A season's greeting musical update

Well, it’s nearly Christmas again, and so time to wish you a merry christmahannukwanzaakah.^*  As I apparently only do new Christmas mixes every 5 years, I guess it’s not time for volume III of my excellent collection of holiday classics Yuletidal Pools.  Which is a shame.  But I’ll offer you the next best thing: minor updates to volumes I & II.

One creates one’s mixes with the best of intentions, and the belief that they will last forever.  Alas, every now and again you find that something you were sure you were going to love always is starting to grate on your nerves a bit.  To that end, I’ve found that two of the tracks I picked for Yuletidal Pools (one on each volume, as it happens) aren’t really working for me any more.  So I’ve updated the tracklists with new replacement tunes.

For volume I, I’ve replaced “My First Xmas, as a Woman” with “Merry Christmas I Fucked Your Snowman” by Botson punks the Showcase Showdown.  A bit of a risky move, as, in a few more years, the latter may begin to annoy me as much as the former has begun to.  But it seemed an appropos swap, and it really is a fun little tune, if a bit over-the-top.

For volume II, I found that “Xmas at K-Mart” began to grate on my nerves as much as it always has my family’s.  So I replaced it with the much slicker “Santa’s Lost His Mojo,” by the Lost Fingers.^**  It’s less of a 1-for-1 swap, but I think it still flows pretty nicely in the same spot, and it’s certainly a much nicer tune to listen to.

So there’s a least a couple of new tracks for ya.  And, if you hadn’t yet discovered my Christmas mix, it’s two full sets that you can enjoy as an antidote to the typical holiday pablum that your ears are currently being assaulted with.  You can thank me later.

Wishing everyone the best, and wondering if I’ll actually manage a full post between Christmas and New Year’s ... happy holidays, you guys.  Take care.

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* As always, ™ previous co-worker Jon Sime.
** And thanks to new co-worker Max for letting me know about those guys.

No Time Like the First Time

This past summer, while sitting in the hot tub with my youngest child (age 7), she announced that she had an idea for a D&D character.

Now, I am not a sports dad, so I don’t know what it feels like to have your child come to you for the first time to say they want to learn how to throw a football.  And I am not a musician dad, so I don’t know what it feels like to have your child come to you at a young age and tell you about the song they’re trying to write.  But I imagine that what I felt at that moment, in that hot tub, was comparable to those scenarios.

My two youngest spend a lot of time in the pool (mostly fighting, or playing, and sometimes doing both at once), and I like to sit out with them and work on my computer stuff and watch them.  Occasionally I get in, but, honestly, I’m not much for playing in the pool these days.  I still do laps sometimes—it’s really the only exercise I actually enjoy—but that’s not a thing you want to try to do while kids are playing (or fighting) in the water with you.  But, when they’re all tuckered out from playing and fighting and playfighting, they often get in the hot tub to cool down (figuratively, obviously).  My littlest one likes it way more than the middlest one: like her old man, she loves the heat.  The middle child will usually give up after a while, complaining “it’s too hot!” And then it’s just me and her.  Sometimes we play 20 Questions.  Sometimes we just talk about mostly nothing.  But, this time, she decided to tell me about her D&D character concept.

It’s perhaps important to establish that she’s never played before.  She’s watched us play many times, of course, and once I let her be a sort of pet character,¹ but she didn’t really do much.  Sometimes we listen to a D&D podcast in the car—specifically, the excellent Dames and Dragons, which is the one she really likes—but, overall, not any real prior experience.  And, yet, this was not a vague idea she was presenting to me.  This was a fully-fleshed out concept: this character had a name, a race, a class, hair color, eye color ... she even told me what type and color of armor she wore.  When she said, “now, her parents—well, she has kind of a dark backstory,” I almost squeed.  I’ve had thirty-year-olds who put less effort into their characters than this.  “Dark backstory”?  What kind of weird YouTube crap is she watching?  But, from a GM² perspective, it’s gold.

