Author: Wren

Gotta Catch ‘Em All

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I’ve been playing a lot of Pokemon X lately. I’ve finally gotten past the place where I stopped last time, even after falling into the same hole of earning tons of money and XP fighting in the Battle Chateau because I’m a completionist and would rather spend two hours walking in circles to find the last Pokemon than move on and breed it from the evolved form I already caught. The problem is, there’s no real “complete” moment with the battle Chateau, so you can level up Pokemon endless or make sure that your wallet is always sitting comfortably above one million Pokedollars.

The other thing I’ve encountered, since I’m actively working on catching all of the Pokemon these days, is just how many Pokemon there are in this game. I’ve caught or evolved over two hundred so far and I’ve only just gotten the fourth gym badge. If I never caught another Pokemon and just evolved the ones I’ve already caught, I’m certain I’d break three hundred. Every route I enter, and even some of the cities, has new Pokemon to catch and there are few overlaps. Thankfully, I’m an old hand at walking in circles and can afford to just throw Ultra Balls at everything because I just go to the Battle Chateau every day so I can achieve my dream of eventually earning a billion Pokedollars. Specifically, having a billion Pokedollars at once, if that is even possible. If not, if the money counter doesn’t run that high, I will settle for having had a total of one billion Pokedollars. I’ve been tracking my expenses so far and I’m a little over two million right now. Only nine hundred and ninety-eight million to go!

I did the same thing with all of my Pokemon Moon play-throughs, and am currently doing the same thing with my Pokemon Ultra Sun play-through. There’s a lot more overlap in Sun and Moon, though there is also variation in what Pokemon can be found on a route depending on which patch of grass you’re in. If I didn’t use a location guide to find out which Pokemon are available where, I’d have missed a few dozen, for sure. That being said, I prefer Sun and Moon’s methods to X and Y’s. I don’t feel trapped on routes as much since I know I’ll be able to find the Pokemon on other routes, much of the time. The biggest downside trying to catch them all in Sun and Moon is that you never get the customary National ‘Dex.

The National ‘Dex was introduced by that name in the third generation of Pokemon games, Ruby and Sapphire. In Gold, Silver, and Crystal, it was referred to as the “Old Pokedex Mode” but it was essentially the same thing. Ultimately, it is an organization of the Pokedex to include all known Pokemon, listing the Pokemon by oldest to newest. It has been a staple part of the core Pokemon games and they completely abandoned it in Sun and Moon. I was devastated! I was looking forward to compiling all of my Pokemon in these new games only to find out that I could, but I’d have no way to actually track them in-game aside from portioning out PC boxes and figuring out where to place Pokemon that way. Which is why I spent the $5 for the Pokebank because you can do the same thing there, but it is a lot easier since it directly interfaces with most of the games. Only one transfer required and you can access it from any of the modern games.

The National ‘Dex available in the Pokebank is likely to be the only National Pokedex available going forward. Since it will be able to interface with all future games and will help solve the problem of cross-generation trading that was such trouble from the very beginning, I can’t see it going away any time soon. Since it is essentially cloud storage for Pokemon, we’d need some kind of big jump in technology for it to be worth changing the system to use something new.

While it isn’t as fun to use the Pokebank to check my National ‘Dex, I can see the value. Nintendo and the developers of Pokemon can just upgrade the one app and the Pokemon in the cloud can be made available to any device people use to access it. Portability, safety in the face of lost systems or games, and ease of access. I just wish there was some character who would give me things for completing it like there was in all of the games leading up to Sun and Moon. I want my ultimately meaningless recognition and prize, dammit!

The Anthropocene Reviewed: Reviewed

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I’m a relatively recent fan of the Vlogbrothers. I’ve been working my way through all of their videos during my workouts because they’re a lot easier to muddle through if I’ve got something else to focus on, and I have to say that I’ve become a huge fan of John Green’s voice. In a lot of his recordings, he sounds so calm and soothing that I find myself feeling more relaxed, no matter what I’m doing while listening to him. I love Hank Green’s videos as much as I love John Green’s, but I don’t enjoy his voice the same way I do John’s. If I want to feel excited about something or to get psyched up about something I’m passionate about, then I’d listen to Hank Green.

As a result, I was very intrigued when John announced that he was starting a solo podcast in which he would review “different facets of the human-centered planet on a five-star scale.” He has called it “The Anthropocene Reviewed” and his first episode was a review of Canadian Geese and Diet Dr Pepper. I’m not going to spoil the review by telling you how many stars he gave each of those things, but I am going to insist that the parts leading up to the numerical rating are the absolute best.

As a huge fan of John Green’s Vlogbrothers videos that were themed as “Thoughts from ________,” I enjoyed these podcasts because they sound just like an extended version of one of the videos. In the first episode, he talks about the history of Canadian Geese, shares some interesting facts, discusses how they’ve participated in the Anthropocene era of the world, and how we Humans have affected them. I learned a lot and I got to do it all while listening to the soothing tones of a wonderful writer. As if that wasn’t enough, he then went on to discuss the soda flavor known as Dr Pepper, which is incredibly interesting to think about. It is a flavor made up of other flavors and there is no naturally occurring equivalent that we can compare it to, so Dr Pepper would not exist without Humans.

