dungeons & dragons – Page 4

Start of the week, end of the week

It’s Monday, which is traditionally the start of the working week. However for me I treat it as the end of the week, because it’s the last day of teaching the current ethics topic on Outschool. I start the new topic on Wednesday (and on Tuesday I have no classes). So it was the end of the Wealth and Poverty topic. Honestly, it’s one I’m happy to see the end of, because it was a tough topic to navigate without making the questions too leading for the kids. By today I’d managed to mentally rearrange things to get the best out of it and make it flow better than my initial ordering, and I’d come up with some extra talking points and questions on the fly that I incorporated in later lessons.

I managed to sleep decently well last night. I did wake up a couple of times – I always do, I’m a light sleeper – but I managed to drift off again before the noise of the past two nights got into my head. It was there again, but I successfully defeated it. I don’t know if I’ll be able to do that again tonight. This evening I tried knocking on the neighbour’s door that I estimate to be the most likely source of the noise, but they didn’t answer. I’ll try again tomorrow during the day.

So I slept in this morning, not getting up until after 8 o’clock. That meant I didn’t have time for breakfast and making/kneading a sourdough loaf and going for my run before my first class at 10am. So I delayed the run until later in the day. My wife wanted to go to the gym during her lunch break (from working from home), so I took Scully out on a big walk and grabbed some lunch on the way.

It was pretty hot in the middle of the day, so I delayed my run until later. I eventually got to it about 6pm, when it had cooled down to 26°C, which is still really a bit warm for running.

During the afternoon I worked on assembling new Irregular Webcomic! strips for this week. I also made a D&D monster for the January challenge in my Outschool D&D group. I post a monthly design challenge for the kids in the group, and at the end of each month we share our designs. For January I suggested designing a hybrid creature monster, along the lines of the classic owlbear – melding together two unexpected animals. So here’s mine:

Sharkle stat block

New content today:

Last day of holidays

It’s Monday, the public holiday in lieu of the New Year’s Day holiday which was on Saturday. Tomorrow is back to work for many people after the Christmas/New Year break, including my wife, and myself, as I begin teaching classes on Outschool again tomorrow after my break.

Today was warm and summery. We went for a long walk with Scully in the mid-afternoon, and were pretty hot by the time we got home.

I worked on writing the lesson plan for the new week of ethics lessons – the topic for the week is “laws”. Asking questions like why we have laws, and what gives a government (or anyone else for that matter) the authority to make and enforce laws?

Another thing I’ve been doing today is downloading PDFs of the old TSR Dungeon magazines, containing Dungeons & Dragons (and occasionally other game) adventures. Someone on reddit linked to a Wizards of the Coast approved (hence legally available) archive of all 221 issues on archive.org. I remember when Dungeon was first published, and I had print copies of issues 1 and 2, though I never bought any more as I had very limited money at the time, and I preferred the broader gaming subject matter of Dragon magazine. So being able to have the entire collection as PDFs is amazing. And not only is there a copyright-holder-approved archive of Dungeon magazines, but there are Dragon magazines there too.

New content today:

New Year’s Eve – end of 2021

I don’t really do end of year retrospectives, so let’s just cut to the chase and see what I did today.

I got up early and headed straight to the supermarket. I managed to book the earliest available timeslot for grocery pickup, which I took because I figures the earlier in the morning I’m there, the fewer potentially COVID-infected people will be around. I grabbed my order and was out of there within about a minute. I also popped into the bakery and grabbed a loaf of Vienna style bread for a special dinner for tonight.

After getting home, I went for my run, and then after that I finally had breakfast. This is very unusual – I normally have breakfast within a few minutes of getting up, so I’m not used to waiting any length of time before eating in the morning.

Continuing from yesterday’s window cleaning, I did more spring cleaning stuff. First I attended to the balcony door and glass panels. I took the sliding insect screen door off the track and washed it clean, then cleaned all of the glass door panels. After remounting the screen door, I continued washing the balcony, which is really a job I should do more often as it collects blown leaves and dust quite quickly.

Inside, I decided to clean out some wardrobe space which has been dedicated to keeping boxes from products such as our cameras, iPads, phones, and laptops. I kept the boxes in case we ever sold the items, but given that we’ve sold exactly zero in 20-odd years, I figure maybe it was time to just get rid of them and reclaim the storage space for something useful.

