character saturday: old blood, new blood

So... Hero Forge ran a very successful Kickstarter campaign back in January (their $42,000 goal was fully funded in 20 minutes, and they ended up getting over $3 million), and this week they dropped their Hero Forge 2.0 website, which now gives everyone the ability to colour your miniatures.

It did mean that the ability to download screenshots, which I've been using to make DnD Character Colouring Book entries, is now part of a pro account. Which makes sense as a business model, but is sad at the same time. Mostly because I now can't do my own colourings and character amalgamations/group shots.

It also took me several days to get to a place I was really happy with as far as the colouring is concerned. And there are still some colouring/designs I'm not completely pleased with. But this is just the first week (not counting when it was open for Kickstarter backers). And I know they have tattoos, shield decals, fabric patterns, make-up (I desperately want eyeliner, since almost all my character art ends up with eyeliner), war paint, scars and the like coming... and that shouldn't take a world of time now that it's live.

I'm also totally missing patterns and textures that just can't be done right now, but that I felt I was finally getting a handle on in Photoshop.

The problems I have right now basically boils down to colour intensity... especially in both the leather and the wood... There are almost none of the colour swatches that I like right out of the box. And a lot of the other colours end up feeling washed out. I will say that I really love the edge/crease detail colours, as seen on the shoulders of the leather jacket above. But I also need to keep reminding myself that these are miniatures designed to be printed at between 25mm and 28mm... and also that as much as I love Hero Forge and the fact that I have been using for years now totally free of charge, they're still a business, and their decisions should reflect that.

I will say that the redo of Orryn Silverthread was one of the ones that a) got the closest to the original overall (minus the aforementioned eyeshadow), but also kind of exceeded it in a lot of ways. Plus it's super weird being able to now view one of my characters not only in full colour but also in full 3D at the same time. It's also good that I can go in and tweak the colours a little (or a lot) in seconds, especially after changing items or posing.

Orryn was my first gnome character (they're a race I just don't much care for, especially when comparing them with my preferred halflings), who I made for a one-shot back at the end of March... who is a class from the world of Critical Role, who took part in a solo adventure (one DM, one player) that was mostly The Witcher but with more than a little of the Mandalorian thrown in. Neither of which I have seen/played. But it wasn't bad.

He ended up being a much more grumpy/gruff character than I thought he might be... and very pragmatic, in that he killed an old woman who happened to be a werewolf not because he had any anger towards the old woman, but he'd been sent to kill a werewolf and find out what happened to the people it had abducted, so he did.

It was definitely one of those instances where I didn't know who the character was going to be until he was out in the world. I do like him though... and so I might have to turn him into a different class at some point, something I can actually play. Maybe the new Rogue who take their knowledge from the dead... I think that might work.

Anyway.

Unsurprisingly, I got more than a little distracted by the new Hero Forge this week. So much so in fact that I totally forgot to have lunch on Tuesday.

I made possibly the final chowder for 2020 this week... depending on how the weather goes for the next couple of weeks, maybe the last soup... since I'm going in a lasagne-type direction for this coming week. It won't exactly be lasagne the way I remember the lasagne Ma made when I was a kid, because that shit was amazing... but it'll be lasagne after a fashion.

I considered pulling the pin on Wednesday's DnD game... just because we had a missing player and that can often result in us falling in a hole of indecision. But we got there. Which was good, because this will be the last game with that DM for a while since his partner is about to have a baby. I honestly don't know what the fuck we're doing this coming week since nobody has made a suggestion or put forth an idea of what the plan is... so we'll have to see. Whatever it is, I'm totally not making a new character... I'll have to see who I have in the roster who seems like a good fit. Or that I want to play.

And then Friday... no game... no DnD, no board games, no nothing. Because our DM was sick. And it was too hot and I couldn't be bothered with anything else.

Today was pretty fucking average.

We did the supermarket thing, and for the first time since March, muscle memory took over and I went down one of the up aisles... I mean there wasn't anyone in it at the time, which definitely helped, but it did confuse us both for a minute there.

Then back here for the usual unpackery and YubTubs... and I also cleared out my fridge, because that's a thing that needs doing on occasion.

From there we took a trip to Kmart, because after I mentioned my Phase 10 cards last week, I discovered that they sell them at Kmart for $10, which I swear is more than I originally paid for them forever ago. And they have update graphics, which I actually like better. So, no loser there.