Now, some things changed as time went on, but the final character is remarkably similar to what she gave me that first day.  Corva Ravenstone is a half-elven ranger with turquoise hair and lavender eyes.  Here’s the current version of her backstory:

Corva’s parents disappeared into the jungle when she was just a baby.  Corva thinks they were studying nature, but she doesn’t really remember because she was too young.  When she was barely old enough to walk, they never came back from collecting herbs one day; the only clue Corva has is that some blood and black fur were left behind. From then on she was raised by her tiger friend Bone.

Corva dresses all in green, except for her light blue armor.  She carries a bow and has a monkey companion named Chip.

Please note that, although I helped put the thoughts above into nice-sounding sentences, I didn’t really write any of it.  None of it.  It’s all her.

So, naturally I decided that this deserved a corresponding effort on my part.  This couldn’t just be a throw-away character concept; this had to be a real character that my daughter played in a real campaign.  The problem, of course, is that creating D&D campaigns is a major effort.  I did a little bit of it for my eldest child, but mostly it’s just been using pre-written adventures for the last several years.  But for this I felt like I had to put together something memorable.  The other two kids are joining us, of course, for what we’re currently dubbing “the Family Campaign.” And I’ve probably put more time and effort into trying to write background and plot and adventure hooks for this one game of D&D than I have in the past 15 years.

Therein lies the problem, of course.  I bit off more than I could chew, and it’s taken me six months to get ready to go.  All this is pressure I put on myself; the kids, I’m sure, would be happy just to play whatever.  But, the more I thought about it, the more ideas I had, and the more the older two started to get excited as well, and the more complicated it all became.  Definitely no one to blame but me, but it just felt like it had to be ... well, not perfect, but at least special.

And I’m definitely not done yet.  But I came up with this wacky idea where each of my three children would play a short, solo intro adventure, which would set up the whole background, and then they’d come together.  I’ve taken to calling these “flashbackstories,” an over-obvious portmanteau word to be sure, but too cool to pass up.  They will each take place 5 – 7 years “ago”³ and they will tell the story of how each character left their original home and came to be indebted to a mysterious benefactor, who will then call upon them to perform a certain mission in return (which will be the kickoff to their shared adventure).  For this purpose, I’m designing mini-adventures that are specifically too hard for their beginner characters, but then pairing them up with a higher-level NPC.⁴  So, the idea is, basically, there’s a fight they can’t really handle alone, discovery of a greater danger, and a guide to help them get out alive and take them away to some relative safety, whence they, years later, come together at last.

Did I mention I was making it way too complicated?

Anyhow, I finally got to the point where I could start with the first flashbackstory, which is Corva’s.  And, this past Wednesday night, my youngest child played her very first game of D&D with her own character.  And it was pretty amazing.

She took to it pretty naturally.  There was the standard amount of newbie fumbling around with which dice to roll, and which numbers to add to the totals, but my eldest volunteered to help out with that aspect.  What is often harder for people to get into is putting yourself into your character’s position and really roleplaying.  That part she just instantly grasped.  She asked intelligent questions and made intelligent choices.  When she ran into her first dangerous encounter, she understood instinctively that it was a fight that she couldn’t win and opted to stay under cover while her much more capable tiger mentor went in to do the heavy lifting.  Then, in a twist that frankly astonished me, she correctly identified my NPC as a friendly and ran to her (staying hidden, of course), and said “I want to grab her by the wrist and help her run away and hide.” This was the character I sent to make sure she survived, you understand.  But my girl knew that Corva knew the jungle better than this outsider ever could and wanted to get her to safety ... she was trying to save her would-be-savior.

We played for a couple of hours before we called it quits, and the next morning she asked when we were playing again.  “Soon,” I promised.  “Maybe when you get out of the shower?” she asked hopefully.  “I have to go to work,” I pointed out.  She seemed very disappointed.  And she’s already asked at least twice more since then.

So I would have to say it was a success, and, assuming I don’t kill myself trying to do all this extra work, I think it will be a pretty cool campaign.  And I think my youngest child will, at age 7, be a pretty amazing player.  I can’t wait to see how it all comes out.

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1 For those of you who speak 5th edition D&D, I was playing a pact of the chain warlock, and so she played my improved familiar.

2 And, for those of you who don’t speak D&D, the GM is the “game master.” Sort of like the referee of the game.

3 That is, from the perspective of “today,” which will be whenever we start the full campaign and they all meet for the first time.

