Purchasing a recipe from Bario

Zweibel glanced over the recipe once again. He stared back into the cooking pot. The thin, bubbling liquid didn’t look anything like the recipe Bario had sold him. Zweibel dipped his ladle in the mixture and gave it a few stirs. Bits of okra and blood shrimp danced around the wooden shaft. Running the ladle a few more times around the gumbo, he felt the liquid start to thicken.

“Just a few more minutes,” he said.

A female gnome peeked out from behind the pile of books scattered across the table. Her plain brown hair fell flat on her head. If not for her height, one could have easily mistaken her for a small child. She adjusted her goggles, before disappearing behind the books.

“That’s what you said a few minutes ago,” she replied.

“And it would have been finished a few minutes ago if I had some help, Pat,” Zweibel said.

“Hey, unless you want me to bring those little prawn back to life—”

“Shrimp,” Zweibel said.

“See, I don’t even know what they are. Do you really want my help?” Patissier asked.

She had a point, he had thought. Of his little group friends, he had been the only person with any ability to cook. Patissier was a priestess of the Light, but acted more like a mad scientist. She had taught him everything he knew about engineering, but when it came to sharing his knowledge of hunting and cooking, she did not have the aptitude. Even after explaining it as a science for hungry people, it generally ended in melted pots or bits of metal in the food.

The other two were just as hopeless. Greenly, a fledgling druid, didn’t have much of a stomach for the subject, and Hark would just as well eat the ingredients raw or drink the wine he kept for cooking. Zweibel looked backed to Patissier and shrugged. He had sent the dwarf and night elf out to the trade district in search of more alcohol for their little get together. Even if they could cook, they were not here to help out.

“I suppose not,” he said.

Zweibel reached for one of the bags resting on the wooden stool next to him. Setting the ladle aside, he stuck his hand carefully into the bag, as not to rip it with his claws, and produced a small handful of peppercorn. He crushed the tiny pellets between his fingers, seasoning the whitecrest gumbo he so longingly wanted to try.

They came from... behind.

He had been born, raised, and cursed in Gilneas. Despite being so close to the ocean, his family was never interested in seafood. The son of a farmer, Zweibel had plenty of experience with vegetables and the occasional beef in his meals. Any time he had asked his father for something from the sea, his father would reply that nothing ever good came from the ocean. Beg and plead as he might, his father would not give in to his request.

Zweibel leaned in over the pot and inhaled deeply. He quickly regretted his decision as the small particles of pepper entered his nose. Zweibel dropped the bag, seeding the floor with pepper. He clawed at his snout with both paws furiously, the pepper stinging his nostrils. His head reared back, his nose aimed in the direction of the pot.

Moments before the sneeze left his snout, something large and heavy struck him in the side of his head. The spray of mucous and saliva flew forth, covering the wall left of the pot.

“You ought to stop cooking in that brutish form of yours,” Patissier said. “I’m getting tired of eating your snot-covered meals.”

Where to begin with my current gaming group. I guess the first thing I need to get out about my group is that none of us are strangers to each other. We didn’t meet at a local Denny’s one late evening after finding a Craig’s List ad. We all did go/are going to the same university, but we didn’t meet each other in the Anime Club or in the basement of one of the dormitories. Hell, I didn’t know any of these people until I moved to Texas almost even years ago. We all met working at Best Buy. Like most people in retail, we talked to each other while avoiding all the customers in the store during our breaks and the down time between customers. At some point during year two, one of the older guys revealed that he played the Baldur’s Gate series back when it came out. We would exchange stories about our party’s composition or how we all wanted to kill Drizzt for his crime of being a Mary Sue. Despite all of our talks about Baldur’s Gate, Fallout, Daggerfall, etc. we never really realized until year three that maybe, we could start a role-playing game of our own. We would talk about it every now and then, dreaming about how awesome it would be to play with other people and relive some of the stuff we did back in our younger days. The problem was, there were only two of us and we would need at least three more if we wanted a standard party of four. Time went on, we looked but couldn’t find anybody. We dropped it and went on with our lives.

Fast forward to year four at Best Buy, my friend pulls me aside one to tell me that he managed to get a group. It turns out he never gave up and managed to talk a few other people from work and some old college friends into giving it a try. The only stipulation at the time was that he runs the game. I agreed like any other person in my position would. I was hungry for some role-playing action. I had a character already set in my mind and was ready to kill something role-play. I showed up that evening to a room of seven other guys, some of them unfamiliar, sitting down at the table with a pile of books in front of them. RIFTS. In retrospect, he and I agreed that it was not the best system to start out a group of new role-players with, but it was the only way he could get them to come. He tried explaining to them why it was awesome to play a half-elf cleric of Jesus/Illmater, but they all called it lame. He then took the approach of RIFTS. For those not in the know, RIFTS takes place on a futuristic, post-apocalyptic Earth where anything and everything is possible. Do you want to have the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fight against Robocop? Just get the core book along with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness and you have yourself a game. Did I mention that the same company also owned the rights to the Robotech RPG? RIFTS was every man-childs wet dream come true. Ninjas, robots, tits, turtles, mutants, tits, boobs, and did I mention tits? I digress, this really should be reserved for a different post for another time.