We also wandered randomly around Kmart, looked at their small Halloween section and shook our heads sadly at their Christmas decorations that are already going out... but as I have said on a number of occasions, we are still part of the problem, because we still looked at it, even though we agree it shouldn't be out this early.

Then we picked up a few bits and pieces at Coles that we forgot to get this morning, came back here, hung out for a bit and then called it a day. So there's that.

Current mood:

character saturday: wild magic ladies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today wasn't much of anything once again.

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

Current mood:

character saturday: the dumb boys

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then there's Khurg.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The most fun.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Current mood:

character saturday: those wascally wizards

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY

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

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

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

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

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

Today was nothing special.

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

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

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

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

Current mood:

character saturday: town and country boys

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

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

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

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

Anyway...

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

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

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

Fun was had by all concerned.

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

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

So one new mouse later and that was that.

Current mood:

character saturday: character sketches

Wizards of the Coast, the folks who publish Dungeons and Dragons, announced a new book this week, entitled Tasha's Cauldron of Everything, which like Xanathar's Guide to Everything, will contain a massive number of new subclasses. Twenty-two of them if the general scuttlebutt is to be believed, plus reprints of other ones that have appeared in other books. Which is very exciting. I mean, like Xanathar's before it, we're aware of essentially all of them as far as I know, because Wizards like to get the community to playtest potential subclasses, or just give their opinion on the potential build.

And that brings us around to this week's DnD Character Colouring Book... where after a random comment from one of my friends, I designed a character for a subclass that isn't even published yet... so we have Sister Lomea, the wood elf Twilight Cleric, who I made using a lot of the design choices that came out of last week's artworks. She's also my second lesbian character, since I just knew as I was putting her art together that she had a wife. Sometimes you just know, you know.

Just don't ask me how goddamn long it took to put that Elvish script around the top of her weapon.

Then, I realised that somewhere in the back catalogue was a character I first created probably 15 years or so ago, who was originally a sorcerer, but who would make a very different and interesting kind of druid. Which led to me making Blaze (not his original name... but the name he gave himself... I think he was probably called something basic by the orphanage like James Rose), the former orphan and human Circle of Wildfire Druid... along with his wildfire spirit, Ember (which is just some very cool phoenix art I stole from the internet).

So think of these are a character sketch more than anything.

Will I ever play either of these two? Who can tell. It will partly depend on how much they change the subclasses, whether I'm more excited by some of the other ones. I've probably played less than half of the ones in Xanathar's at this point... so only time will tell.

And if not, it was a fun exercise in character creation/adaption. Plus the artwork looks fucking cool.

Anyway...

This week's soup was a pretty simple potato, bacon and leek... blended smooth, which I haven't really done this year, because I've been enjoying the chunkier kind.

Thanks to SBS On Demand, I've ended up watching a slew of Jackie Chan movies... which is not something I'd done before. Not for any particular reason, they just never seemed super exciting to me. But they're fun. In most of the movies I've watched the female characters are often portrayed as complete idiots, and the commitment to stunt safety based on the post credits footage is insane to the point of lethal. But Chan is super charismatic, has amazing acrobatic and martial arts skills and they movies are a fun romp for the most part.

Wednesday's DnD game was decent. I mean we did have a character death, but the player concerned wasn't overly cut up about it. Otherwise, decent.

Friday's game was great... I mean it was mostly a shopping episode, but I love those. And we got a bunch of fun character stuff, which I also love. I will say that once we've shopped and done all the other bits and pieces, and schemed and plotted and whatnot, I wouldn't mind a big, fat, protracted combat session. Because it's been a while... granted the last few of those felt more deadly than I would have liked, but we've levelled up a bit since then.

I also had a really interesting and intricate conversation with Fluffy before we headed out, which was great.

And after the game, we worked out that there was a very high likelihood that at some point during my tenure in North Adelaide that we were all in the same place at the same time without knowing it... or at the very least all crossed paths at certain points. Which wouldn't surprise me, honestly. But is still kind of awesome.

Today we had good weather. Especially compared with the last few weekends. But actual sunshine and the ability to not wear a jacket and whatnot.

We started off with the supermarket... I'm doing something with chicken and soup again this week. Very likely including some noodles of some description. We'll see.

