#seeing the world populated with a few such characters? including one of our companions?

[wolfsong-the-bloody-beast]

I love Taash's outlandish ideas about the Crows. Each question they ask Lucanis about them is more ridiculous than the last. And when they ask him whether there are any non-binary Crows... I thought, that's it. I'm going to make a non-binary Crow Rook to romance them.

[pixelgrotto]

Saltmarsh stories

One more Dungeons & Dragons campaign comes to completion! For over a year and a half, I’ve been running Ghosts of Saltmarsh for my girlfriend and her best friend, and the pair of them finally finished last Saturday after 23 sessions and nearly 100 hours of playtime. We started playing in person December 2019 and had to move online in March due to COVID, and eventually my gf’s best friend moved out of town and then out of the country. But in spite of global transitions and pandemics, we still surmounted the odds and finished without missing a single month.

Since Ghosts of Saltmarsh was my gf’s introduction to D&D (minus a few games she played as a child), it took up quite a bit of space in my crusty Dungeon Master mental cave of planning. Luckily, I found it to be a very enjoyable campaign to run, mostly because as an anthology of classic adventures, it lacks the overly convoluted storyline that plagues a lot of other D&D fifth edition campaigns I’ve either played through or DMed, like Tomb of Annihilation, Out of the Abyss and Waterdeep: Dragon Heist. 

Ghosts of Saltmarsh contains eight adventures united by their seaside themes. Three of them are updated versions of the classic U1-U3 Saltmarsh modules, which were among the first British D&D products produced from 1981 to ‘83. These three tales revolve around the players befriending local villagers and helping a lizardfolk tribe fight off invading sauhaugin, and they’re good, mostly as an example of early D&D material that required players to treat so-called “monstrous races” with diplomacy rather than violence. The other adventures are from old issues of Dungeon magazine, and run the gamut from a decent lighthouse dungeon crawl (Isle of the Abbey, from Dungeon #34) to a nifty survival horror-style ship romp (Salvage Operation, from Dungeon #123). Additionally, Ghosts of Saltmarsh contains rules for ship battles, which are good enough considering that D&D isn’t a naval combat simulator, and the book also devotes its first chapter to describing a great new version of the town of Saltmarsh to serve as a central hub. 

I think Ghosts of Saltmarsh’s anthology format is my preferred style of D&D hardcover book at this point. Just give me a main town that I can detail and populate with my own NPCs, a bunch of adventures taking place around the vicinity that I can hack as necessary for my players, and I’m good. This format is also reflective of D&D’s early roots, where campaigns weren’t 250-page books with save-the-world plots, but short modules focused on building clout in a certain region and establishing a base. I think it’s also a very newbie-friendly format, since beginning players can really become invested in one central location and the people residing in it.

Since I was only running this game for two people, I had plenty of time to help the girls grow attached to Saltmarsh and its denizens. These consisted of several faces from my other games, including the very first D&D character I played as - a ranger who settled down in Saltmarsh as the head of the city guard and served as mentor for the next generation of adventurers. Other NPCs evolved depending on what I thought might make my gf and her friend laugh. For instance, Oceanus the sea elf, a Saltmarsh mascot since the '80s, started out as a surfer bro but eventually morphed into a douchebag/dingbat a la Schmidt from New Girl, which I started watching with my gf sometime over the course of 2020. And Captain Xendros, the tiefling owner of the local magic item store, was only supposed to be a minor shopkeeper until her sassy banter stole everyone’s heart, winning her a place as a major character by the end of the game.

I also gave the girls their very own house to decorate and return to in between missions, which was another fun ode to the older D&D roots that Ghosts of Saltmarsh embraces, but also a chance to insert Animal Crossing-style interior decoration into our campaign. My girlfriend clocked a staggering 300+ hours into Animal Crossing: New Horizons at the start of the pandemic, and seeing her and her friend derive great pleasure from using Roll20′s wonky drawing tools to sketch out every room of the house (and create a shrine in the bathroom with random bits of gold on the floor, no less) was stellar. 

Aside from a house, the gals also received two animal companions - a pseudodragon and a shadow mastiff. The pseudodragon appears as a familiar that can be found after Ghosts of Saltmarsh’s first adventure, The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh, but the shadow mastiff was an inclusion of my own because my girlfriend really wanted a dog for the longest time, and I figured I would give her one in-game before we got one in real life. (Yup, we now have one in real life.) Generally, I’m a huge fan of injecting a little Pokémon into my games with animal buddies, but in this case the pets also served as valuable fighting companions that helped balance Ghosts of Saltmarsh’s combat encounters, which are meant for four people.

On the topic of inclusions, I stuck a bit closer to the content in Ghosts of Saltmarsh than I usually do when running a campaign based on an official D&D hardcover, probably because the book in question was just more usable this time around. The final split was maybe 60% book material and 40% my own stuff. The end of the campaign was nearly all me, since I couldn’t quite formulate a way to include the final two adventures in the book, Tammeraut's Fate and The Styes. So instead, I gutted them for concepts and created an overarching story that tied Saltmarsh’s threats to H.P. Lovecraft’s Esoteric Order of Dagon. There’s a ton of Lovecraft influence in The Styes, after all, and Dagon was included as a demon lord in third and fourth edition D&D, not to mention Pathfinder. I drew inspiration from all of those versions, along with the stats included in Sandy Peterson’s Cthulhu Mythos book for fifth edition. 

Ultimately, it all made for an entertaining story that scaled mightily. At level 2, Thea the tiefling rogue (played by my gf) and Zora the half-elf bard (played by her best friend) were utterly outclassed by smugglers in a haunted house and had to use a door as a shield to escape. At level 12, the pair defeated a demon lord and closed a portal to the Abyss. (To be fair, both accomplishments are pretty epic. The door escape was one of the most creative D&D moments I’ve ever seen, and we’re still talking about it today.)

While I wish we could’ve rolled physical dice together for a little longer, I’m glad Roll20 was available to keep our game going through a period of global strife. In the midst of it all, there was always D&D to fall back on. And hopefully, there will be more to come. I’ve got Candlekeep Mysteries on my shelf, another anthology of D&D short adventures...and it’s just waiting for me to formulate a plot to tie ‘em all together!

[kryptsune]

What are Shattered and Infernum about?

🌼I will try to give as much info as I can without completely butchering it with spoilers. Infernum is a story I created nearly 7 years ago back in High School. It combines a lot of different elements which I will discuss in a moment. In essence, it is the answer to the question, what is behind the other doors in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland?

It combines my love of mythology, fairytales, and the supernatural. Wonderland, as it is referred, has been corrupted with a curse called “the madness”. It consumes the entire world in a plague of insanity and fear. Each character has a design from their respective period in time. They do not all come from the 1800s even though the book was written at this period. In short, the world of Wonderland is the equivalent to an afterlife. It is very akin to the concept of purgatory. Corruption brings out the worst in all the inhabitants. In the case of Wonderland, it turns them into the thing they feared most in their seemingly forgotten pasts. 

The basic idea is that the Garden of Eden was not a place within our own dimension but just one of a multitude of worlds all connected at a central hub, the Hall of Doors. Now I don't personally believe in the concept of purgatory but in the story, I have made it so that those that would be in limbo or purgatory go to these worlds to live their lives without the hindrance of the past until they can be lawfully judged. This includes those close to death. It's like the scales of judgment and the weighing of one's heart in the book of the dead.

Usually, these people are either sent to heaven or to Hell but this world is for the ones that are in a morally grey area or the judges just don't see them as being one way or the other. If you take the idea of reincarnation it's very similar in my story only those that pass lose their physical form and are transferred to Infernum. Only certain characters can pass physically through dimensions as well. They mostly use their astral projection in the form of dreams or nightmares to contact those outside of Infernum.

After a while, the celestial beings that created these limbos decided upon another course of action. To use the world's two-fold. One for inspiration and creation of those still living on earth and the second a purgatory meant to guide lost souls. The descendants of the first are the rulers. Here is the catch they are fairytale, folklore, and mythological characters. The reason we know about them and their stories is because of writers and poets that were able to see the other side but lived to tell the tale so to speak. It was an inspiration to them to write and continue their stories for our present dimension.

Wonderland is supposed to be based upon the Garden of Eden.  In order to maintain a balance of both good and evil in the world, this limbo was created and therefore the evil side also had to make a contribution. The agreement that once a soul chooses its path they go to either Heaven or Hell was formed. The Angelic side did not honor the other and banished the demon hold on the world effectively breaking the balance. Each character has a tragic past life before they end up in Infernum. Their lives seem to be morally ambiguous so that their time of judgment is not fulfilled. So each character has their demons so to speak. It essentially becomes a second Hell. The more souls the demon side has the stronger they become to take over the other worlds and vice versa. 

The inhabitant's souls become twisted and corrupted. Each character becomes a demon form of themselves during the nighttime. It's supposed to play into the idea that first appearances are deceiving but no matter what the inner demons are always there. They become something you hate or are afraid of. Wonderland is one of the main locations or I would argue the main one but there are other characters and stories that all intertwined and are weaved together. Because this story is so old I need to overhaul quite a few things. That said the basic ideas/ core ideas are still present. 

Shattered on the other hand was actually a story or choose your own adventure narrative that I made for a course in college. I will post my notes on that as well for you. 

Environment/Background: The world is a huge unknown to its inhabitants. A dystopian society deeply rooted in Japanese culture and feel. It mixes some elements of a more feudal area of Japan with high sci-fi elements. The best examples of this aesthetic would be The Hunger Games and Ghost in the Shell. A technologically almost fantasy city, Seiiki (English translation: Sanctuary) stands alone in this world. The outside world has been infested by demonic spirits and monsters. Ones that threaten their way of life if the containment of the city were to fail. It is spread through the cities through various channels as certain sectors of the entire city support their own economies and ways of life. Seiiki is described as that of a major city but in reality, it is a largely populated landmass surrounded by what appears to be an indigo and black miasma, presumably where the demon/yokai threat has originated from.

Each sector of the “city” has its own leader that are then taken into a voting process in which the next “king” is elected to preside over the entire city. This sector's inhabitants see substantial improvement in the quality of life as the power and riches funnel to the current king in power. All decisions, however, are decided by the leaders of each sector for the rest of the people, supposedly. The city being technologically advanced seems to be a paradise that would account for the number of kami and divine imagery.

Propaganda: The city revolves around the cleansing of the citizens and their devotion. There are specific rituals that people have to conform to in order to “keep the evil” from the city. Each person or family has an A.M.E (Automatic Mechanical Entourage). It is a robotic creature or automaton distributed as a companion. “They keep citizens safe, make their lives effortless, and Happy.” These mechanical creatures have varying looks about them. The higher up on the social ladder the more intricate and complex. They are modeled off of Japanese spirits and made to the owner's specifications. At their core, they are a security system and “companion.” Those higher in power have A.M.E that reflect Japanese Mythos and even can be family and crest specific. The current ruler in power brandishes the kitsune as their symbol which can either be the head of a fox or the 9 tails.

Their religious practices have shunned the old Kami in favor of new ones that have given the city its ability to have these technological marvels and also keep the demons at bay. Each sector's citizens give offerings to these new gods as they pray for safety among other things. It is against the law to mention anything of the old religion as the people's devotion is said to have caused all this, to begin with, their heresy is to blame. The new religion seeks to cleanse them of these past sins.   

Every morning begins the same. The people wake up to join their families for tea distributed by the leaders. Then announcements are broadcasted through the entire city usually being news of some sort, product advertisement, and entertainment. In addition, there is a government-run group that acts as a peacekeeping faction. They seem to have a clandestine background as they never show their faces. They hide behind A.M.E masks of animals or oni brandishing black cloaks. They are considered a kind of secret police known as The Pack.   

[justforbooks]

On Western Stars, Bruce Springsteen Rides in the Whirlwind

A look inside the LP being hailed as The Boss’s best since Magic

In his memoir Born to Run and its live companion piece Springsteen on Broadway, Bruce Springsteen describes his first drive cross-country, when he was 21 years old. That would place that journey around 1970, ’71. Let’s pretend that at the end of the trip he found himself in sunny Southern California (not “down San Diego way,” but in Los Angeles) and decided to hang around there, writing songs, playing acoustic gigs, and by ’73 was getting some cuts on Linda Ronstadt albums, generating buzz as a solo performer from shows at the Troubadour, and the record labels started showing interest, resulting in a deal with Asylum, or Reprise.

Springsteen’s L.A. debut album released that year, let’s call it Greetings from Griffith Park, Ca., might’ve sounded something like his new Western Stars. When he began hinting about this solo project a few years back, Springsteen referenced the SoCal sound of the late ’60s, specifically Glen Campbell’s records of Jimmy Webb songs, and on Western Stars you can hear him aiming at the sweepingly melancholy vibe of “Wichita Lineman,” “Galveston,” and “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.” In Dylan Jones’s upcoming book The Wichita Lineman: Searching in the Sun for the World’s Great Unfinished Song, Springsteen says about Campbell’s singing, “It was simple on the surface but there was a lot of emotion underneath.”

Reviewers have been scrambling to play spot-the-musical-influences on Western Stars, and that’s fun to do. I hear some Johnny Rivers with the Wrecking Crew and Marty Paich’s strings lurking in the corners; Waylon Jennings’s version of “Good Time Charlie’s Got the Blues” (many people have pointed out how much “Hello Sunshine” resembles that song); the string arrangements Nick DeCaro did on Reprise albums for Gordon Lightfoot (Springsteen even has a song called “Sundown,” like Lightfoot’s big hit from ’74), Arlo Guthrie and Randy Newman, or the ones Bergen White charted for Tony Joe White; the hyper-literate, vivid Americana of Mickey Newbury. What a cool game! Nilsson! Jim Croce!

But Western Stars isn’t just evocative of the California sound of the early ’70s; it has, underneath its cinematic strings, the downbeat feeling of the movies that were coming out in 1973, populated by characters who couldn’t really be called heroes: Badlands (of course), Charlie Varrick, High Plains Drifter, Kid Blue, The Last American Hero (which Springsteen referenced on The River’s “Cadillac Ranch”), Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Scarecrow, Walking Tall. (In ‘73, Springsteen’s not-yet-manager Jon Landau was reviewing films—including some on this list—for Rolling Stone.) Those Watergate-era films, road movies, neo-Westerns, stories of outcasts and revenge-seekers, inform the landscape of Western Stars. On the title track, Springsteen reaches back a bit further: “Here’s to the cowboys, riders in the whirlwind” (see: Ride in the Whirlwind, Monte Hellman’s existential black-and-white western from 1966, starring a pre–Easy Rider Jack Nicholson). Sometimes Western Stars feels like an unmade film with Michael Sarrazin, Barbara Hershey, and Warren Oates.

Oh, I haven’t mentioned how good this album is, how memorable many of its lines are. “Fingernail moon in a twilight sky/Ridin’ high grass of the switchback”: his imagery is as crisp and clean as his fictional Montana sky. “Boarded up and gone like an old summer song.” It’s Springsteen’s best album, by far, since Magic (2007), and I already prefer it to the much-revered (in some quarters) The Rising. For one thing, it isn’t carrying the burden of expectations of The Rising (“We need you now!” someone supposedly shouted at Bruce in the street after 9/11, and can you conceive of the pressure? Would anyone have yelled that at Billy Joel?), and it isn’t bearing the heavy sonic weight of Brendan O’Brien’s production. Western Stars feels more open. These tracks have been in the works for some time; he mentioned the project in interviews around the time of the autobiography, but it had to wait until the whole Born to Run/Springsteen on Broadway phase was over. Maybe, by that point, he’d tired of his own narrative voice and his own story and got down to shaping others. These songs are all in the first person, but that person isn’t Bruce Springsteen. They’re hitchhikers and wayfarers (aren’t they kind of the same thing?), stuntmen and bit players. They’re like the characters in the early ’70s novels by Larry McMurtry (Moving On and All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers), and I wonder how Springsteen missed out on writing a song about a rodeo cowboy.

Springsteen is also liberated musically. He didn’t have to consider, as he did with the woeful Working on a Dream and the clunky, well-meaning Wrecking Ball, how the songs would translate in the context of a live show with the E Street Band. You can’t imagine them schlepping around a big string section to recreate these songs, and there wouldn’t be anything at all for Jake Clemons to do, and even Max Weinberg would be fiddling his thumbs for a big chunk of the set. No doubt a few of these tracks will find their way into the possible 2020 tour (please, not “There Goes My Miracle” and “Sleepy Joe’s Café”; we don’t need him straining to be Del Shannon, or the band pretending to have fun on a Jay and the Americans knockoff), and if “Hello Sunshine” gets to replace “Waitin’ on a Sunny Day,” all the better.

Western Stars suggests an America divorced from this moment in history. The only cultural reference is to John Wayne (in ’73 he was doing junk like The Train Robbers), and the one allusion that nudges the album into the late 20th century is to a blue pill for ED. Otherwise, the album would have sat pretty solidly in the Nixon era. For anyone who expected Springsteen to be a beacon of hope that the country will get through this current crisis the way it did through Watergate and 9/11, or who wanted him to draw stark pictures of our heroes and villains, Western Stars may feel slight, or like a challenge he gave himself to complete a genre exercise. But if Darkness on the Edge of Town was Springsteen’s film noir, this album is his bleak road movie, his characters nursing drinks, recalling old loves and old wounds. By the time we end up at the final track, looking at the remnants of a beaten-down motel, we’ve been along on one of Springsteen’s most rewarding rides.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com

[sepiadice]

Tales of Genius Ch. 2: Follow the Light

(9/16/18)

And so, for possibly the first time ever, I got a session two in a campaign! New high score! Woo-hoo!

Also, got to redo an adventure I ran for the old High School crew. Updated it slightly, added a puzzle, changed the final encounter, added a pair of magic items.

Don’t think I have any sort of RPG Life updates. Working on various other projects off and on. Started watching a new Netflix original series that redoubles a plot point later in this campaign.

Added a fourth party member. Which I think I’m going to lock down on. The games I’ve been involved with always had a problem of having a large number of players, so I think I want to try for the classic four-person ensemble.