I took Scully for a walk over lunch while my wife went to the gym. We went over to the fish and chip shop where I got some fish & chips for lunch. I ate at my favourite local lookout spot, with a view over the city. it was a warm sunny day, with not a cloud in the sky. Fortunately, after some vandal poisoned the shade trees at the lookout spot a few years back, one new tree has grown to provide shade on the bench where I sit again.

Back home, I realised there was something I needed to do by the end of the month! The Outschool Dungeons & Dragons group that I run for kids has a monthly adventure writing challenge, and for December I posted a challenge to write an adventure featuring a spooky lighthouse. I said I’d post my own adventure at the end of the month, so now I had to write one. I knuckled down and typed out 100 words of adventure material in a few hours, which I then formatted with some of my own photos as illustrations and exported to PDF, before posting it to the group. Phew!

For dinner tonight, New Year’s Eve, we have something special. For starters I used the figs I bought the other day to make grilled figs with ricotta and honey:

After that was the main course, baked brie in bread with hazelnuts and honey:

Just look at that melty cheese!

That’s the way to put back in all those calories burnt doing exercise and housework today!

It’s now still a few hours before midnight and 2022. I hope you all have a good New Year’s Eve, and that 2022 brings us all some relief from this miserable pandemic thing.

New content today:

Tech panic!

I woke up this morning, got out of bed, grabbed my bowl of muesli and yoghurt, and sat down to check my emails and stuff from overnight.

When the computer screen came on, there was a system dialogue. It said the most recent backup attempt had failed. And…

… that the most recent available backup was from some date in 2018.

Now, I’m no expert in how Apple’s Time Machine backups work, but that seemed somewhat sub-optimal. I didn’t have time to do much about it, as I had to get ready and head to school to teach my weekly Ethics class. So I set it to try and do another backup while I was out, and headed off.

I taught my class, and popped into the supermarket to buy a few things we’d run out of, and came home, to find the new backup had also failed. A quick discussion with some of my more tech-savvy friends confirmed what I suspected – it was time to get a new backup drive. I ordered one online, for pickup, not delivery, so I could get it today. It was ready to pick up pretty quickly, and I caught a train a few suburbs over to get it.

While I was out, I decided to grab some lunch, and had some tonkotsu ramen at a place in the shopping centre. It was okay, but I’ve had better. I picked up my new hard drive, and then since there’s a game shop there I popped into have a quick look at the games. They had copies of the new D&D book: Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft. I had a quick flip through and it looked like the sort of thing I’d like to read through fully and mine for ideas, so I bought a copy, with the limited edition alternative art cover. When 5th Edition first came out, I bought every book as it was released, but now I’m being more selective, as I don’t really have much use for some of the books they’ve been releasing lately (e.g. Candlekeep Mysteries, Eberron).

When I got home I plugged in the new drive, formatted it, set it as the new Time Machine backup drive, and started a full backup. Now, seven hours later, it’s still going, although it should finish in less than another hour. And then I can breathe easy again…

New content today:

Comic photos and walking

This morning I photographed the new batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips that I wrote over the weekend. I finished just in time for lunch, so went for a nice long walk to stretch my legs and get some food. I ended up doing a loop to the Italian bakery and back via a different route, completing 6.6 kilometres according to my tracking app. Phew!

Ad then when I got home I realised I should have got some groceries – we needed milk and bread, and probably something to cook for dinner. So later in the afternoon I took another walk up to the supermarket.

While at home I got a delivery – a copy of the original cover printing of the 1st edition AD&D Monster Manual. I’ve had a Monster Manual since 1983 or so, but it was the updated cover art, while I had the original cover art of the Dungeon Masters Guide, so they never matched. I decided a while back to try to get an original cover Monster Manual, and have been watching eBay for several months now. I bid on a few but lost the auction, and there was one “buy it now” that looked good from a seller in the UK, except it was a large bookseller and they had a disclaimer that the cover photo was a stock photo and not the actual product, and they couldn’t guarantee that the cover art was the same as the photo. I contacted them and said I was after a specific cover art, and could they verify it for me, and they wrote back and basically said no… so I declined to purchase that one. But last week I found an inexpensive copy in good condition from an Australian seller, and snapped it up. When it arrived today, I was very pleased, as it’s in great condition for the age. And now I finally, after 36 years, have a complete collection of the original artwork AD&D rulebooks.

