Dark and Dreamful Daughter

After the cessation of “free Fridays” last month, my $work is kindly tailing us off slowly by offering us one “free day” per month for a few months, to be taken whenever we like.  I took my October free day this past Friday, so this weekend I’ve been enjoying the break.  I’ve only a couple of things to tell you about.

Tonight, all the family except my youngest and I went to a homeschool association teen event, leaving us two to have a father-daughter night.  I took her out to Taco Bell (which for some reason she finds quite exciting), then we came back and she suggested we watch a movie.

Now, the background you must understand is that, a few months back, I quoted something from The Crow to her.  Of those movies which I consider my all-time favorites—I sometimes refer to these as my “top X movies,” since the number only ever increases—one of my main criteria is quotability.  A good movie should provide lots of great quotes that you can bring up in everyday life, such as “buck up, little camper!” or “fuck me gently with a chainsaw” or “screws fall out all the time: the world’s an imperfect place.” I forget exactly which of The Crow’s great quotes I used in this instance (probably “this is the really real world—there ain’t no comin’ back”), but, the point is, my daughter didn’t recognize it: at not quite 10 years old, she’d never seen the movie, of course.  So I suggested we watch it, and, for some reason I can’t recall right now, we were alone at home that night as well.  Now, if you’re going to watch The Crow, you absolutely must watch it at night, with all the lights off.  It’s a very dark movie with a very creepy vibe, so you have to establish the proper atmosphere.  So we fired it up on the big TV, with the sound turned way up, and every possible light extinguished.  And I suppose she was really enamored of this, because, tonight, she requested another “dark movie” night.

So my choice for tonight was Dark City (the director’s cut, natch).  She seemed to enjoy it (as she did the previous choice), and she’s already picked out the next one (The Matrix).  So I suppose it’s become a tradition at this point, and I’ll have to start thinking of even more dark movies for her and I to watch.

The other thing I’ve been working on this weekend is my character for my youngest’s upcoming Witchlight campaign.  My inspiration for this character has been a race from a moderately obscure RPG that I bought but never played (primarily because the mechanics are super-wonky, in my opinion): Earthdawn.  Earthdawn, supposedly set in the same universe as the fantasy post-apocalyptic (and far better known) Shadowrun, had a lot of great fluff ... just not so great on the crunch.  While many of the races are the same in both games, Earthdawn does add a few new options, including a species of swashbuckling dinosaur people: the t’skrang.  This pic should tell you all you need to know about them:

So I had to make up a custom D&D race for them, which I’ve named the tsaagan.  “Tsaagan” is a genus of dinosuars in the raptor family—although it certainly sounds like a fantasy name—and these guys look a lot like raptors.  Plus the “ts” at the beginning is a nice homage to their inspiration.  So far I’ve written up the mechanics (the “crunch”), but not yet the lore (the “fluff”).  But that’s sufficient to get started, I think.  Next up I have to nail down the class, but I’m leaning towards fey wanderer, which seem particularly apropos given the setting.

And that’s all I’ve got for this week’s mostly non-post.  Next time I’ll work on something with a bit more substance.