The second episode, he discusses Halley’s Comet and Cholera, which are both interesting topics. Halley’s comet appears once every Human lifetime. Some people get to see it twice, if they’re lucky, but never more than that (at least by current life expectancies. Who knows what’ll happen in the next hundred years in terms of Human lifespans…). As a result, its participation in the Anthropocene era is more as a spectator, witnessing the drastic change of the world and Humanity at larger. Cholera, on the other hand, is what happens when people gather large numbers and don’t have access to clean water. Cholera is a side-effect of human expansion and continuously pops up because the people with the resources to end it don’t care about it. John does a much better job addressing the issues that have resulted in an ongoing Cholera epidemic, but I feel like my summary is accurate if a little angrier than John’s analysis. Sorry, but preventable stuff like that pisses me off.

While I haven’t found any kind of regular updating schedule for the podcast yet, I think that it will start to gather steam as more and more people start listening. John and Hank are incredibly busy people who somehow find the time to keep doing incredible new things, so I really can’t fault John for not having a specific schedule right now. He has a lot going on these days, by anyone’s standards. I say I’m a fan of the Green Brothers, but I haven’t even started to plumb the depths of their content outside of their YouTube videos. There’s just so much and I’ve already got so much going on!

Anyway, I suggest checking out John Green’s new podcast. There’s plenty to laugh about, plenty to think about, and you get to listen to Mellifluous tones of the elder Green brother’s voice for almost twenty minutes at a stretch. That’s a win all around.

Coldheart and Iron: Part 7

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READ FROM THE BEGINNING

The final tally of the dead was worse than I had hoped but not as bad as I had feared. Six dead laborers, a dozen dead nomads, and two dead Wayfinders. Most of the injured survived, except the one Wayfinder whose wounds claimed him about two hours after the battle ended. Most of the dead had been in the farmhouse, where the bandits had crashed through the door on the tail of their flashbang.

The nomads’ medic was one of the guards in the basement, so he got to work right away after we gave them the all-clear and was instrumental in saving a couple of the more injured laborers and nomads. He worked with Jonathan, our medic, to stabilize everyone we could before we moved them all into the barn to recover, rest, and hide while half of the uninjured Wayfinders scouted to make sure there were no more bandits around.

I personally led the squad to follow the tracks of the group that snuck up on us. It was relief to discover they had split off from the main force before they were in sight of the bandit’s base camp, even if it was frustrating to see how our scouting had failed us. We got back to the farmhouse around ten a.m. and immediately went to work digging graves with the other able-bodied Wayfinders. A mass grave for the bandits and individual graves for everyone else.

Around noon, the laborers and nomads emerged from the barn and started lending a hand. They knew as well as we did that the bodies needed to be buried by nightfall, and they wanted time to lay their friends and family to rest. They just needed more recover after the firefight than we did. Around five in the afternoon, the last shovel of dirt was placed, the last words were said, and any Wayfinder not preparing to leave in the morning was busy hiding all traces of the battle.

Camille was busy with after-action reports and Natalie was updating the supply logs with Jonathan, so I took Lucas aside to help me scatter snow over the graves. We worked in silence as the sun set until the last glimmers of light were disappearing through the haze of clouds coating the sky.

“You should have checked with me first.”

Lucas didn’t say anything. He stopped working and started off toward the setting sun. I let him have his silence for another minute before speaking again.

“I know the nomads would have been captured or worse if we hadn’t done anything, but we’ve lost six of the people who paid us to get them safely across the tundra and you broke one of the biggest rules of the Wayfinders. Again.”

“What do you want from me, Marshall?” Lucas turned to look at me, his usual grin replaced by a mixture of sadness and anger.  “I see people in need, and I want to help them. You would do the same thing, if you found people running for their life.” Lucas sighed and looked down at his feet. “Or at least you would have. I don’t know anymore.”

I stared at my oldest friend and tried to keep my roiling emotions off of my face. “We have rules, Lucas.” His head snapped up, eyes meeting mine and face as carefully neutral as mine. “Over the past fifteen years, we’ve added more and more rules as what we’ve done has turned from a past-time to fund our searches into something bigger than-”

“Than helping people?” Lucas stepped toward me, lowering his voice so no one would overhear. “We started this whole organization in order to help people, Marshall, or have you forgotten that?” I clenched my hands but kept my face neutral as the roiling was replaced by indignation and anger. Some part of me knew that we were both tired, Lucas especially so since he hadn’t gotten much rest the night before all of this had started, either. I took a moment of silence to try to calm down a little, to resist the urge to knock him down, but he took my silence as an answer.

He took another step towards me, getting in my face and dropping his voice to a hiss. “Are you so caught up in playing ‘King Cowboy in the New Frontier’ that you don’t remember what this was all about?”

I punched Lucas in the solar plexus and swept one of his legs. It felt good to be standing over him, but I knew he was just as angry as I was, if not angrier. I relaxed my fists and arms, looked up at the sky, and took a deep breath. I acknowledged the part of me that knew I messed up and tried to get the anger I felt under control. This wasn’t the first time we’d had this argument and it probably wouldn’t be the last.