4 You might find it interesting if you’re a fellow D&D player (and especially interesting if you’re a D&D player from my old gaming group) to know that, for these NPCs, I’m using updated-to-5e versions of my own old player characters.  At this point, I’ve played for long enough that I have an old character for just about every occasion, and I found what I think is the perfect one for each of my 3 kids’ character concepts.

It's the most overstressed time of the year ...

This has been one of our busiest weeks of the year:

• Monday the Smaller Animal was in D&D class.
• Tuesday The Mother took all the kids to Magic Mountain.
• Thursday was Inspire’s Winter Wonderland followed by Dojo Boom.
• Friday was Dave & Buster’s.
• Saturday was our belated National Heroscape Day celebration; I took the kids and The Mother stayed home this time.
• Sunday was a birthday party.

Additionally, there was going to be a vendor fair Wednesday and the annual holiday party for $work on Thursday night, but somethings had to give.  Partially because it’s been raining like crazy here in the desert, which is, needless to say, somewhat uncharacteristic.  So, I wish I had time to write more, but I’m just too tired.  Next time.

Shadowfall Equinox VI

"The Hungry Ghost That Lingers"

[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.]

I really thought that, after narrowly missing being the first mix to achieve a sixth volume, surely Smokelit Flashback would be the second.  But it’s funny how things work out.  See, I listen to a lot of music at work, and, when I’m doing more mindless work that I don’t have to allot that much mental capacity to, upbeat fare rules the day: Salsatic Vibrato is a go-to, but Sirenexiv Cola or Totally Different Head are good choices too.  When I need to actually concentrate on stuff, though, I need something that’s a bit mellower, a bit more background-able.  For many moons Smokelit Flashback fulfilled that need for me.  Lately, though, Shadowfall Equinox has been coming to the fore.

This makes perfect sense, of course.  As I began describing way back with the inaugural entry into this series, and perhaps culminating with my deeper exploration of just what “ambient” means as a musical style in the third installment, SfE is all about ambient, and ambient is all about contemplative thought and creative endeavor.  As Brian Eno put it way back in ‘78, “Ambient Music is intended to produce calm and a space to think.” So it’s a crucial part of my work regime, and every once in a while I decide I need some more variety ... something new.  And that invariably leads to a new volume of this mix, my tribute to the Hearts of Space program that really kicked off my mixes as they exist in the modern sense.  So here we are.

Just as with Salsatic Vibrato VI, this mix is falling into a groove, but also showing even more variety as it goes along.  Volume I, you may recall, featured 3 tracks from Jeff Greinke and 2 from Black Tape for a Blue Girl, whereas this mix has only one track from each and no repeated artists at all.  In fact, only 3 other tracks are from artists we’ve seen before in this mix, leaving a whopping 13 tracks from new artists.¹  Sure, that means that several artists we’ve come to expect—such as This Mortal Coil, Falling You, and Stellamara—aren’t here this time out.  But fresh faces are always good: new blood keeps the mix from going stale.

Of course, old blood provides continuity, and we weren’t about to see a Shadowfall installment without hearing from Jeff Greinke, who is the only artist to appear on every volume.  Though we’ve explored a few other albums from this ambient master, we haven’t fully exhausted the album where we started, Wide View.  “Glide” is another track typical of that amazing album: slow and autumnal, with a crispness somehow reminiscent of the brittleness of first frost.  From Black Tape for a Blue Girl,² also a fairly typical piece: “Tear Love from My Mind,” from one of Rosenthal’s early(ish) albums, A Chaos of Desire.  There are muted, muddy vocals in there somewhere, but mainly it’s a swirling, floating, goth-drenched ethereal piece that epitomizes the darkwave sound.  And, while Kevin Keller didn’t show up for our very first volume, he’s been on every volume since, and this one is no exception.  “Peace” is a calm, soothing piece from only about a decade ago, and shows off Keller’s style admirably.  His marriage of ambient and neoclassical is sometimes referred to as “ambient chamber music,”³ and this track embodies that pretty perfectly.