Otherwise it was definitely one of those "many things" supermarket days, especially given that the last couple haven't been, so I'd run out of a bunch of stuff. But overall, not that much different from usual.

Afterwards we did the unpacking and a truncated YubTubs, then headed into the city for a few errands. Not gunna lie, it's still weird. I mean it's probably going to be weird for... the foreseeable forever... but yeah, just going into town is weird. I would imagine going to one of the large shopping centres is even weirder, but we haven't done that in quite a while.

Anyway... we ran a few errands, nothing particularly exciting, and then called it a day. But it was nice to be out in the sunshine.

Current mood:

character saturday: fantasy fashion designer

This week's DnD Character Colouring Book is one I wouldn't perhaps normally do... in that it's OPCs... or Other People's Characters. But in the case of both of these, I had quite a lot of involvement in the design of the HeroForge models, and I'm completely responsible for the colour design for both... so fuck it. Plus I'm probably going to redo the artwork for Lucas because the player came up with a different, more interesting pose... damn him, I mean I also want to colour the new version, but damn him anyway.

But honestly, I love the final results of both of these, especially Lucas, because total Edgelord (which was absolutely the design aesthetic for this whole character), but the hair and beard texture on Torren is probably one of the best I've done, to totally toot my own horn.

And I worked out some new techniques on both of these, especially the subtle chainmail texture on some of Torren's armour. Not to mention the Glomesh style texture on Lucas's tunic because I had to resolve the confusion between his chosen clothing piece and the fact he's wearing scale mail. Plus, it's pretty fucking extra.

EDIT: Okay, so I updated the Lucas art... because I love it even more than the original, which is weird, because it's the exact same colouring, with the exception of the rune glow and the pose... but somehow it's even better...

They're also travelling around with my gigantic Dragonborn boy Marux... and what's amusing is that while he's 7'2", all the party, independently of each other, are quite tall, even the dwarf (relatively speaking), so when I put all of the characters in an image together and scale them accordingly, they all look average height. Because a sense of scale is important. In all things, but definitely in character art.

So this week has been... something.

We started with soup what I made up out of my own head... in that I put some vegetables, some tomato, some chicken, some hope... and it all came out pretty well actually. I mean it was just me mashing together three of four different soup ideas, but it worked out well.

Wednesday's DnD game was pretty decent... playing a high charisma, low wisdom, low intelligence character has it's moments. And there were a couple of moments where I said the right thing at the right time for something that became a plot point later... and I had no idea at the time.

Thursday I had my first haircut in 169 days (nice), or as the "time between" website pointed out, 46.17% of 2020. Yep, from neat and trim to dishevelled hobo in just under half a year. Wow... totally did not realise it was that long. I knew it was a hot minute... but that's longer than expected.

And as I had intended for a while, it wasn't back to the same old same old... we went different. Not dazzling or spectacular, but different. We skipped the colour, but I got her to run a toner through it, so that any of the yellow in the grey or the remaining bleached hair got taken out. I was also very grateful that she offered to trim my beard for me also, since I hadn't bothered to trim it in a little bit... I didn't actually take notice of how long, but let's say more than a month.

Since it didn't require me to do anything other than sit there, I was totally on board, and I left there looking and feeling more like an actual person than I'd done for a while.

So there's that.

Of course that's also the time when Winter properly hit, and the temperature turned definitely bitter cold. Because timing is important.

Friday morning I got a call at about 10:20... and when I picked it up it was my chiro's office, because I hadn't put the appointment in my fucking phone and hence had absolutely forgotten. Goddamn it.

Thankfully she had an appointment in the early afternoon, so I headed into town for that.

Then Friday night was DnD... except it wasn't because one of the party needed a nap, but we didn't know that until we were almost there. So there were board games instead. Well, a board game, Villainous to be precise. And it's pretty damn good.

I feel like it's one of those games that is easy to pick up but difficult to master, and very much depends on which villain you're playing, and the luck of the draw in a lot of ways. But a lot of fun.

And what with standing around like numpties chatting to start, and then more of the same once we were done, it was after midnight before we left and around 1am by the time I got home.

Today was the new average... also it was too fucking cold to go anywhere after the supermarket.

So we did the supermarket thing, I'm making some version of potato, bacon and leek soup (but not chowdah this time), otherwise I didn't buy a hell of a lot of anything. Which might bite me in the butt later in the week. Or not.

