First-Person Narrator

I've been meaning to do my answer for the "Game Covers Women Want to See Meme" for ages. Finally getting around to it tonight! Here's what it's all about - a while back, Brand Robins, posting at Yudishthira's Dice, said the following:

Ladies, what RPG covers (or interiors) have you seen that involve a woman in the art that make you say, “I want to play that” or, just as good “I want to play her.” Or that make you feel like it is a game you could like, or be included in by a group of guys you’d never met and whose maturity you didn’t neccisarily know?

And then tekanji turned it into a meme:
( Read more... )

D&D today was pretty darn good. First off, the new wheeled backpack (which I refer to in my head as the Geek MoBag) works perfectly. It holds all of my source books (that'd be ten, for those who care) and my DM binder and notebook and such just fine. The front pocket is exactly the right size for a bunch of pencils, a calculator, and my dice. And then, the best part, I can lift it in and out of the car without knocking myself over! And roll it around! Instead of giving myself bruises by trying to carry the weight over one shoulder! w00t!
( And now, some geeky talk about the content of today's game... )

I am so absurdly proud of myself. My entry for this week's poetry challenge over at tucson_writers was a lot of fun, and I'm really pleased with how it turned out. Go check out "A Geek's Sonnet to His Love"!

In the morning, Mom is taking me shopping for pants. Pants! Eeeee! I'm so excited about the idea of owning blue jeans again. I'm still mourning my last pair, which died tragically of a hole in the thigh...

After mattmatt's inspiring example, Jimmy and I spent a chunk of time this afternoon/evening making little dudes out of sculpey, for use as miniatures in my D&D game. You can see pics of my efforts in my Amazingly Geeky Gallery, but here's the group shot:



The things I've learned from this experience are as follows:
1) Something about dwarves lends itself to excellence in clay miniatures. mattmatt's dwarven cleric looks great, and my dwarven monk came out better than any of the others I did.

2) My webcam is a really, really bad camera. I may borrow my dad's much nicer digital camera sometime soon and take better photos of these little guys.

I'll probably end up doing some of the less-in-demand-as-miniatures characters later on this week, so you may be seeing a few Valmaiverse regulars in clay form in the not-too-distant future.

Well, I'm stressed out. What else is new?

I'm actually feeling ok right now, though. We ended up cancelling our usual D&D game tonight, and I went out to dinner with Jimmy and Dan, instead. I love playing D&D, of course, but playing for three + hours is a lot more intense and tiring, etc., than having dinner and chatting for one hour.

Now that I'm home again, I'm gonna try to organize some of the things I need to accomplish for Friday. I may yet get around to writing a WotD today. We'll see. In the meantime, here's the original lineart that I used to make all of those silly icons yesterday. I think most of it looks a lot better in black and white and at the original size, frankly, even though nobody seems to have arms to speak of...

Haldis rocks.

I have had many characters over the years, since my super-awesome cousin Brian taught me to play D&D at the tender age of... well, so young that I don't really remember (though I do have a lingering pencil scar dating to that era, oddly enough). All of them have been cool in their own way.

Emerald, my first D&D char, was super-neat because she was an -elf- and her name was -Emerald- and she had a cool -sword- that was on -fire-. I rolled translucent pink dice, drew bad sketches, and had basically no roleplay to speak of.

But hey, I was a kid!

After Brian moved out and became a grown-up and stuff, and Erik and I kinda stopped playing D&D (for a while...) I took up MUDing. I had several different short-lived characters on many different MUDs. The one that survived was Revena of Mocker from Magrathea. Name look familiar? Yeah.

Revena was my first serious attempt at roleplay and, as a result, I consciously chose traits for her that were opposite to traits that I considered myself to have. For example, she's a complete coward. And she lies. A lot. She has basically no moral code. She's a thief. And an elf, rather than, say, human. And, more recently, she's become an immortal goddess, which is -definitely- something I'm not... She glows blue in the dark, as well.