Our other two returning artists are Jade Leary and Jens Gad, both of whom we saw for the first time last volume.  “Salvatrice,” is a fairly typical piece of gothic minimalism from Leary, while “El Momento” harkens pretty strongly back to Gad’s days with Enigma.  It’s tough to beat “The Orbiting Suns” (which is his piece from last volume), but this one is pretty solid too.

The Cocteau Twins are not technically a returning artist, but only because their track from last time (“Sea, Swallow Me”) was a collaboration with Harold Budd.  For this volume, I thought it high time we have a proper, solo⁴ effort from the Cocteaus.  “How to Bring a Blush to the Snow” is another beautiful piece off Victorialand⁵ which provides that amazing, dreamy sound that the Cocteaus are so well-deservedly known for, as well as a touch of a dark reminder that they started out as a goth band.  Angels of Venice we’ve not seen before on this mix, but of course we’ve seen them plenty: mainly on Numeric Driftwood—every volume so far, in fact—but also on Penumbral Phosphorescence and even Fulminant Cadenza.  “The Sins of Salome,” from their second album, has a bit of Middle Eastern flair (as the name implies), but mainly its wordless vocals and sombre cello carry us, relaxed and untroubled, into our closing track.  Likewise, Télépopmusik has so far been relegated to Smokelit Flashback—specifically volumes IV and V—where their downtempo trip-hop fits in perfectly.  But “Swamp” is something a bit different: not quite creepy, but not quite not creepy either, the science-fiction background noises and the lonely jazz saxophone backed by strings in the foreground combine to make something more downbeat and ethereal than their usual fare.

Many of the new faces here result from an exploration I did looking for neoclassical bands I had not yet discovered.  Mira Calix, for instance, I was assured (by the Internet) was neoclassical, but I’m not sure I buy it.  South African born, London bred, Calix is mostly electronica of the decidedly weird variety, though she does have a tendency to mix in classical instrumentation.  “Schmyk” is a minimalist piano piece with some concurrent synth noodling and not as much discordancy as she seems to be prone to from my limited experience with her thus far.  Opener “Somnolence” is from Swedish dark neoclassical band Arcana.  They remind me quite a bit of Dark Sanctuary, the French dark neoclassical band we first heard on volume II.⁶  For a while, this volume just opened with “How to Bring a Blush to the Snow,” but eventually I decided it needed a short intro piece, and “Somnolence” is just too awesome to pass up.  I don’t like all of Arcana’s output,⁷ but this track is great: quiet, just slightly menacing, and building up to something.  Here I pay that off with the Cocteaus, which I think is a better choice than whatever Arcana used on their album.  Finally, Ludovico Einaudi is an Italian pianist whose spare “Solo” (from Nightbook) is the perfect closer for this set of late-fall-inspired contemplative tunes.

As for the new ambient artists, the collaboration bewteen Deborah Martin and J. Arif Verner is actually one I’ve had for a while now, but I think I must have forgotten about it and only recently rediscovered it.  It’s pretty amazing, if not particularly genre-transcending, and “Vicis Pro Vicis” is one of the most spare and ethereal pieces on an album where spare and ethereal are the words of the day.  Whereas Esther Garcia, who I originally found on Jamendo with one of those sets I like to refer to as “soundtrack portfolios,” is harder to pigeonhole.  Like all such albums, her Incidental Fussion is very eclectic, with no two tracks really sounding alike, but the delicate, airy beauty of “Air Elements” is the one that seemed perfect for this mix.

Like Télépopmusik, Laika is mostly downtempo trip-hop,⁸ but “Dirty Feet and Giggles” is more of a weird interlude on its home album.  Here it makes a bare-bones, echoey, too-long-to-be-a-bridge into the second third of the volume, and specifically into Kid Loco’s amazing remix of Talvin Singh’s “Traveller.” The original is a meandering piece of rave-adjacent electronica from Singh, a Brit known for fusing Indian style into drum&bass.  What French DJ Kid Loco does with it here, on the other hand, is much closer to downtempo/chill.  It’s just a hair away from landing on Smokelit Flashback, but it’s just light and relaxing enough to end up here instead.

When it came to picking a volume title, it was slim pickings indeed this time out.  The line I used is from the Black Tape for a Blue Girl track, supposedly; I sure can’t hear it, but the Internet assures me it’s true.  And it sounded cool in any event.

