Elves should have mathematicians, too

Dinner the past couple weeks was "get rid of things with milk in while 3rdragon isn't here", in particular hamburger buns (which turned into cheese sandwiches) and palak paneer from a mix that had rather questionable instructions (it turns out that 1.5 cups of milk + a packet of spices does not make a paste, it makes soup. Also that actual paneer works better than cheese that melts).

This week we're having pork and celery stew, and garden stir-fry, and probably garden salad.

So if I'm going to work my way through the onedeadplotbunny archives, I need to make a list of the projects I have outstanding, that being step one. I've made at least partial lists along those lines before, but not really ever done anything towards keeping them up to date. I rather suspect that I'm going to want more sorting and grouping than is easily available in a journal entry. I'm also going to want to be able to track status, but I don't think that's going to quantify nicely.

Maybe I'll start by writing it out on paper, and then we can see about typing it up and what format it should be in long-term.

Since I've gone to the bother of migrating this blog (not that there was really any bother involved), I suppose I could take the opportunity to add some content, since that's sort of the point of a blog. Not that there's going to be anything I can post that the one person reading this doesn't already know, but such is life.

Or at least low-effort anti-social blogging.

Maybe highlights of what I've read recently, and what we made for dinner this week (the second largely because I want it for reference). But really I ought to be writing scenes if I want to have any hope of completing Camp Nano, so probably I should stop typing here and go do that.

So I just read the most recently published (this year, I think) book in a series that was apparently started forty+ years ago, and then proceeded to reread the chronologically later but written forty+ years ago books that followed it. It's sort of surreal to see how the writing has changed -- not that the older books are bad, but the author is so much better now. There were definitely moments when I was telling the characters "You were so much smarter when you were eight years old!".

It's also fascinating to see how she maintained the continuity. I don't think she ever explicitly contradicted herself -- the political focus and the magic style* didn't quite line up, and some of the characters seemed to be lacking knowledge one might have expected them to have acquired (either during the new book, or during the fifteen years between), but the straight out facts weren't noticeably different. There were even some incidents that had been referred to in flashback in the old books that occurred in the new book.

I wonder a bit what she would do if she were to rewrite/edit the old books now -- whether the politics would change. Presumably some parts of the style would (the old books seem to rely a bit more on snappy banter for dialogue).

. . . I'd been going to also ramble about ebook discovery, but I think I've been staring at this bit of internet long enough, so that can be its own post (or not, depending whether I get to it).


*Doing all magic via the recitation of poetry has been deprecated in the new book

(Because clearly I should continue using this space to tell stories about my D&D game.)

In the style of my gaming advice posts, although this is an anecdote rather than a request for advice, let me introduce you to the characters:

• Ath, human paladin/rogue.
  
• Chou, dwarf fighter.
  
• Emgeri, human ranger/fighter.
  
• Perk, gnome/halfling cleric/bard.
  
• Rino, half-elf scout (and Emgeri's uncle).
  

We take turns running the game (Rino's player is our current GM), and we try to play with subjective morality as much as possible -- so Detect Evil really turns out more like Detect Smitability (this does mean that the GM needs to have a fairly good idea of what everybody's gods think about stuff, so as to return the correct opinions). So when Chou's player joined the game and said she wanted to play an evil character, we said, "Sure, but be aware that the paladin has to try to reform you once he finds out, and we probably need to talk outside of game to keep things in balance."

So, Chou. We met him at the home of one of Rino's friends, and he started traveling with us once his spiritual mentor abandoned him to finish his pilgrimage alone, with only a highly inaccurate map for guidance. He seemed a fairly standard grumpy and taciturn dwarf at first, except that he wore a cabbage on his head as a sign of his devotion to the Cabbage Lord (a god none of the rest of us had previously heard of). He was the chosen Migrator, which meant that he needed to go to the Cabbage Temple at the Elvish Ends of the Earth and plant cabbage seeds. We didn't really know where that was, and neither did he (beyond the inaccurate map from his spiritual mentor), but Rino thought his father would know, so Chou tagged along when we went to see Rino's father.