When I looked down again, he was still on the ground, clutching his chest and gasping for breath. I squatted down next to him and, after he’d recovered enough to stop squirming, I grabbed his shoulder. “Dude, you can’t keep saying stuff like this. You know I don’t think that. You know why I started all this. You know why I’m STILL a Wayfinder after almost twenty years of fruitless searching.”

“That’s…” Lucas gasped and coughed. “That’s no excuse. If anything…”

I felt the anger creeping back and tried to keep myself calm. “You know better than anyone else what this disaster has cost me. You’ve got family and friends you could be living with instead of wandering around out here. You chose this life. This life is all I have.” I sat down next to him and rubbed my face.

I took another deep breath and softened my tone a little more, trying to sound a little more apologetic. “I would have helped them, that’s not the problem. That’s not the rule you’re in trouble for breaking. You knowingly led a group of bandits back to our group. You compromised our secrecy and, as a result, people died that otherwise wouldn’t have if you had followed protocol.”

Lucas glared at me as he pushed himself into an upright sitting position. His voice was angrier that mine had been and I was glad that almost everyone else had gone into the barn. No one else would be able to hear us if we started shouting. “Protocol would have meant taking them to Chicago and they had just been chased away from there! What good would that have done them?”

“More good than this would have.” I gestured at the graves we were sitting near. “You could have taken them to Rockford instead. That’s much closer than Chicago and you would have been able to get them there by tomorrow morning if you pushed them hard enough. They’d have been safe behind the walls of the enclave there.”

“And risked getting shot at while trying to push children and elderly at a quick pace? We’d have had to leave that old woman behind in order to have a chance of making it, because she’s too big to carry.”

“At least then everyone else would have had a chance.” I stood up. “Also, I’m pretty sure that old woman could have outpaced most of the other nomads.” I chuckled, trying to lighten the mood.

“Sure, then she would have had an equal chance to get shot in the back, just like everyone else..” Lucas started struggling to his feet. I offered him a hand but he smacked it away and glared at me instead.

“Stop arguing. You know I’m right or else you’d have hit me back by now.”

Lucas slipped in the partially melted snow I’d been sitting on and he fell over again. He shot me another dirty look from his place in the snow before just laying back and covering his eyes. “I can’t even stand up, much less strike a superior officer right now. I’m too tired. Couldn’t this have waited until after we found shelter for next week’s blizzard?” He let his arms fall to the side and picked his head up to meet my eyes. “Or at least until after I’ve gotten some sleep?”

I shook my head. “I’m sorry I hit you, Lucas. That was way out of line and I know you don’t really think I’ve forgotten anything. I wish this could wait, but we have to talk about this today. If nothing happens to you, if there isn’t a clear resolution about what happened, then the laborers, the nomads, and the Wayfinder trainees will start to wonder about why their friends and loved ones are dead. I wouldn’t be surprised if we have a problem with the laborers before the week is out.”

I offered Lucas my hand again and, after a moment’s hesitation, he took it. “They paid us to keep them safe.” I grunted as I hauled Lucas to his feet. “They all know that nothing is certain out here and that we couldn’t guarantee their safety, but this will be a hard thing for them to handle. All the trainees now realize just how likely it is that they’ll die out here if they stick to guiding large groups. This will seem like a slap on the wrist to them, but you did break a rule and these are the recommended consequences.”

Lucas took a step back after he gained his feet and brushed the snow off his pants and coat. “Yeah, that you wrote.” His voice was calmer, but I knew I’d need to do more to make it up to him than apologize.

I nodded. “You’re still head of the scouts, but your pay for this trip is going into the death benefits of our dead Wayfinders and you’re demoted to Lieutenant. Once we’re back in an enclave, we’ll look into getting you promoted again since the only reason you’re not higher ranked is that we don’t have higher ranks. No matter what, though, your pay won’t change for future jobs”

I stared at him, stony-eyed, while I waited for him to acknowledge my orders. After a another few swipes at snow that was no longer there and a deep breath, he saluted. “As you say, Captain.”

“Good.” I nodded and gestured toward the barn. “Now let’s finish up so we can go inside, eat, and get some sleep.”

Once we had finished, we walked off toward the barn. Someone had set up a LED floodlight near the door so we could finished up. Once we got near the door and started taking packing up the flood light, my nose detected the first hints of someone making hamburgers. My stomach growled in response and I was suddenly struck by the realization that it had been over twenty-four hours since I had eaten. I was so focused on the hamburgers that it took Lucas pointing it out for me to realize that the noise I was hearing was shouting coming from the inside barn. I left Lucas to finish up and, rushed inside. When I saw what was going on, my heart fell.

Tabletop Highlight: First Reactions to Fifth Edition

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Over the weekend, I took my first deep dive into D&D Fifth Edition. I’ve made characters and even briefly played it before, but this was the first time I actually explored characters rather than rushing through the process. Carefully considered each class and, after looking at what I had to work with, settled on playing a Sorcerer. The first D&D character I ever played and the most fun D&D character I ever played were both sorcerers, so the class is near and dear to my heart.