Shadowfall Equinox VI
[ The Hungry Ghost That Lingers ]

“Somnolence” by Arcana, off As Bright as a Thousand Suns
“How to Bring a Blush to the Snow” by Cocteau Twins, off Victorialand
“El Momento” by Jens Gad, off Le Spa Sonique
“Vicis Pro Vicis” by Deborah Martin & J. Arif Verner, off Anno Domini
“Dirty Feet and Giggles” by Laika, off Sounds of the Satellites
“Traveller [Kid Loco's Once Upon a Time in the East mix]” by Talvin Singh [Single]⁹
“Swamp” by Télépopmusik, off Angel Milk
“Salvatrice” by Jade Leary, off And Come the Sirens
“Tear Love from My Mind” by Black Tape for a Blue Girl, off A Chaos of Desire
“Sleepwalker” by Colourbox, off Colourbox
“Godnat” by Analogik, off Søens Folk
“Peace” by Kevin Keller, off In Absentia
“Schmyk” by Mira Calix, off One on One
“Glide” by Jeff Greinke, off Wide View
“Air Elements” by Esther Garcia, off Incidental Fussion
“Find the Song” by Mary Youngblood, off Dance with the Wind
“The Sins of Salome” by Angels of Venice, off Awake Inside a Dream
“Solo” by Ludovico Einaudi, off Nightbook

Total:  18 tracks,  80:19

In the “what the heck are these guys doing here?” category, we have first and foremost Colourbox, the not-really-dreampop alternapop labelmates of the Cocteau Twins and Dead Can Dance.  And, since they were part of the 4AD stable, members of Colourbox appeared in the music collective This Mortal Coil, which is how I discovered them.  Colourbox is known—inasmuch as they’re known at all—for eclectic, upbeat songs, but “Sleepwalker” is something entirely different: another spare piano piece, but (unlike Keller’s “Peace”) with a more lonely sound, almost like the background music in the sad part of the movie, where the protagonist is feeling low before the climactic comeback.  Next up, Analogik, a Danish electrojazz group who came to me via LittleBigPlanet.¹⁰  “Godnat” is uncharactistically slow and meditative; its electronic sounds—reminiscent of an old ship creaking on the waves—are almost hypnotic here.

And, last but not least, I found Mary Youngblood when I went looking for some Native American music ... not the traditional sort, but more modern fare infused with Native American elements and, if possible, performed by Native American artists.  This is how I discovered that there used to be such a thing as a “Best Native American Music Album” Grammy, and that Mary Youngblood had won two of them.  I confess that I don’t properly appreciate all her songs, but her flautism is undeniably beautiful, and “Find the Song” is easily my favorite tune of hers.

Next time, we’ll swing back a bit more upbeat, to our bright-and-shiny videogame-inspired mix.

⇐ Shadowfall Equinox V

Shadowfall Equinox VII ⇒

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1 Although, to be fair, several of them have been seen before here on different mixes.

2 Who we’ve seen on every volume but one.

3 At least Wikipedia refers to it that way.

4 Well, I suppose “solo” is not the right word to describe a three-person band named after twins, but you know what I mean.

5 Feel free to refer back to my full discussion of how I discovered this amazing album.

6 And, since the two bands started within a couple of years of each other, I can’t help but wonder if there’s a whole dark neoclassical scene in Europe that I’ve missed out on.

7 Come to think of it, I don’t like all of Dark Sanctuary’s stuff either.

8 Only they’re from the UK instead of France.

9 As always, I hate linking to YouTube.  But this one doesn’t seem to be available for purchase anywhere, at least in the US.  Maybe if you’re overseas you’ll have better luck.

10 And, thus, they will eventually start showing up on volumes of Paradoxically Sized World.

Less than nothing to say ... practically a negative amount to say, really

It’s a short week, and I’m a little busy on top of that, so I’m not going to say much this week.  Tune in next week to see if I can muster up a full post.

D&D and Me: Part 6 (The Contemplative Life ... of Punching the Crap out of People)

[This is the sixth post in a new series.  You may want to begin at the beginning.  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.]

