Random Thoughts

Beyond The Cracked Mirror

( Book idea ramble )

So, by now the news is everywhere here in the US: Osama Bin Laden, architect of 9/11, was killed in a firefight in a multi-million dollar mansion in Pakistan.

I'm not sure how to feel about this.

On the one hand, I won't say I'm not glad he's gone. I have no sympathy for the man himself or the ideals he represented.

I'm ambivalent about the manner of his death. The Navy Seals that found him scouted out the place then butchered everyone inside. There were women and children killed, including one used as a human shield.

That single-mindedness has me somewhat disturbed. Sure, they didn't bomb the place off the map, but still I'm not comfortable with the deaths of those arguable innocents.

So while I can grimly think, "Yay. He's gone." I'm not standing up and cheering. Bin Laden is gone. Al Queda isn't. Not yet.

I just don't know how I feel about this.

One thing I've seen a lot in various bits of writing advice is that once you've finished one story, it's time to start working on the next. This tends to be a big, scary thought, because often, you feel like you've used up all the ideas you had on the book you're working on currently.

But it's occurred to me that I think I know what my next project will be once I've finished The Tale of The Exile.( musings and ideas )
Yay ideas!

My first update in a fairly long time.

I was all set to facepalm for my state yet again as the state legislature passed a "Birther" bill that would require presidential candidates to provide their full long-form birth certificates to prove they are natural born citizens.

I hate the Birther movement. I really wish it would die. President Obama has repeatedly produced his birth certificate, but because Hawaii doesn't use quite the same forms of certificates as other states it gets repeatedly challenged. This is just bad politics at work.

I don't like the Tea Party. I think they're radicals way too far on the right, and I feel most of the ones that have been elected have revealed themselves to be hypocrites of the highest order. But for all that, I think the idea of "fiscal responsibility" has merit. However, those who claim to be pursuing this lofty goal have decided to use this agenda as a mask to pursue right-wing fascism.

The Birther nonsense is an outgrowth of this. It's pure garbage, and I'm embarrassed that my state is participating in it.

But thankfully, Gov. Jan Brewer also recognized this bill for the bullshit it is and vetoed it.

I will freely admit I don't like many of Gov. brewer's policies, but this I can finally applaud. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for chopping the nuts off this thing.

What the hell is wrong with my state? Congressional Democrat Gabrielle Giffords was shot outside a supermarket while meeting with constituents today. So were a whole bunch of other people, including a federal judge. The guy fired of 20 rounds into the crowd.

What the fuck?

Really, what the fuck?

Has the political divide in our country gotten so acrimonious? I mean, what the fuck?

Jesus.

Maybe I shouldn't be watching the Hayward hearing....it just keeps pissing me off watching Tony lie through his fucking teeth.

"I can't recall."

"I wasn't involved"

"I had no knowledge of shit that my company was doing to cut costs at the expense of safety."

713 safety violations in five years. Fucking BP. The next highest number quoted was 8.

I ThinkI agree with Mr. Burgess - "Well, with all he doesn't know, apparently any one of us could do his job."

So, I was digging through my folders, doing some spring cleaning, when I came across this. It's a bit of world-building I did for a friend's campaign, a bit of holy text for an order of psions living in a city called Dreamheart. It's basically an origin myth for the God of Madness in this setting, as well as the creation of the city of Dreamheart, the psionic race known as the Talashari, and the Teninar (dream spirits that bond with the Talashari, essentially this world's version of the Kalashtar). I liked doing this bit, and I'm trying to figure out what I could cannibalize for my own home game...perhaps a city drawn into the Shadowfell or The Region of Dreams.

This is one reason I was drawn to Aldora. I like the idea of collaborative world-building, because I was already doing some of it to begin with. I also have a Traveler's Guide to Shadowmount, which is another city in this setting, (and another place set within The circle of Endless Night, which I thought was one of the coolest ideas from his cool idea-packed game world). I may post it up later.

I;m looking for suggestions to make this bit of holy text more readable. I think I took minimalist description to it's limit, and there's a lot of repetitiveness that I think gets in the way of the narrative. Thoughts?

 

( Codex Ixilati )

My fingers have been clicking away, doing scads of writing. Most of it isn't story writing, though...it's world writing. Creating backstory and things to hang ideas on. Much of it was coming up with cities, for which I blame cracking open my copy of Sharn: City of Towers. It got me in the mood to dig out my old 3rd Edition "Building cities" packet and start building cities district by district. Here's an example, from the town of St. Clarice:

 

( Rue Angelique )

of course, after building St. Clarice (which is small, only 10 districts) I got the urge to do other cities. First I dug up Notre Dame, which I had done some work on WAAAY back when (I think I started mapping it out around 2003-2004, but honestly I couldn't tell you when I first started messing with it, I only know it was the fist city I built with the demo version of Campaign Cartographer and was what convinced me to buy the full program). After some design work, however, I decided that I didn't really want to be dealing with that city much. It's too far away from the current campaign area to merit much design work, and I can't forsee sending the party there anytime soon.

However, this brought up something I had considered, a trip to Minas Mesidii, the elven city on the other side of the barrier between The World and The Feywild from where my party is. My party is currently trying to stop an invasion being launched from this city against their home, so it seems natural that they might, at some point, visit it. And I've never done any design work for Avaleron, the nation of imperial elves that threaten the party. This would be a good chance to discover just how a city in this country differs from the familiar ones of Coralton. It seemed like a good challenge.