Hope they’re having fun. Doubt plagues me, but they’re not whining to me, so it’s probably fine? It’s still clear I need to continue practicing GMing, and I’ve noticed I’ve been stuttering and having difficulty pronouncing words. That will all need to be improved before we move on to the podcast phase.

Now, for the second part of Tales of Genius![1]

CAST

Eli Roberts: (Played by Lyons) Child of Clio. Doctor, travelling to write a medical text akin to Gray’s Anatomy. He’s an Intellect! Olivia Grayson: (Played by Maddie) Child of Thalia. Apprentice to Eli. Believes her Squirrel-raccoon companion is her boyfriend reincarnated. Fromthe: (Played by Jose) Child of Calliope. Military veteran and current mercenary. Also has some mercantile ambitions.

Jean De Ferrero: (Played by Anthony) Child of Terpsichore. Travelling con artist.

Quick exposition:

So, that whole “Child of…” thing is part of my world’s lore. About nineteen hundred years ago, nine sisters travelled the world and founded nine schools of philosophy and nine separate cultures that populate the world. The only solid marker for the tribes is eye color. White/Light grey for Clio. Yellow for Thalia. Orange for Calliope. Green for Terpsichore. Others for the other tribes as they’re introduced.

The sisters are named after the Greek Muses.

And, so, onto our tale.

DATE: Late Winter 1911

PLACE: THE TINES (Mountain border of Astree and Hervar)

We open back up on North Fort. Food supplies are running even lower, especially since a good chunk of it has been poisoned. The mayor has decided to send those clever adventurers to try and find an alternate path out of town,[2] plus this nice Jean fellow who speaks highly of his own conquests.[3]

After some brainstorming while I was busy making curry,[4] the mayor mentioned the town crypts, which are a small network of caves some distance from town. There’s an iron door there which no one has explored past, because there’s a bunch of warning symbols on it, so better just stick the dead in there until claimed. But, well, it’s something?

The party heads to the crypt, as I couldn’t be bothered to force any scene work in the town. Would’ve been nice to establish the mixed critters of the setting, but I’m bad at following even my own notes, and I didn’t really have any cause to delay them.

In the crypts, they discovered a small band of Saber-toothed foxes.

Olivia tried to befriend the foxes using the cheese from the rations North Fort gave her, but the foxes weren’t satisfied, and unhappy with the intrusion. So combat despite Olivia’s protests!

I still am far from getting a handle of combat narrative, but after a few rounds, they’ve killed two foxes and scared off three.[5]

Then Olivia used a magic spell to cave in the entrance. Which… I should probably take a moment to taunt the party over.

And now I have. What nerds.

The party moved towards the iron door. It’s magic proof,[6] locked, and barred. So the group needs to figure out how to get in.

Unbarring it was easy enough, but it’s still locked.

But, hey, the party has a new Scoundrel Character! Maybe he can pick the lock!

The dice say no. This is dire, as the back up plan I had is sitting in North Fort,[7] and that’s not an available path anymore.

Okay, okay. Let’s reason this out. Is the door there to keep people out, or something in? Both, but which is important?

Which is to say: this door opens out, so the door hinges are on our players’ side! Which the fair doctor thinks up, then teases the con artist for not coming up with.

Said scoundrel (Jean) uses skullduggery to get the pins out. (Because it’s heavy iron, hasn’t been moved in a while, and would require finesse. Probably some heat to remove frost). I then have them do another check to get the door open since the lock is still engaged and needs to be worked out of the wall. Which they do.

Momentary inside baseball thing that might ruin the magic: I didn’t have a firm solution. I just placed the door down and waited until I heard a solution I liked. I recommend fellow GMs do this, but also try and prepare an alternate solution if the party can’t get past it for some reason. (See footnote 7 for my release valve).

On to the next room! A massive cavern, with many tunnels shooting off, and crystalline protrusions here and there. Then there’s a wooden lean-to slash shack near the door.

In side is a desk with a chess game mid-progress, and notebook tracking the game next to it, a glass jar of mythril dust, and a mummified corpse sitting in a chair[8] holding a bullseye lantern.

Eli Roberts examines the board, makes a move, notates it in the notebook(!), pockets the mythril dust, then investigates the mummy.

(A spent story point later also says he took the notebook.)

Eli fails to find anything notable on the corpse, so he turns to figure out what path to take.

Olivia, who we are learning this session has no regard for her fellow humans, uses her magic to puppeteer the mummy.

This jostles a rolled up scrap of paper out of its beard.

Time for the puzzle! Also pop quiz for my world building lore, because screw you, at least learn the muses you picked for your character’s heritage![9]

I wrote a poem (not a great poem, because I lack rhythm) that referenced the Muses in a certain order.

Now, this puzzle needs workshopping, because once the party figured out to use the mummy’s lantern[10] to shoot a beam of light into a large crystal to refract it into colored beams, and that they needed to follow the beam that corresponded with each Muse’s assigned eye colors in the order listed on the poem, there wasn’t much else to do until the final twist.

I probably could’ve done something with the crystals. Finding them, getting them in position,[11] just some complexity for the successive rooms.

Needs workshopping. But we also had a time limit, so maybe simple wasn’t bad for this rendition.

Now, this refracted light thing was an expansion on a moment that wowed the last time I did my North Fort session, which I mimicked halfway down the mine: the first obvious crystal sent the light bouncing all over the chamber, hitting other crystals, and illuminating the entire chamber, revealing a mural![12]

The mural told the mine’s story: they were mining it normally, then thought ‘hey, let’s try magic!’. Magic resonated with the mythril they were mining, heating the cave and waking up a giant snake that started gobbling people up. They got some adventurers in to deal with the snake and stopped using magic.

What I wish I added was the snake’s giant skull in this room. Instead, I had it in another room, looming over the exit tunnels. Oops.[13]

So that’s neat.

The party continued the prescribed solution and moved on, seeing the ribs of the snake were repurposed into support beams.

Another element I failed to convey is that the mining shafts were actually expanded from the snake’s tunnels throughout the mountain.

Anyways, the final room was the cool twist. Because the final mentioned Muse is Urania. Who I assigned black/dark grey eyes.

Black light’s not a thing. What could be the…

They killed their light. Eventually, mythril dust started to glow, a thick vein going down the final correct tunnel. (The poem also mentioned Urania using the stars in her line. This fit with the mythril dust but also her role as the Muse of Astronomy.)[14]

And they exit into another large chamber like the one at the top. Including wood office shack and an iron door. Inside the shack is another mummy, chessboard, and a notebook with matching move notations to the one earlier.

Including the move Eli noted and wrote down.[15] Huh.

Eli’s player spent a Genesys Story Point to say he nabbed the first notebook earlier so he wouldn’t have to hike back up.[16]

For those curious, there’s another poem on this end for going the other way. The colors don’t even have to be the same since they’d be approaching the crystals from a different angle, so the first step doesn’t have to be Urania![17]

Anyways, the spent story point ruined how I’d hoped to bring in the boss fight, so instead a Masked Snake slithers in.

Smaller than the one slain long ago, but still pretty big. Also way too young to listen to reason.

Again, three party members work to kill it as Olivia uses nonlethal magic. The snake iced the floor, making footing difficult.

I allowed the fight to drag on a while because, despite putting in my session plans to come back to make stats and having more than a month to, I never did.

Really should sit down and just make a series of notecards for easy, normal, and hard enemies. Get too distracted with narrative.

Anyways, combat rages, half the party gets upset with Olivia’s efforts not to kill the snake, when a mysterious figure in fancy robes and snake skull mask arrives and pulls a gun.

Olivia promptly magically murders this man without a word. Then steals his mask. And returns to nonlethal spells against the snake.

After realizing the snake can’t fit through the door, Eli and Jean attempt to flee, but Olivia refuses to leave, instead standing on the human corpse she created to avoid the disadvantage of the ice floors.

Eli goes in and finishes off the snake.

Grumpy after the encounter, they exit the caves, which leads out to a point on the path below the avalanche. There’s a way to connect North Fort and Soldier’s Rest.

They go to Soldier’s Rest (named such because it’s where the military men went to rest when not on duty at the mountain fort). Turn in a letter of introduction to Soldier’s Rest’s mayor, and step outside.

Where they encounter a Jackalope. They’re giant creatures ridden by the mail carriers of His Majesty’s Courier service![19]  The courier has a letter for Eli Roberts: The Queen and Heir Apparent are ill with a mysterious disease, and Dr. Roberts comes highly recommended by his peers to help.

Whether this is because his peers genuinely believe he can do it, or because not healing the royal family could have dire consequences and they’d rather gamble Eli’s career over their own is a question I intend to play with.

End session two.

Admittedly, it was a railroading session that hinged on two combats that I didn’t prepare properly and a puzzle that need a few more facets, but I set some Campaign Plot up and actually got players to the table, so I say sufficient success! Always a learning experience! And Anthony seemed to prefer the system vastly over GURPS, so I think it’s good.

Just need to cement running combat and the Advantage and Disadvantage system. It’s a new thing that takes getting used to. Plus the question of what to do when you get a nothing roll.

Also need to get firmer control over what magic can and cannot do. And also that GM trumps rulebook everytime.

I have an outline for the next session. Just need to add some meat and work in elements the players enjoy. Maybe try and have it be less of an Eli Roberts focused story.[20]

Until next time, may the dice make things interesting!

[1] Pompous sounding name? Perhaps! But it’s a grab from the Tales JRPG series, and a TED Talk I saw once. [2] Had the party asked, the Mayor was avoiding asking South Fort for help because that crosses a border and could cause a lot of diplomatic tensions. The party didn’t ask, so I’m noting it here for my own gratification. [3] Because we needed to fit a new party member in some how. [4] Which I forgot to put potatoes and apples in. I’m disappointed in myself. [5] Unless it was the other way around. There was confusion! [6] Iron is magic proof in the setting! Because I’m taking inspiration from my vague knowledge of fair folk mythology. [7] Her name is Debra. I didn’t have the exact details (improv!), but if needed, she’d have the key for the door for… reasons? [8] I keep trying a Douglas Addams thing where I save the most glaringly obvious and distressing fact for last. It’s never worked because I keep getting interrupted or the players overlook I mentioned a monster. Might be a sign to stop, but why would I? [9] I casually left a prose-y cheat sheet on the table before we started. So it’s open notes. [10] Always provide the required tools if you can’t be sure the party has the needed supplies. [11] My much coveted block puzzle! I’ll figure it out someday! [12] In the pathfinder version, it instead revealed a sleeping dragon. I should’ve worked in a similar element on top of what I put in the chamber. [13] Maybe if I ask nicely, my players will pretend this is what I did. [14] Why do the muses include two with dominion over Astronomy and History? Who knows! They just do! [15] I was hoping someone would mess with one of the notebooks for this exact reveal. They played right into my hands. [16] I’ll leave it to the players to retcon why they stole the first notebook. [17] Maybe Urania should’ve been the mural room. You light the crystal for the story, then have to darken it to move on.[18] [18] Take three on this dungeon’s going to be epic! [19] A pay off when, long, long ago, when I was very young looking through a borrowed copy of GURPS 3rd Edition, I saw a picture of cowboys riding giant rabbits with saddlebags reading ‘Bunny Express’. Finally did it. [20] He took the reigns on the session one mystery, and the letter plot hook only works with him. I’ll try to do hooks working off the other three before returning to him, if at all.

[aion-rsa]

Insults, World-Building, and Blind Cats: An Interview with The Blacktongue Thief’s Christopher Buehlman

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

This post is sponsored by

It only takes a small, insignificant moment to completely change the course of a life. It’s that premise from which The Blacktongue Thief starts. Kinch Na Shannack, working thief, is spared when a banditry gig goes south. The Spanth warrior who spares him, Galva, is on a quest—and the Taker’s Guild, for which Kinch works, assigns him to accompany her, gain her trust, and wait for further instruction. As he travels with Galva, and, soon after, a witch companion Norrigal, he begins to question just where his allegiance lies, and what he owes his newfound friends—and the world.

From the first pages of The Blacktongue Thief, this Den of Geek reviewer was hooked, in no small part because the narrative voice is quite simply a delight. Kinch welcomes readers straight into a world where humanity was nearly destroyed by goblins, and where giants are encroaching on the northern border. But besides all that, a person’s got to make a living, and Kinch has a debt to the Takers Guild he’s bound to pay off. Kinch tells the story like he’s sitting next to you at a table in the pub, sharing the worst and best moments with a lingering delight at the sheer telling of the tale. He exaggerates and lies, but lets you know he’s doing so with a wink and a nudge.

This fantasy novel invites readers to share a pint of whatever’s good, learn some colorful language from a variety of nations, and maybe even join in a song or two. If the atmosphere I just described feels a bit like a renaissance festival, it should come as no surprise. Author Christopher Buehlman, previously best known for his poetry and his horror novels (and shortly to become known as a rising star in fantasy, as well), is also Christophe the Insultor, Verbal Mercenary, a regular comedic performer at renaissance festivals.

“My career as a professional insultor on the renaissance festival circuit definitely informed Kinch’s language,” Buehlman explains. “He’s always ready to trade barbs, and he isn’t afraid to work blue.” Blue language is absolutely a highlight of the book; Kinch’s swearing is utterly inventive, and because he speaks a number of languages, the different curses reveal a lot about the cultures that created them. Kinch presents the Spanths, particularly Galva, as overly honorable and a bit uptight, something that’s not only revealed in her lack of patience for Kinch conversing with a cat he rescues, but also in the way she argues the proper conjugation of a particularly colorful swear. (You can read some dictionary-style definitions of Kinch’s curse words over at the Tor/Forge blog.)

There are linguistic connections between the curse words (and other vocabulary) in the novel and the real-world counterparts that provided inspiration. “The Galts are not unlike the Celts; I thought of them not as a direct analog to the Welsh or the Scots or the Irish, but as a lost tribe,” Buehlman shares. “There is something of the gaelic in Kinch’s poetic, artistically gifted, externally governed homeland, and his language, storytelling, and, yes, insults and doggerel, come from that. As for chodadu, it is based on Spanish jodido, and operates similarly. Jilnaedu, on the other hand, is a more original Spanth term, meaning ‘vicious idiot.’ As with Galtia and Ireland, Ispanthia is not Spain, but it and its language would snuggle in nicely between Spain, Portugal, and Catalonia. I think Spaniards will recognize Galva but also find lots of new things to discover about her and her country.”

One of the most fascinating aspects of Kinch’s world is the impact the Goblin Wars have had on the human population. The goblins came and fought in three waves; the first two were fought by men, but soon there weren’t enough men left to fight. “Women had to go under arms,” Buehlman describes. “More, they had to win. And they did. For now. The Daughters’ War wasn’t about fame or glory, or even power and wealth—it was a raw, muddy, no-holds-barred struggle for survival between two competing species, one of whom regards the other as a food source.” The win came, but at a great cost. Humans have taken a huge hit, and the majority of humans are now women, putting women in positions of power throughout all of the human territories. 

In fact, the book is populated with women who hold their own against Kinch’s narrative voice. While we get Kinch’s introspection and his assessment of his own character, we see him against a company of strong female characters. Galva is a warrior, honorable, devoted, the kind of knight Don Quixote dreamed of being. Norrigal isn’t an accomplished witch yet—this is her first assignment outside her apprenticeship—but her raw power is astonishing, and her willingness to do the dirty work as needed gives her a wonderfully practical edge. Sesta, one of Kinch’s contacts with the Taker’s Guild, is a ruthless Assassin-Adept, skilled at both magic and murder, so confident that she treats Kinch more like a pest than a tool, even when insisting he follow the terms of his assignment. While there’s a bit of romance, none of the women feel put into the narrative just for the sake of being Kinch’s love interest—in fact, they all feel as though they’d do just fine without him, if it came down to it, and he’s lucky they’ve let him stick around to tell the story.

The desire to depict so many women in control of the world and the narrative came from one of Buehlman’s world-building ideas: “I wanted to present a world that would show the reader how artificial the idea of patriarchy is,” he says, “and how it could be turned on its head with a big enough catalyst.”

Buehlman’s world is both beautiful and terrible—the consequences of the Goblin Wars are present in every aspect of the book, including in the appearance of actual goblins. That looming sense of dread, that humans might not win the next time if it came down to it, lend an intensity to the world, and may remind readers that Buehlman’s previous novels fell into the horror category. “Writing horror is a bit like writing form poetry,” he describes. “With a sonnet, a villanelle, or a pantoum, you have to respect a rhyme scheme, or a repetition pattern, and/or a syllable count. With horror, you have to establish a certain tone, and you have to check in with the reader’s amygdala every so often. This isn’t exact or formulaic, as it can be in poetry, but it needs to have its own internal rhythm. You can have a long build up, but you must bake in a sense of dread–the reader will feel betrayed, and rightly so, if your premise advertises one kind of story, and they get something else entirely for 70% of the read. Horror, like comedy, is binary. It succeeds or fails viscerally.”

Making the switch to fantasy meant making some changes. “Fantasy… is much more forgiving. The reader primarily expects a sense of wonder, a sense of going someplace new. It’s more like free verse. You can do anything you like, as long as you tell a good story and fascinate,” Buehlman shares. He also identifies a few common traits between the genres: “If I took anything with me from horror to fantasy–aside from, hopefully, the universally necessary elements of character, pacing, and clear language–it was that sense of dread. We see the goblin ship coming, and there’s no way off the island. We feel the footsteps of the approaching giants, and hear their horns, but this is a strange city and we don’t know where to run. Too late—the humans on chains that they use to flush us out of our warrens have already seen us.” 

The horror elements are well balanced by companionship (particularly in the form of one furry feline) and song. “Kinch has an inexhaustible supply of songs to sing or quote, and singing is of course quite popular in a world without electronic media,” Buehlman muses. “Songs are how people once got their  entertainment, expressed emotions, even got their news.” The prominence of music also harkens back to Buehlman’s renaissance festival roots: “Renaissance festivals put a high standard on songs, both as stage entertainment and as something patrons can participate in. And so does Kinch’s world.”

