So... these four images are, unsurprisingly, all the same character. And a character with a long timeline, but a brief history.
Dus started out as Dusk, a young half-drow rogue I played in a test game once. As in, we were asked to test play a module that somebody from our branch of Adventurer's League had written. So, I threw together a quick character, which was the aforementioned rogue.
The module was kind of a mess, I ended up providing some pretty extensive feedback, and I believe that it got better after the next edit. Or at least better than it was.
But then one of the guys from AL wanted to run a homebrew game, which, honestly, I wasn't super enthused about, but I also wanted to support him, because he was a friend at the time (he's since slide off the face of the earth, but, you know, that's fine), so I redesigned Dusk, turning him into Dus and making him a changeling, which wasn't AL legal at the time.
Changelings can take on the appearance of anyone, but as part of their "culture", they tend to have two types of appearances, Personas and Masks. Masks are a temporary appearance that you taken on as needed, and might express a mood, whereas Personas are, as the name suggests, a more developed identity, crafted over time and used for a specific purpose. There might be a Persona for combat, another for negotiation, or one that deals with a skill. And one of the parts of the explanation that I like is that in changeling communities, there might only be one persona that's the healer for example, but that persona is shared by several different creatures who use it when they're on duty.
Which, honestly, feels much more like an NPC thing than a character thing.
These weren't really Dus's personas at the time. Dusky was, and in honor of the original version, this one was also raised as a weaver and created the drow persona to match his adopted dad, but the other two were personas I came up with when I was throwing around rogue ideas recently. Dustaniel du Prost is the persona I've nicknamed The Fool... the persona he throws on when it's in his interests to be underestimated or otherwise overlooked. Or when he needs to talk to fancy folks. And Pleasure is for when you absolutely need to have access to a woman designed to get people's attention.
There are two downsides to changelings though. The first being that you can only shift into a shape that you have clothing for. So, in the case of armour, you'd need to have access to armour that could change with you. Or you need to stay in a similar shape no matter the persona or mask.
Or have a very kind DM that gives you access to armour that shapeshifts with you.
And the second problem is... playing what amounts to three or four characters seems like it could be a giant pain in the ass. Or at the very least, a lot more work. I also can't work out whether you just do the reveal immediately, or whether you travel as a persona for a long time, only transforming when it makes sense to do so.
I mean, it's very much the "when do you do any kind of reveal for a D&D character?" question. To me, the answer is always "as long as humanly possible"... or at the very least, "at the right time".
So, will I ever play Dus... maybe. I'd just need to work out a way to do it that makes sense to me.
Anyway...
This week's soup was what happens when I make Halfling Everything Soup without at any point looking at the recipe. Because what's the point of Everything Soup if you can only make it with one specific set of ingredients.
But it was pretty good regardless.
Thursday night DnD was also pretty good. I mean, I'm running around with a single hitpoint and we're about to go into combat, but otherwise, you know, it was a good time. I also completely forgot that half-orcs have the ability to come back up after being knocked unconscious, because as I've said before, this is the only race from the Players Handbook I've never played before. And it's also why I have the singular hitpoint.
I also discovered that my boy Dax is very much a "if you run, I will chase you" kind of guy... which would be great, if I had better armour.
Friday night DnD was great. And also happened to be Fluffy's birthday, so double good.
But they managed to take out one of the hags, while also being split up and there only being two of them in the combat. And yes, I was a kind DM a few times, but they still managed it in the end. So now she's head and they can go through and clear out the rest of her lair, finding all the things they need.
I also got to have a great conversation between Fluffy's character and the hag at the start of the game, and pull a few of his strings in a way that I knew he very probably wouldn't bite on, but I wanted to make him think about the offer she made him for a hot minute. And then she got shoved in an oven and died ala Hansel and Gretel, so that literally went up in flames.
And I was able to drop some lore on Mrs's character and introduce some themes that will be relevant later... and then we finished the game with Mr's character being reunited with the twin brother who went missing when he was a child.
Because, and I cannot state this strongly enough, if you give me a hook in your backstory, I will absolutely use it. You want a long lost twin. Done, he was kidnapped by one of the antagonists. You want to be a fairy and of noble background. Done, I will absolutely reconfigure elements of the existing story that I didn't like anyway into something that relates to your background AND I will have a character tell you a story foreshadowing it in your very first game. You want to have one parent who left you and another who's neglectful. Done, and I will make you feel every inch of both of those elements and basically the more you give me to play with, the more I will use it to mess with you... and then secretly hope that in the end I can stick the landing of the emotional payoff.
But, yeah, Mr's character and his twin were reunited right at the end of the game... and I had that thing again where, as a DM (and also as a player, but honestly it tends to happen more as a DM), when I play a scene where an NPC would get emotional, I in turn get choked up. And I could feel it coming on as we did the reunion scene with the twins, and I could see Mr going a little the same way, so, yeah, we were basically at time anyway, so they hugged and then I pulled the pin.
It doesn't really matter though, because I can guarantee that it'll happen next session anyway. But that's not for two weeks, because Mr has a work thing next week.
Anyway...
Today was... a thing that happened.
So we did the usual supermarket thing, and then finally got around to doing a thing we've been talking about for entirely too long. Around the time my computer started slowly dying of "being fucking old".
I bought a new laptop.
I didn't overly research anything, I literally went into Good Guys, spoke to the very lovely older gentleman in the computer section, he was, as previously stated, lovely... as the people in the computer section of Good Guys somehow have a tendency to be... in a way that no other store really seems to manage. I told him what I needed the computer for, he said, this one. I said, I have no idea what that brand is, he said, it's basically IBM, I said, yes, that does in fact make me feel better. He said a lot of words that probably mean something to somebody who knows more about computers than I do. And I said, let's do it.
So we did it, and I brought him home and got it out of the box and put it on the kitchen counter and keep stroking the pretty silver brushed metal (yet somehow incredibly square) top of it when I get up...
And I'm now freaking out slightly. We went right through the excitement part and came out the other end with remarkable speed... not a record by any stretch of the imagination, but we're here now.
Not least of all because I just realised that the old laptop (this one, that I'm typing this on) had a 750GB hard drive... and this one has, if I'm reading the box correctly, 256GB... which is just a little bit more than the amount of space that I currently have left free on this laptop.
And it doesn't have a CD drive, so I'm going to need to jump through some hoops in order to get some form of Photoshop working on the new laptop, and while I do have two tiny external hard drives, I think perhaps, just maybe, that there is a case to be made for spending another $100 on a 1T external drive... just, you know... for funsies.
Yeah, I should have known it was all too good to be true. Especially now, having gone back and looked at how much mental trauma I went through buying THIS laptop all the way back in 2014, I should have somehow sensed there would be a problem.
Regret, thy name is limited budget and lack of planning,
It's fine. It'll be fine. It's going to be a total and utter pain in the ass to move stuff across and set it all up the way I want it to be (Step 1: Kill Windows S Mode, Step 2: Install better browsers, Step 3: Uninstall Edge, Step 4: Uninstall McAfee, Step 5: Install Norton, Step 6: Cry) and, honestly, I'm not rushing into it. Unlike last time, I have a functional, if horrifically slow current computer to fall back on.
That's it, that's all you're getting today... my brain is currently fried and I need to go and do something else other than think about laptops.
Current mood:
No comments:
Post a Comment