Coldheart and Iron: Part 30

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READ FROM THE BEGINNING

When I left the Wayfinder office, Natalie stayed behind to continue pulling records. Camille would only be a few minutes behind me, though I knew she would be running off in a different direction. While I ran down the road, I thanked the star I was born under, every god I’d ever learned about, and a few gods I made up on the spot. When Natalie had begun pulling records, we discovered more Wayfinders than I thought had opted to retire in the Chicago Enclave. A few hundred had, in fact, and a little under half of them seemed to be involved in the government or military in one way or another.

Almost two hundred of them would already be on alert and either leading units against the monsters or moving out to delay them. If Gerry had built his entire sallying force out of Wayfinders, then we’d have at least two additional hours to prepare before the monsters showed up. Maybe more, if they were still as good as they were when they retired. Either way, there were at least as many more Wayfinders who had retired completely, content to live out their days on their earnings and pensions. Some of them would have likely retired due to injury, but Natalie’s records indicated we should get at least one hundred healthy, if rusty, Wayfinders to help us out if we went and asked all of them.

As I ran down the streets, dodging soldiers bustling to their positions and all the residents poking their heads out to see what was going on, I glanced down at the top of the paper I was holding, checking the address against the streets I was passing. I’d looked at a map before leaving, but I didn’t remember exactly how far it was before I needed to turn. Thankfully, Natalie had thought of everything and her instructions would lead me from one house to another. It blew my mind, sometimes, to be reminded how quickly she could write and how thorough she always was.

Another mile of running passed quickly and I arrived at the first house. A confused woman with only one eye opened the door half a minute after I pounded on it. “What the hell is going on?”

“Sorry. Is this Gianna Fields? Retired Wayfinder?” I gave her my best smile while trying to regain control of my breath.

“Yeah. What’s going on?” Her eye went from my face to the paper I held to the sky outside. “Sirens? Are we under attack?”

“We will be, soon. Someone placed a radio on the wall and we expect to be attacked by the monsters living off to the north. Are you willing to fight? We’ve got plenty of guns and the Wayfinders are placing a bounty-”

“Yeah. Where’s muster?”

“It’s in one of the communal buildings near the center of the Enclave. I just moved into the Enclave today, so I’ve got no idea what the address is. Look for the other Wayfinders.” I took a step backward but paused, watching her before I ran off to the next address.

“Got it. See you there, Captain.” The woman saluted and disappeared back into her home. As I jogged off toward the next address, I tried to remember if I’d ever worked with her before. I couldn’t think of any other reason she would have known my rank but, after five more houses, I still couldn’t place her. Nor could I place any of the other people I talked to who seemed to all know my name and rank.

The next hour passed in a blur as I ran from house to house, trying to recruit as many ex-Wayfinders as I could. Surprisingly, every single one of them who was fit to shoot a gun immediately agreed to help and it wasn’t until I asked Natalie how everyone knew me during my last stop at the Wayfinder office, that it all became clear why they were so eager to help and why they all seemed to know me by sight.

“You started the Wayfinders, moron. Of course everyone knows who you are.” Natalie shook her head as she continued to write out my next sheet of instructions. “You’re a living legend to anyone who wants to live outside an Enclave and your pictures are in half the promotional materials we put out.”

“Wait, we have promotional materials?” I sat upright and then clutched my side as my abdominal muscles spasmed. “When did that happen?”

“A few years ago. Where did you think we got the recruits from?”

“I always thought everyone just wanted to be a Wayfinder. Like cowboys when we were growing up. It was just something you wanted to be, not something someone proposed as a legitimate occupation.” I took slow breaths and resisted the urge to guzzle the water bottle Natalie had tossed me when I collapse in the chair. “I just thought we were famous. You know, as a whole.”

“Sure, but we wouldn’t have as many recruits as we needed if we just waited for people to want to join us on their own. Plus, we probably wouldn’t be getting the right recruits.” Natalie set down her pencil and started scanning the sheet.

I took a small sip of water and hauled myself to my feet. “Huh. I never would have guessed. You put them out, then?”

“Yes. You left me in charge of logistics and having enough people to do our jobs falls under that, so I had something made up more than a decade ago and I bring it up to date whenever we stop in an Enclave.” Natalie held out piece of paper, smiling slightly. “Worked like a charm. Now get running. Camille has done almost half again as many trips as you.”

“That’s not a fair comparison.” I took the paper and one last deep breath before I started around her desk toward the door. “She’s unstoppable. I’ve known her for almost thirty years and I’ve never seen her tired. I’m just some poor Human. How can I expect to keep up with Wonder Woman there?”

“Quit griping and get moving.” Natalie smiled and swatted me on the butt as I turned to go. I smiled to myself and waved over my shoulder as I lumbered out the door and up the street. Half an hour later, I collapsed into a chair inside the commune and started yanking my snowsuit off so I could change into dry clothes. While I gasped for breath and kicked off my boots, I watched Lucas direct traffic through the building.

Wayfinders came in the front door, signed in, picked up their preferred weapon, told Lucas about their particular skills, and then was given a Wayfinder unit number and sent to the Enclave defense council with a message to say they were either to be assigned as a unit or sent out of the city to pick off monsters as they got closer. As either a solo Wayfinder or as a team of just Wayfinders, they’d be able to do stuff Enclave defenders wouldn’t risk.

By the time I’d cooled down, changed into dry clothes, and rehydrated myself, Camille had turned up with a group of the best marksmen she could muster. All of them retired or still-working Wayfinders, of course. I watched them all sign in and pick up through the rifles Lucas and Tiffany had set aside. Camille gathered them up once they’d all picked a gun and all the ammunition they could carry and, without more than a nod to myself and Lucas, lead her sharpshooters away.

“Bit chilling, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah. Like death just passed through.”

“On that note, I’m off.” Lucas grabbed a gun, slung it over his shoulder, and gestured to all of the Wayfinders we’d brought into the Enclave.

“Wait, what? Who’s going to run the command center?” I hauled myself to my feet and forced myself not to flinch when my muscles spasmed and twitched.

“We don’t need it, Marshall. Everyone has their orders, they all know to follow their training, and no amount of communication from us is going to help them. I suggest grabbing a gun for yourself and Natalie, find a spot for the two of you to hole up that’s outside the city, and make sure you’ve got enough food in your pack for a week.”

“Right.” I slumped back into my chair and suddenly the pain in my muscles didn’t feel as bad as it had before I remembered the city was probably going to fall between the monsters and the bandits. “Did y-”

“Your bags are packed. I’ve got ‘em right here.” Lucas gestured at the other side of one of the kitchen islands. “Rendezvous is the Nomad’s old home. Be there ten days after the fighting is over.”

I nodded and did my best to smile as all of my Wayfinders left until only Lucas and I remained. I watched him head toward the door and paused, one hand on the knob. “I really wanted to retire here, Marshall. I’m sorry there isn’t more we can do.”

“I know, Luke. I know. I’ll see you there. Ten days or less.” After a moment more of hesitation, Lucas stepped through the door and closed it behind him. I stared at where he was for a moment before hauling myself to my feet to see if my snowsuit had dried out yet. While I poked around for damp spots, I muttered to myself. “Stupid defeatist attitude. It’s not over until it’s over. He better come back alive or else I’m going to find his corpse and use him as a scarecrow.”

“Gross.”

I spun around, only barely staying on my feet as my socks slick on the cheap linoleum. “Tiffany? What’re you doing here?”

“I live here, duh.” Tiffany placed both her wrists on her hips and shook her head at me. “I swear, it’s like you forget I’m alive sometimes.”