As for that furry feline: Bully Boy appears early on in the narrative and becomes increasingly important as the story goes on. (Buehlman frequently seeds world-information so nonchalantly that when they become relevant as plot elements, this reviewer was impressed at how cleverly the book was structured to hide the significance of those details until they mattered.) When Kinch first meets Bully Boy, a blind cat, the poor creature is about to be captured by some local ruffians, who will, we’re led to believe, put the cat to death. Kinch takes pity and saves the cat—getting arrested in the process—and the two soon become fast friends. But despite what readers might assume, Buehlman was not always a cat lover. The acknowledgements at the end of the book reveal that Bully Boy was inspired by a real cat.

“Bully Boy never would have been had not a blind tabby showed up on my doorstep in  2015, as I was finishing up The Suicide Motor Club,” says Buehlman. “The antagonist of that book is a sumbitch vampire named Luther, and this poor, blind, sick street cat had the biggest fangs I’d seen on a feline outside of a smilodon exhibit. So Luther he became. But you couldn’t find two more different critters than vampire Luther and cat Luther. The latter was one of the most loving, most trusting beings I ever  had the pleasure to know. I was decidedly not a cat person before he came raoing at my door—I was a dog man from way back. But when a creature delivers its life  into your hands and starts to follow you everywhere you go, clearly loving you  and wanting nothing as much as to live purring in your lap or on your chest, it  wears you down. If you’ve got feelings, I mean. And I had some. I now recognize  canines and felines as equally deserving of our love and companionship, even if  we don’t always deserve theirs.”

While The Blacktongue Thief completes a story, the ending leaves several loose threads that readers will be glad to know Buehlman is working on tying up in the sequel. “I’m still in planning and world-building, which is a massive part of  writing a fantasy novel with sufficient layers to feel credible,” he reveals. “Let’s just say we’ve got  mountains to cross, more and different giants to meet, and one very nasty book to drag  secrets out of. Also, look for a more comprehensive telling of Galva’s experiences as a young  soldier in the Daughters’ War.”

In the meantime, Buehlman is also digging into the rules for the card game Kinch plays (sometimes with good luck and sometimes bad): Towers. “I wanted a game that would showcase Kinch’s luck-gift, and to occupy the same place  in this world as poker does in ours,” Buehlman says of its development. “There are definitely elements of poker in Towers; but  you’ll also find traces of Stratego, that simple kids’ card game War, chess, and Magic. I and  others have found it to be addictive, but also delightfully complex. There are lots of ways to  win, and lose, and strategy is a huge component–nearly as important as luck. And yes, I  believe lots of blood would be drawn over this game if it were played for money in rougher  parts of town.”

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

Whether sitting over a game or sitting around a table, sharing a drink and a song and exchanging insults, Kinch and Buehlman both use storytelling flare to keep readers deeply engaged in the story and the world. And the swearing, songs, and story will stick with readers long after they turn the last page.

The Blacktongue Thief hits bookshelves on May 25th, 2021. Find out more here.

The post Insults, World-Building, and Blind Cats: An Interview with The Blacktongue Thief’s Christopher Buehlman appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/34bKaK1

[princess--cynthia]

The Future

3 Years of Cynthia Reward Drabble for @invisibleimpossibilities, who asked for Bad Future worldbuilding. 

Length: 2,000 words

A series of excerpts from Forgotten History Vol. 3: Logistics, a handbook about the future by Laurent Milistin

INTRODUCTION

Much has been said about the wars, both in my own accounts and the perhaps more flamboyant ones by my contemporary Cynthia Ylisse. However, as 'glorious' as the conflict was either in hindsight or the moment, perhaps the true terror and struggle came from trying to live in the world as that happened. I understand not everyone wishes to read about supply issues and finding shelter, hence why I kept this information out of Forgotten History volumes One & Two, but it is just as important to creating a true understanding of the scenario we were in. 

CH. 1 [Civilization]

Shortly after the fall of Ylisstol (see Forgotten History Vol 1), Ylissean society collapsed almost entirely. With no central government we scattered, most of the major population centers deciding to flee to the countryside in their droves - returning to relatives on farms or smaller villages. The resulting overpopulation of areas never intended to hold so many people caused illness and famine to run rampant, and a lack of strong leadership or organized legal system (see: Chapter 5) resulted in the further deaths of thousands. Of course, due to a lack of manpower and time they were placed in shallow graves - which as Grima's influence spread to these more remote reasons, caused the newly created Risen to claw their way from the ground with little to no aid at all. 

Civilization in other regions of the world fared better - Plegia was mostly intact until three years in, when Grima apparently decided he no longer needed the Grimleal anymore and used his puppet Validar to organize what we believe was a mass ritual suicide among members of the cult. Ferox was used to having individual settlements become self-sufficient due to the nation's sheer size and harsh winters making it a necessity, and life continued in relative normalcy in each of these regions until they were eventually swallowed by the Risen hordes in their own time. 

Across the ocean in Valm, Walhart completed his conquest unimpeded. Grima struck far too quickly, however, and his army was weak from two years of campaigning and the constant guerrilla attempts at rebellion from Chon'sin and Roseanne among others. When Valm fell, the only surviving 'civilizations' were roaming groups of people like ourselves, a mix of military and civilians. When someone died, we stripped them of any supplies we would find necessary and burned the bodies before burying the skeleton in two different graves, to try and save them the desecration of becoming a Risen - and ourselves the trauma of having to fight any more resurrected friends. 

[...]

Groups would form intense bonds, forming their own symbols to identify themselves. We mostly remained as one, only splitting up when we absolutely had to - hearing about artifacts we could recover to perhaps turn the tide, but also to find more survivors. Sadly some survivor groups simply couldn't believe that such a large group could have survived, or even worse, were driven to anger by the mere sight of Lucina and the others of royal descent - believing that the royal family had failed them. More than once, groups would come to blows, fighting over supplies or even simply a difference in belief. This resulted in similarities to tribal society, an apt comparison considering the quasi-nomadic lifestyle we were forced to adopt. 

As far as identification went, our group continued to identify as ‘Ylisse’. Other groups would refer to themselves by village, or the last name of a leader character. 

CH. 2 [Supplies]

Fresh fruit and vegetables came into short supply, with most of the farms actively destroyed by Grimleal at first and later risen. Grima's doctrine was very much salted earth, and as the world decayed so did sources of nourishment. Fish became a mainstay for the first few years, until he poisoned the rivers. Occasionally we managed to set out to sea and recover some, but never for long - boats risked being spotted by Grima's flying scouts far too easily considering the fact that no shipping fleets remained. 

I understand this next segment may disgust some readers, but understand we had little choice. We had to live off the land from what we could find - our diets, towards the end, mostly consisted of root vegetables found in the wild, a smattering of berries, and any non-poisonous or venomous creature we could safely catch. Bear was a luxury, for example, being one of the few creatures that could survive a few roaming risen but still be killed safely by a well-prepared hunting team. Ultimately most of our protein came from insects - locusts and crickets, mostly. Whenever we were along the coast we harvested as much seaweed as possible, storing it in barrels of brine. We mostly drank hot water, boiled and blessed to purify it of any natural or magical poisons - lacking the time to ferment alcohol, and not having access to any fresh springs. The last two winters were harsh, as we had rode out previous ones by smoking and salting meat we caught through the rest of the year, but such preventative measures simply didn't work with insects. Eventually we realized that we had to stay near the coast in winter if we wanted to survive, the dangerous-to-catch fish the only source of food we had. Thankfully it seemed that the risen were also susceptible to the cold, and patrols were far less common, reducing the risk fo these harvests. 

I would be quite happy to never see seaweed on my plate again after that second winter.

[...]

Treats were carefully created to help keep morale up. When we stumbled on bee hives, we would carefully take as much honey from it as possible, and boil it with the water ration. With time and effort we could turn it into taffy, which we would keep in a sealed container and given out sparingly - as rewards, mostly. A single batch could last us almost six months regulated properly. Sweet berries would be turned into preserves, jams to be eaten with a spoon from a cup, or topping crushed ice during winter or when near a peak. 

[...]

Military supplies were hard to come by. Armor was almost non-existent, not having the time to properly craft it for the individual. Surviving pegasus knights or cavaliers protected theirs religiously, sleeping in them to make sure they never lost a piece and hardly ever letting it out of their sight. Protection was shields - often of rough, uneven metal, since he had no forges - and at best boiled leather. Weapons we would take from the dead, friend or foe, as required - spellbooks were used sparingly, as only Grimleal mages had any more tomes we could recover. Thankfully our own group had an ordained minister with us, who knew how to create rough healing staves from branches and prayer, so we never ran out of those - but we have heard other groups had to resort to traditional medicine, frequently including amputation to prevent the corruption from a Risen's claws spreading and killing the man. 

Arrows and javelins would be made from stone heads, enough to kill a basic Risen but nothing else. [...] Other primitive weapons were used for these lower-tier opponents, as metal swords and axes were too important to waste on footsoldiers. 

[...]

Medical supplies - bandages, vulneraries, and so on - were made by civilians during downtime, from home remedies and whatever material we could find. Poultices were based off of folk remedies, as we simply lacked the refinement to rely on the scientific ones - thankfully, several of them worked. As time went on and the supplies to make these grew rarer, we grew ever more dependent on magical healing, which simply could not deal with everything. 

[...]

Ultimately, these supply issues resulted in an average attrition rate of 50-60% of a group per year, either from a lack of nutrition or infection. 

CH. 3 [Shelter and Transport]

Buildings were death traps, even if they were still standing. Often the people who lived there were still around as Risen, and they were too easily spotted from the sky. We would move from cave to cave, or at the very least sufficiently dense forests to hang up sheets without exposing ourselves. Winter was hard, our movement limited - if it was not for the winter also weakening the Risen, we would have been found almost immediately. 

[...]

Horses were used to draw carts, and pegasi for scouting. Most of our travelling was on foot, although towards the end as our numbers grew smaller we either rode the horses or the carts.These carts would be stacked high with supplies, and guarded with our lives - the loss of a single cart could mean the loss of almost three week's rations, medical supplies, and arms & ammunition. These carts and the creatures who drew them were given higher priority for shelter than even us humans, for without them we would be dead. If we found a cave just big enough to store the carts and the horses and we slept outside under sheets and blankets, even if it was storming, that was what we did. 

CH. 4 [Recreation]

[...]

Books and games were too heavy to carry with us, mostly. I know of several people who kept a few of the lighter, physically smaller works on them - stories of questionable quality, but any reading material was good. Oftentimes, we would scratch boards  into the dirt when we made camp and use stones or chips of slate as markers for backgammon and checkers. 

[...]

In a bout of creativity, some of us found ways to make training 'fun'. Spars would become aspects of a play, taking on characters in a competitive contest. Athletics training would feature elements of the absurd, lifting increasingly outrageous items to show off to our companions and provide some form of levity. 

[...]

Crafting arrowheads from flint and other stones became an outlet as well, with many of us taking the opportunity to learn how to create different heads. Barbs, serrated, straight - it was a skill most of us mastered by the end. Similarly we learned how to engrave, leaving notches on leather armor to show who it belonged to and designs in the sides of wooden carts and barrels. This was indicative of most of our methods, where we turned chores into recreation to avoid going insane - by the time we finally went back to the past, our cart was an absolute mess, engravings of a dozen different styles absolutely covering it. 

CH. 5  [Law]

[...]

We had to do away with the right to a jury and minor punishments. With supplies so thin, we were forced to resort to capital punishment for even the smallest of thefts - either execution, or banishment from the band and left behind for the Risen. Morale suffered for it, but we persevered. I believe that the intense belief in justice that some of my compatriots have come to hold comes from this rough legal framework, where we were forced to define every action into 'right' and 'wrong' and keep the ultimate punishment in mind. The one exception was when the victim would openly forgive the criminal, at which point his/her rations would be docked and we moved along. 

[...]

The manner of execution was simple - beheading. It was preferred to use blessed weapons such as Falchion or other minor artifacts we retrieved on our journeys, for these seemed to prevent them from rising as Risen. I believe Princess Lucina was forced to carry out twenty-three of these executions before these days ended, from anything ranging between assault (physical or sexual) to theft to murder.

CONCLUSION

I understand this does not cast a very good light on those of us who survived. But I think it is necessary, to help establish a picture of exactly what we lived through - so that in the horrific event that Grima or some other mythical threat returns, we know what will happen should we fail to stop it. There can be no compromise, for I refuse to let the souls of anyone else become as marred as our own. 

Naga have mercy on us for what we did.

[gullethead]

okay a few mutuals liked this, thats enough to make me elaborate. keep in mind this is a nearly four-year-old elaborate fantasy setting made by five people smashing concepts together (based in but not exclusively made for d&d) with a ton of intricately woven character relationships so sorry if this gets confusing at all and PLEASE ask clarifying questions

warning for lots of mentions of lots of kinds of violence

so. lets talk about Helgrid and Holy.

Helgrid Mulpherik (who belongs to Fish @fish-mouth, as do all the characters here besides Holy and the other PCs mentioned much later) is a 6'11 middle aged half-goliath werewolf dysphoric lesbian divorcee, and at one point was a paladin who served as a gatekeeper in this city called Yennisveg. that's where she was when this enormous attack called the Siege of Yennisveg happened, where a magical curse in the form of a cloud swept through the outer city and caused people to attack viciously. Helgrid was responsible for keeping the gate closed to save most of the city, and killed people who were controlled by the curse to do it - which, even on top of how incredibly traumatizing that was in itself, also earned her the ire of a lot of people in Yennisveg for her part in those deaths and sent her into a depressive spiral. this led to her divorce, and at some point she moved to this quiet village by the sea called Hazelwood and joined the town guard.

fast forward roughly a decade. Helgrid's ex-wife Jeramina and family, including Helgrid's adoptive younger sister/niece Svera (who was coparented by her ex-wife and her paladin mentor who's kind of like her father figure. its a LONG story) have moved to Hazelwood, and Svera has taken to (or, fucked in the woods, then Vegas-married, then divorced, then gotten back together with on much more healthy ground) this up-and-coming tiefling paladin named Holy Light of the Sacred Flame, who technically started living in Hazelwood on assignment but has mostly just been adrift and searching for a purpose. Helgrid takes a shine to Holy and starts mentoring her, helping her focus her anger issues into actually helping and protecting people, which she put to good use during another major crisis in Yennisveg where she was one of the people responsible for putting down a massive demon.

now, Holy is an interesting character to me, because she's definitely... good-natured. she's loud and boisterous but also just. genuinely kind and funny and loving. but she also has a tendency to solve problems with brute force and sees the world in extreme black and white - not just "good" and "evil," but in general seeing things as arbitrary categories. like, as an example, a running joke is that she sees all vampires as 'monsters,' but not werewolves, because vampires are monsters all the time while werewolves are more like regular people who have a curse. she has no PROBLEM with vampires, that's just how she categorizes things.

this brings us to now, which is the campaign Fish is running, a CoS hack called Curse of Venari which is similar to the original campaign but works in our characters and has significantly less racism and sexual violence. Holy is one of four of the player characters who've found themselves in Barovia, which is partially populated with hollow, alternate versions of people they know in the real world. one of these people is her brother-in-law Orek, who she'd found... having been transformed into a vampire. and stuck at the bottom of a lake in a sarcophagus. for twenty years. and currently has stuck in his chest the hilt of the Sunsword, which they were looking for when they found him. pretty much the party's only option at that point had been to mercy kill him, which involved Holy slowly severing his neck with a dagger as he quietly begged her not to. this is how the last session ended.

now bear in mind, this campaign is really the first time Holy's ever been... on her own? because her companions are 1) a fellow monster hunter who doesn't know her that well, 2) a brother-in-law-twice-removed who's a complete pushover, and 3) a brother-in-law-once-removed who's totally checked out of the situation, so there's nobody to really keep her in check. which means that for the first time in her life, Holy has to actually mature on her own and come to terms with the fact that her actions have consequences. and that's, like, an inevitable and always-difficult part of growing up, but... it's now coupled with the act of brutally killing (a version of) one of her best friends, and the nagging doubt about whether he really needed to die, which then makes her question her black-and-white view of what a 'monster' is

and the crazy part about all of this is that Helgrid specifically wanted to avoid these kinds of traumas when she was training Holy, but that's simply not possible when you're dealing with violence. is the kind of violence that Holy and Helgrid do, the violence of protecting others, necessary? maybe. but it's also inevitably destructive and traumatizing for everyone involved by the very nature of violence. if Holy had been trained, but never experienced this kind of tragedy, she'd just be another person who glorifies the idea of violence with no concept of the consequences.

this comic essentially sums up my thoughts on their relationship best:

thinking about my and my friends ocs and the idea of violence as both a necessary evil and inherently traumatizing to all involved and going craaaazyyyy

[connectingbridges]

A companion to - “Supply Chains and a Novel Path to Conflict”

Just noting down a few thoughts here about the article here:

https://geopoliticalfutures.com/supply-chains-and-a-novel-path-to-conflict/

This piece is written by George Friedman, the founder of Geopolitical Futures, the online publication on strategy. While I can never match up in knowledge and experience, I have a few thoughts that could’ve made this piece better. But in naivete I may have made some mistakes too.

In his article, he says, "Two things help define supply chains. One is availability; there are some things that are available only in one place or another. The second is price; in some places the cost of production is lower, frequently because the cost of labor is lower"

However, land/labour/capital also together known as factors of production make only one side of the picture. Urban geographers would have been slightly more nuanced. The third very important pillar of a supply chain is market. (where to sell, how to get things to where you want to sell).

Strategically, you can either track/attack/armtwist the origin (production factors), the path (i.e, the transport of goods) or the market itself.

"The interest and cultures of two nations are different. In the event of a joint national disaster, each one may act differently as both have different nations to care for. The supply chain can shift, but taken as a whole, not quickly". 

