Tuesday, the 7th, was my last day off, and I don't get another one until Friday, the 17th, so the work-week craziness hasn't let up yet. I do get two days off in a row, though, and my second Saturday off in a single month! I usually only get Saturdays off if I specifically request them, and even then it's only about 4 all year. I don't know if I'll figure out what to do with myself with a "weekend" off like this! Especially since I'll work my normal 5.5hr work day on Sunday, and then have Monday and next Tuesday off as well! It will almost be like a mini-vacation! I'll probably need it at that point.
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This past Wednesday was my first day helping out the store about 45minutes away. It actually wasn't that bad of an experience over-all. The ladies I was training seemed excited to learn, which is a fantastic shift from past employees I've attempted to train. There was a decent amount of customer traffic, but not so bad that it was overwhelming, which was also nice. Honestly, the only time I cursed my fate about having to go out there was the drive home. We were having major snow squalls all day - and of course we've been having gorgeous springtime weather ever since - and those squalls were not letting up. I hit up the same highway I drove off of when I drove home from visiting my mom and sister for Thanksgiving. I was much farther east than where I drove off the road, but that was always in my head as I attempted my trip home.
The road didn't have enough snow on it for the plows, due to the wind brushing it off, and yet there was enough on it to be slippery. The roads were also icing over, so the majority of my trip home was with my hazards on as I drove about 40mph (~64kph) in a 65mph (~105kph) zone. Any faster, and I started to slide, or the wind would push me. It was darn near terrifying whenever a big rig (lorry) billowed past me. But I kept my pace, I white-knuckled my way down the highway, and I made it home safely; even if it did take me nearly an extra 10min to do so.
I didn't do much else Wednesday night. I simply snuggled my husband and binged Netflix.
Tuesday night Hubby wanted a breather from his re-watch binge of the American The Office. So, since we were intrigued anyway, and Netflix had been bombarding us with ads for it, we caved and finally started up The Witcher. Wednesday we finished the first season: 4 episodes Tuesday; other 4 on Wednesday. I must say, the show was great advertisement in and of itself. I'm now intrigued enough to want to play the games and read the novels the whole fandom is based off of.
It's been a while since I've had a computer that I could really play games on, though, and I don't know if my laptop is capable. Anyone know if there are console ports for the first two games? At the very least, Hubby can get the third game for the PS4. I saw recommendations to stick with a Windows platform, such as a computer or Xbox One, but again, I don't know how well my laptop will hold up, and our Xbox is a 360.
I'll touch back on The Witcher series on Netflix towards the end of this post. First I want to finish recapping my week.
Thursday was the return of our D&D sessions. We made the mistake of separating the party again. This time it wasn't intentional though. Also, our party was nearly wiped by a friggen magical Rug of Smothering!
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| Rug of Smothering as depicted in D&D 5e rule books |
The story gets a touch long, so I'm going to finish my weekly recap first, and then I'll circle back to this.
Friday, I was once again at work, and then I did some much-needed shopping at Walmart - I had been avoiding it for a while - before coming home to talk D&D with Hubby and Wolfhearted. After an hour or two, Wolf headed home, and Hubby and I again cuddled as we talked about our day.
Saturday I pulled a minor whoopsie.
Remember back in November when I was singing Cyhyr's praises for doing so well during NaNoWriMo? Well, on January 2nd she asked me if I'd be willing to beta the first chapter for her. I warned her it might be a bit before I had time to beta; she was cool with that since she had two other sets of eyes also checking it.
This past Saturday I finally found time to read and beta her chapter.... and apparently proceeded to give the poor thing a minor heart attack.
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But, see, Cy asked me to look at her story with a "critical eye"... and I took that request super seriously.... aaaaaaaand I left her like 100 comments on a 21pg/6600+ word chapter. Most of the comments were either positive reactions to her writing, or questioning whether or not she missed a comma. Some were questions to clear up things the fans would inherently know, but were confusing for a non-fan. Some comments were asking about continuity or foreshadowing and the like. All-in-all, I tried to keep my comments even between both the praise and critique categories.
Cy has since told me that she appreciates the critical eye I put to her work, and she did thank me quite frequently for my comments. But... yeah... I can only imagine what it was like to have gotten a notification that I was editing her work... and there were 100 comments to sift through! I'd probably have a heart attack as well.
Sorry for the added stress right out the gate! My bad!
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Her reply?
HAHA. Fair. She did follow up with basically a "for reals though, thanks for the comments. I want this to be the best I can make it" so, yay for that.Cyhyr: Maybe if SOMEONE didn't leave ~100 comments on the first chapter, I'd have the second one available for y'all sooner than feb 1st lol
After terrorizing poor Cy, I spent the evening watching anime with Hubby, Omnibladestrike, and Goob.