Of course, there were warning signs. Out of character I'd decided to try to avoid hitting Chou with Detect Evil (because who detects evil at random people they meet unless they're expecting to be attacked or something?) for as long as possible, hopefully until there was some sort of party bond* to inform my reaction to the information. But there were non-magically-assisted signs. In a conversation about a recent civil war, Chou said it was "good business," and rephrased as "bloody business" when questioned. But we could pass that off as a translation error -- it wasn't his first language, or Ath's, and you don't go around assuming people like civil wars. Then there was the time he attacked a sphinx Perk was trying to talk to "because it was ugly". That got him a yelling lecture from Ath, because who does that?, but he seemed willing to mend his ways.

And then we got to Rino's father's village, and Emgeri and Rino and Rino's father (= Emgeri's grandfather) had some awkward family conflict time, and the rest of us tried to figure out what was going on with the main plot, and then that night we were attacked by mummies. (This was perhaps a bit a result of an out of character discussion of ways to try to get Chou to be more a part of the group. Things we came up with involved putting him in a position where he needed our help, or in a position where we would all be working to the same goal, e.g. winning the fight.)

It seemed like this had the desired result -- we defeated the mummies, but Chou acquired some kind of mummy disease/curse and we all banded together to try to do something to fix it. Ath even detected evil to try to figure out what was up with the curse, and assumed the result was the curse. And we were all going to race off to the Cabbage temple in the morning, because Chou said his reward for completing the Migration would cure him.

Well. That didn't happen. Because when Chou went to ask Rino's father for directions, he decided the man was untrustworthy -- so clearly violence was the only way of getting the truth. And the relatives clearly weren't going to be okay with this, whatever their personal feelings about the man. And Ath is severely not okay with torture because of consequences of past adventures.

So after a lot of awesome in character conflict and arguments, we've headed our separate ways. Chou's been abandoned to Eeelvish justice, and/or the mummy curse. Ath and Emgeri and presumably Perk (she wasn't here last week) are heading off to follow the main plot, if only because Ath said he was doing so and Emgeri wouldn't leave him (despite calling him an idiot). We look forward to meeting the replacement/temporary character, "calm, rational, nice mercenary".

And we'll see what happens with the cabbage seeds.



*This might have worked better if we hadn't introduced Chou right before a long bit of mostly elided traveling, where presumably everyone was getting to know him in-character, but we didn't actually see it.

I could post about how job-hunting is terrifying, and so is trying to make sure I have/will have done everything needed to graduate by the appropriate deadlines, or about how I have forty students in my class and the next largest section only has 30, but instead I'm going to pretend like life is all frivolity and happy butterflies and ask for advice about D&D.

So, through a series of less-questionable decisions than last time (at least the ones I was responsible for), half of the party seems to have found itself in a situation where it needs to rescue the other half and maybe some NPCs from mostly unknown conditions in the middle of a pretty much unfriendly country.

The rescuers: Ath, human rogue 1/paladin 4, and Rino, half-elf scout 5(? If he's multi-classed I don't know about it). Known collectively as "Team 7 strength". Also Sombra, Emgeri's greyhound animal companion.

The rescuees: Emgeri, human fighter 1/ranger 4; Perk, over-excited tiny person cleric/bard 5 (I don't know what the proportions are); Henry, human NPC performer previously seen as my nano protagonist; and Rusty, human NPC somehow associated to Perk and Henry's band of travelling minstrels.

They're listed about in the order we care about getting them out of there -- we don't want to leave anyone behind, but we barely know the NPCs at all, so we're not about to get killed saving them from a fate that's better than death.

The situation: On our way to the Elven Ends of the Earth, we were forced* to travel through Orkinya, aka No-Magic Land. It seems to be a theocracy of sorts, as uncooperatively monotheistic as it's possible to be in D&D ("all the other gods are evil"), big on avoiding sin (and it seems sin = just about everything), and any magic that's not from their god is EVIL. (And only certain people are allowed to do their god-magic.) And they don't travel much at all, so any strangers will stick out like crazy.

They somehow detect any use of magic in their territory, and send out elite squads to arrest the people responsible. And maybe innocent bystanders as well. We're still not entirely sure what happened when they captured us. (Out of character, we know it's because Rino's thunderstone, while nonmagical, sounded a lot like magic.)

So we were captured, and thrown into a dungeon. Oddly, they didn't take any of our stuff. Ath concluded that they must've wanted us to escape, but he didn't see what else we could do . . .