My initial impression was that the system is complex, strange, and makes very little sense. Over time, though, that shifted. The more time I spent with it, the easier the system seemed. So many of the 3.5 rules I know by heart and so many of the choices I’d made in a 3.5 campaign just aren’t options. Feats are entirely optional, ability scores cannot be increased over 20 via natural level progression, and everything in the system feels a lot more balanced. My past remarks about the 5th edition being more like addition than 3.5’s multiplication still stands, but that means that all of the classes still wind up in more or less the same neighborhood.

The biggest revelation I had while exploring the system more fully was the way it lends itself toward role-playing. 3.5 can be entirely numbers with no role-playing unless the players and DM are specifically making room for it. 5th edition doesn’t necessitate role-playing, but it does make it a much more regimented part of the character creation process. There’s room on the standard character sheet for flavor text about who your character is, the backgrounds provide a basis for less experienced players, and even the class features help you figure out who your character is based on what specializations you pick.

The hardest thing for me to learn is the new rules around combat and actions. I’m used to poison results being specific to the poison used and much more complicated skills that play off of each other and are full of conditional modifiers. The simplified “advantage, neutral, or disadvantage” system takes all of the conditional stuff and wraps it up in one neat little package. I can see combat and skill encounters are going to be much easier for new players to handle since the math isn’t as potentially complicated. I’m going to miss my ridiculous bonuses and OP bullshit that I can pull when I’m feeling petulant in 3.5, but I can see myself running a lot of 5th edition games because it’ll be so much simpler. Instead of spending time looking up rules players are asking about, I can focus on storytelling, good encounters, and keeping the game moving along. I’m really looking forward to how the pacing changes between the two systems.

That being said, I think I’m going to stick to 3.5 for my big story campaigns. 5th edition is still relatively new and I can’t find as many resources for it as I can find for 3.5, so it would be a lot harder to make up some of the stuff I have for 3.5.  5th edition’s power scales are too linear to be able to just fudge a few numbers and make it work, even at mid to high levels.

This past weekend, I stuck to mostly first level things for my sorcerer (and a rogue as a backup character for when my aggressive, “think’s he’s a tank,” sorcerer gets smeared on a dungeon floor). Next weekend, if I’ve got the time, I’m going to look into future levels, magic items, and how all the rules have changed so I can start planning out a campaign to run in 5th edition. I’ve got a lot of friends who want to play now and 5th edition seems like it would lend itself well to online play, so I might actually be able to help my friends who don’t have anyone to play with in their areas, finally. That’d be great. I like running big games full of organized chaos and laughter. Even if I can’t see everyone’s face, I think this would be a lot of fun to do.

Through the Eyes of a Statue

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Everything seemed so quick. The little creatures around it moved faster than it could track, but it enjoyed watching the blur of their movement. The humans were respectful, ensuring the constant exposure to the elements and birds did nothing to damage it. It didn’t really mind the birds, seeing as they moved even faster than the humans, but it did enjoy the colder months when the birds were scarce.

There was a door at the statue’s feet and something through that door attracted many humans and their companion creatures. It suspected that the door led to whatever was behind it. It couldn’t turn to look, but it could feel the reassuring weight of something even larger than itself at its back.

It was so long since it had first opened its eyes and seen the wondrous world around it. The area had changed drastically since then, as the humans molded the world to their will. Once it was the tallest. Now it was dwarfed by the structures around it, whose height passed beyond its sight. It could not turn its head and it missed the sky, but there had been so much going on below that it had not cared.

The humans and their creatures had stopped coming around, though. There had been rumbling and a bright light. Most of the humans had vanished, leaving behind black smudges everywhere. There were some humans left and they still moved quickly, but not as fast as they once did. The statue was sad to see them go, but it thought they would be back. There had always been humans around it.

For now there were the plants growing where the humans once occupied. They moved much more slowly, and it enjoyed that. Maybe the humans would too, once they came back.

Saturday Morning Musing

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The older I get, the more I feel like my life is made up of big moments separated by spans of time spent either recovering from the last big moment or preparing for the next one. Time passage is hard for me to gauge over long spans despite the fact that I’m really good at tracking it over short spans. Over a six-hour period, I can usually guess the time within five minutes. Beyond that, it gets trickier. I routinely have weeks that feel long or days that feel short. Variation in the perception of the passage of time is a common thing for most people, sure, but I feel especially bad at the larger-scale stuff. Until I actually think about it, I’d swear that I was just recently in college. At the same time, I feel like high school and the problems of my childhood are so old that they might as well have happened to someone else.

This isn’t earth-shattering or super special. People feel like this all the time. I’m just focusing on it a lot right now because I’m at this point in my life were things are starting to come together, but the one thing I want more than anything is still going to take a while. I’d give up almost anything to be a writer full-time, but I can’t throw aside my debt obligations for that super-useful degree I got in English Literature (that sounds way more bitter than I feel, but I have my moments where that feels absolutely true) because that’d hurt my dad, who co-signed some of my loans. I need to keep working and making payments in the hope of one day being free of this mountain of debt. Having a wonderful girlfriend is amazing. Having two roommates who respect me, whose company I enjoy, and who share my interests enough to at least nod along while I talk at them is the best living situation I’ve ever had. Being able to support myself AND start paying down some debts by working 45 hours a week is something I thought wasn’t possible a year and a half ago. I have so much to be thankful for that I feel horrible that I can’t stop thinking about how disappointed I am that I can’t write all the time.