Minor tangent: Omni has changed most of his handles to either his given name or to dragnime. So... Omni, if you're reading this and would prefer I use dragnime for your name here, please let me know.
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Look at me, actually getting this thing pre-written, edited, and scheduled to publish "on time."
Sunday evening, while Hubby was at work, and I had the American football playoffs on in the background, I had every intention to finish my draft of this blog, or possibly work on some fictional writing.
Instead I spent HOURS trying to catch up on that social media backlog I keep commenting about. I really should just wave the white flag and resolve myself to the idea that everything that happened on Tumblr the last week of December/first week of January is long gone and forever lost to me....
I did also balance my bank book, and buy new long-sleeve shirts for work... so... there's that.
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Anyway, now that we're all caught up, let's backtrack to that D&D session on Thursday, and how that relates to both my current fiction writing inspiration, as well as The Witcher series.
Fair warning, this is going to be a bit long, so if you don't particularly care about the details you can go ahead and just scroll down. I'll signal when I'm done chatting about this, and I'll recap the main details so you won't be lost. Also, for those reading my full summary, there will be blood and character death mention, just FYI.
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We closed out the previous session by discovering one of the shipping crates in the warehouse was actually a solid block of stone merely painted to look like a crate; expertly painted, but still. Said stone block was fixed to the stone floor via grooves, and pushing the block along the grooves revealed stairs to a secret basement hidden beneath it.
Thursday's session started with the party searching the hidden basement. This is where we encountered the Rug of Smothering - or Murder Rug, as Kriv started calling it. The battle was probably way harder than it should have been, especially when we gave up fighting the thing for a few rounds, instead opting to try to pull the dang rug off of our allies. It went from smothering Cutter to suffocating Kriv... all with just one simple hit point left. We would have been fine if ANYONE hit it just once more, instead of attempting to wrestle the blasted thing!
We were far more depleted and beaten up than Hubby expected we'd be, considering it was the ENTIRE PARTY against this SINGLE RUG; NO OTHER ENEMIES. So, after confirming that the coast was clear, Cutter muscled that stone block door back closed. Feeling secure, the rest of the party voted to take a Long Rest in order to recover.
The D&D rule books define a "Long Rest" as:
Since we could still take watch, we each offered to do so, but Cutter was too paranoid about the group resting in an enemy's lair with only one presumed entrance/exit. He refused to rest - health points be damned - and had Cutter take sole watch. No skin off the rest of our noses... supposedly. After our rest was completed with no incident, our newest party member Solf - or, more accurately, Kriv after watching Solf eye up one of the lair walls - discovered a false-wall that led to a large storage room of gems. Cutter was still on edge and all sorts of "Oh, hell no!" about the gems; refusing to touch anything within the Thieves Den we had stumbled upon. The rest of the group grabbed handfuls. Kriv opened his backpack and just swiped his arm along the shelf to knock as many gems into the pack as possible....a period of extended downtime, at least 8 hours long, during which a character sleeps or performs light activity: reading, talking, eating, or standing watch for no more than 2 hours. If the rest is interrupted by a period of strenuous activity—at least 1 hour of walking, fighting, casting Spells, or similar Adventuring activity—the characters must begin the rest again to gain any benefit from it.
Then we had to roll saving throws.
Kriv, Solf, and our NPC partymate Hakkim all vanished as we touched the jewels. Omni's character Faelyth passed her throws, so she stayed behind with Cutter. This was the beginning of the end.
Turns out the gems were how the thieves normally left their den; they were all transportation spells, similar to a portkey from the Harry Potter franchise. If Faelyth and/or Cutter grabbed just one gemstone each, Hubby would have instantly teleported them as well, but he first wanted to see the party's reaction.
Faelyth and Cutter decided to jet the heck out of that room once the other three disappeared. Cutter attempted to re-open the door he had closed behind the group; not knowing that the thieves used the gemstone teleportation specifically because the stone "door" is designed to lock into place once closed, and cannot be opened from inside. After a few fails, Hubby wanted the duo to go back to the gems and be teleported. However, Cutter is a laser focused man who was more-or-less weaponized since he was a child. He goes after a single task, and doesn't waver unless aimed at or otherwise directed towards a different goal.
Cutter's goal was to get the heck out of that basement lair, and he couldn't think of any option other than through that door. So he started hacking away at the stone to try to carve their way out. Hubby made sure to give Wolfhearted plenty of warning signs - mainly dust falling on top of Cutter and the roof above him shaking - to stop what he was doing and change his plan of attack. Cutter isn't that kind of man, and Faelyth is too socially anxious to pipe up and say anything to the hulking man. Sooooo Cutter chopped away enough for the stone to slip through the doorway... and... onto him.
The real ironic part is that, since Cutter did manage to dodge, and therefore only had part of his body crushed, he would have been able to survive the incident had he rested earlier and recovered all his health - or healed his earlier wounds if we aren't being meta about it. Instead, poor Cutter was still too beaten up from THE DAMN MURDER RUG and succumbed to his injuries.