Interests and cultures are quite deeply rooted in purpose and history even as that might not be the only root. But even as streams in general, the similarities and differences between economic strategy and geopolitical strategy appear as subtle hums when it comes to purpose and as Friedman says, deeply intertwined. In a supply chain, well, at least a globalized one like today’s, the purpose of having economic strategies is not to emulate (Don’t go bragging about making the next Silicon Valley anywhere else! It’s success lies in its uniqueness (in time, in regionality, in ambient conditions and so forth). We as a civilization have, in some cases and must, in other cases, learn this from the one too many examples the world has given us that blind emulation is a mistake. It is however only advantageous for us, to pick a position where we can best be an integral part of the value system and then keep maintaining and strengthening that position. Economic positioning in a global supply chain is based more on functional parameters and it is easier to come up with ideas for re-positioning oneself in an connected (through communications technologies), globalized (through exchange of ideas) world. 

One would think, that COVID has affected everyone equally whether rich or poor, whether populous or sparse and so forth and therefore this makes it an equalizer. But COVID is far from an equalizer. It is akin to the stopping of music in a musical chair game. One does not consciously think about the fact that ‘music is going to start and we are all going to run’. One is neccesaarily thinking about the fact that, “When the music stops the next time, I need to be closer to THAT chair because it is the quickest to catch from where I’ll be and therefore I will run how much I need to for that”. 

On the other hand through the geopolitical lens, the word says it all, geo. This is still classic. There is little change in the nature of this strategy. This strategy is dependent on one’s geography. While in economic strategies one does have some leeway to emulate something from another nation and see if it works for oneself, in geopolitics, it cannot, will not work.This strategy is dependent on who your neighbours are, who your friends are and how they can help/harm you. The purpose therefore, is to determine which attributes of your own geography you can use in order to levitate yourself, thereby, resulting in what would inevitably become a position in the international pecking order. This pecking order does not simply including economic interlinkages, the political, social & military too. The international pecking order does not simply fathom without ideologies playing a role in them. Hence the word ‘grand’ on geopolitical strategies. Economic thought for two nations having the same ‘physical�� advantage of extensive sea and port access ends up necessarily being different because nations thrive on ‘comparative’ advantage unlike individual firms that thrive on ‘competitive’ advantage. Your friends, adversaries, allies and mutual enemies change based on the exigiency of the situation. Hence, something like COVID does not have the capacity to change the political, social and military identities of nations, will not merely on the basis of economic shifts, manage to change this pecking order very significantly although it does, to some extent.

“The more complex a system is, the more likely it is to fail, and the harder it is to fix.”

I’m not sure if this is entirely true and seems like a shallow assessment. Without exploring the nature of a complex system, however intertwined it may be, it is not accurate to say it will more likely fail based on complexity alone. But there is one other thing. Time, is of the essence.

COVID that way, is a time of introspection and strategic preparation. Our earlier foresight has been shaken. Whatever we thought we could do with a pre-covid economy, is now either lost or delayed. Even then, our purpose remains the same. Hence, this is an opportunity to create a better foresight and a better future. On the date that this piece is written, if we have not even started a skeleton to use after COVID is under control, we are already behind.

“Now, the general who wins a battle makes many calculations in his temple ere the battle is fought.” - Sun Tzu

In a game of chess, one prepares. The movement of pawns and knights (in this case political and economic knobs), bides their time, waits for enemies to makes mistakes and learn from them, positions oneself to the maximum advantage before hitting the final move of taking over.

The question is what sense can you make out of this opportunity as a nation.  A pandemic is a brilliant test of values, character and integrity of a nation. Self preservation is the fundamental duty in such a situation.The answer is, this sense depends on how well we understand ourselves. This is a time to keep close restrains on greed and haughtiness because the moment the COVID crisis lifts out, the conditions make it very easy for the ‘vyasanas’ as Kautilya would have described them, to take over, especially when it comes to decisions around reviving the economy. But it is also a time to discuss which of our economic plans are more useful now (than ever before) and will need an immediate ramp up while which can still be put on hold during the time our people continue to heal.

Internally, it is useful for a leader to let the crisis test out which of a national leader’s ministers is worthy of bestowing rewards upon and which of the wicked deserve what punishment becuase it is the ministers who would execute the umbrella order of “I’m shutting this place down early enough for you to prepare. Don’t let your people’s health get affected. Keep their trade clear and let them survive through this time without the hardship of money or having to ward off theives or fight oppression.” It is the physicians who are working day and night to make people better but will also suffer from some elements that malpractice. One has to be extremely alert on that front and investigate thoroughly to assign punishments. It is extremely important to identify the sources of black marketeering and hoarding at this time, gain control over them and only when the right time comes, use them to strategic advantage of slow-hitting an adversary’s markets. It is important for the population to as a duty, display to their leaders their solidarity with the supereme vision of surviving this pandemic by following ministerial orders. The quicker this pandemic goes away comes under our control, the more crucial it becomes to be shrewd about hitting revival buttons after lockdows are over. 

Externally however, due to the nature of COVID crisis, there is little enemity among nations caused by the of the closure of borders. Every nation understands the need to protect, lift back its own citizens from various places and care for them until they are well enought to get back out there. That does not become a cause for geopolitical tensions in a pandemic. In fact, if you’re surviving well, providing whatever aid you can to a friend or the ally of a friend in times of need is something one could do and be called a good sport to be trust. 

I’m not sure for example, if India’s superiority in pharmaceutical production makes for a position in the regular supply chains but when it comes to delivering during a pandemic, it would want to be seen as a trustworthy ally to have or as ‘India is good at something and has been coming forward in a global battle with whatever it can not just its own but ones around it too’. That narrative should matter.

When the crisis is over, it will not be a ‘new world order’. It will be the same old world but where you stand in that world could be different if you introspected, understood and sought after your purpose.

[thesevenseraphs]

Bungie Weekly Update - 6/22/17

This week at Bungie we’re planning a monument to all of your wins.

Even before our old friend Cayde revealed that your stuff (but, more importantly, his stuff) would soon fall prey to the Red Legion, we let you know that we were going to honor our veteran players who join us again in Destiny 2. Today, we’re going to shine a little light on what you can expect if you count yourself among those ranks.

We say a little light, because we have competing goals to contend with on this subject. Some of the ways in which we’ll tip our hat to your legacy in Destiny 2, and some of the ways you’ll be able to show all the young pups that you’d become legend long before they were ever reborn in the Cosmodrome, are best left for you to experience for yourself. Others are little touches that will fall snuggly into the realm of “you just had to be there.” We’re not going to spoil them for you right here and right now.

On the other hand, we do have a handful of emblematic accomplishments that could compel you to tie up some loose ends this summer. We’d hate to have you look back on this time once Destiny 2 launches and wonder why we just didn’t let you know that if you’d just done that one last thing prior to August 1st, 2017, you’d have one more memento to add to your visible Destiny 1-era accomplishments in Destiny 2.

In the spirit of saving some small, but hopefully emotionally impactful surprises for you to experience first-hand in Destiny 2, and in the interest of arming you with the information you need to form your plan of attack over the next few months, here are seven Destiny 1 gameplay accomplishments that we’ll be carrying over into Destiny 2.

All values and statistics for illustration purposes only

In Destiny 2, the real estate just above your Guardian in the character screen is being commandeered to reflect the design of your currently equipped emblem. Emblems will still be visible in orbit while you’re forming your Fireteam, as you would expect, as well. If this sort of personal touch is the type of thing that floats your boat, then you’ll want to pay close attention to the selection of emblems below, and the things you’ll need to accomplish in order to add them to your new collection. Fair warning for those of you who joined us in progress: Some of these emblems have been reserved for Guardians who stood together during specific, triumphant moments in time. In the literal sense of the word, the four emblems that fall into that category are strictly about commemorating and respecting the deeds of those who were there with us at the beginning of our first and second year of adventures. Two, however, are still actively achievable as part of the Age of Triumph record book, and one is tied directly to your still malleable Grimoire score. We’ll be tracking the deeds associated with these rewards until August 1, 2017. After that, the data will be frozen in time so we can begin the migration process for the launch of Destiny 2.

Destiny 2 Memorialization Emblems

Laurel Triumphant

You completed a Moment of Triumph during Destiny’s first year. Laurea Prima II

You completed all 10 Moments of Triumph during Destiny’s first year. Slayer of Oryx

You owned The Taken King and completed a Moment of Triumph during Destiny’s second year. Heard the Call

You owned The Taken King and completed all 8 Moments of Triumph during Destiny’s second year. Young Wolf

You owned Rise of Iron and reached Rank 2 in the Age of Triumph record book. Saladin's Pride

You owned Rise of Iron and reached Rank 7 in the Age of Triumph record book. Lore Scholar

Your achieved a Grimoire score of over 5,000 in Destiny 1. 

Whether you’ve been with us from the very beginning and failed to spend your Strange Coins on Gjallarhorn in week 2, rose up for the first time to throw shade at Oryx deep within his creepy loot-filled fortress, or took your first steps in the snow of Old Russia after hearing the howls of Lord Saladin’s wolfpack, it has been our honor to host you in our world. We’re looking forward to our next big adventure together this September, but before we get there, we have some moments to forecast before the sequel drops.

Track these dates below. They may impact the way you remember the past, spend time in the present, or decorate yourself in the future.

Securing Your Age of Triumph Shirt

You have until August 1, 2017 to reach Rank 7 and unlock the discounted offer to claim your Age of Triumph Shirt . While they will not be their last occurrences, you might need to complete some of these activities to be counted in your Age of Triumph Record Book.

Every Weekend: Trials of Osiris

July 4, 2017: Iron Banner

July 4, 2017: King’s Fall Weekly Featured Raid

July 11, 2017: Wrath of the Machine Weekly Featured Raid

July 18, 2017: Crota’s End Weekly Featured Raid

July 18, 2017: Daybreak Month Begins

July 25, 2017: Vault of Glass Weekly Featured Raid

August 1, 2017: Age of Triumph Shirt Offer Expires!

Live Game Transitions

Destiny 2 is rapidly approaching, like a sneak attack that’s just about to crest the horizon. This means that our two competitive end game experiences will be going into hibernation before reemerging to spread their beautiful wings in unexpected ways in Destiny 2.

If you fancy yourself forged in the fires of the Crucible, you’ll want to mark these dates:

August 1, 2017: Final Destiny 1-era Iron Banner

August 11, 2017: Final Destiny 1-era Trials of Osiris

Weekly Featured Activities 

You’ll still find all theicons in the lower left of your Director, including Crucible playlists, Story playlists, Strike playlists, and featured Raids.

Xûr

Yup! That snake-faced bastard will still make his weekend appearances in a location chosen for him. His will, after all, is not his own.

Console Exclusives

The weapons, armor, and playable activities that have been available only on PlayStation will transfer to the Xbox in October, 2017. Exclusive content from The Taken King will migrate to all four launch platforms, including legacy consoles – including PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, Xbox One, and Xbox 360. Exclusive content from Rise of Iron will only migrate to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. We’ll follow up with a more exact date before it arrives.

Building a Better BETA

They are the men and women of Destiny Player Support. They keep the Internet safe for action and adventure. They lead an army of community volunteers in the fight against game-crashing bugs. One of them shaved his face baby smooth this week due to a near-fatal trimming accident. 

This is their report.

Destiny Server Maintenance and DowntimeIn preparation for the Destiny 2 Beta, Destiny Servers will be taken offline for maintenance.

Date: Tuesday, June 27, 2017

Start: 7AM Pacific (2 PM UTC)

Expected Completion: 4PM Pacific (11 PM UTC)

Players will be unable to sign in to Destiny servers for the duration of this maintenance. Additionally, some Bungie.net and Destiny Companion features will be unavailable. For all vital information about server maintenance, please see this Help Article. If you experience any issues signing in once maintenance has completed, please post a report to the #Help forum.

Destiny Server Queue

In preparation for Destiny 2, the Destiny server queue has been enabled in the event that the population exceeds the capacity of our data center. This queue will only impact players attempting to sign in, and will not affect players attempting to launch into activities or social spaces. Leading up to the Destiny 2 Beta and after the launch of Destiny 2, we expect players may experience this queue during times of high activity or maintenance periods. 

In the coming weeks, Destiny Player Support will be publishing a FAQ to help.bungie.net to explain this feature in depth and answer any questions you may have. Stay tuned to @BungieHelp for further announcements.

[iplayhubme-blog]

GTA Online Guide: How to Play, Easy Money Tips, Build Rep Fast

Need to attempt GTA Online, however aren't exactly certain what you ought to do? Here's an abundance of data and tips on the best way to begin, how to win great cash - and how to abstain from getting slaughtered by imbeciles! Presently refreshed for PS4 and Xbox One!

While GTA Online is an enormously multiplayer web based game, you in reality just play with 29 other individuals at some random time (on current-gen reassures, less on PS3 and Xbox 360). It includes essentially a similar open world as the single-player form, and you're allowed to wander any place you need. Notwithstanding, explicit missions and exercises are instanced – ie, you get put into a region where just you and whichever different players you've assembled up with legitimately can see one another.

For additional on GTA Online, head on over to our GTA 5 and GTA Online Guides Hub. Over yonder you'll discover information on GTA Online Heists and GTA Online Gunrunning.

What is GTA Online?

While you're meandering around the open world, you're reasonable game for different players, so remain on your toes. On the off chance that you need to play Online solo, load the story mode, and essentially select GTA Online from the menu as "welcome as it were." Playing solo limits your character's advancement to some degree; the most ideal approach to play is to connect with different players at the earliest opportunity and generate whatever instanced action you're keen on. That way you can keep off the beaten path of griefers, and essentially focus on finishing missions and having some good times.

There are measures set up to debilitate players from continually executing different players, however actually, in the gta v online cheats event that somebody needs to be an ass, they will. So when you're in free meander, look out for stuff like getting killed the minute you leave an emergency clinic in the wake of being killed. Autos can likewise be booby-caught, so treat enticing looking vehicles with alert and take a gander at how they're left. In the event that it doesn't feel right, proceed onward.

To capitalize on GTA 5, you need companions to work with. Step up to the plate and welcome individuals to go along with you. More often than not, individuals are more joyful to cooperate than waste cash and time battling one another.

What to do when you land in GTA Online

Watch for white spots

They're different players you're imparting your server to. In the event that you see one moving toward you at speed, prepare. They may very well escape for cops, or just going through on their way to a vocation. Yet, they may likewise be a griefer determined to bust some skulls, so discover spread, haul out your firearm and remain chilly until you realize what's up. One thing to recollect: most stores and organizations are sans pvp zones, where players can do little else than affront you. So look for shelter on the off chance that you have to, and sit it out until the individual proceeds onward.

Discover a few companions. Or on the other hand toxic acquaintances. Either will do

The most ideal approach to play GTA Online is to welcome individuals to go along with you as a gathering – or basically trust that somebody will start a gathering welcome. On the off chance that the general population you're playing with are a bit poop, you should gta v money cheat need to go off and do a portion of the performance exercises laid out underneath. However, in the event that it turns out they're very helpful, you can continue playing with them by utilizing the post-work casting a ballot menu to replay the earlier activity (profoundly prescribed if it's simple or potentially worthwhile), or begin another one.

Gathering exercises produce 20% more rep than solo runs. Additionally, it's constantly worth playing a mission again to get an ideal score, as it's constantly simpler the second time around, and on the off chance that you do get everything right, the Rep reward is sweet.

Keep in mind that on the off chance that you are a forceful player and slaughter a great deal of different players, you'll become an abundance target and will probably be chased down for cash. Likewise, in case you're a dick and holler at individuals, you'll all around likely get adversely positioned. In spite of the fact that it's initial days, it appears that Bad Sports are tossed into servers with similar players – which may be fun on the off chance that you like that kind of thing, however ought to be dodged on the off chance that you would prefer not to battle for yourself against 15 other individuals who simply love being jerks.

Try not to get the primary vehicle you see (except if it's a decent one). Discover one that you can live with, as the main vehicle you stall out with until you purchase another.

First goal: Steal a great car

When you touch base in Los Santos out of the blue, don't take the primary vehicle you see. Glance around for one that you like - on the grounds that the principal vehicle you take is the one you need to use until you can purchase another one. Not at all like the single-player game, you won't almost certainly discover premium vehicles at first, so search for something that is better than average enough to live with, and won't irritate you as time goes on.

When you gain more money, you can take a vehicle you need to keep to a Los Santos Customs shop, go to Loss/Theft Prevention and purchase a Tracker for it. It's $2,000, yet it makes the vehicle yours - and lets you effectively recoup it should it go "missing". Get protection as well. It's costly, but at the same time it's justified, despite all the trouble over the long haul for reasons that will turn out to be clear. Like some joke taking your ride and stopping it at the base of a store.

The Pokemon Sword and Shield Interview: "We Knew at Some Point We Weren't Going to have the option to Keep Indefinitely Supporting All of the Pokemon"

We converse with Game Freak about the fight capability of Dynamax, the choice to limit the quantity of accessible Pokemon, and…

The Online variant of Los Santos is a pitiful hive of filth and villainy, and isn't the kind of spot you need to stroll about outfitted with only a self-loader gun. So except if you're Martin Riggs (find it, kids), your quick goal ought to get your hands on a not too bad firearm with the goal that you can at any rate secure yourself, or take part in some hostile battle should the open door emerge.

Accepting you have enough cash, the "best" firearm to purchase is the one you're most agreeable and compelling with. So that should settle on it a basic decision: purchase whatever firearm you utilize the most in the single-player game.

Third target: Buy a carport

While expensive, this is the following thing you have to get. It's the place you can store your vehicles, and you truly do need to do that.

Remember to agree to accept Rockstar's Social Club. On the off chance that you do, when you get a carport, visit the Legendary Motorsports site on your telephone and purchase a free Elegy RH8. This thing is a great base vehicle for Street Racing.

You can develop your notoriety an assortment of ways. On the off chance that you're a certain driver, you can irritate the cops and after that avoid them to gradually and relentlessly develop notoriety. Simply ensure you don't hit multiple stars except if you're extremely certain, as you'll finish up squandering a great deal of time attempting to beat the warmth.