I’m in my mid-to-late twenties. It is possible that only a quarter of my life has passed so far. A huge chunk of my favorite creators, including all of the ones who influenced me the most, didn’t get their start until, sometimes, as much as a decade after they were my age. There is still so much I can do. Even if it takes me another ten years to get to the point where I can write full-time, I’ll still have so much time to write and create. I just feel like part of me is missing when I’m at work, testing software, and trying to stay focused so that ideas of what I want to be writing don’t cause me to run the same test case multiple times without once actually seeing the results.

If you start discussing romance or relationships with someone, the idea of soulmates is going to come up at some point. Generally speaking, people fall into one of two camps. Either soulmates are bullshit and love is about building something with someone you’ve picked or soulmates are a thing and you’re destined for someone. While I’m not willing to rule anything out and I generally don’t call people out for relatively harmless beliefs, I get frustrated when the soulmate idea is expressed as the idea that people are incomplete without their soulmate.  There’s tons of philosophy and even some religious teachings that supports this idea. I don’t think that’s true and I feel like the idea of needing another person to be complete places a lot of responsibility and emotional labor for your well-being on someone else’s shoulders. I don’t need another person to feel complete. When I get lost in my writing, no where I am or what I’m writing about, I feel whole.

That is all I need. All I want. Just this little thing. Just this enormous, seemingly impossible achievement.

I’m working toward it. Updating this blog every day, working a few extra hours a week to reach a state of financial stability, and trying to make time to work on my novels in between it all. This all helps. Writing every day makes time feel a little more real. I can count the days between November 1st, 2017, and today. I can remember most of my posts. I’ve got a record of living all of those days and the act of sitting down to write each night helps me feel like I’m going to eventually get where I want to be. Hopefully, by the time I’m done with my year and a month of daily posts, I’ll be able to see how much closer I’ve gotten.

My Voice

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My voice can fade from lack of use.

My neck is caught up in a noose
Built according to my own design.
There never was a loop so malign
As the fears so doggedly adverse
And twisted into this evil curse.

The end of the cord lies in shaking hands
That seem to have their own firm plans
Of when to tug and when to let be
Because this rope is not to kill me.

I wove this rope of silence and fear
Of the loss of all that I hold dear,
Despite insisting all of the while
That my thoughts and truths were not on trial.
Lies told by my insecurity
To preserve my sense of maturity.

This lesson I learned as I have grown:
My silence belongs to me alone.

To Single Play or to Multi Play

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Despite my love for the almost entirely single-player Legend of Zelda franchise, I generally prefer multiplayer games over single-player games. My Steam account is full of single-player games I have never played or haven’t completed. I never actually finished most of my single-player console games, either. I just eventually lose interest or focus, getting distracted by some other video game or a new book, and never get back to finishing the game. If it is a multiplayer game that I’m playing with friends, I’m a lot more likely to stay interested and finish it.  There are exceptions, of course. I’ve played tons of games of Borderlands with friends and by myself, but I’ve only ever finished it once with a friend. It’s a longer game, so it is difficult to get someone to commit to the entire thing and then actually follow-through over the several sessions it’ll take to beat it.

I never finished all of the really cool extra content for Hyrule Warriors because I got bored doing the daily grind of beating thousands of enemies on my own. For the few missions I could do it, I enjoyed the multiplayer option much more. I started playing and loved Shadow of War last fall, but I never finished because Destiny 2, with its multitude of problems, came out. Destiny encourages cooperative multiplayer while Shadow of War’s multiplayer is only ever competitive.

I prefer cooperative multiplayer to competitive. Competitive games like Mario Kart and Super Smash Brothers are fun, but I prefer any game where I’m working with my friends rather than against them. Halo Co-Op was my preferred way to play with my friends in high school. I never really got into League of Legends because it was so competitive. Even the cooperative aspect of being on a team with your friends or strangers got competitive because people took the game so seriously. That, plus the toxicity, drove me away. Overwatch, on the other hand, is a competitive game but it encourages a lot more cooperation than I feel League of Legends did. Even when queuing for Quickplay and playing with random strangers feels better because not everyone is toxic and most people agree to a basic level of cooperation. Some of my best cooperative moments and matches have been with strangers. All it takes there is communication and willingness to participate.

I’m not a terribly competitive person. I don’t really care about winning or losing, I just want to play well. I want to play a game skillfully and improve, not worry about who has the most kills or whether or not I’m consistently better than my friends. I get frustrated, sure, but only when I know we’re under-performing or one of my allies is deliberately messing us up. I generally won’t try to force people to cooperate with me in games, but I have little patience for people who find pleasure in throwing games or betraying their allies.

I like to improve myself. Daily blog entries here, figuring out how to add novel-writing to my schedule, and then trying to work out between work and writing is all my attempts to make myself the best me I can be. That includes being good at my chosen recreations. I like to play video games and the part of me that is what I identify as the most core part of me also wants to be good at video games. Not so I can go pro in some competitive e-sports league or so I can rule over my friends, but for my own personal satisfaction. I want to be good to see just how good I can be.