So we escaped. Only the party got very separated while doing so, and Emgeri never showed up at the rendezvous outside the city. We can only assume he got recaptured . . .

Perk showed up at the rendezvous with Henry and Rusty by sheer coincidence, since she didn't know about it, but she showed up trailing Orkinyan guards who recaptured Henry and Rusty, and she decided to go back after them without telling anyone . . .

The resources: Three or more people who escaped Orkinyan prison by pretending to convert to the Orkinyan religion, who are happy to tell us everything they know. Any reasonably available non-magic items (we're at a town outside the border and could purchase things), or magic items although they'd probably just get us in trouble. The random stuff we're carrying.

Ath's plans tend to involve lots of lying. He just can't figure out what lie to use. Rino's tend to involve explosions.

. . . Anyone have any brilliant ideas?


*To be fair, we could have taken a boat, but Emgeri gets seasick, and we could've gone north, but that would've been perilously close to a town Ath was banished from . . .

I had a dream yesterday morning which involved evacuating the entire continent of North America by walking through a tunnel from California to Chile, and then through another tunnel to London. I don't think the reason for the evacuation was even clear in the dream. But one minute we were standing around talking about job stuff, and then we were heading down into the tunnel.

(Every reason I've come up with for evacuating the continent wouldn't really be solved by doing it through a pedestrian tunnel. Unless it was just a plot to lower population by then collapsing it on everyone.)

astaraelweeper is playing fun games, and I want to play too. Therefore!
- Take five books off your bookshelf.
- Write the first sentence
- Write the last sentence on page fifty
- Write the second sentence on page one hundred
- Write the next to the last sentence on page one hundred fifty
- Write the final sentence of the book
- Let your friends guess what book it is.

( Here are sentences, alphabetical by author. )

I have been playing far too much Battle for Wesnoth lately. I'm tempted to start writing my own scenarios, but do I really have any idea how to balance difficulty? No, I do not. (But the two-player campaign, which tells the tale of the forbidden love between an elf ninja (er, sorceress) and an orcish ninja (er, assassin)! Or the revisionist history in which you learn Queen Asheviere's not as evil as she looks! It's just the circumstances*!)

My Camp Nano novel has been rather diverted from the story I was actually intending to write (an adventure story about mind control devices posing as party toys) into revisions for New Trenham story one -- I'm still producing words, so I'm counting them, but it's not the story I expected. (Also, the revisions are rather more in depth than I expected, as in multiple full scene rewrites.)

The second month of what I've been reading will show up eventually.


*There are a lot of circumstances to play with, as revealed in Delfador's Memoirs, although designing the final mission so that the objective is for Asheviere to get killed would be all sorts of interesting (but we know it happens in Heir to the Throne, and there's a limit to how far this revisionist stuff should go. Motives, yes. Actual things that happen in-scenario, harder).

Dear various computerized search mechanisms,

What happened to wildcards? What happened to me having to ask if I wanted you to find words inside words? It's not that I object, really, to finding "elves" and "elvish" when I ask for "elf", or finding "danced", "dancing", and "dancer" when I ask for "dance" -- I could have misremembered what I was looking for.

But when it comes to finding "suitable" when I ask for "table" . . . or worse, "decomposition" when I ask for "composition" . . . can't I have a way to turn that off?

(You'll note I'm refraining from complaining about the near impossibility of searching for, say, "theorem 3.7" without having all separate occurrences of "theorem", "3", and "7" returned to me. I get that you don't like numbers and punctuation. I'm not pleased with it, but I get it.)

Continuing from the last post, the other option is that I get in a fight with technology and don't manage to post at all. The following is a tiny piece of fiction that I wanted to enter in a contest on a blog the other weekend, and I never managed to get through the captcha. So you guys can read it instead.
-------------
We paused by a pawnshop, penniless. He fingered his wedding band.

Surprise. "You'd risk --?"

"I would destroy it, if it would only --" He couldn't continue.

"You're not Frodo, buddy. This isn't some sequel to Lord of the Rings."

He opened the door, came back barehanded, some few dollars richer.

Three buildings back, a psychic -- a medium, draped in choice silks from the local Goodwill. Her allegiance: to cash, and to no other truth. He paid her. "Whom shall I summon?"

I let him answer.

"My wife. Dead two weeks."