Mooncrash Post-Game – Episode 51: An Urgent Summons

Disclaimer: As my weekly D&D resumed this Sunday, I thought I'd start chronicling my thoughts on each session here, as a means to examine my own DMing process. Mooncrash players? I ask you don't click the Jump Break below, for spoiler reasons.

Episode Title: An Urgent Summons

Episode Summary: After a half-year hiatus, The Nameless Company is summoned back together by Baron Zuss, their liege lord in Tojezen, who informs them their fortress, Bluffguard, has been covertly conquered by Prygor, the dreaded rival of the party's warlord. Hatching a plan to infiltrate the keep while the garrison is distracted by a local festival, the adventurers discovered a secret passage, containing the accursed tomb of Bluffguard's first Lord, and battle a cavern choker on the crude staircase.

Daily Drabble (Day 2)

D&D was on my mind today, so I immortalized a scene from today's session in the drabble. Here's the prompt:

lilt [lilt] noun

1. rhythmic swing or cadence

2. a lilting song or tune

Aaaaand here's the drabble:

The tracks are no younger than the sunrise. One set of footprints, broader and deeper than its four contemporaries, clearly belongs to a goliath. Another two wear campaigner's boots, the first bearing the distinct tread of a habitual marcher, the second being far more diminutive, childlike. The final two barely qualify as footprints at all; mere scuffs on the surface of the stiff savannah soil. Cutter glances between each of her four comrades, awaiting the verdict amid swaying waves of red dzhate grass. “It's a cliché,” she reports, in her affected elven lilt. “but we're going in circles.”

Thanks for reading! Come back tomorrow for more and check out more exploits from the Nameless Company at the campaign's Obsidian Portal page!

Day 16

Dreadfully behind, as always, but catching up. I wrote 3,200 words today without breaking a sweat and while it's perhaps naive to think I can continue at such a pace the rest of the month, I hope to at least catch up that way.

A little math tells me Cutthroat is like to actually clock in around 57,000 some words, but as Stall Draft 5 has got to be finished by December 5th, I have no time to dawdle around and finish the book. Cutthroat's gotta be down on November 30th like everybody else, 57,000 words or no.

A wiser man than me would say I've bitten off more than I can chew. A wiser man'd be right.

Ran another D&D session. A pair of them, actually, but they constitute as one mega-session in the recap, so enjoy! Not every session you get to push a PC into a vat of molten steel, eh?

Past 60% on Name of the Wind and still can't fathom it. It's settled down some, but the sheer, baldfaced arrogance of the whole premise drives me bonkers at every turn. Love to discuss further, but really oughta finish the book and my book first.

Day 2

Little behind today. A stone's throw from ending the prologue. Check out Death Bar!

Ran the next session of my current D&D campaign. I recently made the Obsidian Portal page public and, when I post a session update, I'll be sure to scamper back here and link up, I don't know, these three words for your perusing enjoyment.

Seriously, though – enjoy. I spend way too many hours updating.

I've also had a roulette of lines from the Epic Rap Battles of History running through my brain the past few weeks. Currently Michael Jackson vs. Elvis Presley which is, coincidentally, not my favorite.

Resurrection

It's me!

November is NaNoWriMo, an activity I've always looked upon with a certain degree of ingrained skepticism. Initially, I was excited – it seemed like a fantastic tool to kick oneself in the pants and, from my research into it, that's more or less what I've sussed.

At the same time, the guiding philosophy of NaNo runs so contrary to my own personal writing style that I was hesitant to jump on board, for fear that doing so would, by 30 days time, render me a gibbering hunk of typos and subject-verb disagreement. I completely understand I'm the exception when it comes to writers, but I have an incredibly difficult time pouring myself out and editing later. Good or ill, I deliberate over a sentence before committing it to page – just my style.

So, thusly, NaNo seemed like a poor choice. Plus, this month, I'm doing weekly rewrites on Stall, my zombie/bathroom/one-room horror script (money for drafts! commerce!), I'm running a full-time D&D campaign (link to follow soon) and I've also started doing this weird thing, where I close my eyes for six or seven hours a day and fall into a state of prolonged somnolence. (Weird, I know. My Thri-Kreen buddies have no fucking idea what that is.)

Point being, who's got the time for NaNo?

But fuck it.

Three Days of Rake

Chapter: 22
Page Count: 287
Word Count: 143,900
Nemo's Bounty: 998,000 Commercial



"Up close and personal, the Pylon is more a landscape than a spaceship; a city skyline, a rocky canyon or a mountain range. An irregular teltriton terrain of contour fins, docking ridges, sensor arrays, command towers and, most notably, quadroturret broadside batteries, over three times the width, five times the height and thirty times the length of The Unconstant Lover, stretches dottible upon dottible onward, from bulging engine bank to distant point of prow, like a bumpy beige horizon."

You'll note the suspicious drop in my productivity. I'm inclined to blame this fucker. Or maybe these smug bastards.

Three days off work will hopefully prove useful to me when I start again tomorrow. I swear, if there's one of those hateful little chore lists awaiting me when I stumble out of bed at four p.m. tomorrow, they're gonna rename Thursday "Arsonday" in my honor.

In other news, I've been planning for my upcoming Los Angeles-based D&D game (tentatively titled "Mooncrash" and am pleased to announce that I've converted two new players to the game! Subsequently, we have one Female Gnome Warlord, one Male Half-Orc Barbarian, one Female Half-Orc Paladin and one Male Eladrin Rogue, all currently under construction, along with my campaign's Obsidian Portal page. More information likely to come.

Lastly, my adoring girlfriend recently surprised me with an extremely early birthday present (mostly an attempt to feed more input into my thirsty writing brain) - a subscription to Gamefly which, before you ask, is the Netflix of video games. I recently returned The Force Unleashed II (for the Wii) and had these thoughts:

The Force Unleashed II:
Beautiful, intuitive, rushed and pretty much devoid of interesting narrative, FU2 is a diverting enough installment in the series, but overall falls short of the original's real ingenuities. Hacking through foes with dual lightsabers is a fun addition, but the game itself, particularly its story, is ultimately unsatisfying, with absurdly simple missions (even on highest difficulty), wave after wave of repetitive enemies and a flat, monotone plot line that barely resolves, despite a pair of overall unnecessary cameos from franchise big-hitters Yoda and Boba Fett. Three of five.

Until later (and hopefully with fewer blisters)
- T