kingtycoon | Oct. 2nd, 2015

I've been gaming a lot with my neighbors - it's not really very involved - on my part - but it's been fun. This is how it goes for me: I work a lot on a setting, a plot & concept paint giant wall sized maps & write supplemental novels - and then... We play extensively in my slapdash 2nd string setting & everyone loves it. (I've thought on why and I think it's because at the table I do strong improvisation & performance- the performance is what I've been doing lately & it's highly regarded).

The idea for this campaign & setting is the first wave of civilization. When you play some D&D there's always ancient ruins with eons of history and layer upon layer of ancient & arcane civilizations. Well, this all had to start somewhere right? So I thought- dawn of civilization, the Ur campaign - in a really literal sense. The game begins in the deep forest where the preliterate PCs (they both wanted to be Chaotic so that's how I picked them as non-civilized folk) have weird totemic adventures living in a perpetual dreamtime of story & myth - they end up confronting the pioneering settlement on their doorstep, rejecting the deep forest's offerings & awakening the desire for gold in a dragon. (Dragons always have money & want it- but what did they do before there was money? This one lived in a swamp and appeared to be a cruel woman who spied on everyone - but upon seeing the single coin carried by one of the PCs went full dragon and conquered the town).

There was a lot of wandering and misadventure in the weird & scenic city of the Elf-Gardener King (only the 3rd of his dynasty & a warlock patron of Hell - from whence he learned the way of building cities). There they caused riots & trouble by spreading disinformation & true facts alike and that's that so far. It's been a lot of sessions lately & quite a bit has happened. I do a lot of NPC interactions - the Giant spider in the forest - the runaway slave-drow who married the giant spider & the pack of wolves out of the north being driven to hunt in the south for unexplored reasons - the cannibal hillbilly & the runaway drow slaves in their ersatz community out in the hills. Or favorite of all - the weird magician in the woods insisting he'd learned the secret of eternal life who came to the discard bin of the forest's people where he animated the bodies. When you can play with the origins of whole schools of magic- that's satisfying. There's a lot- plus quite a bit of player death & character attrition - but in a satisfying way. It's going interestingly.

Of course I blew it off last night to do nothing much of anything. I'm restless with the status quo & interested in a change - I'm in a weird way. I was thinking about work & how I work too much - producing and how little I want to produce for myself right now - when's the last time I painted anything right? Or wrote anything good? It's been a long time - but I produce at work & consume others' production now. I've become that way. I even bought a TV. A citizen, that's me. Shamed to say.

At work we set up some experiments to bring a wi-fi network throughout the campus & messed around aiming & setting up these point-to-point broadcasters - that was kind of fun & also I learned a few things that normally I wouldn't. Technical expertise!

After work I got invested in the idea of doing one of the Ingress Missions in the neighborhood of my job (an exceptionally bad neighborhood - I have no pictures of that because, love though I do hunting down the abandoned weird debris filled areas of my post-apocalyptic town - these places aren't really abandoned and I'll be damned if I'm going to try and shame people living in half-burned up houses by taking pictures and putting them on the internet. Still - it's pretty fucking amazing - what this neighborhood is like. It's really, truly, post apocalyptic and forever will I love this shitty town). Anyhow passing through I come to this big-ass cemetery that I didn't even know about - Ingress sends you to cemeteries a lot - which was fine, like, when my bus passes close to Lakeview I capture & control the grave of Eliott Ness - and for a while controlled the tomb of James Garfield. But this place- it's the old catholic cemetery and local, it's beautiful and I didn't know - I wandered it, and started to feel really ghoulish & guilty about traversing it as part of a video-game - particularly when I ended up in the field for burying infants. Ooh boy. The huge statue of the angels with the plaque saying just "Our Babies" was really... Anyhow - Calvary Cemetery - I never even knew about it and ended up talking for a while with the groundskeeper - it's really something worth seeing if you're into pretty cemeteries in the middle of shockingly depressed communities.