Doing tasks and for the most part helping individual players makes you a "Decent Sport" and will definitely gain you Rep and reward money. Along these lines, amusing however it might sound considering you're playing a standout amongst the most vicious amusements around, oppose the compulsion to go around like a numbskull, shooting everybody you see. Also, be lovely to individuals, regardless of whether they're definitely not. A few players rush to geek rage, and on the off chance that they do, simply quit out of the gathering and abstain from getting sucked into their babble.

Okay cash: Stealing vehicles

In the event that you simply need to do things solo, the most secure introductory approach to make cash is to take vehicles. Voyage the avenues searching for basic ordinary vehicles, which are worth great cash. When you've jacked your ride, head to the closest Los Santos Customs shop. Try not to drive like a blockhead: the more minty crisp the vehicle is the point at which you arrive, the more it's value. Autos sell for between $3-$8k, which on a long haul normal works out about $4.5k per conveyance. A decent, enduring pay, especially on the off chance that you appreciate driving and don't think of it as a granulate.

Enormous tip: don't go taking top of the line sports vehicles, as those aren't sought after. SUVs and Coupes are typically excellent cash. Cars and econoboxes are commonly worth less.

Likewise recall that you can just offer one vehicle for every in-game day, so implies one at regular intervals or something like that. Watch out for the clock, and you can keep the green coming in, especially in the event that you join it with another okay action.

Another method for creating money for vehicles is through Simeon. Check your telephone normally for his instant messages wherein he'll request explicit vehicles. Convey that vehicle to him, and you'll win a pleasant wad of cash. Also, once more, be cautious when taking the vehicle to the drop-off point. Speed of conveyance isn't as significant as ensuring your stolen ride touches base in flawless condition.

[datingdummies-blog]

Debbie Down the Rabbit Hole in “Companion Land”

Our story starts in a far away land known only to the lucky few that have found their life partner as “Relationship Land.”  Debbie grew further and further from her partner here in “Relationship Land” so she ventured out to find a new world. Others have talked about it, but she herself knew nothing about it.  When people would speak of this new land some would share beautiful stories and adventures and others would tell stories of soul ripping, gut wrenching pain. Regardless she longed to find out for herself what might find her when she arrived. 

Debbie is an adventure seeking, curious, independent, loving and hard working woman. She loves a good challenge and nearly detests anything that is just given to her as she has worked hard in her life for everything she has.  She forgives easily and almost certainly gives way to many chances to those that didn't even deserve a first chance.  She is kind, funny and has qualities most men find very attractive.  Any man finding this woman is quite aware they are fortunate to have had her or have her in his life.  Debbie does however come with some negatives as well.  She needs and wants confirmation on a regular basis, she's very aware that this is a insecurity within herself.  She just requires it.  She is attention seeking, and often times looked at by the same sex (prior to getting to know her of course) as something outside of who she actually is.  Debbie turns her nose up to any kind of help from the outside, unless she is asking for it (which isn't often).  She has massive trust issues some would need a ladder to get over the gigantic wall she has seemingly built around her heart.  Also you must get past the gnome named “jiffy” who will undoubtedly have a few riddles a song and dance for you to preform prior to having access to her heart.  Needless to say you will have to put forth some effort to get this girl. Many have tried and very few have successfully succeeded or will succeed. 

Our newfound adventure starts when leaving the world of “Relationship Land” and finally getting out on her own.  While walking down the steep narrow red brick road path she finds an off beaten, and tattered dirt road trail she finds curiously familiar, but different. While walking down this beaten path she is greeted by a White Rabbit for fun we will call him “Roger.”  He greets her with a smile but is on a time crunch and has to run.  Typically Roger the “White Rabbit” is always a little too busy, and usually blind to the needs of Debbie. Roger is the type that when a woman walks away from them or I guess more so when he runs from her, she finds herself still yearning for more.  Still feeling drawn to him.  This is the guy, the girl will write massive texts to begging for some form of an answer as to why she wasn't good enough, why he never gave her more time.  However the most basic answer ladies I can tell you about this type, is you in his mind, were never his, and he was never yours.  He never took you seriously.  He never saw himself being long term with you.  So while drawing you in, keeping you guessing and making you feel more curious about him.  He is not thinking of you at all.  In fact you are just a mere side bitch in his world currently.  I’m sorry, but I'm not sorry.  You will forever be stuck in this zone with him because you are saying it’s ok by allowing it to continue.  

Debbie goes on to feel his distance, but unfortunately for her is still curious and still feeling that magnetic pull to him. So Debbie proceeds to push him away further and by now he is running, sprinting and hurdling to get away from you. While doing so Debbie sees Roger jump into a very dark, deep hole.  All of a sudden he disappears, he's gone.  She looks inside the hole and just as she is peeking her head inside she loses her footing and falls in.  

Deeper and Deeper she falls, feeling dizzy and near vomiting at the sheer terror she is sure to be facing.  Completely unaware of what will become of her at the bottom of this hole.  She finally comes to a stop, and is safe but a little damaged from the fall.  She picks herself up, reads the sign and realizes she's exactly where she wanted and chose to be.  This beautiful but dark land has a large green sign at the entrance that states “Welcome to Companion Land, where we don't promise that any of your dreams will ever come true.  Population:124.6 million.” (Of course thats a real number of how many single people there are in America alone. ) So the adventure begins as she proceeds to take her very first steps into companion land.  Nervous, scared, bruised, but excited as she begins her journey.   

While walking she is talking to herself, she looks like a crazy person to people who could be passing or watching her from afar, but to her she is processing.  Processing that pain that is left within her heart.  Just as she is finishing up her therapy session with herself she is taken aback when a caterpillar larger than the other ones approaches her.  “This shit is starting to get weird” she thinks to herself.  Were off to a smashing start, one so good that would only be best compared to the shit show that would be two hulk sized men combined, most certainly high on ketamine.  Either way it was what it was and Debbie needed to face this one head on as well.  

“Whooooo are you?”  He asks in a very condescending manner.  Debbie responds “I hardly even know anymore sir, because I’ve changed so many times just this morning and I know I am not the person I was before.”  She goes on to tell him a little of her adventure thus far and the tale of Roger, whom is so far off in the distance now that she is merely calling him a tale and not her current present situational hurt.  The caterpillar or for the pure excitement of this story we’ll call him “Caleb” goes on to share his side of things as well.  Except when he explains his situation he is defensive and already waiting for her to judge him for who he once was.  Caleb doesn’t even realize she comes from a place of pain as well and is far from judging him for his past trials and tribulations.  

Caleb is quick witted, has a sharp tongue that gets used in terrible ways at times, he is better than most everyone at anything he puts his mind to, and he financially does very well for himself.  He is smart to a point where he is awkwardly suave with women. He flashes tales of how he spends his earnings and how he makes his earnings turning only the shallow, fleeting women onto him.  A girl of substance is not impressed by this.  She finds him impressive for the other things he possesses. Also his tale of his trails in “Companion Land” Debbie finds equally appealing and intriguing.  She yearns to learn more about him.  He lets her in for a mere second only to take it back from her as quickly as it was given.  Caleb is a guarded man. He is not a bad man for being so guarded, he just might have a much larger wall built around his heart including, but not limited to the leprechaun that guards his heart that will make you leap over a rainbow and guess the a number between one and a million unfortunately Debbie didn't see all that until it was much too late. Realizing this journey will not be complete here, she decides to press forward.  Again, still a little damaged, however this time a bit more understanding.  

She continues her trails on the off beaten path, still talking to herself.  Finding herself more curious where the road is to end, and what will be there when she completes it.  The hurt was surface level only this time, as she didn't quite let the walls down completely with Caleb.  The thing with guarded people is the only true thing they face when being rejected in such a way after not fully letting their wall down is a broken ego.  Which fortunately for her is a lot easier to get over than a broken heart.  So she moves on, this time feeling hopeful and ready to meet someone new.

Alice is a wanderer, she wanders with no care in the world and begins to space out entirely.  When walking she is surprised when an image appears in the clouds.  The clouds start to come down in a fog like motion, this time it feels dangerous and scary, but exciting.  She is enjoying herself far too much for what is actually happening.  Finally out of the fog, comes what looks to be a cat.  A Cheshire Cat. One that looks alarmingly familiar to that of a Disney movie character.  However this one has a name.  “Hi I saw you from afar and thought it would be a good time to introduce myself, I’m Chester.”  She was so thrilled to be meeting someone so new, and he seemed so exciting she goes on to give away her position of excitement far too quickly. “Hey Chester, I’m so happy to meet you, you have no idea.  I have just been walking this path wondering if I’d meet anyone else.  I have to say I’m glad its you.”  Chester backs up a little bit just to give her a non-verbal warning sign to take it down a notch, however sadly for him she has not taken notice and she takes another step further into his personal bubble.  This dance she is playing with him is dangerous as he is one that will spook very easy.  His history actually suggests not to ever get too close as he fades away a lot. 

 Chester is unpredictable, cunning, mysterious, sneaky and typically a bit of a comical relief which is why people get hooked to his personality.  You will never see Chester when you’d like to see him.  You will only see him when he feels he would like to utilize his time to see you. You often times are lost in thought when speaking to him but only because you consistently on a regular basis  wondering what could possibly be on his mind today.  He refuses to tell you his day to day and the way he comes in and out of your life is downright intolerable.  However Debbie is weak and allows this behavior to continue because she is lonely.  She has not found herself yet in this newfound land and is seeking that self inside of the men she has met thus far.  She is sad but puts on a face for Chester each time in her journey he has come to see her.  She doesn't want to lead on that he has disappointed her.  Instead she tends to give him more of herself to the point of being completely emotionally drained. To which in turn he uses this newfound attachment against her and finds a way to use her for his own personal punching bag.  With each blow she grows weaker and weaker.  Her ego is completely tossed away at this point as she is begging for an inch of her old life back.  

She asks why and how is a man capable of making a someone feel so terrible about themselves.  (fully knowing it is more than likely a fault that could only be found within herself)  He goes on to tell her its only because “she is mad and everyone in this world is mad”.. Debbie frantically replies “But, Chester I don't want to get myself back out there among mad people.”  “Oh but you can't help that Debbie, were all mad, you're mad, I'm mad, everyone.”  Chester replies.  “How could you possibly know I'm mad” Debbie defensively remarks “You must be” said Chester “or you wouldn't have come here.”  See Relationship land was comfortable, inviting, familiar.  This land was so far full of ache, and pain mixed with a few good times that were less memorable.  She was near ready to go back, but she knew at this point she was too deep to turn back now.  Chester is gone again, which was no surprise.  Debbie knew he would be and eventually he would fade away for good.  But for now, while still weak she would patiently wait for his return until she got strong enough to say no more.  She is still waiting on this moment.  Thankfully before leaving again the last time Chester pointed Debbie to a direction that seemed to be a little less rocky and a provide a much smoother path much more meant for walking on.  

Along this path is when she sees the sun start to shine down on her and for the first time in a very long time and for the first time on this journey she is feeling the warmth that is the sun.  She is smiling again and feeling whole.  Along this cheery disposition that is her new life she begins to think about Chester again. Wondering what he's up to, and when he will reappear again.  Its in this moment while lost in thought and stuck inside her head daydreaming she runs right into two men who are oddly standing in the dead center of the road in her direct path.  She stops as she is not able to get past them and is confused.  She looks at them with big doe eyes and begins to glare at them.  She loudly wails “excuse me!”  They both continue to stare blankly at her blinded by her beauty.  Almost as if they have never seen a girl so captivating, intriguing and when she talked they could tell she was educated and a true diamond in the rough.  Both men were eager to know her. 

 This is your Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum however again for the stories sake they introduced themselves as “Tad and Tim.”   “Oh hi”, she awkwardly replied “I am Debbie, however I am walking this long journey and I have plans so I must be going now.”  She proceeds to walk the path as they follow her.  “Listen boys, I am not really looking for anyone right now to walk this journey with me so I’m going to continue on.  Its nothing against you I just have people to meet.”  They appear hurt and withdrawn, but still waiting and watching her every move.  Tim asks Debbie “but why can't we join that journey and maybe even walk a little together?” Debbie is taken back, this is the first man who has actually pursued her, wanted her love, longed to be around her instead of the other way around.  They were content with just her.  It was an insane thought but she thought just maybe this could be my end game, the end of my long journey.  Still feeling from the loss of Chester in her life and his absence becoming longer and longer she said to herself “what the hell, how do you know unless you try?”   

She decides to walk this smooth more frequently traveled path with Tim and even Tad.  See, these men are the road most traveled because they are your man who tries to fricken hard.  They are the guy you are not challenged enough by.  See some will settle for this man because he is easy, willing to bend in ways most men shouldn't and he is sweet.  However this kind of girl just sees him as boring.  Her life, and world is treated as an adventure.  How could she possibly settle for an easy road kind of guy?  She needs a man who banters with her, makes her work for it (not in a mean, vicious way)  in a way that teaches her he is a prize to be won as well.  She finds Tim and Tad annoying the more he puts himself in her path, blocking her way rather than walking beside her as he promised he would initially.  He longs to lock her down, and quickly because he sees her for the prize she is.  However she's not looking for this type and she can already see things in him that will not work long term.  She knows she has to move on despite the kind, honest and caring men they are.  Again this is a fault she sees and accepts within herself and someday the man along her journey is going to find her, and be all of these things she just hasn't found yet.  She explains these things to Tim and Tad and walks away with her head hung low knowing she broke his heart but her heart did not belong to him.  

Our less than faithful, comical favorite Cheshire Cat, Chester has yet to reappear back into our lives, so while that hope has been dashed Debbie continues her journey.  There is no other way to go now, except forward and we've gone far too far to go back.  So continue on, we must go.  Just as all hope was lost, and most of all her ego is gone she spots a white tale.  Her heart sinks to the floor and she forces herself through the rosed thorny bush to see beyond the tall grass where she spotted the tale.  She is filled with an ample amount of emotions as she watches him still off in the distance eating what looks to be a carrot.  She approaches, this time slowly.  She doesn’t want to spook him as she did before.  He spots her just as she is approaching him.  He goes to make a run for it but at this point she is far to close and near facing him.  It would not only be awkward to walk away but also there wasn't very many places he could run.  He was now facing her head on.  The only words she could leak from her mouth were questions of why.  She knew she was coming on strong but she had no better way to approach the pain that filled her with so much doubt to her decision to even come to this land.  After all this whole thing started chasing him into the mysterious black hole.  She said “Roger, I saw my future beginning and ending with you, Why?”  “Debbie” Roger exclaimed with his head hung lower than normal “I have no words as to why, just you weren't right for me and while you weren't right for me you will find your happily ever after, I am sorry.” While she knew it was the end of this happily ever after she felt closure.  It was enough for her to continue on, leaving him behind not looking back to even see if he watched her walk away.  She didn’t care.  He didn't hold her future.  He wouldn't be the ticket back to “Relationship land” and she made peace with that.  

She walks away ego bruised but still upright and proud from the last and final interaction with the man that made her chase him through “Companionship Land.”  

While walking still talking and reminiscing on her previous adventures she is dropped to her knees again and quickly when seeing a beautiful, hilarious, whimsical but oddly perplexing kind of man.  He intrigues her, and draws her in with his sheer beauty, the way. he moves, when he laughs how his whole face crinkles.  She smiles at the mere vision of his laughter.  He looks damaged, but beautifully damaged.  Not the kind of guy who needs saving, just the kind that might need a friend. He clearly has a crowd around him as he always does, but she knows she has to make her way to the center of that crowd if she wants him to notice her.  She at first blends herself in, but keeps herself in straight line of view.  She wants to be noticed, not seem desperate.  She continues to draw herself in closer and closer to him.  She goes in so close she now blends in with the crowd and begins to create friendships.  He notices her laughing with a friend and feels curious about her as he is drawn to her as well.  He gets closer to her but not enough to actually have to talk to her, but enough for her to realize he has now noticed her as well.  

This man is non other than your classic “Mad Hatter.”  However in this case his name is Mark.  Mark is everything as earlier described.  In fact he is probably everything her dream man could possibly be and look like.  He offers just enough challenge to keep her entertained, enough love to fulfill her every need and he is just as funny if not more funny than her.  He's amazing in every way, but thats only scratching the surface of Mark.  Mark approaches Debbie with a smile and continues to wow her with his charm, wit and pure entertainer status that mirrors hers completely.  They start this journey knowing each other are capable of fulfilling the other however as we know no life is a fairy tale and this is no exception to that rule.  

Scratching only the surface of this man who enjoys celebrating very merry unbirthdays and classically going out of his mind on occasion he fits in perfectly into companion land.  I’m not sure he is ready for Relationship land so they decide to walk a little slower.  Debbie is feeling emotionally attached at this point to this man.  She had no idea once again the heartbreak that might be finding her at the end of this tunnel.  See Mark moves at a much slower pace, however she is in love and could care less about his pace, even though its been best compared to that of a slug.  Women are unbelievable when it comes to being ok with things we’d never be ok with if we didn't have the emotional attachment.  Sadly we get emotionally attached before fully knowing all the things there are to know about this human, most because your heart is eager and your mind is a thinker. I say this because there are things that are unknown about the lovable Mad Hatter Mark.  He is a bad boy.  The absolute worst kind even, because someday when you call him out and when you tell this tale of this relationship no one will believe he is capable of the things you underwent.  

Unfortunately due to your attachment you will undergo an unnecessary amount of verbal and possible physical abuse prior to getting yourself out of this situation.  He uses drugs, usually uppers like Cocaine and Meth, sometimes appears positively mad. Some looking at the dysfunction might even say he is an undiagnosed man with bi-polar disorder.  So because Debbie found this out after her heart decided to foolishly jump in with both feet she's attached.  Despite her mind screaming at her “get the fuck out bitch!”  Unfortunately the heart wins these battles far more often because a broken heart feels much worse than a foolish mind.  Debbie spent many lonely sad days trying to make sense of him and often times told him he was positively mad to which he would always reply.  “Yes Debbie, I’ve gone mad, completely bonkers..but let me let you in on a secret, all the best people are!”  He tried to bring her down multiple times to the level he felt so comfortable on. It made him uncomfortable to have a woman that openly did not approve his actions he longed for approval for the things they both knew he would never receive from a pearl like Alice.  This road they were walking took a major halt and with two roads in front of them they knew they had to choose.  Walk this road together, or go separate ways.  They both decided they would go separate ways, both broken and hurting and foolishly hearing and feeling the pain that is a heart breaking.  

