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Forgotten Realms Recap #4, Part Two: Wait. What?

Ok, so it’s not exactly "tomorrow." As I said, with the gate opened the company got the hell out of dodge. Previously, any view of the world outside Zhougal Keep stopped after about five feet with impenetrable darkness (not unlike a darkness spell). This time, we were moving through a break in the darkness that appeared relatively normal, and after a short jaunt we were clearly back into normal space. Exhausted, we sat back and, except for some scouting around, waited for the sun to come up. It did. We didn’t die. Success!

With that little detail wrapped up, we assessed the situation. The Nar(f) we had followed were all dead; their leader was gruesomely decapitated by the stone gout that erupted when we first reached the ruins , and we killed the others in the early going of eternal skeletons in the courtyard. Their horses, however, were still around, along with ours, so we had either a) self-propelled loot or b) self-propelled food. Seydlitz was also still alive, and figured to be a bit trickier to deal with. Now that we were on to his magical abilities, he let a shoe drop - he didn’t want to go back to the Adzo. Apparently in Rasheman a male caster gets stuck in a cave or something, and who wants that? Fair enough, said Lu Tse, he can come with us. "Really?" the boy asked excitedly. Nobody in the company was necessarily thrilled with the idea, but they didn’t seem to hate it, either; none of us had a keen interest to stick around except maybe Rahil, but being a native of a village that small is usually contra-indicative of wanting to be in said village.

Click to continue reading “Forgotten Realms Recap #4, Part Two: Wait. What?“

17Feb2009 | John | Comments Off | Continued
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Saturday Potpourri: History of the Internet

I’m on a potpourri video kick these days, go fig. In any event, this is a well-produced video that covers (in very broad strokes, mind) the evolution of the internet from little seeds planted across the world. 8 minutes of your life well spent, imo, and less than that if you skip the credits. Enjoy!

[youtube 9hIQjrMHTv4 nolink]

14Feb2009 | John | Comments Off | Continued
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Forgotten Realms Recap #4, Part One: Reuse, Reduce, Reanimate.

22nd of Eleint (still), 1372
North of Adzo, ruins of Zhougal Keep
Attending: All

So, like I said - CLIFFHANGER! (In case you’re reading this slightly later than immediately-after-the-last-recap, you should probably read this first.) “We are the last, lost,” chants the misty form in the center. “We will welcome you in the end.”

“Roll initiative, homes,” was the best thing we could come up with on only seven days notice. Stupid deadlines! Unfortunately, the early goings made it look like we should have been less ast-fay with the initiative-ay. You see, a party bearing no magical weapons is likely to have difficulty hitting the incorporeal guy who’s tossing out CON damage like he’s a Mardi Gras float captain and we’re a nude… oh hell, you get the idea, we were clearly going to get our asses handed to us. The company had minimal damage sources at its disposal: Lu Tse could generate fire on his hands thanks to his newly-discovered abilities, but that only worked once without disengaging to recover; Grapthar had a couple expenditures of his positive energy ability left, which were mild but useful; oh, and Seydlitz MacGuffin turned out to have magic powers! With a shout of some incomprehensible tongue, fire shot from his hands and landed on the shadow-y dude. Unfortunately, it was only somewhat effective, and we were all soon left with no useful resources and an angry shado- oh fine, Rahil eventually figured out he was a wraith.

Fortunately, Anniel gave up on her bow and the mace she’d scrounged up and went rummaging through the rest of the room. “Surely Fate, that bald, 6′3″ god of chance and destiny, wouldn’t just put us in here to die” she thought. Next to an overturned giant chair (or throne, perhaps?) she comes across an old backpack and a large battleaxe made entirely of metal. It is etched with the writings of a tongue she does not know, and when she hefted it she heard a gruff voice grunt approvingly, although there’s no one else around. “Nobody bothers to write on a crappy weapon,” she thought before wheeling about and charging the wraith. One mighty swing (and one max-damage roll) later, the wraith is rent and destroyed, leaving a scorched mark on the paving stones. Relief abounds. The axe, being of dwarven make, didn’t actually hold any interest to Anniel, who soon passed it over to Grapthar; when he grasped it, he heard the same gruff laughter. “That’s a female!” he exclaimed. Examining the weapon, he found a single comprehensible word, likely the name of the blade - Jorthundaul.

Click to continue reading “Forgotten Realms Recap #4, Part One: Reuse, Reduce, Reanimate.”