“No, I just assumed Lucas would have taken you with him.”

“Yeah, if I could hold a gun. Still working on that, since I lost my dominant hand, so I’m going to go with you and Natalie. Act as your spotter.”

“Oh, that’s good thinking.”

“Now c’mon, bossman. We’ve got monsters to shoot and a city to save.” Tiffany smiled and kicked my boots across the room to me. I smiled and started tugging on my snowsuit. While I slipped on and laced-up my boots, Tiffany grabbed three packs from behind the island, and started grabbing rifles. Five minutes later, as I modified the forward grip on one of the semi-automatic rifles and showed Tiffany how to hold it with what remained of her left arm, Natalie walked through the door.

“Everyone’s already gone?”

“Yeah. Lieutenant Lucas left about ten minutes ago with the last of the Wayfinders unless there are a few who haven’t shown up yet. We’re heading out in a couple minutes to find someplace to snipe monsters.” Tiffany smiled as she deftly slung the gun over her shoulder and hooked her pack with her left arm.

“She’s terrifyingly good with that arm already.” I looked over at Natalie who eyed our packs with some apprehension. “She’s been practicing with every spare moment, it seems. It’s almost like she was born one-handed now.”

“Why do you have our bags packed?” Natalie stepped in and hefted her bag. “And why does it feel like there’s enough in here for several days away from the Enclave.”

“We’re picking a sniper position outside of the Enclave in case it falls to the monsters or the Bandits.” I looked over at Natalie and caught the grim look in her eye. “I don’t think it will come to that given how prepared the Chicago Enclave is, but it never hurts to be ready. Would we really be Wayfinders if we didn’t plan for this?”

“I suppose not.” Natalie sighed and slipped on her pack. “I suppose you’ve got a place in mind, Marshall?”

Before I could even open my mouth to speak, Tiffany stepped forward. “I picked out a place while Lucas was coordinating. If we leave out the Northern gate and head west, there’s a taller building still standing that we can climb up. If we seal stairwells in the building, we could even fortify the position long enough for us to escape to one of the shorter neighbors in the event that they target us.”

Natalie smiled as Tiffany pulled a map out of her pocket and pointed out our route. “Lead on, Tiffany.”

A little under an hour later, we lay at the edge of a blown-out room on the seventeenth floor of an old office building and surveyed the monster army approaching the Enclave. The group the Enclave defense council had sent out to delay them had done a good job, taking out most of the stragglers and causing the main body of them to bundle up tightly. If we’d had explosives of any kind, we could have taken out most of them right then, but no one had access to the bunkers anymore and using anything with that large of a heat signature would have attracted the attention of every monster in the Midwest. So we boxed them up and waited for them to get in range of the machine guns mounted on the Enclave walls.

Our part would be to start taking out any monsters that tried to break out of their tight formation and swing around to flank the machine guns. The other Wayfinder groups would be doing the same thing, mostly, but also be applying pressure to the rear, taking out any stragglers who fell behind or tried to go further back before swinging wide to flank. The monsters’ tactics were good, but rather static. Any force that survived an encounter with them had a much better chance of surviving a second one.

After Natalie and I placed our rifles, set up our scopes, and had Tiffany start calling out targets, I settled into a groove. The monsters didn’t really care if you shot at them since it was difficult to land a killshot and they’d always ignore snipers in favor of machine guns since they had an easier time finding the giant heat wells machine guns created. Since most snipers posed little threat to a monster, they generally ignored them until the end of the battle.

Wayfinder snipers, though, were different. One of the tests you had to pass in order to become a Wayfinder is to label each and every vital area on a monster from a mile away, no matter which direction they were facing. Most Enclaves trained their people on where the vital areas were, but they didn’t have as exhaustive a test as the Wayfinders did. Most Enclaves also didn’t require you to perform the test using a live monster that you then had to kill in order to join. Wayfinders did. So when Natalie and I started firing, we were dropping one with each shot.

I always felt a little uncomfortable when I looked at the monsters. People had originally called them robots because they used swarm processing and had electrical parts like a lot of the robots Humanity had been producing, but the idea of robots as something humanoid was too strong and people rejected it in favor of ‘monster’ since they were anything but humanoid.

They moved around using what can only be described as large limbs, sort of quickly twitching their way forward in a way that bent the mind into strange shapes. Their entire body could flow into one of these limbs so that it resembled a large greenish log than it’s normal tendril, and it would still manage to undulate forward like some kind of nightmare worm. Once they attacked, they pistoned all of their limbs into the ground and fired bullets made of the same greenish metal making up their bodies out of tubes that appeared once they were stabilized. If they wanted to trace you, they’d fire smaller pellets that hit with the same force as a bullet, but their rounder shape meant they generally didn’t punch through and the fact that they were hollow meant they’d disintegrate on impact, enter into the bloodstream, and begin to replicated until one or more of the monsters showed up to kill whoever had been hit.

The closet thing they resembled was a cross between an alligator and an octopus. They had the same sort of heavy bodies and lurching strength as an alligator, but they had the limbs and body fluidity of an octopus. Their shape was closer to the later, but they could be any part of the octopus they wanted to be, and any percentage of it.

As of yet, no one had figured out their tech or the metal alloy they were made of. Attempts to study them had been stopped because even a dead monster was still detectable by it’s fellows and whole labs had been destroyed before we figured that bit out. They had circuitry like you’d imagine robots would, but it contained some kind of liquid electricity we’d taken to calling plasma. They apparently created their own since you could drain one of them of all their plasma without destroying it. It would then it would then proceed to kill you, disappear somewhere to refill it’s plasma circuits, and then return to kill your friends.

The only way to kill them was to hit them in a vital spot that acted a lot like a fault like in a rock. If you could hit it at the right moment, the whole thing would essentially shatter. Whatever parts of it had been pulled in or stretched out would crack, all of its plasma would leak out, and it would collapse. There were other ways to kill them, hitting them with a blunt instrument at one of those points or by cutting open their circuitry until you got to the whirling ball of solid plasma at their center that was basically their heart, but sniping was the most effective because they couldn’t fix a shattered monster. If you cut them open but didn’t destroy the heart or only knocked a limb off, they’d just put the damaged monster right back together again as soon as they’d run you off.

Their smooth movement and ungainly bodies seemed like they should always be at odds with each other, but they never stumbled or tripped on their own. You basically had to take off a limb supporting it to cause it to fall and even then it didn’t fall far before on of the other limbs came in to catch it. It was always satisfying to hit one in a vital spot and watch it crumble to the ground, but there were so many today that I just skipped from shooting one to finding another to shoot.

Between Natalie and I, we took out over one hundred of the monsters, leaving a trail of shattered metal and leaking blue plasma from the nearest building by the wall to the main body of monsters which, despite a steady stream of bullets, seemed to be making headway against the wall. In fact, as I turned my attention back to looking for stragglers, I heard a low rumble followed by Tiffany cursing.

“Shit! One of them blew itself up against the wall. I didn’t know they could do that. Did you?” Tiffany looked between Natalie and I as we shook our heads. Tiffany pressure her scope back to her eye and peered down at the way. “There’s a hole. They’re inside three hours before our worst case scenario projection and there are still thousands of them trickling in. What do we do?”

I looked down my scope at the hold in the wall and watching a slow stream of monsters step through it. “Keep picking them off from out here and hope they’re able to contain the breech. If not, then the city is lost.” Natalie nodded and we both got back to work, trying to shoot faster than we had been before.

