Pre-August Notes

Monday morning: time for a new post.

Time. Ugh, that word. One of the most precious, most frustratingly small resources in my (real) world. 

My kids are going to be rolling out around noon today to go to a water park of some sort. Normally, that would be an invitation for me to do at least some heavy-ish blogging (in addition to the normal house maintenance). But I really, really want to be a little more responsible about some writing obligations I have, and get to things that need to be gotten to. Projects with deadlines (fixed, implied, and assumed) that have been neglected for the fun of world building and campaign crunching.

Fact is, as soon as the PCs get through their latest excursion/expedition...a short one and, possibly, extremely lethal...I plan on putting my campaign on temporary hiatus, just so I'm not using my free (writing) time to fill out the Olympic Peninsula and redesign elf culture.

[I'll probably blog about the elves and some point in the near future...they are fascinating little (er, tall-ish) guys in my world. Port Townsend is a cross between Gondolin and Melnibone with a HEAVY Spaniard influence. Grays Harbor is now named for the "gray elves" who are still conspicuously absent from the county...Abderdeen is as lawless a human settlement as you'd expect to find west of the Cascades (just like real life!), but the elves of Jackson county provide a bulwark between those perennial pirate-types and the more civilized "Sounder" towns]

*ahem* However, just because I will be back-burnering my campaign...probably till September...doesn't mean I won't be playing D&D. The boy will be handling the reins of Dungeon Master for the next four or five weeks as he develops his own AD&D campaign, ostensibly set in my world albeit somewhat east of the Rockies: he's using Montana and his map. A little more open, a little more wild, a little more "adventure."

Besides, he's starting small: he's adapting B2: The Keep on the Borderlands to AD&D (not much of a stretch...the mods are very small) and sticking the Caves of Chaos where the Lewis & Clark Caverns are. I guess that would put the Keep in Whitehall, Montana (about 14 miles away)? Maybe...it's about the right size (Cardwell is probably too small). 

So far, sessions have been catch-as-catch-can (busy lives) but I've sat in on a couple and they've been fine. He is still RAW AD&D rules for the most part, including alignment (my character is "Neutral"), and my PC (a magic-user named Bartleby) has already hit 2nd level. Probably, I should have chosen to run a cleric (the group could certainly use one)...but the lack of magical power in the party, coupled with the challenge of playing a 1st level MU with only one spell, proved too hard to resist. It's been fun; also, I just acquired a familiar (a hawk), and thanks to my CON 16 my little mage has something like 16 or 17 hit points, plus a winged attack pet.

That's good stuff.

Another soccer tournament this weekend, and lots of practices in preparation; I'll get to blogging as I can, but it should be light and brief in nature. If it isn't, it means I'm procrastinating from the things I should be doing.

[by the way...I realize I haven't been adding labels to my most recent posts. That has to do with posting them in a rush. I will go back and fix that in the Very Near Future]

Cheers, folks!

: )