Rev is such a totally awesome, complex, -old- character (I've been playing her for... Jesus. Over nine years now, I think.) that I could write pages and pages about her history and still have more to say. I think I -have- written pages and pages about her history, actually... And they're so out-of-date. I really ought to get off my butt and update the Player's Page.

Anyway, Rev became such a handful, story-wise, that I actually had to create an auxiliary character in order to help narration along. Gagiel, the stick-thin, elven pick-pocket became my next favorite character after Revena, and got some serious backstory all her own. Also, some truly bitchin' tattoos.

Then, Erik and some friends started playing D&D again. At first, I joined them with a cookie-cutter half-elven paladin (of Athena, of all things) whose full name I don't even remember. It shortened up to "Jade," though, thus keeping up the long tradition I've had of naming D&D characters after gemstones. Just a few sessions after starting to play with Jade, though, the group decided to convert to D&D 3.0, and I rolled up a new character.

Tourmaline. She was really the first character whose backstory, opinions and ideals were pretty much concrete from day one. With Revena, and with Gagiel, I had had a few ideas, and then sort of made things up as I went along. With Tourmaline, I planned everything out, and she was that much more real. So much so that when we decided to switch again, to 3.5, with new characters, I still thought about her, and about what she would have done with her life.

In order to write that story, which became my NaNovel this past November, I had to create still more characters, who were never actually used in an RPG and existed purely in fiction. Kelda, Latham and Mother Dyre all came to life in Microsoft Word, and remain pretty much unknown to anyone but me. Not for long, I hope.

But I digress... I was talking about RPG characters.

The next several after Tourmaline were created as NPCs, since I had taken over DMing for my gaming group full-time when we decided to start a new campaign. Ametrine, Brandekk, Emlyn, Valmai, Wynn, all are wonderful in their own ways. I even like Sondra, a little. They are so much fun to play, in part because they are such rich characters, and in part because I am, after all, the DM, and so I get to have the final word on what happens to any of them.

But nothing compares to the sheer joy that can be found in rolling a critical hit on a maximized empowered scorching ray, and completely wasting a CR 14 water drake.

Haldis is a mostly-human battle-sorcerer, and she can take down -anything-. Fireball, scorching ray, stone fist... her spells are freaking -awesome-, and she has the attack progression and armor proficiency to stand up in battle long enough to use them all. Well, she would, if it ever took that long to kill a monster.

I have so much fun playing her... I am a total munchkin.

Of course, half the fun is playing with my good friend Dan as DM, and Isaac, Jameson, JC and Sean. Isaac plays Haldis's brother, Darius, a rather more focused individual who has chosen a life of contemplation and bad-assery. A cleric, in other words. Jimmy is Dyreon, Haldis's husband, an elven diplomat approximately four times her age. I bet you can guess how well Darius and Dyreon get along... JC is a warforged with no name, who is loyal to Dyreon for no good reason, and likes to mutilate corpses. Good times. Sean, up until lately, when school started up again, was playing with us as a changeling bard who everyone thinks is an elf. Together, we kick serious monstrous ass. But mostly, Haldis kicks ass. And then, -she sets it on fire-.

Oh, how I love D&D.

You scored as Lawful Good. A lawful good person acts as a good person is expected or required to act. They are dedicated to upholding both what is right and what is set down in law. </td> Lawful Good 85% Neutral Good 80% Chaotic Good 65% True Neutral 60% Lawful Neutral 55% Lawful Evil 35% Chaotic Neutral 35% Neutral Evil 30% Chaotic Evil 20% What is your Alignment? created with QuizFarm.com

Jimmy and I just got back from California today. Mom and dad not only had my car fixed up a bit, but they very nicely had it washed for me, too. This means that I was finally (after years of waiting) able to apply my totally "kewl" magnetic flame decals to the doors. Oh man. FLAMING COROLLA.

I'm gonna go play with my new vacuum and stuff for a while, and then decide how much partying I'm feeling up to tonight. Happy New Year, everyone!