The Order of the Stick Has Stuck With Me

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One of my favorite webcomics, which happens to also be my favorite D&D webcomic, is Order of the Stick. If you’ve been in the webcomics consumption business or D&D business for a while, you have likely heard of it. It has been going on since September of 2003 and, despite a few setbacks and being the poster child of how too much success can be a bad thing, it has passed 1100 pages. What started as a way to joke about the rules for the new D&D 3.5 release has developed into an epic tale that still manages to find the time to make jokes about the rules.

The first comics are fairly formulaic, by today’s standards. The party is introduced to the readers and jokes are made about obscure rules or the tendency for player characters to fail simple checks, like seeing the monsters immediately behind them. Then Evil Opposites are introduced, a Lich at the end of the Dungeon is encountered, and then the party is released into the wider world to wreak havoc and eventually get railroaded into some new plot or another. They go from light-storytelling at the start so jokes can remain the focus to telling an epic story of personal growth, the consequential struggles of mortals in the matters of gods, and need of individuals to act even when they feel out of their depth. There’s on particular moment, as the webcomic approached and passed its 1000th update that has stuck with me. The combination of the art change and the focus on the growth of one of the characters culminated in a single splash page that still gives me chills.

For a long time, my idea of playing or running Dungeons and Dragons was to create a place for players to sort of just stumble through the world. There was supposed to be a story, but it was secondary to making sure the players got to make their jokes and kill a bunch of stuff. Reading through Order of the Stick showed me there was a lot more that I could do within the world of D&D since the writer/artist, Rich Burlew, manages to tell the entire story without departing from the world. It taught me a lot of how to trim a story to fit within the confines of a D&D campaign, how to ensure my players had agency, and how to even do a bit of railroading without ruining the story. Beyond even that, it taught me so much about how to play within the rule set, how to creatively express myself in a variety of character types, and how to add nuance to the rather black and white D&D morality system without making everything entirely relative or perception-based.

While it managed all of that, the story created a wonderful mixture of sympathetic villains, unsympathetic villains, good guys who get screwed over, and bad guys who get better than they deserve. As soon as you venture outside of the online comics, to the book only publications or the PDFs that were created as a part of the “too much success” Kickstarter (what started out as a cheap drive to fund reprinting a popular book wound up raising millions of dollars and forcing Rich Burlew to take time off of the comics in order to work on meeting the commitments he made during the event, some of which is still ongoing). My favorite story, about my favorite character, is one of those PDFs. How the Paladin Got His Scar is a tale about personal strength, commitment to something larger than yourself, second chances, and choosing to live for something while still being willing to die if it means that everyone else will be safe. I read it at a time I really needed it and I still go back to read it again when I feel like I need to strengthen my commitment to something that feels impossible. Such as updating my blog every day for a year.

People talk about stories or books that made them who they are today and Order of the Stick is one of mine. I would not be as skilled a storyteller as I am without this comic. I would not be the same creative, twisty DM and player without it. I would not be me without it. If you’re looking for something to read and enjoy jokes about D&D and learning about what it means to be a leader or the price of power, check it out at Giantitp.com. Also, yes, the stick figure drawing does improve over time, but it remains stick figures until near the 900 mark, when it improves without losing its original charm.

 

Coldheart and Iron: Part 6

Wren Leave a comment

READ FROM THE BEGINNING

Dawn broke just after six. I’d made two more quick patrols of the grounds, silently moving from post to post, to make sure everyone was alert and ready. Aside from the scouts that Lucas had taken with him to find the bandits forty-eight hours ago, everyone was still alert. The scouts were split up amongst the groups and, aside from a quick scrub of their eyes every so often, were handling their sleep deprivation fairly well. Even us older Wayfinders could handle a couple of days without sleep before our ability to function, and all of the scouts except Lucas were still only in their late twenties.

Right as I was about to start my third patrol, one of our snipers gave the signal. A quick, two-beat bird imitation that let us all know the main force had been spotted coming out of the hills. A five-beat version of the bird call let us know we were facing a force of around fifty people. Compared to the scouts, of which there had only been twenty over-confident morons who fell into our trap, they were going to be a significant problem. We’d wiped out the bandit scouts, so our preparations would still be a mystery, but they’d be more cautious and the morning light that was slowly suffusing through the clouds was only going to help them.

After a quick breath to steady my pulse that had jumped up when the warning signal came, I got up from my post by one of the windows and made a silent circuit of the farmhouse, telling everyone to keep their eyes peeled, stick to their assigned window or crevice, and shoot as soon as they see someone walking toward the house or the barn. While reissuing Camille’s orders, I check over the barricades everyone had made. Most were just pieces of scrap wood we had collected, layered around their firing positions so the bandits wouldn’t simply be able to fire through the walls. A sufficiently powerful sniper rifle still could pierce the multiple layers we had set up, but the laborers and nomads would be protected from most stray bullets when they were taking cover or reloading.