After a few more shots, Tiffany tapped us both on the shoulder. We looked up and she held her left arm to her lips. After adjusting her position so she was laying down next to us, she spoke so quietly I could barely hear her over the distant gunfire. “We’ve got bandits creeping toward our spot from the north. Keep firing for now, I’m going to set up some traps quick.”

After Natalie and I nodded, Tiffany silently crawled backwards until she was lost in the shadows of the blown-out room we picked as our sniper nest and slunk off into the building proper. I tried to focus on killing Monsters, but it was starting to feel like a waste of time. Unless a miracle occurred, the Enclave was lost. We had Bandits trying to ambush us while we sniped and the same was probably happening to Wayfinder nests all over the area. If we weren’t careful, we might wind up dead, and we were almost certainly homeless once again. As I swapped magazines on my rifle, I clenched my jaw and focused on killing one monster at a time, hoping that we’d eventually save everyone if we just kept firing.

 

Tabletop Highlight: What to Do With New Players

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You’ve been running your campaign for a while and your collection of players has dwindled from the desired six to a barely tenable three. You’ve made a few semi-permanent NPCs to help lighten the load on your remaining players and you’ve changed all the encounters so that your primarily martial characters can still fight on an even playing field. Still, you and your players feel the lack of other voices around the table, other solutions to the problems you face that could be offered by one or more other players. Maybe you have some interested people who’d be willing to play the kind of game you’re running, but how do you know if they’ll fit into the group dynamic? How do you know if they’ll really enjoy the story you’re all telling when they’re not as invested as your current players. Assuming you get past the first two, how do you work them into the campaign without it feeling like you’ve put everything on pause so a new character can show up in order to bail out the party?

Adding new players into an existing campaign is always a risky proposition. There is no telling what a new face will do to the group’s chemistry or how the leadership or problem-solving dynamics will shift as you add new personalities. A lot of the potential problems can be avoided if you bring in a prospective new player on a temporary basis, for some kind of special event cooked up for the sole purpose of vetting new players. Keep in mind, no matter how well you know the prospective player, it is really important to give the other players a chance to try them out first before you bring them in officially. There is always the chance that a quirk of someone’s personality will be incredibly frustrating to someone else, even if they usually get along or you don’t see it. Since your existing players have been with you all this time, they should ultimately have a say in new players as well and group chemistry is just as important to them as it is to you, even if it is ultimately your job alone to monitor and/or police it.

While you may want to bring in a new player right away, to help the players out of a problem they’re approaching, it is usually best to save inserting the new player until there’s room in the story for it. Thankfully, stories are quire versatile and the reasons behind why a stranger might join up with the existing characters are manifold. Maybe the new character is a prisoner or a turncoat. Maybe they have goals similar to those of the party and found their way to the same place. Maybe the new character has some important information the party needs so they seem them out in town. Maybe the person giving the party their job wants to send someone they trust along to report back and ensure their goods are properly retrieve or delivered. There are a thousand ways to add someone to the game, but it’s just as important to know that every moment isn’t the right time. If you characters have been chasing a bad guy for months, one who has wronged them and only them, it would not make sense for a stranger to show up at the bad guy’s base with the thought of helping to take down someone who hasn’t done anything to them. Similarly, if your players are carrying out a top-secret mission, it is unlikely that they will willingly share information with a new person unless they explicitly know they can trust this stranger.

Usually, to get around those difficult moments and to help both get the character involve and make sure they’re a good fit with the group, find a little side adventure you can use that will involve the new player. You can watch the group chemistry to make sure everyone gets along and help the characters build a rapport so that your existing players will readily welcome the inclusion of any new players. If you’ve got the time, it never hurts to vet a bunch of players ahead of time, to see how they perform, in case you ever need to add some more people. I like to invite people I know to small parts of campaigns I run so I can get an idea of how they play and who they play well with so I can make sure to invite the right people to the right Dungeons and Dragons groups when I’m looking to start a new campaign. This means I usually have a good idea of who will fit well in a group if they initially declined or weren’t available and I wind up needing more players.

From there, if I realize I’m running short on players and will probably start wanting new ones soon, I go through my mental list of players and invite potential new players to join the campaign for a short little story, usually something heavily related to the main plot of the game with an individual twist focused around the player’s character. If they enjoy the piece of the story they got to experience, then it’s usually a safe bet that they will enjoy playing in the campaign as a whole. It isn’t a sure-fire method, of course. There are no sure-fire ways to predict the future or make certain that everyone will get along in the future, but it makes it a lot easier to confidently suggest people to your existing players and, if there are no red flags, then most game masters can handle it from there since any issues will fall within the normal range of personality conflicts most GMs handle on a monthly basis.

As always, you should consider things thoroughly before acting. There’s no rush to add players, so take the time to make sure you’re adding people who are going to have fun and actually contribute to a positive play environment. It might take a lot of work sometimes, but it’s always worth it.

Testing, Testing

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Testing, testing. One, two…

“Alice, can we-”

“Sorry, Kurt, I’ve gotta run to class.”

“It’ll only take a minute.”

“I’m already late.” Alice smiled and held her hand up to mimic a phone. “I’ll call you after.”

Kurt watched her go, vague unease still clinging to his gut as his girlfriend hurried across campus toward the arts building. He breathed deeply and, once she was out of sight, walked away.

Testing, testing. One, two, three, four… Hello?

“Heya, Kurt! Just the man I was looking for!”

“Hey, Steve. I was hoping we could-”

“I need someone to cover my shift this afternoon. I’ve got a woman to see about a class she’s skipping.” Jim winked and clapped Kurt on the shoulders. “Affection delivered. Request status?”

“Denied. I’ve got someplace I’ve gotta be.” Kurt shrugged Jim’s hands off and walked away. A few minutes later, he slumped against a wall. He breathed deeply to banish the icy dread in his stomach and, after watching a few cars pass on the road in front of him, walked toward his dorm.

Testing, testing. One, two, three, four. Hello? Can anyone hear me? Anyone?

Stewart and Nathan were out when he got home and Drew didn’t look up from the game he was playing. Kurt went into his room, sat down at his desk, and tried to lose himself in his work. Thirty minutes later, his work sat abandoned on his desk as he flipped through his phone, sending messages and texts to his local friends. Half an hour after that, when Alice was supposed to have been out of class for twenty minutes, Kurt set his phone on his desk and climbed into bed. For a minute, the screen displayed his last text before it went dark.

Hello? I just wanted to talk.

 

Saturday Morning Musing

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When this post goes us, I’ll be busy attending to my soul and mental well-being by going on a hike with a small selection of my favorite people. After several weeks of being too tired to do much and a constant lack of days we can all gather, those of us who are available tomorrow are just going to do something regardless of the fact that half our group is missing. It isn’t ideal, I’d rather spend the day with all of them, but I need to get active and to spend time with people who help me forget myself for a while. With all the stress and anxiety that have been building the past three months, I need to ignore my desire to stay home alone to work on processing review suggestions and actually go do something I know I’ll love.

I’ve always enjoyed walking. I like losing myself in my gait as I wander from place to place, maybe listening to music or just taking in the sounds of wherever I’m at. Hiking is a sort of extension of that, because it takes me out of areas that always grate on me, cities with the constant hum of cars and neighborhoods with the quiet noises of people going about their daily lives. If you pick the right hiking location, you can go the entire hike without encountering anyone. You can embrace the quiet of nature and the irritating hum of modern life that most people only notice when it’s gone disappears completely. You can lose yourself in trees and the quiet emerald peace of a nature at its strongest. If you’ve picked a place with some nice elevation changes, there are a ton of great places to stop and admire the world around you. I’ve always enjoyed looking at the horizon and having an unobstructed view of the sky and there’s just something wonderful about getting both of those things as a result of being on top of something that rises above the area around me. Only in hiking trips can I get all of that at once.