So, yeah, then we came back and did the YubTubs thing, then called it a day.

Current mood:

character saturday: bad girls have more fun

This week has been a very Nightingale focused week, so we're revisiting her for the DnD Character Colouring Book.

I mentioned her originally in the template post, but she's been through a lot since then, including a costume change and a haircut... oh, and a fuckton of interpersonal drama, which I ate up with both hands and a spoon. But going to hell will do that to you. I liked her original outfit and design, quite a lot actually... I liked that she used her hair as a tool for her role as a performer, and the fact she would often wrap it up into a coil on top of her head was great roleplay fun. But then I played around with the "Avernus" costume, and the haircut and suddenly I was obsessed with it. Sadly we weren't even in hell at that point, and it took what felt like forever before I got to make the change-over... but the moment was the right one.

My only regret is that I did the colour for the new costume before the high heels appeared on HeroForge (which was this week).

She is by far my most complicated character. I mean, she makes sense inside my head, but other people seem unsure about her, which I kind of love. Even if this, my first experience with the bard class has confirmed that bards are demonstrably pretty shit and I'd rather play just about any other class. I love her anyway.

But like I said, this week has been a lot for her. She discovered a whole lot of information about her family (which honestly threw me for more of a loop than her), she killed her backstory nemesis while transformed into a giant ape, finally shared her history with her travelling companions, met a unicorn, a dao (earth genie), a titan, and traded a powerful item for the blood of a dragon goddess. But it's also not every day a bard is able to string their violin and bow with the gift of unicorn hair.

That's what happens when you have two DnD sessions in a single week. Since we missed our Friday session last week, we moved it to Monday, so yeah, a Monday and a Friday session. Plus a Wednesday session for my other group. With a different DM, which will be interesting.

I also got an update about my oven, which still hasn't been fixed by the way. Since May. But it turns out we're still waiting for parts from overseas. Via Melbourne. Or Melbourne via overseas... one of those. But the tradie has already paid for those parts, so he's at least got a vested interest in getting it done.

So, now we wait. Hopefully not for that much longer, honestly. But we wait.

And, yes, the the Hearty Herdbeast Stew worked out really well this week. I mean, it was the version of it where I read the recipe, remember the major points and just do what I want instead.

Today was about average. We did the supermarket thing. I had no fucking clue as to what kind of soup I intended to make, and honestly, I still kinda don't. I just know it will be something with both tomato and chicken... and also the vegetables. So there's that.

Then there was unpacking and the YubTubs and the usual shemozzle.

And then we went to Big W, for random reasons. Which was followed by a side trip to Target, again for reasons. And that was about it.

Current mood:

character saturday: crew quarters

We're going back to the land of NPCs for this week's DnD Character Colouring Book. And honestly, of the large number of NPCs I've made, these are two that I would absolutely play.

My bard character, Nightingale, needed a crew of fellow performers for our Descent into Avernus (I mean, she absolutely didn't... but I wanted her to have one), and so I came up with a half dozen characters, some of whom basically had two lines and a walk on part in the actual adventure. All bards, obviously, but I dipped into every possible subclass for them.

And these two are my favourites. The fact that their colour pallets are essentially mirrors of each other was pure happenstance. Firstly we have Rhapsody, tiefling courtesan, singer and College of Glamour bard. She's also Nightingale's best friend, and when she walks into a room all eyes go to her. Then there's Taavi, human acrobat/tumbler and College of Valour Bard (I would probably give him a level in monk if I actually ever played him). I described him to the DM as being "clueless but sweet"... like, he has no idea how damn sexy he is or the effect he may have on other people outside of performing. You know, one of those imaginary hot people. I'm sure he probably owns a shirt or two, but he'd definitely of the "sleeves are bullshit" school of dressing.

Soup this week was a very thick chowder... with the chicken and the chorizo and three kinds of onion (because leek is technically an onion, right). Pretty good actually.

This week there was only one DnD session... Friday got called off at the last minute, but we're rescheduling that for Monday, so there's that at least.

Otherwise, nothing much to report.

Today was yet another case of "second verse, same as the first"... Did I use that joke last week? I feel like I've used it about 1500 times since March. But we did the supermarket. I'm revisiting an old favourite this week. Or at the very least, I'm going to make my own version of same, which will generally just mean upping all the quantities.

