Television Quest

Today I was all set to get working on my blog post, but we ended up buying a new television instead.  The old one isn’t quite dead yet, but it’s certainly showing its age.  We bought it about 15 years ago, when we first moved to Southern California.  We’ve been threatening to buy a new one for a while now, but we just kept putting it off.  But, last night, I finally broke down and signed up for Apple TV+, only to discover that our Fire TV is supposedly “too old” to install the Apple TV app.  Personally, I feel like this is just a ploy by Amazon to force us to upgrade when we don’t really need to.

But, regardless of whether it’s valid or not, we don’t have a lot of choice in the matter.  So, either we buy a new Fire TV, or we buy a different type of streaming device (like a Roku), or ... we just buy a new TV.  Because pretty much all TVs these days are “smart” TVs (just like pretty much all phones these days are smartphones), so, as long as it’s a recent enough model, it’ll be able to handle everything we need for now.  And, once the “smart” part of it becomes obsolete, we’ll just upgrade to a new Fire TV or Roku or whatever then and stave off the next upgrade for a while.  So, as long as we needed a new TV anyway, now seemed like a good time to get it.

So we did.  The new one is 7 inches bigger and about 20 pounds lighter.  But it obviously took up more space, so we had to unplug everything and rearrange everything and reroute cords and ... it took a while.  So I ran out of time to do blog posts.  So now all you get is this story about my TV instead.  Sorry.

But, next week, for sure.  Probably.

The clock ticks life away ...

Nothing going on this week, so I’ll skip the partial post.  Tune in again next week for something more substantial, hopefully.

Salsatic Vibrato VIII

"Jump Into My Caddy"

[This is one post in a series about my music mixes.  The series list has links to all posts in the series and also definitions of many of the terms I use.  You may wish to read the introduction for more background.  You may also want to check out the first volume in this multi-volume mix for more info on its theme.

Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

Both Smokelit Flashback and Shadowfall Equinox have achieved sixth volumes in this series; in the unpublished category, there is only Paradoxically Sized World.  So far Salsatic Vibrato remains the only published volume VII, and only SfE can realistically challenge that on the unpbulished side.¹  And now here we are at volume eight.  Of course (as I may have mentioned before), the mixes that achieve these rarified heights tend to be the ones I utilize most: Shadowfall Equinox is my primary work soundtrack, and Paradoxically Sized World is a set of music preferences I share with one of my children.  Smokelit Flashback mainly has the advantage of being the very first of the modern mixes, and it had two volumes before there was a volume I of anything else.  (And also whenever I’m feeling non-specifically weird, it’s what I reach for.)  And Salsatic Vibrato?  Well, that’s the mix I want when I’m feeling happy and I want to double-down on that feeling.  If I’m doing any sort of work (whether in my professional life or just work around the house) that doesn’t require any brainpower, SVb is the perfect accompaniment: it’s brassy, and upbeat, and just ... happy-making.

So what can we expect from this outing?  Certainly we can’t have a volume without Big Bad Voodoo Daddy (we certainly havne’t had one so far), and they’ll make their twelfth appearance here.  In the only-missed-one-volume-so-far camp, Squirrel Nut Zippers, Cherry Poppin’ Daddies, and Lou Bega are all here (SNZ for their eleventh appearance, so they’re only a bit behind BBVD).  Other returning artists include the Brian Setzer Orchestra (who have only missed two volumes so far), Joe Jackson (who returned last volume after a long absence), the Swing soundtrack, electro-swing artists Caravan Palace and Caro Emerald, infrequent contributors Madness, Oingo Boingo, and Indigo Swing, recent discoveries Tape Five, Swing Republic, and Electric Swing Circus, one more brass-funk masterpiece from Earth, Wind & Fire, and the Mighty Mighty Bosstones are back after last being seen way back on volume II.  And there’s still room for 6 first-timers.  So I would say this volume leans a bit heavily on established doctrine, but isn’t afraid to branch out into bold new directions at the same time.