So here we are at the end of the journey.  There is still so much walking to be done for Debbie because her journey is far from over in Companion land however this is just one of the many problems in this world.  There are many times in the time of making my stories I have asked men and women to tell me their greatest love story.  The realness of the situation is every time these people have gone on to tell me this beautiful story filled with so much emotion and passion until they get to the end where they almost always end with the split road decision.  Leaving them choosing the separate paths that might someday lead back to one another but most of the time it ends grim and were left with another heart break under our belts.  Just remember when walking your path in Companion land... Your brain has no heart. You heart has no brain.  So when you speak  and make decisions with your mind you’ll seem heartless.  When you speak and make decisions with your heart you’ll seem thoughtless.  They don't work together and often times choosing one to trust is where and how you get yourself out of the land of pain and beauty.  

[acti-veg]

Let Them Eat Dog

A modest proporsal for tossing Fido in the Oven By Jonathan Safran Foer

Despite the fact that it's perfectly legal in 44 states, eating "man's best friend" is as taboo as a man eating his best friend. Even the most enthusiastic carnivores won't eat dogs. TV guy and sometimes cooker Gordon Ramsay can get pretty macho with lambs and piglets when doing publicity for something he's selling, but you'll never see a puppy peeking out of one of his pots. And though he once said he'd electrocute his children if they became vegetarian, one can't help but wonder what his response would be if they poached the family pooch. 

Dogs are wonderful, and in many ways unique. But they are remarkably unremarkable in their intellectual and experiential capacities. Pigs are every bit as intelligent and feeling, by any sensible definition of the words. They can't hop into the back of a Volvo, but they can fetch, run and play, be mischievous and reciprocate affection. So why don't they get to curl up by the fire? Why can't they at least be spared being tossed on the fire? Our taboo against dog eating says something about dogs and a great deal about us. 

The French, who love their dogs, sometimes eat their horses. The Spanish, who love their horses, sometimes eat their cows. The Indians, who love their cows, sometimes eat their dogs. While written in a much different context, George Orwell's words (from "Animal Farm") apply here: "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." So who's right? What might be the reasons to exclude canine from the menu? The selective carnivore suggests: 

 Don't eat companion animals. But dogs aren't kept as companions in all of the places they are eaten. And what about our petless neighbors? Would we have any right to object if they had dog for dinner? 

OK, then: Don't eat animals with significant mental capacities. If by "significant mental capacities" we mean what a dog has, then good for the dog. But such a definition would also include the pig, cow and chicken. And it would exclude severely impaired humans. Then: It's for good reason that the eternal taboos—don't fiddle with your crap, kiss your sister, or eat your companions—are taboo. Evolutionarily speaking, those things are bad for us. But dog eating isn't a taboo in many places, and it isn't in any way bad for us. Properly cooked, dog meat poses no greater health risks than any other meat.

 Dog meat has been described as "gamey" "complex," "buttery" and "floral." And there is a proud pedigree of eating it. Fourth-century tombs contain depictions of dogs being slaughtered along with other food animals. It was a fundamental enough habit to have informed language itself: the Sino-Korean character for "fair and proper" (yeon) literally translates into "as cooked dog meat is delicious." Hippocrates praised dog meat as a source of strength. Dakota Indians enjoyed dog liver, and not so long ago Hawaiians ate dog brains and blood. Captain Cook ate dog. Roald Amundsen famously ate his sled dogs. (Granted, he was really hungry.) And dogs are still eaten to overcome bad luck in the Philippines; as medicine in China and Korea; to enhance libido in Nigeria and in numerous places, on every continent, because they taste good. For centuries, the Chinese have raised special breeds of dogs, like the black-tongued chow, for chow, and many European countries still have laws on the books regarding postmortem examination of dogs intended for human consumption.

Of course, something having been done just about everywhere is no kind of justification for doing it now. But unlike all farmed meat, which requires the creation and maintenance of animals, dogs are practically begging to be eaten. Three to four million dogs and cats are euthanized annually. The simple disposal of these euthanized dogs is an enormous ecological and economic problem. But eating those strays, those runaways, those notquite-cute-enough-to-take and not-quite-well-behaved-enough-to-keep dogs would be killing a flock of birds with one stone and eating it, too. 

In a sense it's what we're doing already. Rendering—the conversion of animal protein unfit for human consumption into food for livestock and pets—allows processing plants to transform useless dead dogs into productive members of the food chain. In America, millions of dogs and cats euthanized in animal shelters every year become the food for our food. So let's just eliminate this inefficient and bizarre middle step. This need not challenge our civility. We won't make them suffer any more than necessary. While it's widely believed that adrenaline makes dog meat taste better—hence the traditional methods of slaughter: hanging, boiling alive, beating to death—we can all agree that if we're going to eat them, we should kill them quickly and painlessly, right? For example, the traditional Hawaiian means of holding the dog's nose shut—in order to conserve blood—must be regarded (socially if not legally) as a no-no. Perhaps we could include dogs under the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act. That doesn't say anything about how they're treated during their lives, and isn't subject to any meaningful oversight or enforcement, but surely we can rely on the industry to "self regulate," as we do with other eaten animals. Few people sufficiently appreciate the colossal task of feeding a world of billions of omnivores who demand meat with their potatoes. The inefficient use of dogs—conveniently already in areas of high human population (take note, local-food advocates)—should make any good ecologist blush. One could argue that various "humane" groups are the worst hypocrites, spending enormous amounts of money and energy in a futile attempt to reduce the number of unwanted dogs while at the very same time propagating the irresponsible nodog-for-dinner taboo. If we let dogs be dogs, and breed without interference, we would create a sustainable, local meat supply with low energy inputs that would put even the most efficient grass-based farming to shame. For the ecologically-minded it's time to admit that dog is realistic food for realistic environmentalists. 

 There is an overabundance of rational reasons to say no to factory-farmed meat: It is the No. 1 cause of global warming, it systematically forces tens of billions of animals to suffer in ways that would be illegal if they were dogs, it is a decisive factor in the development of swine and avian flus, and so on. And yet even most people who know these things still aren't inspired to order something else on the menu. Why? Food is not rational. Food is culture, habit, craving and identity. Responding to factory farming calls for a capacity to care that dwells beyond information. We know what we see on undercover videos of factory farms and slaughterhouses is wrong. (There are those who will defend a system that allows for occasional animal cruelty, but no one defends the cruelty, itself.) And despite it being entirely reasonable, the case for eating dogs is likely repulsive to just about every reader of this paper. The instinct comes before our reason, and is more important.

[ciathyzareposts]

Companions of Xanth (Preceded by the Worrisome Case of Piers Anthony)

I first read Piers Anthony’s thick 1969 novel Macroscope when I was in my early teens, and haven’t returned to it since. Nevertheless, I still remember the back-of-the-jacket text on my dog-eared old first paperback edition: “Existence is full of a number of things, many of them wondrous indeed — and these are the things of this soaring novel.” This high-flown blurb has remained so memorable to me because it’s so unlike anything anybody would ever write about Anthony’s work today.

Piers Anthony was born in 1934, and first made a name for himself in literary circles as one of the slightly lesser lights among science fiction’s New Wave of the 1960s. He was no Roger Zelazny, Ursula Le Guin, or Harlan Ellison, but he was regarded as a modestly promising young writer in his own right; he even contributed a story to the second of Ellison’s landmark Dangerous Visions anthologies in 1972.

But that honor, along with Macroscope, which became his second and last novel to be nominated for a Hugo award in 1970, actually mark the high point of Anthony’s respectable literary career. It had always been difficult for him to pay the bills as a second-string writer of serious speculative fiction, and it only grew more difficult as the luster faded from the New Wave in the 1970s and his books attracted even less attention. He was saved from a perhaps not-undeserved obscurity by Lester del Rey, one of genre fiction’s most legendary editors and curators. As the first to nurture and publish such writers as Stephen R. Donaldson, Terry Brooks, and David Eddings, del Rey became largely responsible for the post-Tolkien, post-New Wave boom in epic fantasy fiction. But, apparently seeing a different set of strengths and weaknesses in Anthony than he did in those other charges, del Rey guided him down a rather less epic path. Thus in 1977 Anthony came to write A Spell for Chameleon, the first novel in an endless series of them set in the pun-infested light-fantasy world of Xanth.

A Spell for Chamelon certainly wasn’t the worst fantasy novel to be published that year. While it had nothing of any substance on its mind whatsoever, its very lightness made it a welcome alternative to the likes of the three other writers I’ve just mentioned, whose books came complete with all the labored self-seriousness of an Emerson, Lake, and Palmer album. The fact is, there really wasn’t much else like A Spell for Chameleon on bookstore shelves in 1977; it felt like a genuine breath of fresh air.

Unfortunately, that book was as good as Xanth ever got. When it became the best-selling novel he had ever written by far, Anthony recognized it for what it was: a formula for maximum sales with minimum labor investment. And from that point on, he never looked back.

Still, even the first few Xanth novels after A Spell for Chameleon weren’t horribly written by the standards of their kind. Eventually, though, Anthony decided that such niceties as editing were incompatible with his desire to publish one of them every year, along with two or more other books from his other series. In time, he admitted to writing his novels using a “template” in his word processor — ah, the wonders of technology! — that he needed merely fill in, Mad Libs-style. He was actually able to outsource much of the writing to his readers, by inviting them to submit their own jokes and plots and character outlines. But where the rubber meets the road, in the form of sentences on the page, none of these assistants could make up for his refusal to take the time to be any good at his craft. There are sentences in latter-day Anthony in particular which are simply appalling from a writer with decades of experience. Consider, for example, this extract: “So why would I break with him? Because I came to the conclusion that he was a loose cannon. The problem with such a cannon is that it is more dangerous to its friends than to its enemies. I had suffered such looseness before…” If ever a court is established for crimes against the English language, Piers Anthony ought to be one of the first writers it indicts.

Between 1977 and today, Anthony has churned out no less than 42 Xanth novels, with another four reportedly complete and merely awaiting release as of this writing. And in between all those Xanth novels, he’s written dozens of other books. His guiding principle appears to be that not one word he writes should ever be put to waste; he’s wants somebody to pay for every last stroke of the keyboard. Thus he’s written two rambling, unfocused “autobiographies” which seem to be composed of journal extracts and “how to be a successful writer” advice columns he wasn’t able to place anywhere else. And thus when he wrote a series of letters to a twelve-year-old Xanth fan who had been paralyzed in a car crash, he irretrievably tainted the kindness he had evinced in doing so by compiling all of them into a book and publishing that too.

Anthony’s great stroke of genius for promoting all of these books came right out of the modern social-media playbook: he built his brand out of himself, building a cult of personality that superseded pesky details like the quality of his prose or the originality of his plots. For most people, Xanth fandom has a definite expiration date; it generally begins in one’s preteen years, and is over around the time one learns to drive a car. Within that window of time, however, many youngsters are all in for Xanth, and this is due not least to the connection they feel to its mastermind. Early on, Anthony took to appending an “author’s note” to each of his novels, in which he mused about the circumstances of its creation. That anyone, much less impatient youngsters, should have found these interesting was rather bizarre on the face of it. Anthony didn’t travel much or have adventures in the real world or build or do unusual things. He mostly just sat in front of his computer in his suburban home — not exactly a memorably unusual lifestyle in this modern world of ours. In the context of his author’s notes at least, the purchase of some extra memory for his computer or the switch to a new word processor counted as major life events for him.

And yet his fans absolutely ate it up. Most of them were still at an age when books and other creative works seemed to fall out of the sky fully-formed from a realm completely isolated from their own experience. Their glimpses of a real person behind the curtain of the Xanth novels marked for many of them their first exposure to the idea of artistic creation as a human labor — perhaps one they could even engage in themselves. And so, far from being a disadvantage, this sweeping away of the creative mystique was a big part of Xanth’s appeal, inculcating enormous loyalty in Anthony’s young readers. A memorable 2012 episode of the radio show This American Life illustrates the real bond that existed (and presumably still exists) between Anthony and his fans by telling the story of a picked-on teenage boy who ran away to the house of his favorite author — and was, it must be said, treated by said author with great kindness and compassion when he arrived there.

Yet even as he was nurturing such a warm relationship with his fans, Anthony was cementing his reputation among his peers as one of the biggest jerks in genre publishing. His career has been a long string of feuds and shattered friendships, which he describes at length in his autobiographies. His most longstanding battle has been with the Science Fiction Writers of America, an organization he claims to have “blacklisted” him during his lean years; no one actually involved with the SFWA is quite sure what he’s talking about. The real core of Anthony’s anger would seem to be his frustration at not being taken seriously by such establishment organs as this one. He’s long since been dismissed — admittedly, on pretty good evidence — as a lightweight; there will be no more Hugo talk in his future. Anthony complains endlessly about how all of his more “adult” fiction has been overshadowed by the Xanth novels which have made him a rich man, but has never taken the obvious step of simply not writing any more of the latter. The tension between artistic and commercial demands has tortured the psyche of many a writer, but in Anthony’s case it feels more comical than tragic, given that his adult books all tend to read like Xanth novels with more explicit violence — and, most especially, with much more explicit sex. And so we arrive at the really disturbing side of Piers Anthony.

I want to be especially careful in what I say next because I’ve always tried to separate the creator from his work when writing criticism of any stripe. Certainly there’s no shame in writing disposable children’s entertainment. And certainly there have been plenty of other writers who have also been jerks, including some whose talents far exceeded those of Anthony. And certainly writers need to be able to address difficult, uncomfortable subject matter without being accused of promoting or glorifying the things they describe; Vladimir Nabokov should not be deemed a pedophile because he wrote Lolita. But, even having taken all of that to heart, it remains hard for me to avoid the feeling when reading Piers Anthony on the subject of sex that something is simply wrong with this guy.

Anthony’s wrongness about sex, I should emphasize, isn’t the usual science-fiction author’s clunky mawkishness. It’s more extreme even than Robert A. Heinlein during his Dirty Old Man phase, when he wrote about sex like an alien with no understanding of human psychology might, describing it like any other mechanical process might be described by any of the dozens of stock Competent Men who populated his novels: “Now, you see, Friday, it’s just a matter of inserting Tab A here into Slot B, then moving it in and out like so.” No, Anthony’s obsession with girls just past the age of puberty — or in some eye-opening cases with girls who have not yet reached puberty — is more pernicious than this sort of rank cluelessness. It’s the reason that, if I saw a youngster I was fond of reading an Anthony novel, I wouldn’t just shrug my shoulders, but would actively try to steer her toward something I consider more healthy. For there really is, I think, a sickness — moral if not psychological in the clinical sense — running through this man’s body of work.

This side of Anthony isn’t new, although it has grown more pronounced over time as he’s become less beholden to editors. A Spell for Chameleon‘s gender politics weren’t particularly progressive even by the standards of the late 1970s. Its hero is a young man named Bink who wants something which his author considers to be impossible under normal circumstances: a girl with whom he can enjoy a warm friendship-of-intellectual-equals and whom he also finds sexually attractive — for it’s taken as a given by Anthony that a smart girl can never be a sexy one. The solution to Bink’s problem arrives in a girl with the unsubtle name of Chameleon, who cycles over the course of a month between a hideous but brilliant hag and a beautiful but moronic nymphomaniac. (Yes, Anthony’s idea of allegory really is that banal.) And so Bink’s problem is solved. The solution comes complete with a bit of teenage philosophizing, which Bink delivers to Chameleon’s nympho-bimbo incarnation just before they go at it again.

“I like beautiful girls,” he said. “And I like smart girls. But I don’t trust the combination. I’d settle for an ordinary girl, except she’d get dull after a while. Sometimes I want to talk with someone intelligent, and sometimes I want to –” He broke off. Her mind was like that of a child; it wasn’t really right to impose such concepts on her.

“That’s the point,” he said. “I like variety. I would have trouble living with a stupid girl all the time — but you aren’t stupid all the time. Ugliness is no good for all the time — but you aren’t ugly all the time either. You are — variety. And that is what I crave for the long-term relationship — and what no other girl can provide.”

Cringe-inducingly adolescent though this take on guys and chicks might be — especially when one considers that it was written without any apparent irony by a 43-year-old man — it’s pretty harmless compared to where the Xanth novels went later on. Uncomfortably young girls get put in sexually charged situations, often with much older men, over and over. There’s little to no explicit sex — note where Bink “breaks off” in the extract above — but the subtext keeps getting more and more creepy. By 1992, Anthony felt free to entitle one of his Xanth novels The Color of Her Panties. At this point, it was hard to avoid the feeling that he was deliberately trolling the critics who had by now been calling him out for his books’ pervy subtexts for quite some time.

Still, Anthony’s allegedly prurient interest in his young female subjects would be much more speculative — and I would probably not be writing this article — were it not for those other, “adult” books of his. Many of these ooze the same disturbing fixations as the Xanth books, but are able to carry them through to, shall we say, consumation. Exhibit Number One in this category must be Firefly, a 1990 attempt at horror dealing primarily with what Anthony himself describes as “inflamed and perverted sexual desire.” It includes a lengthy sex scene between an adult man and a five-year-old girl, described in minute detail. In fact, the scene is another, rather horrifying example of Anthony’s habit of outsourcing the writing of his books: it came from an imprisoned pedophile with whom he corresponded. Anthony, in other words, literally published child porn. It’s quite simply the most disturbing thing I’ve ever read in a lifetime of prolific reading. Not even Mein Kampf bothers me like this. Needless to say, I won’t be quoting it here.

But, you counter, this was a horror novel, a genre meant to shock and transgress norms. Don’t confuse the author with the work, etc. And I might reluctantly agree with you, even if I didn’t have any personal desire to ever read anything by this writer again. But then comes the author’s note, in which Anthony justifies the rape of this five-old-girl because… she wanted it. She was asking for it, tempting the man who had sex with her into the deed. (Did I mention that she is five years old?) Her name is Nymph. (Did I mention that Anthony isn’t subtle?)