Panicked, Faelyth tried to climb over the rock to get through the newly opened door and out of the warehouse. She slipped on all of Cutter's blood, smashed hard against the stone block, nearly died as well from basically impaling herself on the corner of the stone, and crawled her way to safety... after accidentally pushing hard enough on the stone to shift it and further flatten poor Cutter's corpse.
While Omni had fun running Faelyth, she no longer has ties to the party, has no clue where her other partymates are, is a Drow covered in blood - which is never good - and is a painfully introverted monk that does NOT like being in a city to begin with. So he's going to have her Flight instincts kick in, and she's going to jet. Omni's going to bring in a new character instead of continuing to play as Faelyth, but since she is still alive, there is a chance of potentially running into her again in the future.
In the meantime, though, Faelyth not even attempting to look for her missing partymates before skipping town also means it will be super hard for Kriv, Solf, and Hakkim to find out what happened to their left-behind friends. They may never find out about Cutter's death, and if they do, they may not realize that Faelyth is still out there somewhere.
This is of course assuming that the trio will survive their own ordeal. The gemstones teleported them into the thieves' treasure room. They each filled as many pockets and pouches and sacks as they could, then snuck out of the room. They figured out that the "thieves" are actually cultists worshiping a... demon, I think? Kriv expertly found and dismantled a bell alarm on the exit door, only to discover six cultists praying on the other side... and proceeded to use Thunderwave to attack them... which slams the targets with a powerful air wave, buuuuut also booms out a THUNDEROUS clap that can be heard up to 300ft (~91m) away. Good thing you dismantled that bell alarm there, Kriv....
I really can't control any of my characters from doing The Stupid. Buuuut, Wolfhearted is clearly the same way, hence poor Cutter's death. At least Kriv's trio survived their encounter thus far, and stopped the blood pool from making a demonic summoning circle. Also, Hubby fully supports players not meta-gaming, by following the character's lead instead of re-directing them using player-only knowledge or foresight. Given his characterization thus far in the campaign, Cutter absolutely would have kept hacking away at that stone, believing his 23 year-old self too indestructible for the roof caving in to actually be a problem. Wolf played him that way, damn the results, so Wolf has bonuses for his new character's creation as a reward for such play.
Wolfhearted does seem excited for his new character, as is Omni for his. Wolf was over Friday night starting his build of the new character, and Hubby's trying to get Omni over tonight to work on his.
Anyway, it will be cool to see how these new characters interact with Kriv, whom I could have sworn I was going to lose on Thursday, and I would have been so devastated! I've grown really attached to this kid! I believe he is officially the second-longest D&D character I've played as, and is closing in on Jolene for longest-running character.
Not too shabby for a randomly thrown together character for a "one-shot" game....
Also, yes, Kriv is totally a "kid" still. He may technically be considered an adult by Dragonborn standards, and may have the same physical build as an adult human, but he's still only 16. So I'm very much trying to play him like a modern-day 20 year old human: an adult but still so green to the whole Adulting thing that he might as well be a kid.
That said, due to Kriv's confusion about the term "seed money," he's spending most of the 800 gold coins he swiped from the treasure room on a bunch of large pots and soil. Then Hakkim - who was born over 200 years prior, but due to his Wild Magic constantly shifting his age is effectively now 20 - will plant his own coins in an attempt to grow "money trees." Honestly, Kriv isn't THAT intelligent, but he does have - barely - "above average" intelligence, and really should know better than to believe you could grow "money trees" by planting "seed money." To be fair, though, he did also witness Hakkim's Wild Magic sprout a tree that had fresh baked loaves of bread as "fruit." So now, to Kriv, all things are possible if Hakkim's Wild Magic is involved.
Hubby even rolled for the likelihood of Hakkim's magic sprouting plant life from the gold coins, AND FRIGGEN PASSED WITH A ROLL OF LIKE 97! So, assuming the trio manages to get out of the cultists' den, and survive until Kriv can buy the pots and soil, and assuming the planted coins are not disturbed, golden trees will start to sprout in 3 years, and will be fully matured "money trees" - growing precious gems instead of fruit, and having sheets of emeralds for leaves - in about 14 years.
And Solf wanted none of our nonsense, so he doesn't get a copper of any of our profit!
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OKAY! FOR ANY WHO SCROLLED PAST THAT EPIC ABOUT OUR LATEST D&D SESSION, YOU CAN STOP NOW! I'M DONE!