New content today:

D&D night

I’m a few hours later than normal, because Friday was the day of the big Dungeons & Dragons game that I’ve been preparing for. I had a lot of last minute preparation to get done, and then it was off to AS’s place, where he was hosting for the evening.

We had five players, plus me Dungeon Mastering. The adventure was set in Ravnica, a giant plane-spanning city first described in the game Magic: the Gathering. I instructed the players that their characters did not know one another before the adventure begins, and that they were to keep their characters secret from each other. When pizza had been consumed and everyone had settled at the table to play, I began the adventure:

Splash!!

You are woken suddenly by cold water pouring over you. A LOT of cold water. You flail around, trying to get your bearings, and realise you have no support – you’re splashing in a pool of deep water. You find the surface and gasp for air. You instantly regret this move as a horrible stench of decay and filth fills your nostrils and lungs. But you need to breathe, so struggle to maintain your position on the surface. Your legs reach down and can’t find anything to stand on. And as you blink frantically with your wet eyes you realise it’s dark. Very dark. Darker than the deepest night in the narrowest alleyways of Ravnica. And as your eyes try in vain to adjust to the darkness, you realise there are other people next to you, also flailing about in the putrid water.

The first thing they had to do was figure out how to not drown. They were in a sewer, and had to swim to a side of the tunnel where there was a narrow ledge where they could crawl out of the water. Once a couple of them had managed this, the crocodiles attacked. This was when they discovered that their most of their weapons and magical gear were missing. A few had concealed daggers, with which they fought off the crocodiles.

Once they had time to breathe (the foul, stinky air), they could introduce themselves to each other. And begin the process of working out what just happened. None of them knew each other and the last thing they remembered was going to sleep at night after a fairly boring day.

And thus the chain of adventure had been set off! They ended up tracking across the city, encountering a disinterested bath house attendant (nothing in this city surprised him any more, and he only wanted to cadge an extra gold coin off each of them for a fresh set of clothes), ogre thugs, a goblin gang, helpful librarians, a mystical dryad, and a torture chamber operated by a demon. By the end of the night they had some idea what they were doing, and we packed up to continue the adventure another day. I think everyone really enjoyed it!

As a helpful prop, I made everyone reference cards for their magic items, so they could instantly see in front of them what they had, and hand them back to me when used up (for example magic potions). Here’s an example of one card:

Lantern of Revealing card

(Lantern image is copyright Wizards of the Coast, reproduced from D&D Beyond, at smaller size for non-profit illustrative purposes only.)

Another thing was that Andrew Coker decided his character would have the personality trait: Loves a good insult, even when directed at him. To assist in coming up with good insults, he and I worked together on a random fantasy insult generator, using our mezzacotta random text generators code that I’ve been taking about previously. We kept this one secret form the other guys until after the game, so it was all new to them. It was very cool seeing Andrew’s character slinging these amazing insults at everyone he met during the game. Do check it out, and perhaps use an insult next time the opportunity strikes.

So, a good night was had by all!

D&D prep

Wednesday is Ethics day, and I took my regular Year 6 class again this morning. We discussed various scenarios where people had to choose between friends or relatives and other people who were more deserving by some measure. It was interesting that in each case there were kids willing to argue in favour of either decision. Also there were some circumstances where they clearly favoured the family/friend while in another scenario with different circumstances they favoured the non-family/non-friend.

One scenario was a girl whose parents buy her a new soccer ball because hers is old and worn out. Her friend’s ball is also old and worn out, but the friend’s parents don’t have as much money, so can’t afford to get her a new ball. The question was, should the wealthier child’s parents buy her friend a ball as well? Most of the class said no, the parents had no obligation to their child’s friend.

Another scenario was a boy out sailing in a custom built two-person boat. Near shore, two people call out to him to take them for a sail: one younger boy who is a sailing club member who helped build the boat, but is not allowed to sail it alone, and the sailor’s friend, who is older but not a club member and didn’t help build the boat. In this case, most of the class said the sailor should take the younger boy, because he helped build the boat. (I get these scenarios in the teacher curriculum – I don’t make them up.)

The other thing I did today was visit Andrew Shellshear, who is hosting Friday night’s D&D extravaganza. I’m doing some stuff with projections for ambience, and we tested out his projector and figured out where to point it. He’s constantly designing board games these days, and showed me his work in progress on a new version of a game he’s been working on for a few months. Our group has been playtesting it and it’s pretty good! Hopefully I’ll be able to point you all at a Kickstarter or something in the future.