[Last time I talked about more of my D&D characters and what attracted me to each one.  I had just reached the point of buying 3rd edition and thinking I should try out a new class, with my friend Tim DMing.]

Tim, ever my exemplar, had played a monk, named Edax Rarem, for many years, and I’d always admired him.  Many people hate monks in their D&D games, for basically the same reasons that they hate psionics, or dinosaurs, or guns (even very primitive ones): fantasy purism.  Get your chocolate out of my peanut butter, so to speak.  But I like mixing odd things, so I never had any hang-ups about scifi-style psychic powers in my high fantasy, nor about wuxia-style mystical monks in my solidly Eurocentric medieval-based fantasy.  Bring on the weirdness, I say.  And, as it turned out, Jin Shangtzi was probably the character that I ran for the longest amount of time.  He survived an edition upgrade (from 3e to 3.5e), he played with multiclassing into psionic classes, he spoke little and broke things a lot.  To this day, Jin is one of my fondest D&D character memories.

The thing that is awesome about D&D monks is that they are not the greatest offensive fighters, they are not the stealthiest, they have little abiltiy to sling spells and can’t heal for shit, but, when it comes to defense, they are insanely good.  They have the best saving throws in the game, their armor class scales with their level and their nearly-always-astronomical wisdom score, and they’re the fastest characters in the game.  Besides a nearly pathological desire to break things, Jin was focussed on mobility.  I kept his balance and tumble skills maxed out at all times, and his climb and jump and escape artist weren’t far behind.  I used his few psionic abilities to enhance his already impressive strengths: inertial armor boosted his already high armor class, burst briefly upped his already crazy-high speed, and catfall on top of the monk-standard slow fall ability meant that he never really worried about falling off anything.  He wasn’t the character who could take out the enemy in one round, but he didn’t really care about how many rounds it took, because he wasn’t getting hit by anything, and he was running circles around the bad guys while they tried.

A quick story, which may have been one of my favorite Jin moments ever:  We were attempting to rescue some captives who were being experimented on in this big open underground chamber which was overlooked by a large balcony thing—the way Tim described it, it sounded like the observation deck at a sports stadium or something along those lines.  But there were no stairs or ladder or anything; it seemed that you had to get to this balcony from somewhere deeper in the cave system, because there was literally no way to get from where we were up to it.  And, up there, looking down and (figuratively, at least) thumbing his nose at us, was the Big Bad (or at least who we thought was the Big Bad at that time).  So I decided to let the rest of my party handle taking out the mook guards down here and resucing the hostages: I was going go get that fucker.  You can’t reach the balcony, says Tim.  Jin jumps for it, I say.  Roll a check, he says—I make it.  Okay, but now you’re just hanging off the bottom of the balcony; you still can’t get to the railing, he says.  Jin starts climbing, I say.  Roll a check, he says—I make it.  Okay, but now you realize that the balcony isn’t just open, there’s a transparent barrier of some kind, he says.  Jin breaks it, I say.  But it’s not glass, Tim says; it’s some sort of crytsal, only fairly thin, so you can see through it, but still pretty strong.  Jin starts punching it, I say.  It might take him a while, but he’ll get through it.  By this point, the bad guy’s sneer is gone, and he’s starting to look a bit worried.  As the first cracks appear in the giant crystal window, he decides to get the hell out of there.  Patient as ever, Jin just keeps right on punching.  No need to worry: he knew he could run twice as fast as the bad guy ...

Jin was ostensibly an Asian character, but I never really borrowed the cultural aspect of that.  It was mainly a physical thing: if you’re going to play a monk character, who doesn’t want to look like Bruce Lee?  Actually, Jin was more of cross between Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan, but bald.  And no shirt.  In fact, although it wasn’t exactly a vow of poverty, Jin never had any interest in material possessions, and generally travelled around wearing nothing but pants and a rope belt.  He was thin and ropily muscled; not overly strong, but very lithe and wiry.  As a child, he was the youngest of a huge family.  His parents couldn’t really deal with having one more mouth to feed, so, when a group of traveling monks passed by, they agreed to offer their young son in service, in exchange for some food and perhaps a few coins.  Yes, they essentially sold their child; but, on the other hand, he probably ended up getting a better life out of it.  Unlike the standard dark backstory of dead parents, Jin just didn’t ever think much about his family: they never really mattered to him.  The monastery was his family, and there he learned the wonder of breaking things.