There seems to be a broad spectrum of human desire, and what we call normal is only the central component. It may be that the problem is not with what is deviant, but with our definitions. I suggest in the novel that little Nymph was abused not by the man with whom she had sex, but by members of her family who warped her taste, and by the society that preferred to condemn her lover rather than address the source of the problem in her family.

Those who feel that [the imprisoned pedophile’s] stories represent abnormal taste should read My Secret Garden by Nancy Friday, which details some of the sexual fantasies of women. Neither is Nymph an invention; similar cases are all too frequent. These aspects were from my research rather than my imagination. I don’t know what is right and what is wrong; I merely hope to raise some social questions along with the entertainment provided in the novel. I suspect our priorities are confused. We have problems enough with world hunger and injustice, without making more by punishing people for deviant but perhaps harmless behavior.

Here we have it from the horse’s mouth. The rape of a five-year-old girl is “perhaps harmless.”

We often see this pattern of argument — the “hey, I’m just asking questions!” pattern — among those who wish to say something much of the society around them will consider reprehensible but who lack the courage to stand right up and do so. (You see it constantly, for example, in the toxic arena that is present-day American politics.) Added to all of the other circumstantial evidence swirling around Piers Anthony — his many almost-as provocative statements made in interviews; his correspondences with multiple imprisoned pedophiles, not just this one; the unending fascination with pubescent and prepubescent girls running through most of his novels — it raises a strong feeling that something is indeed wrong inside this fellow’s head. I should emphasize that I have no reason to believe that Anthony has ever acted on the urges in question, if they do in fact exist. Has he found a way to satisfy them through his writing instead? That would be a good thing, if so; the crime exists not in the unfortunate psychological kink of being a pedophile, but in acting upon it. Or, that is, it would be a good thing — if only his books weren’t being read.

Once you’ve seen these things, you can never unsee them. Anthony’s cherished relationships with his young fans — and again, I have no reason to believe he has ever abused their trust in any physical sense — takes on a new, creepy flavor. Suddenly all those long letters to the paralyzed girl, as collected in the book Letters to Jenny, begin to read disturbingly like… well, like he’s flirting with her. And suddenly we breathe a sigh of relief that the teenage runaway whose story was chronicled on This American Life was a boy rather than a girl. How much of this is real and how much is projection? It’s impossible to say. (Hey, I’m just asking questions…) I will say only this: please, read someone else’s books, and try to get your children to do so as well. I smell something rotten at the core of this writer’s output, and I know I’m not alone.

All of the foregoing ruminations were prompted by my ostensible “real” subject for today, the 1993 Legend Entertainment game Companions of Xanth. Ironically, I find myself with somewhat less to say about that subject than I do about Piers Anthony’s odd and disturbing career arc as a writer. The game is… reasonably good, actually, if hardly one of the most memorable works in the history of adventure gaming. The creepiness factor is kept surprisingly low under the circumstances, the humor is hit-and-miss but always good-natured, and the design, with one glaring exception which we’ll get to momentarily, is up to Legend’s usual high standard. Further, in one sense at least, the game represents a real landmark in Legend’s history: it marks the point where they finally dumped their parser and embraced the point-and-click paradigm, thus ushering in the second of the three broad phases of the company’s history and ushering out the age of the commercial text adventure writ large.

Companions of Xanth came to exist at all entirely thanks to Legend’s everyday composer and music programmer Michael Lindner, who also happened to be one of those rare readers who defy the usual age-circumscribed window of Xanth fandom; he had retained his affection for the series right into his adult years. He had first supplemented his usual duties at Legend with those of a writer and designer on 1992’s Gateway, a project consciously engineered by the company’s co-founder Bob Bates to serve as a sort of boot camp for training up new designers. Having duly completed that apprenticeship, Lindner begged for permission to make a Xanth game as his first project as a head designer. His managers obligingly made inquiries, and soon brought home a contract to make a game version of Piers Anthony’s latest Xanth novel-in-progress, which was to be titled Demons Don’t Dream. As was more usual than not for licensed projects like this, Lindner had very little direct contact with Anthony in the course of making the game. He largely had to content himself with pre-release proofs of the novel in question, whose plot the game he made follows fairly closely but not slavishly.

We can probably feel pleased for Anthony’s lack of involvement, in that it means that most of the pervier elements of Xanth are missing. While Anthony in his novel dwells at length over the “luscious young women” in the story, Lindner lays it on considerably less thickly.

The pervy aspects of Xanth aren’t overly prevalent in the game, but aren’t entirely absent either. You can look up “panties” in the in-game encyclopedia…

Still, the plot is rife with other Xanthian staples — not least the meta-fictional elements that had become such a hallmark of the series by this point, sixteen books in. Many of the jokes, situations, and characters in both the book and the game come courtesy of Anthony’s army of fans, who are scrupulously credited by name in the book’s author’s note. The most notable example of fan service is the character of Jenny Elf, based on the author’s young friend Jenny, the car-crash victim he wrote to at such length. (By this point, Anthony tells us in his author’s note, she had recovered from her paralysis sufficient to sit and even stand briefly without support. She would make further strides in the years to come, although she would never regain her full range of motion.) Jenny Elf, who is blessedly not overly sexualized even in the book, appears alongside Sammy Cat, the real girl’s favorite pet.

You yourself play as a teenage boy named Dug who lives in Mundania, the non-magical alternative to Xanth; Mundania, that is to say, is our world. As a hater of computer games, Dug has made a bet with his friend Ed that he won’t like one called Companions of Xanth. If his faith in the pointlessness of the gaming hobby holds true, he wins Ed’s motorcycle; if this game proves an exception to the rule, Ed gets a date with Dug’s estranged girlfriend. (“But what if she doesn’t want to go out with you?” asks Dug. “That’s a technicality we’ll deal with at the appropriate time,” answers Ed. Okay, the game isn’t totally without creepy elements…)

So, the earliest stages of the real Companions of Xanth require you to open this virtual Companions of Xanth and boot it up on your in-game computer. (Confused yet?) After some preliminaries, you get sucked through the monitor screen into Xanth. (That is to say, your character in the game you’re playing gets sucked through the monitor of the computer running the game he’s playing.)

Companions of Xanth resoundingly fails to put its best foot forward. Just as you’re about to enter Xanth and get started properly, it lives up to its name by asking you to choose a companion for your adventures from four possibilities. A nice little addition, this, you think to yourself, as you choose the companion that looks most interesting and entertaining. This must be a way to make the game replayable, a la Maniac Mansion. But nope! Think again! There’s just one “correct” companion to be chosen. Naturally, this being a Piers Anthony creation, that companion is the nubile serpent chick named Naga. If you make the supremely non-Xanthian move of choosing any of the others, the game lets you play for a few minutes longer, then dead-ends you; it’s time to restart or restore, my friend.

Such a colossal design fail is downright bizarre to see in a Legend game of this vintage. It struck me immediately that it must be an artifact of an earlier, more ambitious plan to offer four genuinely divergent experiences — a plan which got chopped down to size once the realities of time, labor, and money came home to roost. Unfortunately, neither Bob Bates nor Mike Verdu can recall what might have gone down here, and I haven’t been able to locate Richard Lindner. So, all we can do is speculate.

After a beginning like that, whatever the reason for its existence, one goes into the rest of Companions of Xanth decidedly nervous, wondering if it’s going to be one of those sorts of games. Thankfully, it isn’t; the aforementioned is its only real design pratfall. After it gets going properly, it evinces the meticulous commitment to fair play which the Legend brand was coming to stand for by 1993.

Much of the humor, and with it many of the puzzles, revolve around puns and wordplay, long a Xanth staple. Mind you, Companions of Xanth isn’t as clever as something like Infocom’s Nord and Bert Couldn’t Make Head or Tail of It in this respect. It is, after all, implicitly written for a less sophisticated audience, yet it can still be good fun in its own right. You’ll spend time here battling a censor ship, finding a way to get beyond the pail, and visiting the Fairy Nuff. Sometimes the puns go a little too far out on a limb — the “com-pewter,” an interactive compendium made out of pewter, is one example — but the puzzles themselves are always comprehensible, which is the most important thing. Only those who struggle a bit with idiomatic English in general, such as non-native speakers, are likely to have any major problems solving the game.

Companions of Xanth as a whole is as lightweight as the novels which inspired it. If it never quite dazzles, it never annoys overmuch either, at least once you get past that first hump, and it might even prompt a chuckle or two. It’s a sort of baseline standard game for Legend, never really managing to distinguish itself in either a positive or a negative way. Yet its interface did mark it as something truly new for the four-year-old company at the time of its release, and as such is perhaps worthy of more attention than the game it supports.

As I noted in my last article, in reality the parser disappeared more gradually than suddenly from Legend games; the full run of titles the company released between 1990 and 1993 shows a slow marginalization of the parser, until finally, beginning with Companions of Xanth, it just wasn’t there at all anymore. In fact, this same evolutionary process could be said not to have really ended even here. Although the move to point-and-click has forced the loss of that sense of infinite possibility that so delights people like me and Bob Bates, what remains here is about as text-adventure-like an interface as can be imagined under the new paradigm. Indeed, it smacks of the old ICOM Simulations interface from the mid-1980s, the industry’s earliest serious attempt to recast the classic adventure game in this mold, more so than it does the contemporary interfaces of Sierra and LucasArts. In a sense, one might even say, the parser still exists in this game. It’s just that you now build your imperative sentences with the mouse instead of the keyboard. Such an approach had always been an option in the earlier Legend games; now, it merely becomes a requirement.

Given that the screenshots of the interface included with this article are all but self-explanatory, I won’t dwell too long on its mechanics. Clicking a hotspot in the onscreen picture will highlight a default verb in the list on the left of the screen. Simply clicking on the hotspot again at this point will take that action, but you can also choose another verb from the list, if you wish. Many objects also have unique verbs which show up below the standard list when they’re highlighted; a rock, for example, might have an additional “throw” verb. And indirect objects are connected to certain actions; throwing the rock will require a third click, specifying what to throw it at. As you’re doing all of this, you see your command being built right there on the screen, just as if you were typing it in via a parser. It’s even possible to specify a verb first, then choose the object it acts upon, although this approach is of limited utility in that it doesn’t give you access to the special verbs connected to some objects.

All of which is to say that the new interface truly does represent another evolutionary rather than revolutionary technological step for Legend. What we have here is not a whole new game engine, bur rather the old one with a different front end. Once it gets past the stage of interpreting the player’s command, there’s less difference than you might expect between this Legend game and those that came before it.

This fact is most clearly illustrated in the screenshots by that little “Undo” button in the corner, something you would never — could never — see in a Sierra or LucasArts game. For those games run in real time, while Companions of Xanth, like a text adventure or an ICOM game, is still turn-based. This distinction has an enormous impact on the character of the game, reaching far beyond the welcome ability to instantly undo your last action when you get yourself killed or otherwise try something unfortunate. Legend games even after the parser went away have a more relaxed, contemplative, literary sensibility than the works of Legend’s peers. There’s still quite a lot of text here, and that text is still treated with unusual care and respect. It isn’t hard to divine, after playing around with one of their point-and-click games for just a few minutes, why Legend became the go-to studio for literary adaptations during the 1990s. While it had proved possible to take the type-in parser out of Legend’s engine, it was more difficult to take the literary spirit of the text adventure out of the company’s collective design aesthetic.

One holdover from text adventures that may not thrill some players is the maze…

This held true even when Legend was otherwise embracing the multimedia era with gusto. Although Eric the Unready and Gateway 2: Homeworld had both been released in CD-ROM versions prior to Companions of Xanth, those were mere repackagings of the floppy-disk-based versions into a more convenient format. But when the subject of this article appeared on CD-ROM about six months after its original floppy-based release, it sported voice acting for the first time in a Legend title. And yet even here the voice acting only covered words said by the characters you met; there was no global narrator. Such an approach felt very much in keeping with that overarching literary sensibility that so marked Legend’s work. In this game, and in the next several Legend games to come, you were still expected to do a lot of reading for yourself.

For the record, the voice acting that is to be found in the CD-ROM Companions of Xanth is excellent — an impressive feat considering that this was Legend’s first foray into such a thing. Even here, their first time out, they were wise enough to employ professional actors recruited from the local union for same and recorded at a professional sound studio. It’s obvious that the actors had fun with their roles; my favorite part of the whole game might just be the blooper reel of outtakes which plays over the closing credits.

In the end, though, I find myself torn on the subject of Companions of Xanth in a way I can’t recall being for any other game I’ve written about here. If it existed in a vacuum, shorn of its association with Piers Anthony, I would call it a fun, frothy little fantasy romp, a solid debut for a new interface which retains more of the spirit of the old than we might have dared to hope for. And I would be happy enough to leave it at that. But, even as I believe it’s wrong to judge art on external factors in the vast majority of cases, there are exceptions, and I’m not sure this isn’t one of them.

I don’t blame Legend in any sense for making this game. Many of the more worrisome aspects of Anthony’s oeuvre become obvious only in the aggregate; most or all of those who worked on this game at Legend doubtless believed that they were merely capitalizing on a popular, harmless series of lightweight fantasy books. And yet I do find myself wishing that they had chosen some other series, just as I wish any current readers of Xanth, young or old, would do likewise. In my role of critic, I can tell you that Companions of Xanth is a (mostly) well-constructed game that’s relatively inoffensive in itself. But should you play it? That is, as always — but perhaps here even more so than usual — something you’ll have to decide for yourself.

(Sources: the Piers Anthony books Bio of an Ogre, How Precious was that While, Letters to Jenny, Macroscope, A Spell for Chameleon, The Color of Her Panties, Firefly, and Demons Don’t Dream; Computer Gaming World of July 1993 and March 1994; Questbusters 108. My thanks go to Bob Bates and Mike Verdu for talking with me about this period of Legend’s history — but I must emphatically state that all of the opinions expressed herein, especially of Piers Anthony and his work, are mine alone.

Companions of Xanth has not been re-released as a digital edition, doubtless owing to the complications involved with licensed titles. I’d prefer not to host it here due to my distaste for Piers Anthony, but you can find it elsewhere without too much trouble.)

  BONUS:

The Compiled Life Wisdom of Piers Anthony, as Found in His Autobiographies

Writers like Roger Zelazny and Samuel Delany got awards because of their sophistication as writers, which sophistication I do not question, but I was regarded from the outset as an entertainment writer. What I was doing was too complex and subtle, not only for others to understand, but for them even to realize that it existed.

The best guide for a book to avoid is an award winner.

I worried that I would not be able to write fantasy well without Lester del Rey’s editing. But instead it was like a burden lifting from my shoulders. Suddenly I was free of oppressive editing.

Then Lester tried to cut the entire Author’s Note from the fourth Incarnations novel, Wielding a Red Sword. He said it was too long, and anyway, they were in the business of publishing fiction, not nonfiction. This was the Note in which I described my computerization — I had until then written my novels in pencil and then typed them with a manual machine, so it was a significant step for me.

When I read Isaac Asimov’s massive two-volume autobiography I found it interesting, but concluded that the minutia of daily existence are seldom worth recording for posterity.

I dumped SFWA, and have remained hostile to it since. There is evidence that some of its members are still spreading falsehoods about me. If ever push comes to shove, I will put it out of business. Because today I have the resources to sue. All I need is the pretext.

I, like most boys, would have been capable of orgasm at any time in childhood, had I known how to masturbate.

A formula I invented for explaining the ways of publishers: TPB = SOD. What does it mean? Typical Publisher Behavior is Shitting On Dreams.

So are publishers really as rapacious and idiotic as they seem? Yes and no. Just as the intelligence and conscience of a lynch mob may be less than that of any individual person within it, so may the net savvy of a publisher be below that of any of its components.

I feel like a beautiful woman. That is, a lovely woman is pursued by many men — but when she mentions commitment, most of them vanish. Some vanish when they find they can’t get her into bed on the first date. Others vanish after they do get her into bed. So she becomes cynical; it is evident that most of those ardent suitors are insincere; all they want is her body for a night, rather than an enduring relationship, unless she happens to be rich. All the publishers really wanted from me was my best-selling series, Xanth — and those who lost it and those who got it tended to vanish as far as my other novels went.

I pondered, and my agent pondered, and it was my wife, who evidently understands the situation of beautiful women, who came up with an effective notion: link the one to the other. Make a package deal. So when the time for a new multi-novel Xanth contract came up, we put it to TOR: double or nothing. If this man wanted to get this woman in bed again, there would have to be marriage — though TOR’s chief editor is female, and I’m male.

[My wife and I] have what I call a conventional marriage: I earn the money, she spends it. In fact she keeps accounts and does the taxes, which are complicated. I decide on the big things, like the significance of world events, and she decides the small things, like everything else. I’m glad I married her, and believe that I would not be where I am today without her. But if I should find myself alone, I would then consider more carefully what else offers, with strong cautions from my life experience. Meanwhile I have a small category of correspondents I treat politely: those who profess or imply love for me.

Women of any age are interesting, and as a general rule, the younger a woman is, the more interesting she is, because natural selection dictates that the man who controls the greatest part of a woman’s fertile years will have the most children. A girl of twelve may have breasts and be a young woman in appearance; she is sexually desirable, regardless of law or custom. A girl of eleven may lack the breasts but be of similar general appearance, and her clothing masks her lack of maturity. So it is evident that some men aren’t concerned about the distinction, and go for the vagina regardless.

I have an insatiable curiosity about the nature of the universe and mankind’s place in it, and my profession of writing allows me to explore it all, seeking answers. I have fathomed a number of things to my satisfaction before they were clarified by the scientists.

Sometimes I’m stupid. This is annoying when I’m taking an IQ test.