12Feb2009 | John | Comments Off | Continued
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Forgotten Realms Recap #3: (B2.5) The Keep on the Shadowlands

22nd of Eleint, 1372
North of Adzo, in the shadow-y keep
Attending: All

As described last week , the company decides that restocking the spell-casters is critically imp ortant to surviving this accidental expedition, and so barricades are erected on both entrances to the room using the cauldrons that were already here; nothing spooky about them, nossir! Setting a rough watch rotation, everyone does the best they can to rest in this most disquieting of locations. Shockingly, we have nightmares. Actually shockingly, the nightmares seem to be related to one another. Much to the chagrin of the DM (I’m betting), we don’t actually dig all the way to the bottom of this particular strangeness, so eager are we to get out of the keep before (we fear) it dissolves into nothing, taking us with it.

[You gotta hand it to us, we've put ourselves on a clock that may not even exist. We're the easiest party to entertain ever .]

We ponder which direction to go, and quickly decide that we want elevation to get a better view of our surroundings - thus, we want to head around to the tower at one end of the keep. We listen to the appropriate door, through which Grapthar had heard scraping noises hours ago, but nothing now stirred. “Let’s go then,” said Lu Tse, and the door was opened. Stepping in with a torch, a series of combat practice dummies are revealed, along with several dead bodies on the floor. “I’ve seen this movie before, ” thinks every single member of the company as the bodies rise up with a series of rattles and hisses.

Click to continue reading “Forgotten Realms Recap #3: (B2.5) The Keep on the Shadowlands”

11Feb2009 | John | Comments Off | Continued
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Saturday Potpourri: Three Minute Star Wars Recap

Here’s the original Star Wars trilogy, recapped by someone who has only seen bits while flipping channels passed Spike TV (or where ever…) over the years. You’re welcome. :)

[vimeo 2809991 nolink]

7Feb2009 | John | Comments Off | Continued
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Saturday Potpourri: The Beatles’ Rooftop Concert Turns 40

Apropos of just about nothing, other than I stumbled across the information, it turns out that it was 40 years ago that the Beatles went on top of the Apple (not that Apple , that one ) headquarters in Saville Row, in London, and performed a short set for the purpose of inclusion in the film Let it Be . There’s all sorts of drama surrounding this story; the Beatles broke up right around this time. I’m not out to get into that mess, I just wanted to share the rooftop footage. What speaks to me is that they sound exactly like themselves in this footage - how many bands have you heard live and discovered that something important, the bit you really love about them, is a product of electronic production? Not these tracks. Enjoy!

[youtube http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc nolink]

Click to continue reading “Saturday Potpourri: The Beatles’ Rooftop Concert Turns 40″

31Jan2009 | John | Comments Off | Continued
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Eberron Recap, Episode 2: Red Queen’s Race

(Note: this session was a huuuuuuuuuuuge infodump. It was fun, and informative, but it doesn’t make for a snappy read so I’m going to be brief.)

The previous session ended with the party beginning its descent to level 12, the bottom of Cyrran Shelter #3. There was, I forgot to add, a repeat encounter with some shadows. They did not pose a serious threat but during the fight we learned that Guard, who had been happily immune to any and all threats on his home level (that’s level 6, yo) was susceptible to stat damage just like the rest of us anywhere else. Good to know. We proceed the rest of the way without incident and come to level 12, where we face a classic fork in the path. Left or right? One way houses the Red Queen, Guard tells us, and the other is home to the Living Document… whatever the hell that means. We choose left.

Success! We enter a large room with a dias on the far end. On the dias stands a humanoid figure composed completely of gently swirling paper. Sadly, the Living Document’s predisposition is to treat visitors as hostile, and so it unleashes an enchantment that leaves several people befuddled, listless, and incoherent… okay, more than usual. The rest of the group manages to maintain its composure and talk to the thing, rather than pay it back in kind. They keep a fight from breaking out, but the Living Document demands that we show our marks. Our what now? A brief frisking of ourselves later, it turns out that all of us except the Kalashtari have small tattoo-looking marks somewhere on our bodies. These being displayed to the Living Document, it explains that it is prepared to answer any three questions that any markbearer asks it. As an added bonus, unlike the stereotypically adversarial stance of, say, a djinni in granting wishes, the Document is happy to explain when a question is pointless and/or unanswerable without it costing a question. So why even have limitations? “Because that’s the way it is.” Dammit.