The quick recap for those who skipped the breakdown:
Now, since Kriv didn't witness poor Cutter's demise, and who knows if he'll run into Faelyth to hear tell of it, I don't know if he'll ever find out that Cutter died, as I mentioned in the more in-depth summary. Presumably, the local guards will EVENTUALLY come upon the destroyed hidden opening to the den - or the trio will lead the guards back to it - and find Cutter's body there, and it will still be recognizable enough to know that it was him crushed under the stone flooring. Someone has to tell Cutter's owner/boss/adoptive father over at the gladiatorial stadium. Perhaps Kriv will find out that way if he isn't part of the discovery of Cutter's corpse.The party explored a hidden basement lair that was believed to house thieves trying to topple the social elites by way of cursed metal jewelry inflicting murderous insanity among them. There was no one in the lair aside from an enchanted Rug of Smothering, which nearly killed off the party by strangling Cutter, and then Kriv, while also beating away the other three.
After taking a rest, which Cutter refused to participate in since he was on-edge about camping within the Thieves' Den, everyone else was healed and had recovered their mana (spell slots, if you're being meta about it). The party discovered a hidden stock room of gems, and while greedily grabbing them - something Cutter again refused to participate in - Kriv, Solf, and NPC partymate Hakkim managed to grab gems that were secretly teleportation spells. They vanished, and in a panic Cutter and Faelyth attempted to go back through the entrance they had used to descended into the lair in the first place, except when Cutter closed the door behind them earlier he accidentally locked them inside.
Laser focused on his task to get them out, and confident he could take any damage that came his way, Cutter carved at the door across the top of the stairs, and ended up having the roof collapse on him, causing him to bleed out and die - although, his injuries would have been survivable if he had rested and recovered with everyone else. Hubby still rewarded Wolfhearted for his playing of Cutter because it was in character to a fault, and that dedication to characterization over survivability should always be praised. Faelyth, terrified of everything she witnessed, just ran away. We may see her again in future sessions, but in the meantime Omni is bringing in a new character as well.
Meanwhile, the trio of Kriv, Solf, and Hakkim discovered that they were teleported into a treasure room, and quickly looted it before escaping the room. They realized they are hunting down demon worshipers, not rebellious thieves. While trying to escape the cultists' den, Kriv used Thunderwave to surprise attack six cultists praying in the next room. He didn't think about the fact that such an attack would alert others just as well as the bell alarm he had JUST disarmed.
The trio survived the cultists - barely - but are now unsure if they will be going up against another wave of them. In the meantime, Kriv and Hakkim made a plan to use the 800 gold pieces they each swiped from the treasure room as literal "seed money" in hopes that Hakkim's chaotic Wild Magic will take hold and cause the gold to sprout into literal "money trees." Hubby rolled, and assuming we survive to plant the money, and it doesn't get disturbed, we WILL have literal money trees sprouting.
Either way, I already have grand plans of Kriv writing up a Beowulf-style epic in honor of Cutter. However, because it's Kriv and because Cutter wasn't very forthcoming with personal info - Monday's questionably-canon soft roleplay with Wolfhearted notwithstanding - I'm guessing Kriv's epic might not end up being terribly accurate....
None of this will happen until Kriv finds out about Cutter's death, however, so I have some time to work on it.
I already have plans. Lots of wonderful, glorious, hyperbolic plans.
And this finally brings me back to The Witcher on Netflix. In the series, there is a bard by the name of Jaskier. Now, apparently the name Jaskier is Polish - the language the books were originally written in - for "yellow flower" or "buttercup" and thus his name was translated to "Dandelion" in the books and games, but kept as Jaskier for the Netflix series. Also, in fairness, Jaskier/Dandelion is simply his stage name, if you will. If we're being technical, the bard's name is Julian Alfred Pankratz, Viscount de Lettenhove, a noble turned bard upon completing his studies and becoming bored with teaching.
Anyway, he has become a beloved side character, and is responsible for probably the most popular and obsessively played/shared/covered song from the Netflix series: "Toss a Coin to Your Witcher," a ballad to try to positively rebrand the otherwise ostracized Geralt of Rivia and his other Witcher brethren.
I really do love this song, and I get all of the hype it's received. Give it a listen, if you haven't already by now. The show has been out for nearly a month, after all....
Anyway, while there is really no way I could ever make Kriv nearly as epic and/or masterful as Jaskier, I now have a new "mentor" as it were. I doubt I could write anything as catchy as "Toss a Coin..." but that's the goal I have for Kriv and his epic retellings of himself and his friends. There's a reason I created Kriv as more of an acting bard than a songsmith though.... Again, Cutter's getting an epic written about him that is more akin to Beowulf's poem, or the Odyssey, or Trials of Hercules and the like rather than a song. I'm excited to get this figured out.
Any sort of work on my ML fanfiction - either OatS or prepping for my February projects - are most likely put on hold until I get this dedication to Cutter ironed out. I need to make sure it's good to go for whenever Kriv discovers his friend's fate.
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I want to give you fine readers something new to read so bad!
Until next week.
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That sounds exactly how most of my D&D games went! I love it!
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