And we’ll kick it off with the opener for BBVD’s all-time best album, Americana Deluxe.  Now, I’ve mined this album extensively: of its 12 tracks, I’ve used four on previous volumes of this mix, and several others are slated for other mixes.²  I haven’t used a track from it recently, though, and I really wanted to return to it.  “Boogie Bumper” isn’t quite a bridge, but it’s a gorgeous, mostly instrumental intro track, and I thought I’d honor that by using it open this volume.  From there we launch directly into “Master and Slave” by CPD off their best album, which is another track I’m surprised it took this long to get around to, and, continuing the trend, I thought I’d go back to the Brian Setzer Orchestra’s best album too: “This Cat’s on a Hot Tin Roof” is the opener for their amazing The Dirty Boogie, which, if you’re into this type of music enough to still be here eight volumes later, I’m sure you already own.  This latter tune is the primary one to stray from strict retro-swing into that 50s-reminiscent, often brass-infused, retro-rock-and-roll that I’ve struggled to find an appropriate label for.  For the remainder of the retro-swing, Indigo Swing is one of the bands in the subgenre that misses more than it hits, but their eponymous track is pretty hoppin’; the Swing soundtrack and Joe Jackson’s Jumpin’ Jive album are (as I’ve noted before) not so much retro-swing as just modern takes on classic swing.  The title track from the Jackson album was originally done by Cab Calloway, who was arguably the best swing artist of all time; “Gotta Get On This Train,” as rendered by singing-voice stand-in (for the film’s lead) Georgie Fame, is one of those tracks that the Swing soundtrack does so well: co-written by co-star (and fantastic singer in her own right) Lisa Stansfield, it’s a song created for the movie that utterly sounds like it was conceived in the 40s at the height of swing’s power, and Fame’s voice³ really sells it.

And all but one of these are right in a row, a powerful retro-swing pentad to open the volume.  From there we branch out, first to the retro-mambo of Lou Bega—“Baby Keep Smiling” is one of his slower numbers, but still sunny (and provides our volume title)—and then the retro-hot-jazz of the Squirrel Nut Zippers, with one of their rollicking instrumentals.  “Lugubrious Whing Whang” serves as a bridge to the volume’s more experimental middle stretch.  But it’s electroswing that dominates the volume’s back half (which is, to be fair, more than half the volume, by length).  Caravan Palace is back with one of their most experimental (and frenetc) compositions, “The Dirty Side of the Street.” The magnificent Caro Emerald is back too, with another track off her best album, Deleted Scenes from the Cutting Room Floor.  “You Don’t Love Me” slows us down just enough to be a great closer without losing the vibe: it’s a bit melancholy, but still manages to be peppy at the same time.

As I’ve noted before, electro-swing is almost entirely a European phenomenon, and we’re covering the continent pretty well here.  Caro Emerald is from the Netherlands; Caravan Palace is from France, as is our newest electroswing discovery: Lyre le temps.  From Strasbourg, they tend a bit more towards the electro end of the spectrum of the spectrum than their Paris-based compatriots, although our CP selection here certainly pairs well with “Hold the Night,” which has that same frenetic, jitterbug-adjacent pace and experimental feel.  We also cover Denmark, with more traditional electroswing artist Swing Republic—“On the Rooftop” is perhaps not quite as awesome as last volume’s “Mama,” but close—and Germany with another tune from Tape Five—again, “Bunga Book” isn’t the equal of their tune from last volume, but it really oozes that 40s swing vibe, primarily via a (presumably deliberate) similarity to Louis Prima’s “I Wanna Be Like You.”⁴  And we mustn’t forget the UK, where the Electric Swing Circus continues to be unfairly underappreciated.  “Valentine” has some shades of “Bella Belle” (their selection from last volume), but adds a certain electronic darkness that makes it slot perfectly between “The Dirty Side of the Street” and our two most experimental tracks of all (which we’ll come to in just a bit).