See, I had decided that Jin was a monk dedicated to a deity.  This wasn’t strictly necessary, from a game standpoint—if you were a cleric, you definitely had to pick a deity, and if you were a druid or a paladin, you were encouraged to pick a deity, but monks could just be monks.  Not Jin, I decided.  Glancing through the Greyhawk gods,^* there was one clear choice: St. Cuthbert, who was, as Wikipedia puts it, “the combative deity of Wisdom, Dedication, and Zeal.” Could there possibly be a divine figure that more screams “monk!” at you?  I think not.  So I decided that monasteries of St. Cuthbert, while perhaps rare, did exist, and they would typically house two orders of monks: the Gnostics, who believed in study and meditation and concentrating on developing the mind, and the Somatics, who believe in exercise and disciplined movement and concentrating on developing the body.  The Gnostics were the majority in any given monastery, but there were always at least a few Somatics, who were the adventuring monks, the monks of action ... the ones that the D&D class was referring to.  Jin was one of those.  From a mechanical perspective, Cuthbert was lawful neutral (as was Jin), but, while he was not explicitly good, he didn’t allow evil clerics either (Jin certainly leaned more towards good than evil).  Among Cuthbert’s domains are strength and destruction, which is awesome for a monk whose primary mode of dealing with the world is to punch it in the face.

But I decided that Jin was not just a thug who liked beating people up under the guise of religion.  No, Jin (like all the Somatics, in my wholly invented history) believed that the only way to understand the universe was by breaking as much of it down as possible, and by breaking things into smaller and smaller pieces, until you could understand the nature of matter by understanding each of its components.  That the best way to break things down was by punching the living shit out of them was just a bonus, as far as Jin was concerned.  With his absolutely abysmal charisma, he was socially awkward, but not in a shy way.  You know how some people just say whatever they think, without regard for social propriety or whether it might hurt anyone’s feelings?  That was Jin.  He never lied, but not because he had anything against it, particularly: he just sucked at it.  If the party engaged in any sort of subterfuge, they quickly learned that they had to tell Jin to just shut up entirely; if they encouraged him to try to play along with the deception, he would happily try ... and fail, every time.  In any event, he never much understood the point of lying, even if he was happy to play along with whatever his friends wanted.  So much easier to just say what you mean, and mean what you say.  He was a deep thinker (middling intelligence and, of course, very high wisdom), and he was well aware of his tendency to say the wrong thing, so he often stayed completely silent, preferring action to words.  He had no interest in gold or jewels, and even magic items only interested him insofar as they could help him break things.  I’m pretty sure his only real magic item, even at the higher levels, was something Tim invented specifically for him: they were bracers, and they increased his damage against creatures a bit, as I recall, but they were especially helpful in destroying objects, which is something Jin really loved to do.  Can’t get the chest open?  Ask Jin to break it for you.  Can’t pick the lock on the door?  Jin will be happy to break it into splinters, I’m sure.  Dangerous artifact needs to be destroyed?  Jin is practically salivating over there to have at it.

Though Jin concentrated on being a monk, I still retained my fascination for D&D’s weird little system of psionics, and when the Psionics Handbook came out, with all new (much simpler) mechanics for 3e, I instantly siezed on the psychic warrior class.  Keeps the base attack and the fortitude save at appropriate levels, while adding cool psionic powers and (oooh!) psionic feats.  I’d already played a psionicist, so I was familiar with what psionics could do.  And, while many people (including my eldest child) don’t see a connection between monks and psionics, I always thought it was a natural fit: they both need discipline, they both concentrate on developing their minds, they both are just slightly to the left of “regular” magic.  So I loved adding a few psychic warrior levels to Jin’s solid monk background.  The last level I took (which I believe brought Jin up to 12th) was a variation of sacred/psionic fist, which I reworked specifically to get access to the destruction domain.  Once a day smite and an inflict light wounds deliverable via touch attack?  Well, Jin’s method of “touching” people was to punch them in the face, so, hell yeah: sign me up for all of that.

Jin was a big part of my D&D experience and, as you do with any of the PCs you carry around for a while, I began to think of him more like a friend than a fictional character.  It was definitely the only time I really enjoyed being a primarily combat-focussed character, but then Jin was always more that just a guy punching people (although he thoroughly enjoyed that aspect of it).  He was a bit of a philosopher, a bit of a mentalist, and a big believer in the orderliness of the universe.  He never wanted to be the ruler of the kingdom, but when his friend Magnus (a sorceror-cum-dragon-disciple played by our friend Marcus) ended up taking the throne (due to a series of weird circumstances kicked off primarily by his emergent draconic nature), he was quite pleased to take over the job of head of the palace guard.  Instill discipline in a bunch of raw recruits while simultaneously keeping all the important people safe?  It was perfect.

Next time: the long break, exploring Pathfinder, and coming back home to 5th edition.

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* Greyhawk was the default setting for 3e, just as the Forgotten Realms is for 5e.

Happy birthday to me

You know how I said that this weekend was my birthday weekend and I wasn’t going to promise you a full post this week?  Yeah, well, this is me delivering on that non-promise.  Or anti-promise.  Or something.

Hey, you know what I just found out?  Neil Gaiman is a Scorpio, just like me!  This is important, of course, because (as I’ve written about before), Neil is the fifth point on my pentagram of literary idols.  There are any number of excellent reasons to love Gaiman—Coraline, Stardust, Sandman, Neverwhere—but surely the epitome must be American Gods.  Read the novels, watch the series, listen to the sequel Anansi Boys as read by amazing vocal talent Lenny Henry ... get it any way you can.  And send Neil some good thoughts today.

This weekend we didn’t do much.  My computer keeled over again, so that consumed 5 hours of my life.  We watched Men in Black: International finally; it was good.  We went to a fancy Italian place that we hadn’t tried yet; the lasagna and the mushroom risotto were particularly lovely.  I worked on my D&D spreadsheets and made a small amount of progress.  And the donut shop actually had cinnamon donuts for a change!  So, overall a fine weekend.

Next week, a proper post for sure.

Dark night of the soul

This week, our lovely power company turned off our electricity for about 24 hours.  It was quite a trying experience, especially for our children, who think that if you don’t have any electronic devices, your life is pretty much over.  “I’m so BOOOOORED!!” was the call du jour.

Now, on the plus side, located as we were between (at least at one point) four wildfires, we feel very lucky that we suffered zero property damage, never had to evacuate, never were in danger of losing any of our family, be they fleshy, furry, or scaly.  So we’re very pleased about that.  On the other hand, the fact that power was restored to the vast majority of our city—including the vast majority of our very own neighborhood!—nearly 12 hours before it was to us was pretty irritating.  The Mother is of the opinion that they just plain forgot to turn us back on.  I prefer the theory that they foolishly tried to turn everyone back on at once and a couple of the circuits just keeled over dead from the shock of it all.  Either way, we’re not pleased at the extra expenditure at Costco (for flashlights and headlamps) or the food that will be slowly going bad faster than usual over the next few days and weeks.  What makes it even more frustrating is the fact that the power company claims that they have to cut the power to reduce the risk of starting new fires when the winds get high.  Yet, within minutes after they turned the power back on, a whole new fire broke out, and the current working theory (at least according to that bastion of accuracy, the Internet) is that the sudden resumption of power actually caused the fire.  So it’s quite frustrating overall.

On the plus side, my children finally got to play that Minecraft Uno game we bought them, and I now understand why people used to go to bed so damn early in the olden days.  Also, if there was any lingering doubt in my mind that I need that stupid CPAP machine to sleep, they are firmly put to rest.  I went to bed at midnight and woke up at 2am, then at 4am, then at 6am, then the next time I didn’t even bother looking at the clock because obviously it was 8am, then the next time I woke up it was 7:30am, so obviously I was wrong before, and then the power came back on 8:30am and I promptly got up and reassembled my machine and got 3 good hours of sleep.  So that was fun.

Compared to all that, nothing else this week is even worth mentioning.  Tune in next week when (hopefully) there will be a longer post.  However, next weekend is also my birthday weekend, so I make no promises.