So I've started. And I've done some initial mapping. I've laid out the district I'd like to use, but here I've gotten a little stuck. I know the areas, but I'm having a hard time placing them spatially. I'm not sure how I want to build this city, aside from having a palace at the center of it. I'm not sure how I'm going to shape this city. Should I do the typical wheel structure? Should I put some sort of lake nearby, or use a river? How can I split this up into neighborhoods to make everything make sense? I'm not a city planner!

Oy. So I'm looking to divide up 20 districts into a bunch of neighborhoods, each of them having 2 - 5 districts each. I'm also trying to come up with some geographical features that may have an impact on the design (like the river I added to St. Clarice way back when) and how that would affect city development. I've put up the districts I've selected and if you have any suggestions, I'm open to them.

 

( Districts of Minas Mesidii )

It's not been a very productive week for me. i haven't done a lot of writing...mostly I've just been watching my New Series Doctor Who collection and writing up entries for my Dungeons & Dragons Wiki.

My rest cycle got messed up again, so I'm trying to adjust it back to something sane and, if I'm being honest, not really doing that great a job of it. It's probably an adjustment to the summer heat...It encourages me to crank up the cooler, which makes me sleepy. The cooler doesn't cool very well when the outside temperature is lower than the temp inside my room, which makes my room warmer at night than it is during the day, and my level of wakefulness fluctuates to follow suit. It's annoying, and it makes me not want to do much. Not really a good habit to be in.

Because I have nothing better to do, I found myself musing about how I managed to get into Roleplaying Games in the beginning. It started with a board game, oddly enough.

This was in '93 or '94 (I don't quite remember which). It was just after Feast (the Baha'i equivalent of church, where the local Baha'is gather, read prayers and writings, deepen in the Faith, and then deal with whatever business the Local Spiritual Assembly had to address). At least, it was after the portion of Feast that the kids were expected to sit through 9prayers and readings), after which we were excused so the adults could talk shop without boredom-induced mischief.

We were meeting at the Stone's house this month (there were only two Baha'i families in Chino Valley, ours and the Stones, so we alternated Feasts). After the kids were excused, me and Danial Stone would head into Danial's room to play. Danial and Jeremy had quite an impressive collection of board games, the kinds with lots of interesting gadgets and little fiddly plastic bits. The game we pulled out to mess with on this particular occasion was called HeroQuest.

HeroQuest was a board game made by an alliance of Milton Bradly and Games Workshop, set in the Warhammer Fantasy universe. It had everything to ecite the imagination of a 12-year-old: Fold out bookcases and furniture, squares of tiles with exotic things printed on them (rock slides and pit traps and walls and such), card with treasures and magical items and spells printed on them, and, most importantly of all, the figures. There were cream colored skeletons and zombies, green orcs and goblins and one-eyed axe-wielding lizard things, hulking gray armored warriors, a skeletal wizard, and a hideous gargoyle. And then there were the maroon hero figures - the mighty barbarian, the crafty wizard, the stout dwarf, and the willowy elf. We set the furniture, tiles, and monsters out, chose figures, and ran through the board chasing monsters down.

We weren't playing by the rules very much...all we know was that we used the dice with skulls and shields on them to attack and defend, and we had the stas for the monsters. Daniel's set was missing a few bits, and other pieces were broken, but that didn't matter. We made up a story as we went along...the elven prince of the realm had been kidnapped (we rescued him from the rack) and the Chaos Sorcerer needed to be defeated, but he could only be hurt by The Spirit Blade, so once we found that we could fight him!

It was a glorious time, and by the time the parents came in to drag us home, I had asked to borrow the game from Daniel. He agreed, and so I borrwed the game for a month. I read the rules, and found I'd been doing some stuff wrong just setting things out. I invited my friend Philip and my sister to play with me, but this time I was in the role of Zargon, the Mad Wizard who controlled all the monsters and refereed the game (basically the Dungeon Master). The game was fun, but it was incomplete...several important bits were missing, such as the cardboard platform that had all the information on new weapons and armors that could be bought with the gold found from treasure cards.

So I saved my allowance in order to buy my own copy of the game. It took a while, because I've never been good at saving, but eventually I managed to get a copy of the game myself and assembled it.

I also made copies of the back of the quest booklet. The game game prepackaged with 14 quests, but had a space in the back that you could photocopy to make your own new quests. So I found myself making a lot of new quests in my spare time, cutting out little icons and pasting them on to a map.

I convinced my friend Philip to play with me, though my sister didn't return. He wound up controlling all the heroes. We went through a few of my custom maps after finishing the fourteen official quests. We didn't get very far into my homemade quest, sadly. The game just seemed to die for a bit.

Then Phillip picked up a boxed set for the Warhammer Fantasy war game. He thought it was an expansion of HeroQuest (a natural enough mistake) with slightly different rules, and invited me to play, this time with him controlling everything.

The quest was me, playing a frail wizard, taking orders from a king to retrieve items that got stolen from him. We didn't use a board - he just described scenes to me and asked me to react to them. I fought a monstrous Chaos Warrior on a rearinghorse (the one who as pictured on the top of the box, who was like a general or something), using spells of slightly disturbing magic (like one that burst people's hearts from shear pleasure, and another that created a 20 foot tall pillar of rotten flesh) to win the day and retrieve the king's items.

Eventually, Phillip revealed to me that he had no idea what he was doing and was making things up as he went along based on images in the codex and card descriptions. I didn't really care...I wanted to know if I would finally corner the Chaos General and end his reign of terror. But we never did continue that campaign.

But that was where the seeds of a hobby were set - playing through a half-understood wargame after playing a board game based on it. It was a glorious start.