Funnily enough, while three questions doesn’t sound like much, we actually know soooooo little about our situation that we don’t even use all of our questions in one sitting. Nevertheless, the picture does get clearer. In no particular order:

Click to continue reading “Eberron Recap, Episode 2: Red Queen’s Race”

29Jan2009 | John | Comments Off | Continued
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Forgotten Realms Recap #2: We’re Ruined!

22nd of Eleint (Sep), 1372
North of Adzo
Attending: all -Anniel (character played by committee)

When we left off, the scraggly outcropping of rocks that the Nar(f) were camping in had exploded in a torrent of dirt and rock that resulted in a surprisingly-complete Keep of Evil(tm)(c) surrounding the company and the Nar(f). We pick up this week with a fuller description of what ails us – we’re all in a courtyard that has several doors leading away from it, as well as a giganto double door that, ostensibly, leads to our freedom. In the center of the courtyard is a gigantic statue of a demon (a glabrezu to be precise, although I don’t think that anybody’s character knows that) and scattered about the courtyard are about a half-dozen skeletons. This being a fantasy game and not just, you know, life, the skeletons are as upright and mobile as the rest of us.

A fight breaks out! The company faces both barbarians and skeletons, but they aren’t allied and many of them are fighting each other. Sephora rushes forward and stands protectively over Seydlitz MacGuffin (such an ironic last name! ). The skeletons are heard to hiss things like “forgotten” and “lost” and “forlorn” and “loss” and “sorrow.” At first the fight goes almost too easy, as many skeletons are dropped by a burst of positive energy from Rahil while many of the party’s attacks focus on the Nar(f) – Lu Tse figures that only they have a motivation to get the boy in particular, so they have to be dispatched first. Then the other shoe drops and more skeletons are spewed up out of the ground. From there it’s a pitched battle of skeletal attrition as skeletons drop and occasionally are reinforced – by themselves, it turns out later, or at least the same undead souls powering each collection of bones that rise up. No individual skeleton is particularly threatening to the members of the company, but they just. Keep. Coming.

Click to continue reading “Forgotten Realms Recap #2: We’re Ruined!”

29Jan2009 | John | Comments Off | Continued
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Eberron Recap, Episode 1: Pilot

I don’t remember if I actually said this before or not, but I’ve gone from not playing any D&D to being a player (non-DM, even) in two different games! <- exclamation point indicates excitement… On Saturdays, my old group has been ably taken over by another player, who has set us down in the Eberron campaign setting; as far as I can tell, one other person has minimal knowledge of the setting and the rest of us are n00bs. In order for our real-life ignorance to flow smoothly within the game, he has integrated a combination of memory loss and stanger-in-a-strange-land displacement right into the story. To wit:

We have a cold opening (no warm-up or background) of our characters waking up to find themselves drenched in goo, standing in the midst of giant, broken glass(ish) tubes. Each of us is dazed and disoriented, but we can spend little time asking questions because there’s a more immediate problem. In the center of the room, several goblins are dead or dying at the hands of a pack of shadow-y undead. Not just shadow-Y, shadow-shadows! Right into initiative we go, where we discover that whatever we may not remember, our inherent skills and abilities are still right at our fingertips. Wallace Worthington V, a sneaky little halfling, plays dead and riffles through the pockets of the goblins, but the shadows don’t buy it and he gets whapped for ability damage. Meanwhile, Mekashtari (a human-ish woman who later tells us she is from Kalashtar) channels divine energy to force the shadows to flee, Corn (my human swordsage/warblade who is sure that that isn’t his actual name) tries to stab them without much luck, and Lucius Deveraux Minster (”you can call me Buck¹“) draws his pistols and shoots one dead. Wait, what?

Click to continue reading “Eberron Recap, Episode 1: Pilot”

28Jan2009 | John | Comments Off | Continued
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Speaking of The Graveyard (audio)Book, It’s Free

Well, sort of. Just thought you should know that, last year, Neil went on a promotional tour for The Graveyard Book during which he read a chapter of the book at each stop. (One particularly long chapter got split in two, much to one audience’s chagrin.) In a blessed move, his publisher consented to record these readings and place them, in their entirety, on his young readers’ website, Mr. Bobo’s Remarkable Mouse Circus. You can find the videos here. I’ve listened to parts of it at work, and sure enough he delivers the same wonderful performance during these readings that he does on the audiobook. So, turn on your speakers and open a new tab, clicky-clicky, and have Neil read you a story today while you work. Enjoy!

28Jan2009 | John | Comments Off | Continued
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