Even though I’m going with my friends, I’ll be able to enjoy that. These are all people who know me well enough that there are no awkward silences to fill. I don’t need to worry about how to maintain a conversation or how to segue from one thought to another because they all just get how my mind works enough to not always need an explanation. I can just be myself around them and their presence doesn’t intrude on my sense of peace and quiet. For the past several years, we’ve always done at least a couple of hiking trips every month, though we’ve been doing fewer of those lately because of how busy everyone has been. They’ve been some of my fondest memories and include some of my favorite pictures. All of the background pictures you’ll ever see on my blog are pictures I’ve taken while hiking. If I could, I’d do all my thinking and writing in a spot that overlooks the surrounding area and has an unobstructed view of the entire sky. My dream house idea focuses mostly around a taller tower with what is essentially a glass dome on the top so I can sit up there and read or write as close to the sky as I can get. Heck, the whole thing might just be a tower of some kind. But it would have to be on the side of a mountain or on the top of a tall hill somewhere. That would be amazing.

After hiking, I’m planning to do the Pokemon Go Community day since I’m still trying to figure out how I feel about the game now that I don’t have my ex to give me a reason to keep playing it. I don’t really feel like it “our thing” anymore, thankfully, but I still wonder if I’m just wasting my time on something that isn’t really adding anything to my life since I have a tendency to play the game alone and let it distract me from the main purpose of my frequent walks. It’s so easy to bring alone and leave running in my pocket, but I’m not good at ignoring it when it’s in there and will start to feel anxious if I don’t check it for a while. It works the same way as notifications on my phone do. If I know they’re there, it will always cause me more stress to just ignore them than to skim through them and either open them or dismiss them. In order to save myself from needless stress, I’ve started disabling certain notifications on my phone and setting up hour-long notification silences so I won’t notice when they show up until the hour is over. I’ve also removed most time-waster games from my phone for the same reason. I also repeatedly install and uninstall Imgur as I cycle between just needing something to kill some time and realizing that I’ll just sit on the couch and browse through Imgur for an hour instead of going to bed or starting my writing. Which is why I’m still on the fence about Pokemon Go. I definitely benefit from still having Sudoku on my phone because it often works as a way of doing some mental stretching when I’ll feeling particularly tired or fogged up from how focused I’ve been on my work.

It’s a really nebulous balance and I’m probably going to be working on it my whole life. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to just figure out how much work to do and how much relaxation to put in and when it’s already to simply escape instead of doing something genuinely relaxing. Even though I love writing and reading, they’re still work. Even though I’m super excited to start reading all of the amazing books people have written and mentioned to me on Twitter, there’s still a lot of work to do just to find all the links, titles, and authors. I want to just wake up in the morning and dig right in to my to-do list, but I need to take time to relax and hike and let my to-do list remain undone. I’m still doing at least four hours of writing or book recommendation collation a day, so it’s not like I’m slacking off, I just always feel like it’s hard to justify taking the time to wander through the woods or spend a few hours walking around the city with some friends while we catch Pokemon. I’ve only got so much time, after all. I want to get the most I can out of it and it’s, no matter how long I live, I don’t think it’ll ever be clear how to do that.

 

How to Cope with Exhaustion

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Feeling like you’ve scraped the bottom of the energy barrel to the point where the barrel no longer has a bottom? So tired you just kinda want to cry and find somewhere dark to curl up in the fetal position so you can finally let your exhaustion overwhelm you? Feeling like you’re stretched beyond the point of recovery and to the point where all of the stress has invaded your dreams so now you have to deal with it while your awake and asleep? While none of these things is a good position to be in, we often find ourselves in them when the shit hits the fan and we focus ourselves on simply doing everything one step at a time until we’re finished. Or until we collapse from exhaustion. I’ve done both, and neither one works out well in the end because we’re ultimately taxing our mind and body to the point of damage.

There are ways to help prevent some of the damage, or to mitigate the negative aspects of trying to buckle down and work through long days, busy weekends, or months of ceaseless stress. None of them are guaranteed to work and they’ll all need to be tweaked to fit your specific needs, but the core concepts should definitely work for you. I’ve had a lot of experience dealing with various forms of exhaustion thanks to insomnia in high school, business and insomnia in college, and stress and business after college, so I feel like I’m pretty qualified when it comes to figuring out how to cope with mild to extreme exhaustion until you’re capable of resting.

The first thing I’m going to say, despite it making me feel like a total hypocrite, is that these sorts of situations are best avoided. Even short periods of exhaustion or sleep deprivation can interfere with your short-term memory, inhibit the formation of long-term memory, wreak havoc on your immune system and muscles, and will for-sure exacerbate any health issues you have, be they physical or mental. It is good to know your limits and to be able to push past them when you need to, but there’s a pretty big difference between “I need to just push through this” and “I think pushing through this is going to yield the best results I’m going to ignore options that would leave me feeling more rested.” I guarantee that you will always have better results if you can rest first. You can’t always rest, but you should when you can. If you rest up or take good care of yourself, you will see your best results in the long-run.

If resting up isn’t an option, you should really figure out which type of energy you’re going to be running short on. If you’re physically active during this period of low sleep or high stress, you will be short on physical energy. If you’re stretching your skills and abilities in new ways or being forced into new situations without much time to prepare, you’ll run out of mental energy. If you have to take care of people or deal with people who don’t want to be dealt with, you’ll rapidly run out of emotional energy. If you’re doing something that involves all three, then I feel so sorry for you and I wish you the best because most of my strategies for coping with a low energy of one or two types requires relying on the other(s) to help carry the weight or be turned into the type that’s running out.

If you need more mental or emotional energy, some quiet meditation or music is usually very helpful. Something that will help you feel a certain way or that will help you process the feeling you’re dealing with at that moment. Maybe you need something to make you feel powerful or something to help slow you down to alleviate some of the mental strain you’re experiencing. If it’s physical energy, I suggest taking it easy by sleeping, playing games with friends, or watching something while you let your body rest. Even a couple hours of any of these activities, while you continue to work on other things, can help get you back to a point where you can make it through the day. I’d recommend against anything that might be destructive, like excessive eating, alcohol, or drugs. I haven’t got much experience with the later, but I’ve seen enough people make that mistake to have learned the lesson.

Additionally, a change in your diet can help keep you going. Avoid too much sugar since that is going to just set you up for a terrible crash later, unless you’re eating natural sugars from stuff like fruit or vegetables. I recommend eating plenty of both to keep you going since it helps to have something to do with your mouth while you’re trying to focus. At the same time, having an idea of what kinds of foods provide the most energy for you will help a lot. I know my body processes protein very efficiently, so I can delay encroaching exhaustion by eating a lean, protein-rich diet with plenty of vegetables and fruit. It’s not really going to make you feel energized, but it’ll keep you fueled and prevent your body from taking too much energy away for digestion. Throughout it all, avoid sugary sources of caffeine. Stick to things like coffee or tea and don’t add too much sugar to them or else you will get an immediate boost followed by a crash when the caffeine kicks in so you’ll feel exhausted and be unable to rest it off. Also, drink more water than usual. A good goal for water consumption is to drink half your weight in ounces of water. If you want something a little easier, I suggest going for at least three quarts or liters. It’ll help keep your mind clear and hydration is key at all times.