We’re a bit light on the ska this time, but I thought we’d return to the Mighty Mighty Bosstones (who we haven’t seen since volume II), and of course the original two-tone ska boys: Madness, missing here since volume V.  From the former, “That Bug Bit Me” is another track off Let’s Face It; I favor the two previous selections (which is why we saw them first), but this one is pretty rockin’ too.  Madness’ eponymous track is an early B-side of theirs, which you can find on their excellent compilation album Complete Madness.  It’s silly and fun, as most Madness tracks are, and I thought it was an excellent penultimate track for this volume.  I also thought it was a good time to circle back to the funk classicists with an awe-inspiring horn section: Earth, Wind & Fire.  I’m pretty partial to “Shining Star,”⁵ but “Let’s Groove” is pretty badass too (with some of the best use of voice-processing I’ve heard), and I thought it broke up our two ska tunes kinda perfectly.

Salsatic Vibrato VIII
[ Jump Into My Caddy ]

“The Boogie Bumper” by Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, off Americana Deluxe
“Master and Slave” by Cherry Poppin' Daddies, off Zoot Suit Riot [Compilation]
“The Indigo Swing” by Indigo Swing, off All Aboard!
“Gotta Get On This Train” by Georgie Fame, off Swing [Soundtrack]
“Jumpin' Jive” by Joe Jackson, off Jumpin' Jive
“Baby Keep Smiling” by Lou Bega, off A Little Bit of Mambo
“Lugubrious Whing Whang” by Squirrel Nut Zippers, off The Inevitable
“Same Man I Was Before” by Oingo Boingo, off Dead Man's Party
“Another Day in the Big World” by Eurogliders, off This Island
“Disenchantment [Intro Theme]” by Mark Mothersbaugh [Single]
“Don't Stop That Crazy Rhythm” by Modern Romance, off The Platinum Collection [Compilation]
“The Dirty Side of the Street” by Caravan Palace, off Panic
“Valentine” by the Electric Swing Circus, off The Electric Swing Circus
“Farligt Monster” by Analogik, off Søens Folk
“Bootleg Brass” by Stepcat [Single]
“Bunga Book” by Tape Five, off Swing Patrol
“Hold the Night” by Lyre le temps, off Lady swing
“On the Rooftop” by Swing Republic, off Midnight Calling
“This Cat's on a Hot Tin Roof” by the Brian Setzer Orchestra, off The Dirty Boogie
“That Bug Bit Me” by Mighty Mighty Bosstones, off Let's Face It
“Let's Groove” by Earth, Wind & Fire, off Greatest Hits [Compilation]
“Madness” by Madness, off Complete Madness [Compilation]
“You Don't Love Me” by Caro Emerald, off Deleted Scenes from the Cutting Room Floor

Total:  23 tracks,  79:22

Which leaves us with the less likely candidates.  We’ve heard Oingo Boingo here before,⁶ and they certainly have the horn section to back up their creds for this mix.  Wikipedia wants to call them “ska and punk-influenced new wave,” which ... sure.  Why not.  “Same Man I Was Before” is also from the excellent Dead Man’s Party and is satisfying both musically (with great brass hits and interesting synth sounds) and lyrically (the singer goes from “not the same man I was before” to “not the same boy I was before” and finally to “not the same ghost I was before,” who can “disappear, disappear, disappear whenever it may please me”).  Contrariwise, this is the first appearance anywhere on these mixes for the Eurogliders, an Australian band who caught my ear in my freshman year in college with “Heaven (Must Be There).” That’s more of a ballad, but they can also do upbeat, and on that album (This Island) in particular, they supplement singer Grace Knight’s saxophone work with two trumpeters, who are put to good effect on “Another Day in the Big World.” It’s just so upbeat and happy I thought it would work well here, so here it is.

And thence on to Mark Mothersbaugh, who is both famous for being one of the primary songwriters for Devo, and also for a metric shitload of soundtrack work, mainly for Wes Anderson and cartoons.⁷  He’s written for Rugrats, Pee-wee’s Playhouse, Yo Gabba Gabba! (where he also taught kids how to draw), and, most important for our purposes, Matt Groening’s foray into fantasy, Disenchantment.  The main theme for this show is so infectiously brass-filled and joyous, containing a counterpoint that I’m pretty sure is tuba and accordian, that I just had to download it from YouTube and stick it here as a bridge from our first two 80s tracks to our final one.

