarket carpark. The answer is yes, yes you can. Is it sensible in any way? No, no it is not.

But mostly it was just being back in the suburb, wandering through the little shopping centre that I've wandered through a million, billion times, seeing the things that were exactly the same as they were seven years ago, or whatever. So we had some breakfast at Cibo, had a bit of a wander and then headed down to Arndale, which we also haven't been to really at all since I moved out of North Adelaide. Because now it's on the opposite side of the city and, honestly, it's a bit of a hole.

They've made it look bright and shiny though, so that's a plus.

We basically did a wander around the whole place like we used to, picked up a couple of bits and pieces and waited for Mr Mechanic to call me. Which he did, but then we still had a couple of hour to kill. Which we did by going back to Northpark, where we used to do our weekly shop for about a thousand years, and wandering around the shops on both sides of the road, then stopping for lunch.

In the end we were still early getting to the mechanic, and then we basically had to sit around for another half an hour anyway, because the glue on the window/mirror still needed to dry.

Eventually though, the car was ready, I drove Ma back to her car and we went on our merry ways. With a brief stop off from me to grab a 2T external hard drive from Officeworks.

Wednesday was very dull, mostly because I spent a large chunk of the day copying files from the old laptop to the external drive. And that took ALL OF THE HOURS. Yes, it didn't help that at one point I was copying over like 20,000 files (I think that was all my iPhone and digital camera files to be honest), which took forever.

On the plus side, it hardly filled up any of the giant external drive, so yay.

Thursday was the public holiday for the funeral of the Queen... but we had it on Thursday because Victoria wanted to double stack it with their Friday public holiday... grrr. Not that it really matters because it was a one-off.

Thursday night DnD was good. We made it through relatively unscathed, I mean, my character took a giant arrow to the chest, but also, he ran into a room designed to lock you inside and heat up and took a grant total of like 4 points of damage from that, so, you know, he kinda had it coming.

On the plus side, we ended with him heavily flirting with a delightful elven bounty hunter... but also about the drink his body weight in alcohol in order to win a drinking competition. So we'll see how his evening progresses.

I mean, I think if push comes to shove he might pick the lady over the contest... but he also really wants to beat the current champions. Also, weirdly, he's very confirmed to me in the last couple of weeks that he's straight. Which is fine, I hadn't actually given it a ton of thought, but eventually my characters generally let me know how they're wired. And Dax is both straight, and predominantly attracted to elven women it seems. So there's that.

But I look forward to seeing how it all comes out next week.

Friday was Chiro day... so, usual trip into the city, with a wander around afterwards, poking my nose in basically the exact same shops I poke my nose into every time. But it was a nice wander in the sunshine.

Friday night DnD was cancelled. But we knew this, because Mr is on a work trip. So instead, Fluffy, Mrs and I had a board game night. And it was a good, chill night. With a good game. Which was very pleasant. Doubly so because I didn't have to prep for DnD.

Like I said, a lot of things.

Anyway.

Today was actually pretty good.

We did the usual supermarket thing this morning. Although one of the things you don't expect to see first thing in the morning on a Saturday is a bunch of people in their early 20's all dressed up in medieval garb. They looked amazing (well, most of them), and I told them so. Because that's what you do, you don't ignore them like everyone else seemed to be doing, you tell them how good they look.

Later research seems to indicate that they were probably heading down to Victor Harbor to the Viking Festival. Which I didn't even know was a thing. Also, turns out that there's a Medieval Festival in May, so might have to keep that one in mind.

The rest of the supermarket trip was much less interesting, although I'm trying out a new recipe for soup that I found this week. Which seems like it's a combination of the rice soup I've made a couple of times and my chicken CHOW-DAH. So it should be interesting.

After the usual unpackery, we went to IKEA to find something specific Ma wanted... and came back with a whole bunch of stuff we hadn't intended to get, because what's a trip to IKEA without doing that.

But a pleasant trip.

Current mood: