The dragon, possessed of exceptional hearing, overheard the plans as he was selecting a tasty morsel from the herd of cattle grazing just outside the village. He was outraged, as he considered himself to be a great neighbor, dining only on livestock and keeping more aggressive dragons out of the area. While he did not want to destroy the villagers (who else would provide him with such tasty cattle?), he was not sure how to proceed. So he went back to his lair to ponder his predicament.

The villagers mounted their expedition a few days later. Waving pitch forks and torches, they climbed the mountain trails to reach the dragon’s lair, only to find it empty. When they turned around to head back to the village, they found their path blocked by the dragon. This was when they realized that a flying dragon may be a terrible sight to behold, but a dragon up close is much more terrifying.

Most of the raiding villagers scattered, seeking shelter behind rocks, trees and each other, trying to find indirect paths back to the village. One man, however, stood his ground in the middle of the path. “Oh, Dragon,” he said, “We are here to bring eternal peace to our village by destroying you. Yield to us now.”

The dragon raised his eyebrow at this speech, taking in the absurdity of the speaker’s situation. “Oh, Human,” he replied, “I will not yield for my destruction will bring not eternal peace but many years of heartache and despair. For upon my death, another, more terrible dragon will take my place.”

The speaker looked around for his fellow companions, uncomfortable with this turn of events. Another, more terrible option had not been considered. Realizing that he was in this alone, that all of the other villagers had fled, he shuffled his feet, digging in the loose dirt with the toe of his boot. “We cannot allow you to live for fear of our lives, yet we cannot survive a more terrible dragon. What solution do you propose for resolving this impasse?”

The dragon refrained from stating the obvious, that he had never taken a life of a villager. Instead, he attempted to reason with the speaker. “If it is only fear of your lives that prevents us from being neighbors, perhaps we can reach a compromise. If I swear only to eat your livestock and never your families, can you swear on behalf of the village to leave me in peace?”

The speaker appeared thoughtful for several moments, knowing that the decision he made would affect the entire village for many, many years to come. The fear of a more terrible dragon, however, forced him to consider this compromise as the best possible option. “I swear, on behalf of the entire village, that so long as you only dine upon livestock, no action will be taken against you by our citizens.”

Making it official, the dragon stated, “I do so swear to only dine upon livestock.” Both the speaker and the dragon smiled, the dragon only a little to avoid showing too many teeth. Then the dragon proposed a feast to celebrate this newly established peace. The speaker promised a spectacular feast in three days’ time and returned to the village to share the good news. While many still gazed fearfully upon the mountainous trail leading to the dragon’s lair, most were willing to accept peace at the price of a cow.

And so, when the sun rose on the third day, the dragon carefully settled himself in the field and shared a spectacular feast featuring the fruits of the harvest. And thus, all were happy, especially the dragon, who had become quite found of cattle.

There’s been a lot of press lately about use non-plastic alternatives for shopping bags. You can buy cloth bags from just about every store now (at least in our area). My mother-in-law has several of them in her car so they are handy for shopping purposes. I was looking at them the other day and noticed all the corporate logos and whatnot all over them.

And I got to thinking, how much cooler those bags would be if they had roleplaying-related slogans on them. So I’ve come up with the following:

1. My other bag is full of dice
2. I rolled a 20 on my Knowledge (Nature) roll
3. A dragon ate my refridgerator, so I have to buy more food
4. The DM said to bring snacks or else
5. This is my Bag of Holding
6. If you don’t save (plastic), you take full damage

Therefore, I present to you the five ways I know I’m not an elf:

1. I hate being outdoors on my vacation!!
2. I desperately hate bugs. It is pretty satisfying hitting a water beetle with a shovel though.
3. I find it difficult to revere the root system of a tree or bush. The symbolism of its tenacity does not endear me to it when my hands are blistered and cut from removing said trees or bushes.
4. The tapestry of obscenities I wove while removing said bushes and trees alone probably precludes me from inclusion in the elven race.
5. I got horrifyingly sunburned on my first day outside. When was the last time you saw a sunburned elf that didn’t have glue-on plastic ears at GenCon?

Questionable Content has been running a storyline lately surrounding one of their characters potentially getting mauled by an errant raccoon, and a few of the jokes lately have been revolving around rabies. Also, there have been a few dream sequence strips lately that reminded me a lot of something that would fall out of Vanir’s head.

This got me thinking to what Vanir could do with a rabies infected character. As this idea took root, I started to contemplate how he could sing “My Sharona” with a mouthful of faux foam to really sell the point and then it hit me… rabies would probably be a minor inconvenience. (At least in 3.5 edition).

Without falling back on the lame shtick of “uh… this is magical rabies. It’s resistant to ‘Cure Disease’”, the best I could do is hope that his antics would lead the group into enough immediate roleplaying to make the notion interesting for a bit.

Sadly, work responsibilities have prevented me from getting far enough into the 4e books to know if they made curing disease more of a process, or if its still a magical balm for all sorts of interesting maladies that could make for an interesting gaming session. Perhaps this week I will tear into those books and all questions will be answered.

Until then, head on over to Questionable Content, read a few, and tell Jeph that Dante sent ya. Maybe he’ll stop by over here and make my month. I don’t even know if he roleplays, but I’m assuming from the tone of his strip that he’s got enough nerd in him to roll a few 20′s.

After considering at length what adventuring in the Demiplane of Dread could mean, this random question popped into my head tonight and it was just too good not to ask you all:

Do zombie vegetarians still want to eat brains?

I think chances are good that the answer is yes, however they will readily substitute it for cauliflower.

This also got me thinking about Jonathan Coulton‘s Re: Your Brains. Everyone should go buy his music right now, all the time. I would really love to get the chance to hang out with him someday, but chances of that are very remote!

Have a very zombie-riffic weekend!

Here’s the Story, D&D Style

The Phantom is a bard. He uses some mad Disguise skills to hide his horrible scars, and he obviously took the Skill Focus: Cape Flourish feat. He uses his Bardic Music to Fascinate and Suggest to Christine, that he is a angel and she should love him. She fails her Will Save and totally believes him.

Then, Raoul comes along. He’s a rival bard, who uses his Bardic Music to Fascinate and Suggest to Christine that the “angel” is not to be trusted and she should love him instead. She fails her Will Save and totally believes him instead.

There’s some crazy “who’s better than whom” battling, with music and rapiers and such. After leveling up, the Phantom rolls very, very well on his Craft: Opera roll, and Christine is cast as the lead. On opening night, the Phantom pulls out his Disguise Kit and joins her on stage after he kills the other guy, then kidnaps her via the conveniently placed trap door and whisks her away to his lair. Raoul tries to follow, but he fails his Reflex save when he triggers a trap door. He falls into a pit of water, but he makes his Swim check and manages to escape. He eventually finds the Phantom’s lair.

There’s more singing, and each of the bards tries to cancel out the other’s Bardic Music. Christine finally makes a few Will Saves and realizes that the Phantom really isn’t the catch he wanted her to believe he was. Raoul and Christine escape to live happily ever after, while the Phantom disappears into oblivion.

Then, Andrew Lloyd Webber takes down his DM screen and says, “Well, that’s that. Good job, everyone! Next time, we’re playing 4E, which means you can’t be bards, so email me your new character concepts.”

The Plot… Wettens

I didn’t think anything of the leak until I went downstairs to prepare the area for D&D. I got my bar all cleaned up, and then I noticed that the floor was a little cooler than normal by the stairs. Then I heard it… the sound of water dripping onto leather.

Looking up, I found that the water from the hookup had… well… ruined a few areas of the finished ceiling in my basement. I immediately employed the use of large fans and a dehumidifier and called the plumber.

Help arrives in the form of Albus Plumberdore

The short bearded man arrived today, looking very much like a workingman’s version of Richard Harris as Albus Dumbledore and proceeded to fix the water hookup (apparently called a hydrant). After knocking a hole in my ceiling (*wince*), he had to go to the local hardware store to get some parts, and curiosity getting the best of me I went down to see what he was doing.

Necessity is the mother of invention

Now, I’m not going to get too far into it now, but suffice it to say that I really, *really* like Lord of the Rings and have subsequently decorated my basement with all sorts of accouterments from the films (never fear, I will post more fully on this once I can take some better photos). Luckily, none of my displays were harmed by the water, however I did vacate the wallhanging stuff from the affected area.

Very near to where the hydrant was leaking, I had United Cutlery’s Staff of Saruman hanging on its hanger. I relocated the staff to my bar for safety, and hilariously, I found this in its place:

Apparently, in the process of knocking the hole in my ceiling ol’ Albus Plumberdore needed a third hand to hold his hammer and he elected to use the staff hanger as his proxy. Not only that, but he fell victim to the strange entropy field that exists in my house and affects only contractors, because this is the second hand tool that has been inadvertently left at my house by someone doing maintenance. I was delighted to find that my $299 service fee has earned me One Hammer to Rule Them All!

It’s almost going to be difficult to take it down once my ceiling is repaired…

Sometimes nurturing, sometimes gone…

Often, your character’s mother will fall into two categories: the nurturing type that readily awaits any update from their all-grown-up child, or sadly, she is dead and gone. Very rarely will she have some sort of mental illness or be the cold standoffish type.

This is where this post could diverge into a valuable discussion on how to give your character’s mother some interesting characteristics, but I think I’ll leave that one for when I’m in a less irreverent mood.

Another interesting thing about your character’s mother: your arch-rival always knows where she is, and given the opportunity will capture her and hold her hostage. For this reason, I recommend your character giving ol’ Mom a very valuable gift, if she is still among the living.

A necklace of fireballs, when you love her enough to give her the ability to do 10d6 damage. You know… to keep her safe from interlopers. Also, a few lessons on how to use it might not hurt so she doesn’t incinerate her sewing circle showing it off. And sending her a letter from time to time wouldn’t kill you, would it?