And that final track is from Modern Romance.  You may recall, when we last saw them (on 80s My Way II), I pointed out that I was originally scouting them for inclusion here.  “Don’t Stop That Crazy Rhythm” was a decently big hit in their native UK (#14 in 1983), but somehow it never made it over here to the US.  Which is just insane to me: it’s an amazing, super-brassy, dancey, salsa-inflected (our only one this time, sadly) tune that defies you to sit still while it plays.  I was just blown away when I discovered it, and wondered how in the hell I’d been missing out on this music for almost four decades.

And from there we hit the most exciting pair of back to back tracks in the whole volume.  We kick it off with Analogik, a Danish ... well, Wikipedia says that “their music mixes elements including jazz, electronica, reggae and Balkan music,” which is another of its infamous descriptions that fairly makes your head spin.  But I suppose it’s not too far off.  I found them because they did a tune for LittleBigPlanet 3 that I wanted to feature in Paradoxically Sized World,⁸ but I found the whole album so interesting that I started looking for where else to put them.  “Farligt Monster” is a weird, trippy little tune that isn’t quite what you’d call “glitch,” but perhaps borrows some elements from that subgenre.

And thus it makes the perfect flow into a proper glitch-hop tune—in fact, it’s easily the best transition on the volume.  There’s a bizarre little appendix on “Farligt Monster” that bleeds beautifully into the abrupt bursting into being that is Stepcat’s “Bootleg Brass.” Now, glitch-hop is distinct from glitch—the latter is just using sonic “mistakes” such as feedback whines, CD skips, hiss from vinyl, distortion from speakers, etc to make something in the general neighborhood of music.  But glitch-hop takes the basic elements of glitch, samples them, chops and recuts them to form a strong beat and more melodic tracks.  One Internet source says that it combines elements of lo-fi and hip-hop with the building blocks of glitch, and that’s a pretty good description.⁹  Now, a lot of glitch-hop doesn’t employ brass—and, I gotta be honest with you, I’m not sure whether several of the tunes on this particular volume, including this one, are employing real, live brass instruments—but I came across this magnum opus of Stepcat’s and I was just blown away.  It’s utterly amazing, and 100% belongs here, even if all the “brass” is just synth-generated or sampled.  It’s gorgeous, and thus perfect as the centerpiece of this volume.

Next time, we’ll check out the intersection of dreamy and trippy.

⇐ Salsatic Vibrato VII

Salsatic Vibrato IX ⇒

__________

1 There is technically a Smokelit Flashback VII, but to describe it as neotonous would be generous.

2 Including one which has already been published: Moonside by Riverlight II.

3 Which you may not think you’ve heard before, but you probably have.

4 Whether it’s sufficiently different from that classic is of course in the eye of beholder; though I felt it deserved inclusion, I certainly wouldn’t put it on the same volume as any version of the classic song from The Jungle Book.

5 Which we featured as the closer on volume V.

6 Specifically, on volume V.  Again.  I’m just now realizing how much repeat traffic we’ve got here from volume V.

7 I’m pretty sure that’s not a redundant statement.  Pretty sure.

8 It’s called “God Russik,” and I haven’t managed to work it into a volume yet.

9 Fun fact: this same source says KOAN Sound (who you might remember from Paradoxically Sized World volumes II, IV, and V) are glitch-hop, at least with their later tunes.  I can sort of see it with “Introvert” and “Dynasty,” but honestly “Lost in Thought” is just too peaceful for that.  But it’s interesting to contemplate nonetheless.

To be silent ...