Then we ran into an acquaintance we haven't seen in a while, chatted with him briefly before heading back here.

And then we did the usual gubbins... which is to say, unpacking, followed by the YubTubs. But then a really beautiful animated movie (My Life as a Zucchini... beautiful, but melancholy and a little dark at times) was just starting on the TV, so we watched that before Ma shuffled off home.

Current mood:

character saturday: inspired by the discworld

First things first... and this is said with all due vehemence, FUCK THE NEW BLOGGER INTERFACE! 

Everything is nine times larger than it needs to be, it's taken directly from the "entirely too spaced out and too clean while being shit" school of design, you can't drag and drop images anymore and while they have put in the ability to manipulate the HTML code, they've also hidden it in a place that makes no sense and the editor is now adding in stupid fucking code it doesn't need to. Fuck that noise.

I will remain annoyed for some time but will try not to mention it again. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Moving on, we have this week's DnD character designs, both of which are inspired to greater or lesser extents by Terry Pratchett's Discworld. I mean it makes sense because I've been reading through the series for a while now, and I don't know if I'm ever going to get around to actually being able to play either of them. But if not I do have half of a plan to use them as NPCs for a later campaign.

So, we have Brother Dilmah (yes, named after the tea brand), from the Temple of the Golden Leaf, a Way of Shadow Monk. He's, unsurprisingly, inspired by the History Monks, specifically from Thief of Time, and he's also the first time I attempted to give one of these character designs wrinkles or signs of age. It's super simple, but I think it works pretty well all things considered. And he gets a shadow simply because he's a Shadow Monk, but I was kinda proud of how it came out.

Next to him is "Goody" Adora Posset (Goody being a title short for Goodwife, Posset from the drink of the same name) along with her albino raven familiar, Master Finian. And she's both a College of Lore bard and my take on one of the Discworld witches. Because of all the DnD spellcasting classes, the bard is the one that feels the most like the Headology we see in the books. It's about words and their power and making people thing the way you want them to think. And the bard class has access to all of those spells.

But I gave her access to a couple of other spells, including the Find Familiar spell so she could have her own version of Nanny Ogg's Greebo and Granny Weatherwax's You. Weirdly, although it's one of the simplest designs of a costume/character, it's kinda one of my favourites. And after this design, all the potion bottles I've added are modelled after this one because it came out so well.

Moving forward...

Still waiting for a functional oven. Allegedly the parts are on the way. I don't know I can throw much of a spaz. But I'm considering it in the next week or so.

This week I made basically vegetable soup... but added salami to it. Because if there is any rule that I've followed all my life it's that the thing with many vegetables is good, but it's 1000% better if you add salami to it. It's just facts.

Otherwise I did a good solid bout of tidying up my crap early in the week. Stuff that just needed to be put away in the place that it came from and not just left swinging in the proverbial wind.

There were just the two DnD games this week, the usual Wednesday and Friday. Honestly Wednesday nearly turned into a complete shitshow... people who don't usually show up were rumoured to appear, people who should have been around weren't. It very nearly didn't happen. But there were three of us and we decided to play anyway.

It was a weird game, mostly because it felt like the other two weren't overly engaged. And on top of that the adventure was written a little clumsily... or perhaps a little too openly. We legitimately either didn't pick up on the cues or the cues were vague as fuck. Or maybe a little of both. But we got there eventually.

Friday night's game was... character reintegration. And it was cool, a lot more effective than the last time we attempted it. Choices were made, good choices. Weird as fuck, but good. So we'll see how that goes. Hopefully this means that we can make some progress in the story, since it's been a little bit. I mean, don't get me wrong, I live for the roleplay, and I'm sure the direction the plot is leading isn't anywhere near as straightforward as I think it is.

We are starting to think about what comes next though... so there's that.

Today... today was a world of "Henry VIII I Am"... "Second verse same as the first". Nothing new or exciting really. We did the supermarket thing... I reverted back to chowder again this week. Because it's easy, and I wasn't feeling the other options.

Then we came back here, discussed important things, like teevee shows where people commission art, watched things on the YubTubs... all the hits of yesterday and today. We had a wander over to the Village, and then pretty much called it a day. Not thrilling. But we haven't done thrilling in a while.

And that was it really.

Current mood: