On Life and Love

“Observation” posted!

Jackie in a hamperChapter 8 of The Witches of Ming Ung, “Observation” is up, and picks up right where “Interception” left off:

“Hardi, why in all the worlds wouldn’t we tell Wilder about this?” Robert asked, waving a hand at her comm. He’d just listened to the ransom note for the second time, and was sitting at the desk with his feet propped up.

Yet. Not tell him yet.” Hardi stood still in the middle of the room, staring at the floor with her hands tucked in her pockets. “And I… don’t know,” she said slowly.

After that deep voice had threatened to go on “vacation” for a week, Hardi had listened to the message again. And again, until the rough voice was etched into her memory. Robert had walked in on her standing as she was now, letting the file loop. She’d looked at him guiltily, but let it play for him.

Robert sat leaned back and balanced his chair on two legs. “Have you had one of your visions? Does it feature you as the heroine, saving the planet from the bad guys?”

This has been a far crazier week than I thought it would be, hence the lack of writing here in any form. I worked at the hospital last weekend, and as I was moving an absolutely insane number of charts–more charts than I’d seen in about two years, when we starting doing a lot more digitally–I reminded myself why I have that job. Multiple streams of income. I’ve Greg started a new D & D game this week at the house, and I’m getting to play with all-new folks. A couple of guys from the LARP I do, one guy from work, and good ol’ Nathan.

Greg tried something this game that we’d never done before, and that was to use the Dawn of World (PDF) rules to have us collectively generate a world. We played D & D gods–Avandra, Zehir, Ioun, etc.–and created the world with our own flavor, everything from mountains and rivers to D & D races. Greg let us go decently far with changing stereotypes, so we were able to build civilizations with specializations and tech that differs from the stuff in the books. We’ve got a floating island, a nearly wiped out Elandrin civilization, a protected civilization of Wilden living in and around a forest of… well, let’s say Melora’s avatar is named after THC.

He’ll write up the world history from that session and make a world map, and then next session we’ll make characters in that world and be off on our crazy adventure. I think it’ll be a blast, especially once all the players learn about each other and settle into things.