Last year I wrote “The Abomination of Corvintown” as backstory for a D&D character, but held it in the hope that I’d get to tell the story in-game. That didn’t happen, so now I’m making it public. It’s pulpy and grim, and I think it came out very close to how I intended it. Go read it.
I was in the Duke’s army for a year, didn’t like it. Shitty food, pay was only a promise, and the officers were all stuck-up bastards. I had to see out my year, and a little more from the stockade. Then I went looking for my brother in the Greymark.
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I enjoyed this short treatise on the history of sieges.
Unfortunately I can’t see how to apply its precepts to writing.
The third season of my D&D campaign starts Monday, and I’m going to discuss some of what I’m trying to do in it—without, naturally, giving anything away to my players.
Season One and Season Two were good, and I really liked doing them, but the environment for the third season is where I had intended the whole thing to be set when I first came up with the idea for the world: a continent that had been cut off to everyone for a very long time, a place where I could do a kind of cross between Joe Abercrombie and Deadwood[1].
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There had been rumors of war, fears that the conflict raging to the south and east would reach out for us, but we didn’t expect anything to happen soon. As I went to bed that night, I felt a mild unease, a concern about what the next months would bring.
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The shovels made steady progress. Sern and Jerym, the two locals I’d hired to dig, grumbled at my not helping, but digging is what I was paying them coin for. I needed to be free to keep an eye on them both, as they wouldn’t have been there with me if they’d been trustworthy. The lanterns I’d brought provided enough light, and the pile of dirt to one side grew until there was a solid noise, wood struck by metal.
I stood. They looked back at me, and I told them to clear off all the dirt first. More grumbling, but they did it, and when I nodded they levered the wood apart, ripping it up and revealing the body inside.
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In the pantheon of old Athrai, still one of the dominant Q’Resti faiths, Afuegan, brother to the god of war Atargan, is the god of archers. Afuegan is also the god of accuracy, the pursuit of excellence for its own sake, and monomania.
His singularity of focus, and his occasional blindness to larger concerns, are both represented by the fact that he is missing an eye. This is one account of how he lost it.
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This longsword is the same blade referred to in older Issilanth texts as “The Firedemon’s Tooth”, as can be seen by comparing descriptions from historical sources.
This is a description from private letters during its possession by the Kelera family:
My visit to Yeemn’s chambers did not go as well; his response to the absence of my maid was to play a trick upon me wherein he took his family’s sword (a prized possession, apparently) directly from the fire, where it had been since before my entrance, and against my will pressed it to my fist—there is no injury, for the sword was somehow cool to the touch. He laughed and told me that it “likes the fire”, and that its sheen was whiter than that of a normal sword, and showed me the glow from letters near the hilt. I could not make them out, but thought they spelled a name beginning with “W”. I did not care for his trick, which frightened me badly and made it ever clearer that unlike his brother Yeemn remains a boy, but conceded that the blade was an excellent one and remarkably sharp—particularly if it was, as he claimed, hundreds of years old.
—Private letters of Seev Denina, 1082 IY.
I recently finished the second season of my D&D campaign, and want to review the season just as I did with the first one.
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Bethany couldn’t believe they would actually kill her. For what? In some kind of insane ritual? They looked like cheap horror extras, with a cramped basement for their stage and an altar that was despite its appearance certainly not solid stone.
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Caroline gestured, and the two acolytes came forward, hustling Bethany between them. She was gagged and her arms bound behind her, but she tried to struggle anyway, her eyes wide and wild. While they tied her to the slab, Caroline began lighting the candles in sequence, waiting for them to finish and step outside the circle before she lit the final one.
While filling out background details for an upcoming episode of my D&D campaign, I came up with this town and its history, which I thought worth sharing. It’s strongly rooted in Q’Rith, but could easily be transplanted to another setting, and it looks promising to me as a potential base for a series of adventures, although I’m not sure I’ll actually use it as such.
It’s a harbor town of about 3000, far north of any other urban areas, independent, surrounded by sparsely-populated cold country, and run by a group of six, its founders.
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While getting ready to run the second season of my roleplaying campaign, I found myself with a question: several societies in the setting (based on this outline) are able to reliably navigate over vast oceans, but how are they able to do this?
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I might have to read The Last Ringbearer, a Russian parody/response/fan-fiction piece set in Middle Earth around the end of the War of the Ring. See also: “Unused Audio Commentary by Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, Recorded Summer 2002, for The Fellowship of the Ring (Platinum Series Extended Edition) DVD, Part One.”[*] and Bored of the Rings.
| [*] | Although note that it’s more parody of Zinn and Chomsky than of The Lord of the Rings, and that I admire their work and reject the piece’s implicit claim that their real-life analyses are of a similar kind to the reaching arguments made in the McSweeney’s piece. |
Yikoon did not announce his presence, and his skill was sufficient to evade the wards set by the Temple Elders. He hid himself in disused spaces, and waited patiently before moving from one to another. For weeks he used his sorceries to blunt his hunger, and watched. Dedication to his goal kept him silent, observant, and still. Finally he had knowledge and confidence enough, and he made his way into the compound of the Temple’s child sorcerers.
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It’s late, and what I think everybody needs at this point is a zoomable, clickable, English and Elvish map of Middle Earth.
This is mainly referring to weapons in Dungeons & Dragons-style roleplaying games, but also fantasy literature given that magic weapons are staples of the genre.
In my Fantasy World Sketch, I suggested that magic would have altered human development significantly, primarily in the realm of food production. I didn’t go down the route of completely reimagining how societies would have developed, in part because I wanted to end up with something that resembled a “classic” fantasy milieu, but it seems clear to me that since food production is a priority for most species, magic would be used to improve it. Historically speaking, war is another important societal endeavor, and its import is clear in most fantasy realms—that is, the impact of magic on warfare is discussed at length and covered in the rules.
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Over the last three weeks ideas about a setting for a fantasy roleplaying campaign have been popping into my head. I haven’t really wanted to work on this, especially since I don’t intend to run a campaign anytime in the near future (although doing so remains tempting), but I had to write some of them down, and now I feel I should outline the major points of this setting, just to get them out there.
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Afterwards, when I was next aware, everything was dark. I had my eyes closed, but couldn’t seem to open them.
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I died a while ago. I’m not sure how long, but it can’t be more than a few years. I don’t keep track of time too well.
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He didn’t like it. The work, whatever it truly was, had dragged, and now they were stuck there a third night.
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I found myself outside a large building, a building that looked familiar. After a few moments, I realized that it looked like many buildings I had encountered in my life, especially in childhood.
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