It is far better to be silent than merely to increase the quantity of bad books.
— Voltaire (maybe)

Way back in my first ”nothing to say” post, I used this quote, which is commonly attributed to Voltaire.  It applies again to today’s post, and I (again) made an attempt to source the quote, and once again I failed.  Wikiquote refuses to source it, and Quote Investigator hasn’t tackled it yet.  GoodReads says he said it, and they’re usually pretty reliable, but then again they also usually provide a source, which they don’t here.  AZ Quotes is usually not reliable, but at least they give a source: The Portable Voltaire, although I’m not sure if I can consider that an authoritative source.  Still, as I said last time:

But, you know, it can be true even without being famous.
— me (definitely)

And, it is true.  So I shall be silent.

D&D Story #2: Birthday Bedlam

For a few blog posts now, I’ve been dropping hints about the special one-shot D&D adventure that I’d planned for my middle child’s 16th birthday.  Now it’s time for a full explanation.

First of all, understand that this kid (whom I used to refer to as the Smaller Animal, but now is taller than everyone else in the house) enjoys playing D&D, and really enjoys playing a fantasy character who can change shapes.  That’s just his thing.  In D&D (as you may recall from my story of his first ever D&D session), that typically means druid, so my kid has played a lot of druids.  Like, a lot.  A metric shit-ton, even.  And there’s certainly nothing wrong with playing the same class all the time, if that’s your jam, but it’s also good to step out of your comfort zone every once in a while.  So I (and my eldest child) have long been working on convincing the Smaller Animal to try other things.  And, while we’ve had a few minor successes here and there, he’s mostly stuck with the druids.

So, for this birthday, either The Mother or I (or maybe we did it together) had an idea to have a “D&D paty,” where his friends could come over (which they haven’t been able to do for the past two birthdays in a row) and we’d all sit around and play D&D all day.  Something self-contained, I thought: a one-shot adventure, designed to be completed in a single session.  And I hit upon the brilliant idea to invent a new ancestry (which D&D often refers to as “race,” which is not only a word charged with real-world baggage, but also just a terrible term for it—“species” would be closer) ... a society where everyone is a shapeshifter.  No need to be a druid, you see: you can just change your shape.  All the time.  To (mostly) whatever you like.

Now, no one’s ever done this in D&D before because it would be difficult to come up with an ancestry that’s (roughly) balanced¹  against the core ones: human, halfling, elf, dwarf, etc.  But I had the advantage of being able to say: look, you’re all going to have this ancestry—it’s part of the conceit of the game.  So they were all on equal footing, so balance didn’t really matter.  Plus they could all choose to look like any crazy thing they wanted to.  (If you’re interested to see the stats I came up with, feel free to check them out.²)

And this seemed to work: given the freedom to be able to change shape whenever they liked, they seemed not to need to actually do it in the game—even my shapeshifting-obsessed child never changed into anything the entire session.  So I think I was successful.

Next, I needed a short, self-contained adventure which could be adapted for teenagers.³  I ended up picking a short adventure called Bedlam at the Benefit.  This adventure was short (and inexpensive), and it had a number of advantages:

• It has a social interaction phase, an exploration phase, and a combat phase, thus giving equal weight to D&D’s “three pillars of play.”
• How well you do on each phase has an actual impact: the social encounter determines monetary rewards, and “succeeding” on the exploration challenges makes the combat easier.
• The vast majority of the bad guys are not human—not even remotely humanoid.  There’s no question about whether or not they need to be eliminated.
• The device of a children’s hospital is going to engage the players immediately: you’ve got to be pretty stony-hearted to not want to help a children’s hospital succeed.
• It’s very self-contained: you can present this is a mission the characters have been given, they go do the mission, and everything wraps up neatly at the end.