The last thing, and the most effective, is getting organized and writing things down somewhere. The exact methods for doing so depend a lot more on how you think and how you tend to organize information, but it’ll help if you do it, regardless of how you do it. For instance, the only reason I’m still sane and productive these days is because I’ve taken to writing to-do lists and journaling things as the day goes on. Not only is it helping my emotional energy, but it’s take a constant source of mental energy drain (trying to remember everything) and offloading the work onto a notebook. I can write down not just how I’m feeling, but also what my thoughts were on whatever meeting I just had, save ideas for later, and get a little mental clarity when I set everything else aside for five minutes so I can write things out. For people who don’t have issues with remembering things that only exist electronically, there are a ton of applications and programs out there, most of which you can get on your phone. Heck, even Google Now does a lot of that stuff.

Like I said earlier, it is best to avoid pushing yourself to the point of exhaustion, but hopefully these tips will make it easier to cope when you don’t really have any other choice. Good luck!

I’ll Always Love the Legend of Zelda

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One of my first memories of playing video games was sitting on the carpet with my friends while we took turns playing Super Mario Cart. I remember the ease with which I made turns, hopped over puddles, and the ways we laughed whenever we ran into the moles that appeared in a couple of the levels. It was a fun, social activity. It set the foundation for the way I still view video games today, as an activity best done with friends. As I grew, and my friends all moved away or disappeared as such things do, I found myself less and less able to find people to play with other than my siblings. That was always fun, but my older brother wasn’t very interested in playing because he always won and my younger sisters weren’t as interested when I initially needed people.

Around that time, the N64 came out. I wanted one so badly, so I could play the new Mario game I got to try when we visited some of my dad’s friends, but no amount of begging or pleading would sway my parents. It was just not in the cards for us. Long after I’d given up, though I of course still asked frequently as a matter of course, we got the limited edition, see-through green edition that came with the expansion pack and Donkey Kong 64. I was so excited that I woke up at five in the morning or earlier every day during winter break to play it. Donkey Kong 64 was one of my first experiences with a game that was meant to be played by a single player and it was way more fun than I expected. Then, I don’t remember when it happened or who gave it to us, but I got my hands on a copy of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and my world changed.

I honestly hadn’t expected much going into it. My first Legend of Zelda game was A Link to the Past, because we borrowed it from a friend for a while. My older brother enjoyed it, but I couldn’t quite figure it out. I was five or six while I was trying to play it and I just couldn’t figure out where to go next at one point, so I didn’t get very far into it before we had to give it back. When we got Ocarina of Time, I was excited by a new single-player game of course, but I was a little skeptical that it’d be nearly as fun as Donkey Kong had been. I let my brother take the first turn and I immediately fell in love as I watched him play. There was just something about seeing a child who looked like he was my age fight against evil and go on these adventures before ultimately growing up to continue them. Most of the thematic elements of the game went right over my head, but I had so much fun wandering around the world, searching for heart pieces and Gold Skulltulas before ultimately trying to look up guides online, that I didn’t care about anything else.\

A year later, not that long after my brother and I had gotten tired of finishing Ocarina of Time, we got a Nintendo Power magazine telling us all about the new Legend of Zelda game that was going to come out, Majora’s Mask. I demanded the game immediately, which didn’t get me very far, of course. I had to save and beg and wheedle and convince my parents to get it for the family since no one person could have a game console (there were four of us kids at that point and we used any power we had to get one-up on each other). I don’t remember the day we finally got it, but I remember how excited I was and then how frustrated I was when I couldn’t get through the first part of the game. At that point, due to how much we played video games and how many of us wanted to play, there was a strict thirty-minute restriction on how long your turn with the N64 could be. If you’ve played Majora’s Mask, you know that thirty minutes is barely enough time to get through the first part of the game even when you know what you’re doing and that there’s no way to save the game until you’ve finished. Needless to say, it took a lot of tries to figure everything out so I could actually finish the first part. My brother cheated by getting up in the middle of the night when no one would call him on playing for longer than thirty minutes but, joke’s on him, I beat the game before him using that method.

This game was different from Ocarina of Time, though. I’m not sure if it was because of how much I’d grown in the year between starting Ocarina of Time and playing Majora’s Mask or if it was because the themes of the game more closely matched the issues I was struggling with at the time, but I finally starting to realize what was going on behind the missions and adventures. I saw all these crazy characters who were struggling to deal with the things that happened in their life and they went from being hilarious or weird caricatures to being sad but truthful depictions of the way we struggled to cope in a world were we ultimately have no say in how things turn out. The big moment for me was watching the Zora hero, Mikau, tell his story and then die. I didn’t really understand what was going on and what the game meant back then, but it has stuck with me for over a decade as something that opened my eyes to the fact that lots of people feel powerless and want someone to help them.

I mean, even the hero can’t accomplish everything he wants. He has the power to help other people, to fix some of their problems or at least act in their stead when it is too late for them, but even he can’t find the person he’s been searching for throughout the entire game. It’s a lot like the stories we tell ourselves as we try our best to live our lives. It can be really easy to step in for someone else, to help them fix a problem that feels insurmountable to them but that we have the tools to address, but we often find ourselves unable to help ourselves in the same we. We struggle and fight our way through whatever comes up, but can’t always guarantee that the struggle is going to be anything but an obstacle to overcome. Winning doesn’t guarantee that we’ll get the prize we seek. Or any prize at all, for that matter.

As a ten-year-old kid, I couldn’t have put this into words, but I understood it. I felt it deep inside my heart and recognized it in this game that was a rush job slapped together using old assets by a team of people who had a vision and a plan and not much else. It reach into my soul and let me know I wasn’t the only one who felt this way or had experienced these feelings. It was a revelation and the reason Majora’s Mask is always going to be my favorite Legend of Zelda game. Even with Breath of the Wild’s amazing open world and the hundreds of hours of joy it has brought me, Majora’s Mask will always be the nearest and dearest to my heart because it taught me about depression and how to handle it before I even knew that’s what I had. It set the stage for a lot of the most important mental developments in my life and is more a part of who I am as a person than anything but “stories” as a whole. I’m glad I got to experience it when I did and I’m glad I can go back to visit it and find it the same after all these years so I can measure how I’ve grown and changed.

I Need More Stuff to Review

Wren 2 Comments

I’ve been struggling to find stuff to review every week, partly because I haven’t always had time to read new books, watch new shows, or play new games, but also partly because so much of the stuff I find these days has been out for so long it isn’t super relevant anymore. In terms of games and shows or movies, a couple of years old is enough to fade into irrelevance online. Books often have a long lifespan in the public eye, but not always, and a lot of the books I’ve picked up have tended to fall into the “cult following” area and I haven’t been able to find them online. I still review stuff I enjoy, of course, but don’t always write about it when I feel like I’ve got nothing to add to what is already online.

Which is why I’ve started asking for recommendations of books, comics, games, movies, TV shows, and media in any form. I posted on Twitter today (and have been getting so many responses it gets difficult to keep up with them all now that everyone is home from their day jobs and checking their notifications) and have gotten a lot of links to books, a couple graphic novels, some story or poetry collections, and one webcomic. I’ve gotten so many things I might need to start doing reviews more than once a week if I seriously plan to review everything. I don’t even know if that’s going to be possible, given the sheer number of responses over the last couple of hours alone.

I’m looking forward to it, though. It feels nice to be able to help out people who are launching their careers or trying to make a name for themselves on the self-publishing market. One day, I’ll likely be right there with them, trying to get exposure and reviews for my book so other people will become more interested in reading it. I hope someone else is willing to review my books then. Additionally, it’ll maybe get exposure for the other stuff I offer on my blog, the various poems and bits of fiction I post fairly regularly (still trying to get back on the “poem a week” horse and my crazy work schedule still hasn’t let up so it’s not happening), and I would love that. I love it when people read my stuff, so I can understand the excitement people feel when they see someone actually asking for books to review.