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/companions-of-xanth-preceded-by-the-worrisome-case-of-piers-anthony/

[liberalcom-blog]

Dark Grimoire Tarot

https://liber-al.com/?p=42457&wpwautoposter=1559870597 Deliciously dark and grimly enchanting, this dread tarot will help you connect with your inner shadow. Strange creatures and powerful sorcerers dwell in savage landscapes-an inspiring realm where magick is reality. This ominous, exquisitely crafted tarot is ideal for magicians, witches, horror fans, and anyone drawn to the dark side. Boxed deck includes 78 full-color cards and instruction booklet Flip side of box is in Spanish: Tarot Oscuro de Grimoire The companion booklets for most Lo Scarabeo decks are in five languages: English, Spanish, French, Italian, and German. Editorial Reviews Summary: As dark and mysterious as the mythic world created by H. P. Lovecraft, the Dark Grimoire Tarot is strongly recommended for those mature enough and brave enough to examine their darker sides, and by coming to know and control those aspects of their psyches, be able to master themselves. This can lead to true maturity and what Jung called “individuation.” A powerful deck that may be better for personal evolution than for divination. Review: Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) was a mildly successful writer of short stories known as “pulp fiction.” This was a designation based on the inexpensive, pocket-sized magazines where his stories appeared. These small magazines were published on cheap paper known as “pulp.” Today, only a few magazines that were originally “pulps” remain, one of them being FATE magazine. Most of the few that survived are now full-size. Lovecraft was deeply influenced by earlier and contemporary writers such as Ambrose Bierce and Robert W. Chambers, who not only told a story, but projected a mood. He eventually developed a style that featured a mood of horror lying just beyond what we normally see and hear, horror that is liable to break through into our unknowing world at any moment. He created an entire other world populated by evil powerful beings intent on taking over the Earth. According to the stories, people would try to contact these beings who eventually became part of what was known as the “Cthulhu Mythos.” Lovecraft even invented a mythical book that supposedly revealed the secrets of the beings, giving it the title of a book he had created in his childhood, The Necronomicon . Lovecraft’s stories are spooky, but on a literary basis he was no Shakespeare. He wasn’t even a Poe. But two things occurred that gave his stories extra life. First, because he wasn’t all that successful, he took many jobs ghostwriting stories for other people (he wrote one for Houdini). He included aspects of the Cthulhu Mythos in those stories. Second, he was part of a group of pulp writers that included Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, Frank Belknap Long, Robert Bloch, and others. They would, on occasion, use aspects of the Mythos in their own stories. It became a sort of running gag between them, going to far as even using each other’s names, in disguise, in their stories. If you read many of these stories from different authors, and saw these similar names and characters, might you not assume that there might be something real in all of this? Indeed, for a time, used booksellers were frequently approached with requests for copies of the fictional Necronomicon . And when there is a demand, someone will eventually supply what was demanded. By the end of the 20th century, several versions of The Necronomicon had appeared. The most popular one blended a bit of Crowley, Sumerian magick, and quotes from Lovecraft into a supposed magickal system that was seemingly usable…or at least it was believed usable by the people who purchased the inexpensive mass market pocket edition that became available. Meanwhile, there had been during the 1960s-1980s a veritable explosion of interest in the works of Aleister Crowley. Quietly, almost out of nowhere, came a British writer named Kenneth Grant who claimed to have Crowley’s real secrets. Over the years his writings blended some concepts of Crowley with those of Lovecraft. This helped trigger a new interest in Lovecraft not as a fantacist, but as an unconscious revealer of actual occult secrets. The Cthulhu Mythos was alive, and the various versions of The Necronomicon were its Bible. Eventually, Donald Tyson and Anne Stokes did a Tarot deck based on these stories, The Necronomicon Tarot . But just as there are many versions of The Necronomicon , so, too, would there be multiple decks based on that vision. After spending a long time fascinated by the stories, artist and designer Michele Penco created a Tarot along this line, too. In other parts of the world it is known as the “Tarot of the Necronomicon.” In English it is called the Dark Grimoire Tarot . In actuality, it might be more appropriate to call this deck the “Lovecraft Tarot.” A cameo of his image is on the back of each card. Or perhaps it might be best called the “Cthulhu Mythos Tarot.” The images are taken from many of Lovecraft’s stories that make up the mythos. For example, the Two of Swords is clearly based on “The Music of Erich Zann,” a violinist who must play to keep horrifying demons at bay. The Three of Pentacles illustrates “Pickman’s Model” and the reason his art was so horrifyingly realistic. The Ten of Swords is obviously from “The Dunwich Horror,” showing a twin that was much more of his terrifying father than it was of his mother. On the other hand, calling it the Dark Grimoire Tarot is also valid on several accounts. First, the colors-mostly grays and sepia tones with a few very muted tints-are dark. Second, the imagery is also dark. The RWS tradition shows the Hanged Man hanging by his ankle and in a meditative or even ecstatic state. Here, the interpretation is quite literal, showing a man who has been so horrified by what he read in the Necronomicon that he has hanged himself in his dismal garret. To match the colors, the art itself is very simplistic and muted, no photographic realism as found in some decks today. This is certainly appropriate as it gives the flavor of some of the art found in the old pulp magazines. In my opinion this simplicity is a good thing. With muted, simplistic images you are forced to fill in the concepts with your own ideas. And that marks the true strength of this deck. According to the psychologist Carl Jung, we each have a positive side and a negative side. He called that dark side “the shadow.” He believed that part of human development is understanding and accepting that we each have a dark side, and then choosing to harness its power while eliminating its negative and antisocial aspects. He called this process “individuation.” Today, however, most people try to avoid facing their shadow. Everything has to be made 100% safe and “nicey-nicey” or someone is going to sue! Unfortunately, our world is not 100% safe and nicey-nicey. Submerging or ignoring the shadow doesn’t eliminate it. Rather, it allows it to fester and grow in the dark until, in some people, it explodes in acts we term “evil.” One way to prevent this is to face our shadow and come to terms with it. This deck, with its darkness and incomplete imagery, is absolutely perfect for allowing us to work on this process. This is a deck for the brave and mature. It is haunting and incredibly deep. Ffor personal growth this deck can be an important tool. The Little White Booklet (LWB) adds that this deck is “a key that can open forgotten doors in the darkest corners of the psyche, those doors hidden in the shadows and engulfed in spider webs. Opening those doors can mean gaining knowledge of our own fears and recognizing our own dark side, learning how it can balance our whole being.” Although the deck follows the basic format of the RWS, the symbolism of the Major Arcana is completely different, at best giving only implications of the RWS. The meanings of the cards may seem unfamiliar to you, as the Cups represent dreams, the Pentacles represent shadows, the Wands represent lights and creativity, and the Swords are demons. Most often they do not show the tool of their suit, although you will find each card labeled. Each suit is a type of separate grimoire. The meanings of these cards are based on the imagery and not necessarily the traditional RWS interpretations. Therefore, comparing this deck to other Tarot decks is simply impossible. It is its own creature. Perhaps, like Lovecraft’s “Evil Old Ones,” this has just been lurking just outside of our line of sight and is only seen through hints in our peripheral vision during our darkest nightmares, nightmares so real that when we wake we make sure that the windows are closed and the doors are locked. The Little White Booklet includes a five-card “Magic Pentagram” spread. And since it it modeled after the RWS deck, you can use it for other spreads, too. Don’t be surprised, however, if while giving a reading you slip into self-examination and confrontation with your own shadow. This deck is strongly recommended for personal meditative and spiritual work. However, as Lovecraft might have advised, don’t try using it when you’re alone-or when you think you’re alone-and in the dark. Deck Attributes Name of deck: Dark Grimoire Tarot Publisher: Llewellyn ISBN:9780738713847 Creator’s name: Michele Penco Brief biography of creators: Penco is an art designer living in Pisa, Italy, who is fascinated by all things Lovecraft. Name of accompanying book/booklet: Dark Grimoire Tarot Number of pages of booklet: 64 (14 in English) Authors of booklet: Giovanni Pelosini Brief biography of author: Pelosini is a Tarot artist and author. Available in a boxed kit?: No Magical Uses: Shadow work meditation, self-analysis, individuation Artistic Style: Illustration Original Medium: Pencil or chalk (?) Theme: H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthluhu Mythos Tarot, Divination Deck, Other: Tarot Does it follow Rider-Waite-Smith Standard?: Yes, in name if not in symbolism. Does it have extra cards?: No Does it have alternate names for Major Arcana cards?: No Does it have alternate names for Minor Arcana suits? : No Does it have alternate names for the Court Cards?: No Why was deck created?: “This deck of Tarot cards was inspired by the dream worlds of fantasy literature, by grimoires, whether real or imaginary, by the nightmares that they have generated and continue to generate in the depths of the subconscious. Book suggestions for Tarot beginners and this deck: Any introductory book on the Tarot. Books (collections of short stories) by H.P. Lovecraft. Book suggestions for experienced Tarot users and this deck: Books by Lovecraft, Kenneth Grant, and critiques of the Lovecraft/Occult linkage. Alternative decks you might like: Necronomicon Tarot from Donald Tyson and Anne Stokes andThe Shadow Tarot by Linda Falorio and Fred Fowler. – From the Publisher

[kayawagner]

Holiday Festivity [BUNDLE]

Publisher: Skirmisher Publishing

This very special 99% off customer appreciation bundle contains 12 titles, including Gold and Platinum bestsellers, for just 25 cents and will be available for only a short time! Skirmisher Publishing would like to wish you a merry Christmas, happy Hanukkah, jovial Saturnalia, joyful Yule, frugal Festivus, and an otherwise great holiday season however you choose to observe it and hope some of our great publications will bring you some enjoyment during it.

100 Oddities for a Hung Stocking Regular price: $0.99 Bundle price: $0.01 Format: Watermarked PDF This "100 Oddities" holiday mini-sourcebook will only be available until the end of the holiday season!  When the holiday season comes around why shouldn’t the heroes in your campaign get in on the action?Why not roll up a few random treats and tricks using this table of random items, any of which might be found in a stocking hung over the fireplace, a goody bag at a birthday party, a bucket of Halloween candy, or any other time when gifts are in the offing?  Oddities are intended to aid storyteller creativity, turning possibly bland areas or gaming episodes into something more, and the goal of this publication is to make things more fun and to take your imagination in directions it might not otherwise have gone. They fill in the corners of a bookshelf, a room, a level... 100 Oddities for a Wizard's Library Regular price: $0.99 Bundle price: $0.01 Format: PDF Welcome to 100 Oddities for a Wizard's Library, third entry in Skirmisher Publishing's ever-expanding series of curiosities designed to fill the empty corners of your campaign worlds!  Oddities may clutter a shelf or lie forgotten in a corner but are not defined by where they are so much as what they are and are unusual by their very nature. A dead rat in the basement of an abandoned building is not an oddity, but the same dead rat with its eyes sewn shut is. Oddities make you think about why they exist, how they ended up there, even what the hell they are, questions that are key to an engaging and invigorating roleplaying experience.  Oddities are intended to aid GM creativity and turn possibly bland areas or gaming episodes into something more. The goal of this... Age of Night (Volume 1: Business Between Brigands) Regular price: $4.99 Bundle price: $0.05 Format: PDF Join Drake, runaway avatar of the God of Night, Rhonwen, a naïve mage of the White Order, Thelonius, a spy and assassin hiding from the Shadow Houses, and Kamaria, a thief with ties to no one but her companions, as they embark on their journey! In their quest to free Drake from his bonds to the Covenant of Mandra they will journey across the Republic of Amathea and face many challenges and enemies along the way. Search for freedom. Find your place. This edition of the graphic novel includes a bonus short story and appendices of sketches and work process, some theological notes on the goddess Mandra, and a character profile of Drake. ... Carnivals, Theaters, & Other Entertainment Places (City Builder Volume 3) Regular price: $1.99 Bundle price: $0.02 Format: PDF City Builder Volume 3: Entertainment Places is the third in a series of 11 complementary books designed to help guide Game Masters through the process of creating compelling and exciting urban areas and places within them for their campaigns. It is not specific to any particular game setting and is designed to be compatible with the needs of any ancient, Dark Ages, Middle Ages, Renaissance, or fantasy milieu.  Contents of this book include: An Introduction that describes the scope of the series and how to use the material in this volume; Individual sections devoted to descriptions of Carnivals, Menageries, Museums, Parks, and Theaters; and One or more Adventure Hooks tying in with each described sort of place. This download includes both low-resolution screen-frien... Cthulhu Live’s Mysteries of the Mythos: Murder at Miskatonic Regular price: $2.99 Bundle price: $0.03 Format: PDF Miskatonic University, that ivy league institution of higher learning that has produced many a fine young adult ready to shape the world the way they see fit. With diverse courses such as Peruvian Basket Weaving, Modern Occult Legends, and Ancient Languages, Miskatonic has a class for any student. And with the award-winning sports team, the Fighting Cephalopods, even the athletic scholar can find his path to a brighter future among these hallowed halls.  There is, however, a class not in the curriculum that one person on campus is about to earn a masters in. That class is Murder 101. This class has only one test, but the final is a real killer. Who will pass this course? Will it be the jock? What about the bookworm? And let us not forget about the professional rival! Only time an... Earth Dog (A Monster for 5th Edition) Regular price: $0.50 Bundle price: $0.01 Format: Watermarked PDF In honor of the 2018 lunar Chinese New Year, Skirmisher Publishing is proud to announce the release of “Earth Dog: A Monster for 5th Edition”!  Earth Dogs are elemental animals look like sturdy, well-formed, hairless mastiffs that vary in color from beige or brown to orange or even yellow. They are gregarious, loyal, and exuberant and respond well to life with various intelligent species, and are therefore often kept as pets, animal companions, or guards by Earth-dwelling beings like Dao. On the Prime Material Plane, Earth Dogs are most likely to be found in places like mountains, rocky ravines, gemstone mines, and the temples of deities with which such places are affiliated, where they typically serve as guardians. In cultures that observe the Lunar New Year and adhere... Forbidden Monsters of Foree: Brainlashers (Cardstock CharactersTM) Regular price: $2.24 Bundle price: $0.02 Format: PDF Behold the strange and terrible world of Foree! Awful and nonsensical are the rules of this inhospitable world, where Wizards alone reserve the right to utter the names of certain monsters. But we have dared to mention here one of these fell creatures, the Brainlasher, and to present its fearful likenesses for your consideration. Using their alien technology, psionic abilities, and mind-shattering abilities, the Brainlashers are among the most loathsome and formidable of monsters. While they have long inhabited the known worlds, the Brainlashers have been used to populate the world of Foree with no acknowledgement of this. They are, in fact, the brainchildren of H.P. Lovecraft, Brian Lumley, and the other luminaries of the Mythos and those inspired by it. This set of 12 full-color p... Lives of Kos (Swords of Kos Fantasy Campaign Setting) Regular price: $3.99 Bundle price: $0.04 Format: PDF Welcome to Lives of Kos, the fifth volume of the highly-anticipated Swords of Kos Fantasy Campaign Setting! This book contains 118 system-free biographies of personages who live on the island of Kos or the lands surrounding it and are mentioned or appear as characters in the related sourcebooks or stories about the campaign setting. All of them can be used either individually or in conjunction with one another, and within the context of the Swords of Kos campaign setting or as part of any other milieu. This book follows Kos City, Kos Island, Lands Beyond Kos, and Encounters and is fully compatible with and expands upon concepts that appear in them. The Swords of Kos Fantasy Campaign Setting has deliberately been designed to be system free... Orc Raiders (Little Orc Wars/Cardstock CharactersTM) Regular price: $1.49 Bundle price: $0.02 Format: PDF This set of downloadable Cardstock CharactersTM miniatures contains three variations on five different figures, a Champion, Infantryman, Javelineer, Boar Rider, and War Boar. They are the ideal addition to any sort of tabletop fantasy RPG or wargame and can be used to enhance encounters or even serve as the basis for them. The different variations can also be used to easily reflect different levels and capabilities and one of the factions has blank shields that can easily be customized.  These miniatures were designed specifically for both the tabletop and video versions of the H.G. Wells' Little Orc Wars miniatures game. We hope you and your players will enjoy battling with them! ... Stevenson At Play Regular price: $1.49 Bundle price: $0.02 Format: PDF Famous as the author of such great works of literature as Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson was also a dedicated war gamer. Stevenson at Play, one of the lesser-known works of this “Grandfather of Modern Wargaming,” describes a complex strategic wargame that the author and his stepson, Samuel Lloyd Osbourne, played in the early 1880s.  Skirmisher’s edition of Stevenson at Play includes an Introduction by Osbourne, a Foreword by publisher and wargame designer Michael O. Varhola, and several period pieces of art, including some hand-drawn sketches by Stevenson himself. This download includes low-resolution screen-friendly and high-resolution... The Christmas Inn Regular price: $0.50 Bundle price: $0.01 Format: PDF This short story set in Medieval England during the turbulent War of the Roses tells how the events of one cold and stormy winter night caused an old and storied inn for travelers to have its name changed. It includes some pleasingly evocative imagery, particularly with regard to the proprietors of the inn and the men-at-arms that converge upon it.  “The Christmas Inn” was written by author Ella F. Mosby and illustrated by acclaimed English-American artist R.B. Birch and was originally published in 1892. Modern readers may find the tensions described in this story strikingly familiar but take heart at the way they are set aside during the holiday season. ... Wisdom from the Wastelands Issue #39: Unique Superscience Artifacts Regular price: $0.99 Bundle price: $0.01 Format: Watermarked PDF Imagine — barely 50 years ago — pulling out your smart phone in Dallas to take a selfie as President Kennedy passed by. The technology people casually sit on today might have gotten you disappeared by an alphabet agency, for possessing alien devices and/or photobombing by the Grassy Knoll gunman. A hundred years ago, talking into your hand could have landed you in an asylum. Three centuries ago, they would have burned witches for catapulting surly birds at petulant pigs. This idea, Clarke’s Second Law, is a powerful philosophical/imaginative concept and a very useful tool for Mutant Lords. In Mutant Future, it translates into superscience: Ancient equipment so advanced it seems supernatural, able to break the laws of physics and engineering. Wisdom from the W...

Total value: $23.15 Special bundle price: $0.25 Savings of: $22.90 (99%)

Price: $23.15 Holiday Festivity [BUNDLE] published first on https://supergalaxyrom.tumblr.com