My post was a bit better defended, since I was facing the direction the bandits were most-likely coming from. I had my barricade set up underneath my second-story window and I was the only person here so I’d be able to hide entirely behind it. The wall around the windows was layered with more wood, of course, but my barricade would stop anything but the largest caliber rifles. One of Natalie’s most ingenious ideas, the portable barricades had saved countless lives. Lightweight and incredibly durable, they were a lot like body armor you could take cover behind. Most sniper rifles would leave a huge dent in them, but they’d leave you alive as well, and the repairs were fairly easy to do in the field.

I settled in behind my barricade, head down, and eyes waiting on the signal. The seconds thudded by, each measured by the silent passing of seconds on my watch while my heart supplied the sound effects. Five whole minutes of silence and the repeated mantra Camille had taught us when we first realized marksmanship was the only thing we’d be able to depend on as the world fell into chaos around us. Sight, exhale, squeeze. There was a lot more to it than that, but breaking it down into single words that represented the whole made it easier to focus during moments like right now.

Then, so dimly I almost couldn’t see it, was the change in light I was looking for, shining in through the window. I popped up, legs bracing me against my barrier and eyes darting past the flares that were just coming to life on the treeline. I picked my first target and fired. The rifle pushed into my shoulder, the thunderclap boomed through my earplugs, and I saw my target fall. I switched focus to another one and fired off a trio of shots, hoping to get something vital through the bush she was standing behind. She went down. I swapped to another target, but then bullets started flying out of the trees and I ducked back down.

I heard a few cries of pain from the floor below me and more from the woods. A few bullets zipped through my window and out the wall opposite and one blew a hail of splinters out of the reinforced wall as it exploded on impact. I pounded the floor three times, signalling to fire at will and then scooted away from the window on my stomach. I crawled out of the bedroom, down the hallway, and stopped at the top of the stairs. There was a window facing the opposite side of the farm clearing and I carefully poked my head over the sill.

Creeping up the slight incline, through a scattering of grass clumps and bushes, was another group of bandits, almost as large as the group attacking us from the east. I hadn’t taken a close count, but I could definitely tell it was way more than fifty between the two groups. I thumped the floor twice, and fired a few shots out of the window. They group of bandits scattered, but didn’t manage to avoid the rain of bullets coming out of the farmhouse. Most of the laborers weren’t skilled with a gun, but we’d given them all the guns and ammo we’d taken from the bandits, so they were given free-reign to fire as they liked.

Once the bandits started regrouping behind whatever cover they could, I rolled away from the window. I went back to my original position and started adding a dozen potshots to the chaos that had engulfed the area around the barn. When I came up to shoot the last four bullets in my magazine, I added a whistle signal to the roar of my gun. Two beats, two beats, a short pause while I took cover again, and then four beats. Almost forty bandits coming from the west.

A couple of moments later, as I reloaded, I heard Camille’s distinctive whistle pierce the battlefield. A single, long note cut through the bark of combat rifles and then the small contingent of Wayfinders that had hidden in the snow, waiting for the bandits to pass them, went about their work. We sent a few more volleys into the forest, but had to stop soon so we wouldn’t hit our own people. I banged the floor twice, telling the nomads to stop, and then banged it four times. Following my own signal, I returned to my westward facing window and started shooting at the bandits from there.

The bandits seemed content to focus their fire on the first floor, doing their best to chew through the walls around the windows and being rewarded with several screams. I got a faceful of splinters when I rolled off to the side, thankfully avoiding the bullets that ripped the wall up but unable to get my hands up in time to protect my face from the wooden shrapnel. My eyes were fine thanks to my goggles, but I was going to either die with a face like a porcupine or spend a few hours pulling splinters out of my face.

I tugged out the largest ones on the right side of my face and kept firing. One cluster of bandits made a break for the farmhouse and, as I went to fire at them, the remaining two dozen bandits started blind-firing at the farmhouse. They didn’t hit much, but they succeeded in forcing everyone back behind their cover. I blindly emptied my magazine in what I hoped was their direction. A couple of seconds later, as I was reloading, one of the doors crashed open and I heard the unmistakable shriek of a flashbang grenade. I popped over the sill and started shooting at the rest of the bandits that had started running toward the farmhouse, doing my best to ignore the dizziness and ringing in my ears despite my earplugs.

I got almost a dozen with solid body shots before the ones in front realized what I was doing and started shooting back. Bullets flew through the walls and even the floor around me, filling the air with wooden shrapnel that bounced harmlessly off my thermal jacket and pants. I shifted my position to get a better angle on the bandits approaching the house but, as I shifted into a kneeling position, I took a bullet through the meat of my calf. I shouted in rage and pain, trying to keep my balance, but failed. As I crashed to the floor, I kept firing, blindly shooting through the wooden defenses. If more bandits got into the farmhouse, it would be a slaughter. Right now, there was a chance that some of the people would survive. As I slammed a new magazine into my rifle, there was too much shooting inside the house to be just the five or so bandits that had broken down the door. The amount of screaming certainly sounded like everyone down there was dying.

Bullets whizzed past me as I grunted in anger at rapidly devolving situation, rocked back on my uninjured leg, and then threw myself down the stairs. I rolled so my uninjured leg would hit ground first and gritted my teeth against the pain of banging my injured leg against everything I could find. At the bottom, I used my momentum to throw myself to my feet and spun around the corner to face the room where the grenade had gone off.