I am one with the universe.

I’m going to spare you the details of the campaign, but it was actually pretty fun. I started playing a human mystic named who went by the name of Diametes Jackson, but ended up being called Space Moby for having rolled a physical strength of 4 (Average human being 8-10) and the space suit I wore. Overall my experience involved creating barriers to protect the rest of the party from the incoming damage or buffing them through other means. It wasn’t the best character I’ve ever played, but I payed the small sacrifice needed to let the other guys have a blast doing hundreds of MEGADAMGE! The rest of the party consisted of a gunslinger, a pyromancer-type character,  a cyber knight, a full conversion cyborg, a tengu named Fengu, and an ice-based superhero whose only contribution to the party was being the center of the story line and freezing heads. After a year, our GM finally called brought the story to a close and ended the game. Most of the people involved were absolutely in love with the system. At the end, we only lost two people in our group. One of the guys had to go off to Austin for college, while Mr. I-Freeze-Heads got an overbearing girlfriend who wouldn’t let him spend four hours with friends on a Sunday night. It was then that he and I figured it would be time to introduce them to the wonders of D&D. The group wouldn’t have it. They wanted more RIFTS. More adventures like the one that just took place. Our GM didn’t really have any other stories to tell at that point and really wanted to play in a game. It was then that I decided to take on the mantle of GM for the group. It was the first time I had ever ran a game, and it showed. I had a few GM NPCs that overshone the characters and my plot had a few holes in it, but the guys didn’t seem to care. They were playing RIFTS. We did this for a few more months when one of the guys finally came out and said he was bored. Almost immediately a few more people started sharing the same views, so I killed the game.

Around this time, a few of the new guys started getting deep into TESIV: Oblivion. They began to see that “sword and sorcery” could be more than Harry Potter. After waving the good old D&D books in their face again, they agreed. Our last GM wanted to take up the mantle of DM again and I agreed. He was better at it than me, and I really wanted to play my aasimar cleric of Ilmater. This time around, we needed new blood to replace some of the players who had completely lost interest in role-playing. We managed to pick up our first but most certainly not lats girl for the group. Amazingly enough, nobody hit on her  and she was a great player. I only say that because I have experienced in the past certain people who try to shove their dicks down the throat of every girl who role-plays. I no longer game with those type of people, but back in the day you didn’t really have a lot of choice in some parts of the nation. I don’t want to go into much detail about the game as I feel it might make for another post concerning game design at some point, but I’ll at least mention that it went on for a year before it slowly died off. We gained some people and we lost some people. Like the first game we played, it was time well spent. We draw closer to the present and the reason for my writing this.

I have been playing role-playing games both on the table and on my computer for a good portion of my life. I’ve learned that sometimes, you have to let campaigns die. Maybe there was a month long break between sessions and everybody forgot about plot. Sometimes the GM runs out of juice or the story goes absolutely bonkers (looking at you epic level campaigns). Shit happens. Games die. The idea of a campaign that runs the entire lifetime of a group of players is absolutely absurd to me. I play games to share stories and escape the daily grind of life. Playing the same character over several years, never trying something different or brand new, would just feel like a grind. This is why I’m an altoholic in World of Warcraft. Sure I have my hunter I’ve been playing for going on six years, but I supplement that experience with playing different races and classes. I would not be playing WoW today if not for that very reason.

The fact that campaigns can and should die is something that my group, the other GM excluded, has not learned. When we first started playing, the campaigns went for a year not because the stories were interesting. On the contrary, the stories were full of tropes, cliches, and horrible dialogue. They went on for a year because it was something new for them. They had never really experienced what it was like to play with a group of people pretending to be something their not in a world that does not exist. They created fictitious bonds with people that were as strong as the real thing. They felt the rush of rolling your first natural twenty in a life or death situation, and the humility on rolling a natural one when interrogating the queen’s guards. This was a change in their normal life routines, and it was good. They had never done any of this before.

