Got up extra-early for critical 8:00 AM meeting at work. Navigated through noteworthy traffic in a state of high alert, trying not to stare at clock. Arrived in nick of time.
Meeting rescheduled for 10:00 AM.
10:15 AM, required parties skip meeting.
(Discussing spreading our havoc and mayhem to the enemy’s communications)
Constance the Half-Orc:The problem is getting it into their communications stream.
Urgon the Gnome: I think I can slip it in there.
Darya: Boys are all alike.
***
GM: There’s a difference between “tart” and “slut”.
Player: An expensive difference.
***
Darya: (Trying to be helpful, for once) When a mommy bird and a daddy bird get drunk and fall into a nest together–
Anja: I’m from a farm. I’ve seen the horses.
Darya: Well, no wonder you have unreaslistic expectations.
***
GM: (Referring to the not-inconsiderable endowments of high-priestess of goddess of magic and death) They’re real—they’re not mine, but they’re real. (Pause) Wow, that actually came out of my mouth.
So, how does a stuck-up, party-loving sea-elf find herself working (shudder!) as an attraction in a travelling circus known as The Wizard’s Caravan of Marvels? I’m so glad you asked.
Moraliel Wavedancer lived in the warm, shallow waters south of Bilit Island, the pampered—dare one say spoiled—youngest daughter of one of her tribe’s most respected members. Her life was a comfortable round of social engagements and entertainments, flirtations, the admiration of the youth of her tribe, and cozy fishing and trading expeditions with her six sisters and innumerable cousins. That tribe, like most sea-elf tribes since the coming of the Maelstrom, was nomadic, though they were tempted to settle near Araterre, in a new trading village. However, the recent, unexplained disappearance of one of Moraliel’s more annoying and less desirable suitors made the Elders wary of that vicinity.
One day, while swimming near the continental shelf, led there by a bit of boredom, rather more curiosity, and the desire to go further than anyone else, she happened across a group of shark men performing some bizarre (and incomprehensible) ceremony. Not only was their ceremony weird, they weren’t even supposed to be there; shark men hail from deep, northern waters, several thousand miles away, near a land called, by the humans, Sahud. She observed, fascinated, from a coral cave, trying to make sense of their bizarre language and actions. Unfortunately, near the ritual’s peak, she was spotted.
The shark men took extreme umbrage at Delphine’s presence, and they gave chase. They followed her through seaweed forests, mazes of rock and coral, and even through a cloud of stinging jellyfish. They would have killed her, if not for the intervention of a human mage. The man whom she would later refer to as simply “the Wizard” plucked her from the sea and floated her high above the surf with magic.
However, sitting comfortably in midair beside her, he foretold that they would never give up trying to kill her, for when shark men get a scent, they never forget it. In fact, they were circling still, below, as she could see. Furthermore, she would bring nothing but death on her tribe if she returned, for the shark men were mighty warriors, and no amount of elven trickery would prevent the deaths of many sea elves.
But he had a solution; there was one place they could not follow—dry land. He would provide a refuge for her and a job where she could use her obvious talents and good looks. All she had to do was sign this contract…Or, he said, “I could just leave you here, to the predations of yonder shark men…”
And so, she became Delphine of the Deep, a member of the Wizard’s Caravan of Marvels, performing feats of grace and dexterity for audiences full of dryfeet and complaining her way through what looked to be an insufferably long contract.
I decided it was time to play a character with no redeeming qualities, and I have to say it’s been fun. She’s modeled after Patsy in Absolutely Fabulous, only without the drinking, drugs, and casual sex. In fact, she doesn’t drink and is something of an ice princess; the slinking about is quite definitely only part of the act.
Her companions in the travelling life are Mama Quilla, a big-cat trainer and Kolokolo, her tiger; Cha-rool, a self-important, storytelling, sentient-eating pantherine sphinx with a talent for fire-magic; Boggs, a hobgoblin with a few tricks up his sleeve and ambitions of ringmasterdom; Affed, a belly-dancing Medusa; Hysterion, a genuine minotaur complete with temper and ability to massive amounts of damage; and Gregor, who has a lot of scars and will eat absolutely anything.