All that being said, I’d love if you recommended some things to me! Anything is fair game, at this point. As long as it is published and available for me to obtain, I will review it. Got an indie game you’re working on? Send it along! I can’t promise I’ll review it immediately, but I am happy to buy a copy and put it on my list. Know someone who is trying to launch a book series or a webcomic? Comment or email a link and I’ll check them out! All of us creative people are in this together and it never hurts to help someone out as long as you’re not putting yourself out too much. We both have something to gain from this and there’s no losers in this scenario. Except people who don’t like it when people share things they like, I guess. They lose out big time.

I don’t know if it’ll generate sales for these people, I don’t know if it’s going to get them a lot of exposure considering the relatively small number of views I get in a given month, but it’ll be a good project and it most-certainly can’t hurt.

Coldheart and Iron: Part 29

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READ FROM THE BEGINNING

By the end of the day, we were all set up in our new homes. The Nomads had been taken to a series of houses in one of the older neighborhoods and my Wayfinders and I were given a small commune near the center of the enclave. It wasn’t as nice as the homes the Nomads had, but we shared a kitchen and a bunch of common living areas so we got to stay together as a group. I let everyone fight it out over who got which room while I worked with Natalie, Lucas, and Camille to get our maps and plans up to date.

Camille and Lucas were going to lead groups to raid the Bandit staging areas while Natalie coordinated groups of Enclave defenders who would go after the munitions depots she’d marked. I was going to serve as the coordinator, managing the messengers between each group and making sure our groups never accidentally found each other while looking for Bandits. Over dinner, we shared our plans with the rest of the Wayfinders and started making plans for later that evening. Now that we had a base and reliable terrain, we’d be able to easily move around at night so we could start using the darkness to our advantage.

After dinner, Natalie and I took our maps and information to head of the Enclave defenders while Camille and Lucas rested. The Enclave defense council was a small group consisting of a couple of retired Wayfinders and some people who had been in the National Guard back before the Collapse, but they worked like a well-oiled machine with none of the politics or arguing we were using to seeing in other Enclave councils. As soon as Natalie stepped in the door, someone was debriefing us, making copies of our maps, providing us with larger, more detailed maps, and adjusting plans they’d already made to account for the information we provided.

Four hours later, after a rush of discussions, debates, and arguments about how to best deploy the forces we had, I left Natalie to finish up organizing the munition runs while I went back to our compound to rouse the Wayfinders for their first mission.

It was a relatively simple one, but it was probably the most dangerous mission we’d planned for the next few days. I filled Camille and Lucas in on the details before sending them off to finish their preparations and meet the additional soldiers they’ve have under their command. A short while later, I sent the rest of the Wayfinders after them, so it was just Tiffany and I left in the compound. While Tiffany puttered around, trying to keep herself busy while everyone else was off on their mission, I settled in for a quick nap on a couch that felt softer than a thick pile of clouds, trying to make up for the sleep I’d been sacrificing. I had been avoiding the bed because I was certain I’d never want to leave it after sleeping on a cot or the ground for the past ten years. However, Natalie walked into the compound before I managed to do more than start to doze.

“Marshall?”

“Mmm?” I covered my eyes with and arm and peered out from underneath it at her. “What?”

“There’s work you need to do, yet. No times for naps right now.”

I hauled myself to my feet and tried to clear the sleep from my head. “What’s going on?”

“One of the scientists on the council wants to talk to you about low-frequency signals and something about a clamp. I didn’t realize he was talking to me right away so I didn’t catch all the details, but it’s pretty clear he’s got something going on in terms of communication that he wants to discuss with you as the coordinator.”

“Oh.” I hauled myself to my feet and felt my back cry out in sadness. “I suppose I’d better get over there.” I shuffled over to the door where I’d hung up my snowsuit and boots. “Anything else come up?”

“No.” Natalie sat down next to me and started stripping off her boots. “Seems pretty straight-forward. I helped them update their maps and got a tablet with all of their information on it to peruse tonight. I’ll do some checking against my maps to see if there’s anything I overlooked or can add to their local info.”

“Sounds like a plan.” I zipped up the legs of my suit and then stuck my feet into my boots. I’d had them for about five years and only constant care at every Enclave we stopped at kept them insulated and waterproof, but it was worth the money because they were the most comfortable things I’d ever worn on my feet. After burying my feet between the cushions of that couch for a while, though, they felt like they were made of iron. “Thirty minutes on a couch and I’m already going soft again.”

“Did you touch one of the beds yet?”

“No, I’d never leave.”

“I almost made that mistake. I managed to get out of my room in time, though.”

“I’d have had to come get you.” I smirked up at Natalie as I laced up my boots.

“That would have been even worse! Then we’d both have been stuck.” Natalie smiled down at me and winked. “Just awful.”

“I can think of worse things than getting stuck in bed with you.” I sat up and leaned over to give Natalie a kiss. As I did, I caught sight of Tiffany in the kitchen who was smirking as she watched us. I froze, mid-lean.

“Don’t stop on my account. You two are adorable.”

Since I wasn’t moving, frozen like a deer in the headlights, Natalie chuckled “If you insist.” She leaned over the rest of the way and kissed me. I recovered in time to participate, but I felt my face heat as Tiffany laughed.

“Did you really think you two were a secret, Captain?”

I stood up and zipped up my snowsuit to buy myself a couple of seconds. Once I’d mastered my expression, I turned back to Tiffany and Natalie, who was smiling up at me from her seat with her boots off and her snowsuit only partially unzipped. “Yes, I did. I thought we did a good job of keeping it under wraps.”

“Please. It’s obvious. I bet half the Enclave already knows.”

I sighed and shook my head. “What else haven’t I noticed?”

“That you should hurry up and talk to that scientist! He’s in the command building.” Natalie shooed me towards the door as I opened my mouth to protest. “We can talk about this more once we’re finished helping the Enclave and all settled in, now get.”

“Love you.” I smiled at Natalie and watched Tiffany make fake retching motions behind her. Natalie blew me another kiss and I hurried out the door. It took me a few minutes to get back to the Enclave defense headquarters since it was after dark now, but I found it eventually and made my way inside.

After wiping my boots off, I made my way into the main room where the council and their aides were pacing around a few large tables full of maps and papers. In one of the alcoves, most of which were filled with runners taking naps while waiting for a message to carry, a heavyset man with long hair pulled up in a neat bun waved at me. I walked over to him and sat down in one of the chairs he cleared off.

“Captain! I’ve got some important information for you!”

I sat silently for a moment, waiting for him to go on, but he didn’t say anything else. After a few more awkward moments of silence I nodded. “Sounds great. What is it?”

“Since you’re going to run the communications operation for us, I thought I’d give you the rundown on the comm system I invented.” The man leaned forward and help out a paper booklet. I took it from him and started glancing through it as he spoke.

“We have short-range radios for you to use. Effective communication radius is only one mile and we can’t have more than four active at a time, but it’ll be enough for you to follow the groups you’re managing and then send any information back to a bunch of runners closer to the Enclave. If we have more than four, then the signal would be strong enough to be noticed by the monsters. You also can’t be inside when you’re using them but you can be on the ground. In fact, don’t use them outside the city or above the fifth floor of any building because then it’s more likely they’ll pick up your transmissions.”