Here comes the problem. Before we first started playing a few years ago, everybody thought role-playing as lame and stupid. RIFTS was just a stupid system an there was no way they would have fun with it. A year later they were enthralled with the concept of it. While we played RIFTS, there was no way in hell they would play Dungeons and Dragons. It’s full of elves, wizards, and lame fairies. Plus it has new rules that I have to learn! How ever will I learn how to play it? Several months later: “Fuck yeah, D&D! These rules are easy! We killed a dragon! Have you heard of Drizzt because he is cool! Need more exclamation points!” It was a natural progression to move on towards Pathfinder at that point as 3.5E was no longer being supported except by the community, and most of them were heading towards Pathfinder. Yet again I was met with the cries of how difficult it was going to be to learn a new system and new rules. Even when I explained to them it was 3.75E, they cried. Guess what happened? If you guessed that several months later after me talking it up that they finally caved in and loved it, you guessed correctly.

Something that my group has yet to figure out is that each time they were presented with a new system to try, they denounced it before trying it. There was no way they were going to like the system, yet each and every time they loved it. So the question is why do I present them with new games? Earlier I stated that they didn’t love the games because the stories were good but because it was new. Near the end of every system cycle, something I noticed was the players lack of interest in gaming. People would start showing up later, spend more time texting each other, or drawing something unrelated to the game. The problem is that the members of my group are, at heart, console gamers. They are used to purchasing a new game to play every few months. A new world to explore with new villains to kill. I learned this early on and used it to my advantage in helping keeping them interested.

It’s been almost two years since we started playing Pathfinder and I’m starting to lose people again. The group has dropped down to three people not including myself. I tried at every corner to get them to try new games such as Rogue Trader or Monster and Other Childish Things. I spent my money and my time looking for new ways to entertain them, yet each and every time I was met with resistance. At this point in my role-playing career, I am thinking about taking a break.

I’ll end this post for now as I’ve gotten off-topic with I originally wanted to talk about. After being bombarded with football in the background and loud wubwubwub music in the foreground, I doubt I’ll be able to recover what was lost in my thoughts.

The most important information I walked away with this year was sign up the moment games become available. Although I signed up for several events, I only managed to get into one gaming session on Sunday in the morning. I believe it was a Pathfinder Society scenario designed for characters level 5 to level 7. Of course, I didn’t have a character that high nor have I played in any Pathfinder Society games. As such, I was forced to take a pre-generated character and use it for the adventure. After having come off an entire year of playing a cleric in one of my friend’s games, I went with my old favorite. The game went pretty well, although after dealing with the people in my party, I am absolutely thankful for my regular group. We had a couple of grognards in the group that seemed to go out of their way to make the game painful at times. Other than that small inconvenience, I had fun.

I foresee that next year will be a much better experience. I will definitely sign up for only one or two seminars instead of five. Although they were fun, the seminars I attended seemed to coincide with some games I had wanted to attend. The other thing I intend to do is to force a local friend (or two) to come with me to the convention. I also plan to purchase my ticket months in advance instead of one week before the convention. $600 plane tickets are not very fun.

I suppose I’ll save what I was wanting to talk about for another time. My groups’ Pathfinder game starts in about four hours and I still haven’t written up the adventure for tonight. We are currently running the Kingmaker Adventure Path with about six players on average. They are at the end of the first book, but still not quite up to level three. I figure one good dungeon run with a lot of killing should get them to where they need to be. Time to start writing!

While browsing Digg earlier, I came across a list that ended with me in shock and disappointment. I am a gigantic advocate of reading. Since I was a small child, I loved to read. I have read a large variety of genres ranging from classical literature to the Warhammer 40K novels. Looking at this list, though, I am severely disappointed in myself. While I have heard of all of these books and read excerpts from most of them, I have not actually read a majority of them. I suppose I best get to reading. The list will be found after the cut, with the ones I have read in their entirety marked through.

Siddhartha By Hermann Hesse
1984 By George Orwell
To Kill A Mockingbird By Harper Lee
A Clockwork Orange By Anthony Burgess
For Whom The Bell Tolls By Ernest Hemingway
War And Peace By Leo Tolstoy
The Rights Of Man By Thomas Paine
The Social Contract By Jean-Jacques Rousseau
One Hundred Years Of Solitude By Gabriel García Márquez
The Origin Of Species By Charles Darwin
The Wisdom Of The Desert By Thomas Merton
The Tipping Point By Malcolm Gladwell
The Wind In The Willows By Kenneth Graham
The Art Of War By Sun Tzu
The Lord Of The Rings By J.R.R. Tolkien
David Copperfield By Charles Dickens
Four Quartets By T.S. Eliot
Catch-22 By Joseph Heller
The Great Gatsby By F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Catcher In The Rye By J.D. Salinger
Crime And Punishment By Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Prince By Niccolo Machiavelli
Walden By Henry David Thoreau
The Republic By Plato
Lolita By Vladimir Nabokov
Getting Things Done By David Allen
How To Win Friends And Influence People By Dale Carnegie
Lord Of The Flies By William Golding
The Grapes Of Wrath By John Steinbeck
The Master And Margarita By Mikhail Bulgak
Bonus: Honeymoon With My Brother By Franz Wisner