I looked past all of the collapsed bodies and focused on the still standing ones. A couple of the laborers where struggling with bandits for the control of guns, so I took a quick shot at each bandit, ending the scuffles, and then sighting on the doorway as the rest of the bandits showed up. There were only eight, and they didn’t enter after a flashbang, but I got lucky. I had a direct line of fire on all of them and they were too focused on the laborers screaming and hip-firing right next to the doorway.

Once they were down, I limped my way back to the east-facing side of the farmhouse and peeked through a window. The Wayfinders were cleaning up there, chasing after a group of bandits that had fled and finishing off any bandits left alive. I clicked the safety on my rifle and slung it over my shoulder.

I collapsed into a chair along the wall, popped out my earplugs, pulled out my first-aid kit, and started inspecting my wound. While I let my hands and all my practice take over, I called out. “Any further sign of bandits?”

There was a few moments of silence before a scattered chorus of “no’s” came back. I grunted and held my breath as I started bandaging the wound. A quick plug, then a cotton wrap around my leg to hold it in and prevent my thermal pants from shifting. After securing everything, I tentatively stood up and discovered I couple manage on my leg as it was. I stumped over to the other room and started assessing the mess.

There were a dozen dead bandits lying on the floor near the door, and about that many of the nomads. It seems like they had taken the worst of the flashbang attack, though there were a few dead laborers as well. The cries and whimpers of the injured made it hard to listen for the signals from the Wayfinders, so I set all of the uninjured laborers to clearing the dead bodies away, figuring out how many people had been killed, and collecting all of the gear from the bandits. I had the nomads collect all of the wounded and take them upstairs, away from all of the dead. There was only the one room and a large storage closet up there, but it was a bit room and there weren’t many wounded who would be back on their feet quickly.

While the laborers and nomads shuffled off to do what I had said, I went outside and whistled the all-clear signal. I got one back from the barn and carefully made my way to the big double-doors. Camille met me just inside them.

I saluted. “Getting numbers now, but it looks bad. Lots of dead nomads and laborers. There was a breach and they had flashbangs. I’ve got the survivors taking stock and sorting the injured from the dead right now.”

“We’ve got one dead Wayfinder out here. Diego. Got hit by a few lucky shots when he popped up to provide some covering fire for the snipers to reposition. Still waiting on final injury reports.” Camille saluted and then we took a moment to steady each other. I looked her over and, aside from the stress I could see in her eyes, she seemed fine.

“First is clean up and then a bit of scouting to make sure that was all of them. After that, rest. We’ll stay here for a couple of days to bury the dead and pick over the bandits’ supplies.”

Camille nodded. “I’ll get the scouting parties organized. Once the laborers and nomads are finished taking care of their dead, we’ll need their help collecting the bandits.” Camille turned to face the east, looking off into the woods. “Flashbangs?”

“Yeah.” I took a deep breath and shifted my weight so it rested more fully on my uninjured leg. “The way they attacked the farmhouse suggested they have at least a little training. Hopefully they have more grenades they didn’t use.”

Camille shook her head. “That’s not what I’m thinking. I’m just curious about why a group this well-supplied would be attacking nomads or a fortified position like ours. Even by typical bandit standards, this attack was idiotic. They know how to breach and enter a building, have the high-tech gear to do it, and yet used waved tactics to try to get to the barn.”

“And the house.” I sighed and rubbed my eyes, careful to avoid the splinters still stuck in my face. My usual post-battle headache was already forming. “Their approach to the farmhouse was horrible. I was able to just mow them down after the first group breached and they weren’t even using cover as they snuck up to the farmhouse.”

“Sorry about that.” Camille turned back to me, concern on her face as she looked over my pincushioned face and the hasty bandage around my leg. “I was sending the snipers over to your side when Diego went down. The bandits decided to rush then and the barn would have been overwhelmed if we had continued to turn away.”

I shrugged. “I’m alive. We’re going to have to explain what happened to the survivors, so let’s just focus on getting through the next twenty-four hours and then we can start in on all the guilt of losing people we said we’d protect.”

Camille smiled ruefully. “You’d think I’d get used to it after almost fifteen years of this.”

I walked over and put my hand on her shoulder. “Camille, I’d be worried if you didn’t still care.” I looked around and, sure that no one was watching, embraced her. “You did great. Most of us are still alive and that’s more than most would be able to say after a day like that.”

“You bet your ass I did great.” Camille laughed quietly and hugged me back. “Now stop with all this mushy stuff. You don’t need to hug me after every death.”

“No, I don’t.” I stepped back and smiled at my oldest living friend. “But I’m still going to. Makes me feel better.”

Camille punched me in the shoulder and I turned away. “Now, I’m going to check on the non-combatants. I’m going to need to spend some time talking to kids whose parents died.” I closed the barn down behind me and looked up at the overcast sky. The snow was holding off for now, but the skies looked fit to burst. There was light diffusing through the clouds, but the day wasn’t getting any brighter. It would snow soon and we had bodies to bury. I looked back at the ground, ignoring the bloody smears around me and the groans of the injured, and limped off in the direction of the cellar doors. At least the cellar would be a bit warmer.