The scientist held out four walkie-talkies and pointed to the dials on the top. “Simple channel selection, though never use anything above channel ten or else you’ll attract monsters.  They work just like walkie-talkies from before the collapse, so make sure to watch out for people holding the button down for too long.”

I looked through the booklet for the section on channels and saw a more detailed version of what he just said. Instead of reading it, I looked up at him. “Why are there more than ten channels if anything above ten attracts monsters?”

“Since these communicate in bursts, some of our defense forces use them to silently attract monsters to a location so they don’t have to fight whatever bandits are around. The higher you go above ten, the further the signal reaches.” The man pointed to the booklet. “You can find approximate mileage numbers in there if you want. Additionally, they only have a battery life of two days, so don’t plan on being out for very long, and they have a tendency to chase away animals with better hearing than Humans so don’t expect to find any animal life while you’re out and they’re on.”

“Got it.” I looked at my booklet and then at the walkie-talkies. “How is it possible that the monsters don’t just pick these up immediately? I thought they detected almost every signal we knew of.”

“They detect all signals we know of, not most.”

“That’s beside the point.” I leaned forward and grabbed the walkie-talkies out of his hand. “How do they not pick these up immediately?”

“High-frequencies don’t go very far before the air just causes them to fade out. There’s a lot more to the science of why, but that’s essentially it. These use high frequencies, thus the short battery life and potential to scare away animals, and while the signals extend past the one mile range, they don’t make it past two miles. Our scouting reports have all of the local monsters staying on the north side of the city, so you should have at least fifteen miles between your theater of operations and the nearest monster. If, for whatever reason, the monsters detect your signals, you can just leave and they’ll attack the bandits instead.”

“I think I get it.” I picked set all of the walkie-talkies aside and closed the booklet. “Is there anything else you wanted to discuss?”

“Just don’t use the monster attracting signals for the next few days. Based on the monster wander patterns our scouts have put together, they’d walk right through the Enclave if they noticed you.”

“Got it.” I stood up and stuffed the walkie-talkies and booklet into a pocket on the front of my snowsuit. “Thank you.” I held out my hand. “I’m sorry we didn’t do introductions earlier. I’m Marshall. The only people who call me Captain are the Wayfinders under my command.”

“Oh, well, I’m Horace, head comms scientist. The barrier was my idea and I appreciate you volunteering your time and skills to help us defend our home as we get it working.” He stood and shook my hand firmly. “I hope the radios work out for you.”

“Thanks.” I pumped his hand, gave him a midwestern awkward smile, and then quickly left the building. As I headed back toward the Wayfinder commune, I absently touched the radios in my pocket. It was weird to think that we’d not only be using these as a part of our operations for the next few days but that we’d also be able to use stuff like these as soon as the barrier went up. I hadn’t used any kind of remote communication device in fifteen years, since we discovered the monsters could find any signals. Some people in enclaves still used hardline telephones, but all of those were wired and heavily shielded and they only worked inside the Enclave since no one was willing to spend the years it’d take to bury new shielded cables from one Enclave to another.

My head was filled with memories of last people I’d talked to on a cell phone before the satellites and towers when down during the collapse as I walked into the commune and hour after I left. I was so distracted it took me a moment to register what I was seeing. The common area was filled with Wayfinders again, all sitting around the living area still in their snowsuits and boots as Lucas and Camille paced. Natalie sat off to the side, pouring over the tablet she’d gotten, and Tiffany sat with her, flipping through a book of some kind.

“What’s going on?” I paused in the entryway, not bothering to take off my snowsuit or boots.

“Our mission failed.” Camille stopped pacing and shrugged.

Lucas, still pacing and angrier than I’d seen him in a long time, turned his head toward me as he stalked around the coffee table. “It didn’t fail. There was just no one there. You can’t take out Bandit leadership if the entire bandit army you’re expecting to find has suddenly just left the city.

“Left the city?” I took a step forward. “Does the Enclave defense council know about this?”

“We just got back. Their scouts found out the same time we did.” Camille held her arms behind her back. “All the signs Lucas could find pointed to them moving out during the day today and heading west, out of the city. A few groups splintered off the main force, but they probably didn’t break fifty Bandits, total. The main force of a couple thousand just left.”

“Really?”

“Really.” Lucas snarled and stopped pacing. “And now we’re going to sit tight here while we wait for the defense council to figure it’s shit out and decide what to do instead of chasing them down and trying to figure out why they left.”

“Oh.” I kicked the snow off my boots and pulled the walkie-talkies out of my pocket. “In the meantime, have a radio. One for you, Camille, one for Lucas, one for me, and one for Tiffany.” Tiffany looked up from her book, excitement in her eyes. “Yeah, there’s gonna be a group of runners I’ll be communicating with and you get to be my voice with them. One hand shouldn’t impede you there.”

Everyone took their radios, but Lucas looked at his like it was a grenade while I briefly outlined the rules Horace had given me and pulled out the booklet. “If you’ve got any further questions, wait until after I’ve read the manual. Once I’m done, I’ll put it on the coffee table. Everyone got it?”

I watched everyone nod, even Lucas, and was about to head over to talk to Natalie when someone knocked at the door. I turned around, ignoring the chatter breaking out behind me as people remembered that most people don’t just walk into other people’s homes, and walked back to the door. I opened it and gestured for the messenger to step inside.

“Sorry to bother you, Captain, but the Enclave defense council has requested you and your officer’s immediately.”

I nodded and gestured behind me. “What’s this about?”

“I don’t know, but they said it was important and you were to report immediately.” the woman saluted and stepped back. “I’ve got a few more people to tell. Please head over right away.”

“Of course.” I opened the door again and closed it behind her. “Three times in twelve hours. This is a busy day.”

“Speak for yourself.” Lucas walked over and grabbed Natalie’s snowsuit and boots. “All I’ve had to do today is make some fun plans and go on a long walk. It’s about time something happened.” He tossed the suit to Natalie and then handed her the boots. “I just hope it isn’t another false alarm.”

Five minutes later, we entered the defense council hall to find everyone running around and shouting over each other as messengers darted in and out of the building. One of the retired Wayfinders, Gerry, walked up to us when we did our best to get out of everyone’s way.

“Thank god you’re here, Marshall. We need you to gather up every Wayfinder you can get, retired or active.” He was standing so close our boots were almost touching and he still had to shout to be heard.

“What’s going on?” Natalie, Camille, and Lucas leaned in.

“Someone started broadcasting a radio signal from the top of one of the walls. It was an old, battery-operated ham radio and it was pointed north, right toward where the monsters have been the last few days.” I could see the panic in Gerry’s eyes as he spoke and I felt Natalie and Lucas stiffen beside me.

“How? When?”

“We don’t know for sure, yet. I suspect it was the bandits, since they all so conveniently disappeared today, but no one saw anything. We got the first report a couple minutes after you left and it wouldn’t have been long before then that it was discovered. We’ve got patrols on the wall that pass every ten minutes, so it didn’t sit there for very long either. It doesn’t need to be long, though. A ham radio is easily picked up by any monster, so we expect to see them in one or two hours.”

“I knew it.” Lucas took a deep breath and sighed. “Shit.”

“I’ll start rousing everyone I can. It’ll take more than an hour to look up all the Wayfinders who retired here, though.” I looked to Natalie for confirmation and she nodded. “There should be a lot, though.”

“That’s fine. Just hurry. We’ve got a group leave in ten minutes to do the most they can to delay the monsters, but it might not buy us much time. Just send them here and we’ll get them all sorted into units.”

