Highmoon's Ponderings

A new vignette from Ierne:

From Thúr Rí they sailed, ten black small ships each carrying three soldiers. Three giant soldiers. Three giant Fomori soldiers.

The ships moved independently, pulled by some dark magic over the rough seas on their approach to mainland Ierne. On each mutated hand, each demon held a wicked blade as sharp as hatred, a blade that could tear a horse in half, a bull in quarters, a man in shreds. With these cruel instruments they tore into the sleeping seaside village, wasting no time to unleash death. Into thatched roofs they stabbed, through lime-covered walls they broke, spilling warm blood from warm bodies onto cold earth. Stomping over the village, towering over the sluggish defenders, they slashed at the small and slow targets as if they were little more than chickens in a pen come dinnertime. For dinnertime had arrived.

When it was all over, twenty-nine Fomori dined on the crudely-cooked corpses of sixty-four men, women and children. Sated, they capped the feast with the one fallen giant, fuel for more chaotic mutations, its strength absorbed into the rest.

On their own one or two feet, or in the bellies of the others, all thirty Fomori would reach the walls of Dún nan Gall and recover the stolen eye.

So did Balor command. So it would be done.

What I want to do with this is becoming clearer in my head. I still need to figure out some Aspects of the whole, see how they fit within the greater Fate of Ierne, but maybe in a couple of weeks I’ll be able to tell you something more concrete.

DriveThruRPG took an amazing initiative last week by offering $5 donation and $10 donation options for Haiti relief which would be matched dollar for dollar by OneBookShelf. Wanting to find a way to help out as well, publishers asked OBS what they could do, and the result is something that can only be called inspiring.

As of today, and for the rest of January, DriveThruRPG and a multitude of publisher partners, are offering the Gamers Helping Haiti $20 Donation Bundle. When you “purchase” this product, you donate $20 to Doctors Without Borders, the recipient charity of all donations collected via DriveThruRPG. As a gift, you get a bundle of products worth over $1400.

Click here to purchase the Gamers Helping Haiti $20 Donation bundle.

This is a win-win situation, as you help out a worthy cause and get some amazing RPG products for your collection. You have until January 31 to get it, so don’t let it pass.

My company, Highmoon Games, is proud to have included four products in the bundle for all those who help out:

1. Liber Sodalitas: The Dream Healers (Pathfinder)
2. Shrouded Agendas: The Purifiers (D&D 4e)
3. From Stone to Steel (OGL 3.5 Fantasy)
4. Frost & Fur (OGL 3.5 Fantasy)

The last two will only be available via the bundle and will go back to being “out of print” at the end of January.

Let’s all be a part of Gamers Helping Haiti.

It’s now a week since my bike took a tumble from a Miami Dade Transit bus and got hit. I dropped it at Miami Beach Bicycle Center on Wednesday for repairs, kind of preparing myself mentally for the repair cost quote. I sweated there for a bit when I got confirmation that the rear wheel was a total loss and an original Electra replacement would be somewhere around $200, but Alex Ruiz came up with a better and cheaper solution, replacing the rim with a non-Electra one that is actually a bit stronger (it has dual aluminum layers from what he told me) along with stainless-steel spokes. The total was $107 with tax, which made Tuesday’s ride on the Metrobus the most expensive bus ride in my life. But, Elam now has a new tire that runs fantastic and is back in action.

Sort of.

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I’m sometimes asked why I blog and I rarely have a more meaningful answer than “just ’cause.” I’ve been thinking about that answer for a long time, and I think I now have a better one that actually means something.

I blog to have a conversation, sometimes with other people, sometimes with an idea, sometimes–oftentimes–with myself. I also keep a handwritten journal for the same reason, though that one gets the more personal chats, the ones I *may* have with people I love and trust, late at night, quite possibly drunk. May. But I digress.

For whatever reason, I have far more friends whom I mainly connect with online than in person, which means my blog serves another function, that of main line of communication between friends and family and I. It’s not that we don’t comunicate in any other way, but that the blog provides a very handy central point.

It is because I see blogging as a conversation that I also have come to adopt the following policy: always comment on other people’s blog posts. Or at least, almost always.

See, a blog post to me is like we’re sitting around a table, maybe having a beer, and you or I say something. In a face-to-face context, chances are high that we’ll have something to say in response, and then in response to that and so on. Maybe that topic will die down, but then we’ll pick up with something else. That right there is the process of blogging and commenting. When one blogs and there’s no comment to follow, it’s like we’re just sitting around the table completely silent, ignoring what any one is saying. Pretty soon you wonder if you’re alone at the bar talking to yourself.

This is why I’m setting a resolution to be more active in my comments to other people’s posts, because I don’t want them to be talking to themselves.

Check out another perspective on the same topic from Fred Hicks: No Silent Fan.

Likewise, I invite all my readers to comment on my posts; I’m looking to talk with you, not at you.

Gareth-Michael Skarka asked about roleplaying via Skype in a recent comment, and though he received some info from my fellow players in the Lady Blackbird game, which was conducted via Skype, I told him I’d write a post about it from the point of view of a newbie to the medium, given this was my first time playing that way.

In general, I am very happy having Skype as a new tool in my gaming box. Don’t get me wrong, it doesn’t replace face-to-face, in-person gaming, but it is far more engaging than play-by-post/-email, both of which I have done in the past few years and had mixed results with.

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Today I was to start my car-free commute to the University, due mainly to the fact that yesterday I got a ticket and had my license suspended and taken away (for a supposed unpaid infraction that was actually thrown out of court and reduced to $0, I found out later), and if I’m caught driving, well, it’s the slammer for me. No problem, I have a bike and Miami’s fairly good public transit system at my disposal. Let’s do this.

I biked from my house in South Beach across the Venetian Causeway and into the Omni station at the edge of Downtown Miami (see MapMyRide.com route here). It took me about 35 minutes and it was an eye-opener in many respects: how much weight I need to shed from what I’m carrying (I calculate I was carrying about 30 lbs between the chunky bike chain, backpack with school stuff, laptop and extra clothes due to the 40° weather), how different it is to bike for leisure vs when you need to get somewhere on a time schedule, and how I need to better layer for the cold so I can remove layers more efficiently while riding. All good lessons. And in the end, I did make it to Omni, fairly tired, with a nice burning sensation in my thighs from the exercise, but overall fine and dandy. I was actually quite proud of myself!

Then came the bus leg of the trip, taking bus route 93 from Omni station to 135 St along Biscayne Blvd. The bus pulled up, I brought down the front bike rack and hefted (ugh!) the bike into it. I was always afraid that the 700-size wheels on the Amsterdam would not properly fit the bus bike racks, but they fit just fine, surprisingly (700 is not a common size in the US). It was also my first time using the bike rack so I followed the instructions on the Miami Dade Transit (MDT) website to the letter when locking it, but asked the driver as I got on if I’d done it right; my bike is back-heavy due to the panniers so it felt a bit wobbly and I wanted to be sure. She made a non-committal noise and shrugged; I took that to be a yes.

Elam on the bus bike rack.

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