Still, the adventure isn’t perfect.  It had a number of things that I felt needed adjusting:

• It’s too hard. You’ll notice that this was the one aspect the reviewer I linked to above dinged it for: while it’s ostensibly designed for 5 3rd level characters, it’s likely to wipe out such a party.  Given I was working with younger people, who were not inexperienced, but also not as fully tactical in combat as experienced adults might be, it was probably even more likely.  This one was simple to fix: I just doubled the levels and told everyone to make 6th level characters instead.  Besides, 6th level characters get a lot more cool features to play with than 3rd level characters do, and that’s important for a game where you’re not likely to play those characters again.
• The monsters are too samey. Basically, other than the mad wizard, you’ve got neogi and gibbering mouthers.  Now, a gibbering mouther is an awesome monster, with a whole bevy of flavorful abilities, and I absolutely adore the neogi, just for the utter insanity of its existence: it’s a spider the size of a large dog with an eel for a head.  But I wanted more variety.  Plus this gave me the opportunity to make sure I could tweak the difficulty of the combat just so: having a bunch of monsters with different toughnesses makes it easier to dial in the exact level of menace you want to portray.
• Innocent people get killed, by design. This adventure is designed to raise the stakes for you by starting to off the innocent bystanders.  Maybe that’s fine for a group of adult players, but it seemed unnecessarily grim for a group of kids.  This was easy enough to fix as well: I made it so the innocent bystanders would just disappear instead, and then they could all come back at the end (see? everyone’s okay after all).
• Neogi in D&D are historically slavers. That is, a neogi has a power that it can use to take over someone’s mind and make them do things against their will.  They’re hardly the only D&D monsters that can do this—vampires have a “dominate” power, for instance—but neogi are specifically portrayed as going around enslaving other creatures and using them to boost their own status in their society.  Which is a bit ... icky.  But, above and beyond that, it’s absolutely no fun for your character to get taken over.  In some ways, it’s worse than dying.  And kids hate it even more than adults, I think.  So I took that off the table by reducing the number of neogi to one, and giving it a big creature that it had already dominated (which itself was a pretty horrible monster), so it had no need to try that on any of the characters.
• Monetary rewards are fairly meaningless for a one-shot. That is, once the adventure is done, handing out a bunch of treasure doesn’t do your character any good, because you’ll (probably) never play that character again.  So essentially you get a bunch of gold you’ll never get to spend.  I handled this by just converting the monetary rewards to bonuses on future rolls, and handed them out right before the big combat at the end so everyone had a chance to use them.

Next, I wanted some cool shapeshifting music.  That just involved scouring YouTube for music inspired by shapeshifting creatures such as werewolves, rakshasas, kitsune, and selkies.  Then I had to arrange the songs into the proper order.⁴  Then I had a playlist, which you too can enjoy if you’re so inclined.

Next, I wanted some pictures to throw up on the screen to give everyone a the proper atmosphere.  Since this was a children’s hospital that had been converted out of a spooky sanitorium, and they would be arriving close to nightfall, I went with this pic I found on the Internet:

Next, the arrival of the mad warlock and his twisted minions.  For this one, I had to find a bunch of different pics and glue them together with the GIMP.⁵  My picture editing skills are not great, but I get by.  Here’s what I came up with:

Finally, I needed a map.  I don’t use maps and minis for all my D&D games, but this one was special, and I felt like it really needed that extra oomph.  I employed both the two younger kids to help me put it together—that was a bit spoilery for the birthday boy, but he loves building maps so much that I felt it was better to let him help design the thing than try to keep a surprise.  Here’s what we came up with, as seen in game with minis deployed:

You can see the mad warlock in the center, towards the back of the main entrance; cells with prisoners in them in the back; a few miscellaneous walls for cover; and various statues and other bits of flavor throughout.  Our heroes are towards the front (which is on the left in the picture), either waiting to come in, or already charged in for battle.

Next was trying to get everyone to come up with their characters.  This is a bit like pulling teeth at this age: between indecision and procrastination, it was close to impossible ... in fact, my ten-year-old was the only one who got done early.⁶  The birthday boy went with an artificer.  There are different flavors of artificer in D&D, but his was sort of a fantasy mad scientist, sporting a “boomstick” (magical version of a musket), a shrink ray, an invisibility suit, and a portal gun (reflavored spells).  My youngest was a college of spirits bard, who communed with ghosts for information and magic.  My eldest was an earth sorcerer/monk, calling upon the stones themselves to help out in combat.  My middle child’s two best friends were, respectively, an owlin (looking) warlock who wielded a giant pen like a spear, and a bard who appeared to look so much like an ordinary human man that it was unnerving.  And that’s pretty much all the prep.