In two days I leave for GenCon. This will be the first convention I have ever attended. To say that I’m not nervous is an understatement. While I am going with friends who have been before, I am usually antsy about large crowds. Throw in that this is the largest gaming convention in North America and probably the world, and I have one daunting weekend. The events I look forward to the most are Chainmaille Dicebag, Video Games Live!, and a Pathfinder Society game early on Sunday morning. When I first wanted to attend GenCon, all I could think about were the crazy games I would play with other gamers. Looking at the events I have signed up for, that really doesn’t seem to be the case. Four of the seven events I have signed up for are  seminars with three of them relating to Pathfinder. There are are couple other seminars that I will try to attend including a first look at the Deathwatch game by Fantasy Flight Games. I will definitely post my exploits and possibly some pictures if I can get a hold of a digital camera.

Looking back on this marvelous Saturday, I can say that I feel it was a waste. I had planned on doing a cavalcade of geeky things ranging from working on my group’s Pathfinder campaign to my Japanese essay due on Tuesday. Alas it was not meant to be. The need for sleep overpowered me and I was soon on another world full of grotesque monsters and annoying projections. At the moment I’m writing this, I have another three hours before I need to lead myself to bed for another early Sunday morning. While I do not particularly like the early Sunday shift, it does leave me with Sunday evenings off for game night.

So yes. Nothing of interest happened today. Rather than ramble I’ll go ahead and call it a day. One last thing though, while browsing /tg/ a few minutes ago, I came across a paladin art thread. I generally don’t look at the “post class/game character art” threads as I just boot up DownThemAll and download all the pictures without looking at the thread. This one caught my eye though as the first picture was Seelah, the Iconic paladin from Pathfinder. I’ve played Dungeons and Dragons since 3.x and never really cared about their iconic characters.  I would be lying to you if I said that the art in the books didn’t have anything to do this. This is probably best left for another post later down the road. So I clicked on the thread and began to read some of the posts when some green text caught my eye. The hardest (and most controversial) thing about playing a paladin is the requirement to be of Lawful Good alignment. If you kill an innocent, tell a lie that knowingly will damn/kill/hurt an innocent, or do anything that can be considered evil, you lose all your powers

A joke in the table-top community is that gamemasters will go out of their way to make a paladin fall. I’ve never personally experienced this, but I know few people (Read “One person”) who have taken it upon themselves to play this class. I have, however, read countless tells of gamemaster dickery and general asshattery that ends in players stabbing players with miniatures. So in closing, the copy-pasta that follows is something that every fan of paladins, D&D, or role-playing should read.

“None of that, ‘Oh well if you’re truly sorry, there’s nothing I can do,’ horseshit. No, he coup de graces your ass because he’s a goddamn Paladin. His job is killing evil. You know what his job doesn’t entail? Being a sympathetic ear for every whiny NE or CN or LE douchebag who’s only being evil because the world is unfair to him or every punk that lets his own dislikes or laziness overcome his own personality.

You know what unfair is? Being able to know what kind of person everyone is before you even talk to them. Smelling evil so potent on a motherfucker that you want to sink your fingers in his chest and pull that tar out until the screaming stops. Having the psychotic urge to murder people that you’ve never even met, for the sole reason that your God decided that you ought to be his right hand without your choice in the matter, that’s unfair.

But unlike Evil McBlacknails over there, that Paladin puts on his helmet, sharpens his sword, and then continues walking through crowds of people day by day, resisting the urge. Seeing evidence of injustice so black it makes him sick. Seeing murderers and rapists walk the street, watching good men hang as evil ones pull the lever. Saving his righteous violence for when the situation exactly, specifically, precisely calls for it. Surgically removing that which is most evil.

Because he’s a Paladin. And if he gave in to the urge, what would he be?

Who will right the true wrongs if not he?

It’s not about not falling as a Paladin. It’s about falling so fucking hard you crash through the planet and stand up on the other side.”

I figured I would try to start the process of writing at least once a day. The only things I write these days are essays and what other little homework I am given. I used to write for fun when I lived in Missouri, but since I moved to Texas, I just have not had the motivation. Hopefully writing these random thoughts will help me sort out any issues I have in life while increasing my writing skills.

As a famous spy once said, “I appear to have burst into flames.”