We’ve only had a couple of games so far, but the premise is that when the Wizars wants something, he sends a group of us out after it with minimal guidance and instructions. Our first mission was retrieve a particular book from a monastery. That went reasonably well, in that none of us got killed, nobody burned the bat-winged, black sphinx as a demon, and we got what we came for.
Our current mission is to get the Wizard a dragon; preferably live. We had to cross a border between two kingdoms, and naturally, with a war brewing, there was plenty of scrutiny. When the sergeant of the border guards was looking at the sphinx, he asked “Is he dangerous?”
“Yes,” Delphine told him. “He’s cranky, and has abominable taste in literature.”
It’s been a while since I’ve been able to do more than toss out snippets of dialogue from the D & D game, but we are working our way through the module in fairly good order, causing mayhem wherever we go.
Highlights include one character starting a new religion, that of the Happy Butterfly god, who is reminiscent of Itzpapalotl, but more into the joy of causing chaos by slaughtering one’s presumably unhappy enemies. This turn of events surprises neither the other characters nor their players.
We also cleared out a nest of particularly nasty, and fiendishly intelligent, infernal critters; got rid of a major army outpost in an ancient, partly-sunken, abandonned elven city in a swamp and took their stuff; had a positive encounter with the fearsome elvish Serenissima mafia family (collected a nice reward for returning some of their stolen goods); gathered some much-needed intelligence; took tea with a tribe of wood elves, who gave us a ride on their giant owls, leading to a great many jokes about in-flight meals and high-velocity protein. (Believe me, whatever you’re thinking, our minds were in the gutter waaaaay ahead of yours.) We recovered the soul of a powerful undead creature, with whom we hope to negotiate an alliance at best and neutrality in the current conflict at least. We also picked up another traveling companion, a small lizardman variant with magical aptitude, to whom we rather inevitably refer as the lizard-wizard.
So, now we find ourselves in a major city, about to sell of a lot of the loot we’ve been carrying around. Fortuitously enough, we’ve got a lot of high-quality weapons and armor to get rid of in a war zone, so prices should be good. Very good, in fact; we’re looking at a decent six-figure amount, all told. Even after an eight-way split, we should be well set for funds. Not to mention the fact that we stand to collect a hefty fee from the lord of the city in question, for certain service rendered; see above. After that, we have the outline of plan that involve heading out to intercept a wing of the army in a mountain pass, hopefully causing the same sort of disruption that we did back in the village that we booby-trapped within an inch of its life. (When you arrange to set the river on fire, you know you’re being obssessively thorough.)
The holidays were quiet, peaceful, and relaxing. I hope yours were, too.
Over the break, I got out my ice skates for the first time in nearly ten years, and discovered that while I’m not 25 anymore, it is balanced out by not being 70 pounds overweight anymore…mostly. I saw Happy Feet (environmental message delivered with a sledgehammer, but worth it to see a penguin dance like Savion Glover), Eragon (like one of my ex-boyfriends, it’s kinda pretty but not terribly bright), and A Night at the Museum, which I enjoyed a lot more than I expected, as I generally lack enthusiasm for Ben Stiller movies.
I’ve been back to work for a few days now, and while my team has gotten much larger, half my billable hours are gone. I’ll be doing some work at the company HQ (which I like to refer to as the Dairy Case, because it’s where the big cheeses are) until that gets sorted out. I’ll be happy if I don’t have to drive to Muncie three days a week.
Housemate has started bar review, and is already a bit brain-fried. Still, I have great faith that he’ll do just fine, even if his brain feels like tapioca by March.
Today was a day for coincidences.
I called one of my fellow yoga teacher trainees to see if she’d gotten her card from Yoga Alliance yet. She said she hadn’t, but while we were chatting, she was opening her mail. Lo and behold, there was her envelope from YA.
Later, I was IM’ing a long-lost friend recently found, and told her I was thinking of getting my act together enough to run Teenagers from Outer Space. It’s probably been four years since we gamed together, and I don’t know how much opportunity she’s had in that time. But she wrote back that she had just found her dice the previous night.
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