For the session itself, they were given their mission, went undercover as adventurers who were being called upon to impress rich donors and convince them to give more money to the children’s hospital (still under construction, though mostly completed), and actually raised a bit of money for the director (for which I rewarded them with some bonus dice to be used later).  Then, in the midst of the fundraiser, the mad warlock appears on the lawn with his minions and kidnaps a bunch of the rich donors.  They managed to kill both the gibbering mouthers (which made the final fight easier), but the rest of the monsters got away with some captives, as they were designed to do.

Next, they had to explore the creepy basement and sub-basement of the new hospital, which had been sealed up and forgotten about.  It was full of vermin and ghosts, and they had to figure out how to learn as much information about their foe as possible.  This was a skill challenge where each character could pick whatever skill they liked, as long as they could think of a way to describe what they were doing.  So, you could say “persuasion,” and then describe how you talked a ghost into giving you info, or you could say “athletics” and describe how you kicked down a door or moved some rubble to find some clues, or you could say “religion” to recognize some of the mystic symbols scratched into the walls ... whatever you liked.  If you get a certain number of successes before you get half as many failures, you “win” the challenge and the bad guy’s powers are reduced (because his evil, Lovecraftian overlords are disappointed in him, I suppose).  His powers are also reduced if you don’t get all the successes, but you do get at least half of them.  So there’s actually four different versions of the warlock you can face.  Our party didn’t quite cross the finish line before hitting that last failure, but certainly enough to pass the halway mark, so they got a middling version of the warlock to fight.

Then it was time to run the final combat.  This drug out forever, partially because I had probably overestimated how many monsters they could handle, partially because it’s difficult to get kids to focus on the battle and keep things moving sometimes, and partially because I didn’t have the chance to review everyone’s character ahead of time and familiarize myself with exactly what people could and couldn’t do.  But we got through it in the end.  Here’s my battle highlights:

• The winged pen-wielder did the most damage to the warlock directly, taking out over half his hit points.
• The artificer killed most of the smaller monsters with a single shot each, and did the majority of the damage to the medium monsters.
• A well-placed shatter spell from the disturbingly normal-looking bard did exactly enough damage to finish off the medium monsters.
• The earth sorcerer/monk took on the biggest monster solo and took it down to 2 hit points before it fled and eventually got taken out by the artificer.
• The ghost bard mainly concentrated on keeping everyone else alive, and ended up healing enough total hit points to constitute a whole ’nother party member.

In the end, almost all the monsters were destroyed outright, the warlock was killed, sending the few remaining monsters back to their other plane of existence, and releasing the trapped prisoners (even the ones who had disappeared).  The director thanked them all, the ancient evil was vanquished permanently, and the hospital was able to open in safety.

So I think everyone had a great time, despite us running close to twice as long as we originally planned, and I think they were satisfied with their characters and their success.  My two youngest (that is, the birthday boy and his little sister) are already talking about bringing their characters back for more stories, so I take that as a positive sign that it was a good time.  It was a bunch of work on my part, and it sucked up a lot of my time over the past few weeks, but I think it was all worthwhile to hear everyone cheer when the bad guys were defeated at last.

Hopefully we get to do it again sometime.

__________

1 Personally, I don’t believe things have to be precisely balanced in D&D.  Just not grossly unbalanced, if you see what I’m saying.

2 As always, credit for layout primarily goes to GM Binder.

3 Technically, my youngest is not a teenager yet, but she was probably the most mature child at the table, so I wasn’t worried about her.

4 See my series on music mixes for why I’m so obsessed with the order songs play in.

5 The GIMP—GNU Image Manipulation Program—is the open-source alternative to PhotoShop.

6 And possibly the only one who was truly and completely done with their character before we actually started playing.