This afternoon my wife and I took Scully for a walk at a nearby park. I did some more prep for D&D on Friday, and that was the day. Tomorrow morning I hit the photography set for new comics!

Unforeseen events

Today I planned to photograph a batch of new Irregular Webcomic! strips that I’ve written over the past few days. But first thing this morning I had to visit the dentist for a routine hygiene/clean thingy. Alas, it turned out that I had a cracked tooth, which needed filling…

I ended up spending over two hours there, and left with a numb face. Arriving home a lot later than I thought and not feeling the best, I decided to give the photography a miss and leave it until Thursday. Instead I did some more prep for Friday night’s D&D game, and a bit of coding on a secret new random text generator, which promises to be a lot of fun.

Oh, and on the way home from the dentist, I got swooped by a magpie! It’s still the middle of winter, but it’s so warm and spring-like already that the magpies are apparently nesting already. It hit me full in the back of the shoulder and head as it dive-bombed me. I was rather shocked as I haven’t really been attacked by a magpie for several years – I’m usually pretty cautious when I know they’re nesting, but it never would have occurred to me that they’d be laying eggs so early in the year.

It really has been an amazingly warm winter here. There are still trees with autumn and even pre-autumn green foliage that hasn’t dropped, while other trees are sprouting new spring foliage already. And the magnolias are in full bloom:

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A post shared by David Morgan-Mar (@dmmaus)

Comic writing…

I knuckled down and wrote a big batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips today. I’ll photograph them tomorrow morning and then assemble them over the next few days. Might show off a preview photo or two tomorrow. But the main question I had today was a matter of pirate grammar: Which of these is most correct?

the cook ne’er been captured
the cook ne’er bein’ captured
the cook ne’er be bein’ captured
the cook ne’er been bein’ captured

Speaking of comics, I’ve had some new submissions for Lightning Made of Owls after a big period of no new strips coming in. A new one was published last Friday, and another today.

Then I did some stuff with character sheets from my players for Friday evening’s upcoming D&D game. I’m letting them generate 5th level characters to start the game with, and so granting them some magic items. They have some limited choice, but I’m deciding the final items. I’m trying to pick things that would fit their characters and which will be useful and fun in play.

The other main thing I did today was house painting. We had some work done a while back to repair some minor cracks in the walls and gaps along ceiling joints and stuff, and rather than pay the repairers to paint, I decided to just do the painting myself. I’ve been slowly doing it in bursts, as there’s a lot of undercoating and then top coats to apply to all the various surfaces. The cool thing is I get to use the drybrushing technique I learnt for painting miniature gaming figures to blend the touch-up paint colour with the original paint. The touch-up paint is almost the same colour as the original paint, but it’s just possible to discern a difference if you look carefully. But much harder with a drybrushed transition between them. Gaming skills in real life, yeah!

New movies!

Bit of a hodge-podge day today. Made a dentist appointment, dropped off some dry cleaning, did some grocery shopping…

Oh, I worked some more on the D&D adventure I mentioned yesterday. It’s not complete, but it’s now in a state where I can share it with interested people to get some comments, and see if they want to try playtesting it with their own D&D groups. I’ve uploaded it to my Secret Patron Page, which Patreon patrons have access to. (If you’d like to see work in progress like this, please consider sponsoring me on Patreon!)

And I did a bit more coding work on the mezzacotta random generators, exposing the board game description generator (work in progress), and the version 2.0 incarnation of mezzacotta Cinématique (that link is version 1), the random movie generator. And it has a shiny new high-res logo (click on the image or here to go to the new version 2.0):

And finally I did a thing I’ve been meaning to do for some time. I contacted the after school child care centre near the school where I teach Ethics classes, and volunteered to supervise kids one afternoon a week. Specifically on Wednesdays, during the weekly chess/games club. I’m offering to supervise a group of 4-6 children and Dungeon Master a game of Dungeons & Dragons for them! I don’t know if they will take up my offer, but at least I’ve made the move. One thing I have going for me is that I have a few years of experience working with primary school students, as well as being accredited by the State Government to work in a child supervision role. So hopefully it’ll work out! I’ll keep you updated.