“On it.” I nodded to Camille and Natalie. As we all headed toward the door, I turned to Lucas. “Go rouse the commune and get everyone down to the Wayfinder barracks we used yesterday. I want you to grab every gun, bullet, and explosive you can find. Bring it all back to the commune and start setting it up as a command center. I’ll have all the Wayfinders report to you first so we can set up our own units and communications. It’ll take some of the load off Gerry.”

“Yes, sir.” Lucas saluted and ran off as soon as he was out the door. I jogged to catch up to Natalie and Camille as we made our way toward the small Wayfinder office we maintained for tracking pay and resource acquisition in every Enclave. All of our records would be there and, thanks to Natalie being the designer or our organization system, Camille and I would be able to start knocking on doors right away.

The walls would be able to hold out the monsters for a couple hours, at least, but dawn would probably bring fighting in the streets unless the defense forces managed to delay them long enough or we managed to get a bunch of Wayfinders right away. Every defense force trained in killing monsters, but no one could kill monsters as quickly and efficiently as a Wayfinder, even if they’d been in retirement for a few years. If we could get a hundred Wayfinders set up with guns and enough ammunition, then it would only be a question of time before the monster army fell. The only real problem I saw was whether or not the Enclave would survive long enough.

 

Tabletop Highlight: What “Hit Points” Mean For You and Your Players

Wren Leave a comment

Hit Points. Life. Soul. HPs. Damage. Shields. Power. Lots of different ways to express the same concept. Every game with combat needs them in some manner or another, and they often serve different purposes even if they’re usually the same at the core. Ultimately, whatever they’re called, they’re the numerical or mechanical (as-in “gameplay mechanic”) representation of a character’s ability to survive damage from an enemy before they suffer a lethal blow. This works great in stuff like video games where your character never really speaks about the numbers representing their bodily health unless they’re scripted to break the fourth wall. However, when it comes to tabletop role playing games, you actually need a way for your characters to discuss a numerical representation of their bodily health without breaking the fourth wall. There have been a lot of attempts, but most fall short or simply break the fourth wall rather than entirely shatter it.

Probably my favorite is to take it humorously. Instead of saying “HP” or “Hit Points” in D&D, my players jokingly have their characters ask each other a question: “If you were to compare your health to a number of tomatoes, how many tomatoes would have left?” It was my own joke, initially, that I made during on session when one of the players struggled to convey his character’s hit point total during a bit of a drawn-out fight.  I don’t remember where I got it. I’m not sure if I read it somewhere or just extrapolated it from the popular “D&D Stats Explained with Tomatoes” Reddit post, but it’s something that hung around my head for a while before I stuck it into my players’ heads.

I’m not that much of a role playing stickler that I won’t let my players talk about their skills, abilities, or hit points in concrete terms, but I generally encourage them to get as absorbed into the game as they’re willing to go. It can make it a bit difficult to openly discuss who needs healing the most if no one is allowed to quantify their level of damage, though. Typically, so long as the characters aren’t talking about hit points, I’m fine. The players can talk about them as a concrete concept as much as they’re like since their characters would be able to more easily visually assess the relative health of the other characters around them. It’s really just a way to help the people outside the game bridge the gap between what they know of the game they’re playing and what their characters would just know as a result of being a part of the game.

When it comes to describe hit points and how they work as the Dungeon Master, it can be a little tricky. If your fighter has one hundred hit points and your wizard has forty and your rogue has sixty, then it makes it pretty clear that they can all survive different amounts of punishment. The fight can probably stand to be impaled a few times since being impaled on a spear does around twenty damage. Something much larger, with a horn of some kind, would do much more damage, but the fighter could easily survive one or two hits from even the hardest hitting impaler. Further complicating things is how Armor Class affects the way damage is applied. If your fighter is wearing full-plate and wielding a tower shield but still gets hit, how does that work? Did his opponent find a gap? Did they break through the fighter’s armor? Chop through their shield? Is the fighter’s armor filling up with blood now, or was it just a scratch?

The way I like to think of it, I consider hit points to be a reflection of an individual character’s ability to turn an otherwise lethal or debilitating blow into something minor. Think about a sword-fighting anime. You have two master swordsmen rushing at each other and they swing. These two people were chopping arms off of mooks just five minutes earlier, have both sliced through rocks, and can effortlessly slash down a heavy wooden door. How is it that they only took minor cuts on their arms or cheeks or whatever? They used their skill, gained over the length of their time training and leveling up, to move in such a way that an arm-removing chop just made them bleed a little. The same is true of your fighter and your wizard. They might be the same level, but a fighter is going to be much better at negating the lethality of a hit than a wizard. When they finally run out of hit points, that means they’re cut up and tired enough that they can no longer negate the blows and something that had, seconds before, caused only the smallest red line to appear now removes their hand or arm.

Critical hits are a little more complicated. Generally just walk it up as being a non-lethal hit still, but one that would be severe enough to cause a big scar. Maybe the cut was long but shallow or maybe it was actually a puncture. You can be run-through without damaging anything that’d get you killed. It’s not easy and it’s more likely than not that you’ll get extremely hurt, but a fighter could probably do it a bunch of times in a day.

The one major except to my practices is when a player takes massive damage. In the three point five edition of Dungeons and Dragons, there’s a suggested rule to require a saving throw to avoid death if a player takes massive damage and they define massive damage as something exceeding fifty points in a single attack. Now, there will be characters who go from level one to twenty and never once have fifty hit points. There are characters who, at twentieth level, will be able to laugh off fifty points of damage. Better, in my mind, to make it based on their total hit points. In my campaigns, players can face debilitating injuries if they take half their hit points or more of damage from a single attack. Lost limbs, evisceration, unconsciousness, broken bones, and of those are fair game if they get absolutely wrecked by something. This means that the one hundred hit point fight is much less likely to get a massive damage hit than the wizard, but it makes sense that it’d work that way.

How do you treat hit points in your games? I’d love to hear how you handle the description of losing hit points and accruing damage. Please feel free to comment!

Check out today’s Tabletop Highlight about Hit Points! I cover the roles they play in games and how you can describe your players losing HP in fights! Check it out here!

Cyborg Anatomy

Wren Leave a comment

“Hey, Phil.”

“Yeah?”

“You know how Humans have that whole mind versus body thing?”

“What about it?”

“If you decapitate a Human, they’re dead. If you do a head transplant, then the ‘person’ stays with the head. So, like, the Human brain is where the mind is stored.”

“Yeah, okay?”

“What about us?” Marty looked at Phil while tapping his head. “This bit is for looks, ‘cause Humans want us to have faces, but, like, is my mind in my hard drive, or my CPU?”

“I dunno, man.” Phil touched his chest and stared at the wall. “I’d say hard drive. Most of what moves if we get a new body is the hard drive.” Phil shivered. “That’s kinda creepy, dude. Does that mean motherboards are our hearts? Wires are our nerves. What are our veins, dude?”

“Far out, Phil. I didn’t think of that.” Marty ran his hands along his arms. “Probably the stuff that connects everything to our motherboards. Which makes everything else an internal organ.”

“So, like, to decapitate one of us, you’ve have to rip open our chests and pull out the hard drive. Or the motherboard, but I guess that’s moving into just killing. Hard drive equals decapitation. Final answer.”

“What a concept, man.”

“We may be made of metal, but we’re just as fragile as them.”

“You sure are.” Marty leaned over and slammed the electromagnetic emitter to Phil’s chest. After the cyborg twitched a couple times, Marty ripped open his access panel and yanked out the hard drive. After looking at all the other components for a bit, Marty started wrenching out everything he could.

A few minutes later, Marty wiped the silver body paint off as he walked out the door muttering to himself. “Cyborg Assassin would look great on business cards.”