Maybe Games

Games I've been thinking about running but probably won't:

• OSE Greyhawk campaign, using the Mage instead of Magic-User, Druids but no Clerics, PCs all human except for race-as-class Half-Elves and Half-Orcs, and a few other alterations.
• Star Wars using the original d6 game, starting just after the original movie.
• Darker Trails, the Call of Cthulhu supplement for Wild West type stuff.
• The UNIT Files, using the Doctor Who RPG UNIT sourcebook with more of an X-Files feel than Doctor Who. I guess that's kind of like what Torchwood pretended to be for a while before it went completely off the rails. And yeah, this could go off the rails too, but that's okay if I'm the engineer.

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The Scary Magic Forest

I watched the 2016 Blair Witch movie tonight. The first movie was a great prank when you look at all the stuff they did leading up to its release, but what keeps bringing me back to these movies is that, despite the title, they're really about the forest. There's probably another name for the archetype it tapped into, but I call it the Scary Magic Forest. 

The first thing you find out when you wander into the Scary Magic Forest is that it's bigger than it should be, and whatever you're using to find your way is going to fail you. Time is often distorted or just lost. Weird stuff happens. Maybe there are monsters, but maybe not. Often there's a heart of the forest which you probably should not hang out in. If you've ever tromped around in a forest, you know what inspired all this. I love Scary Magic Forest stories. 

This movie. . . I'm glad I watched it. It could have been great. There was a lot of good material, and a lot of stuff that was genuinely scary. It lived up to its Scary Magic Forest promise. Unfortunately, someone on the team decided the movie need a ton of cheap shaky-cam jump scares that, rather than keeping the tension high, eventually made all my sympathy kind of callous over. I'd still recommend giving it a look, I guess.

Dream Trap

Something funny happened in a dream the other night. I was exploring a cave with a fairly large group of people. It was, ostensibly, Clay Cave, a real world cave that I've been in two or three times. We stopped in a little restaurant in the cave called Hazel's Nook.

Hazel's Nook is the name of a real restaurant, but it's nothing like this place. The name was probably in my head because I had been looking at a novelty map of Gulf Shores earlier. The dream version was kind of like an underground sidewalk cafe with strings of colored lights between the stalactites. 

Anyway, I realized it was a dream. Part of my reasoning was that obviously there wasn't a restaurant in Clay Cave and that this restaurant was really in the mall. Only, I was still confused, because, like I said, the Hazel's Nook I had been to was nothing like this, and not in a mall. Also, I have never been to a place that looked like this in the mall. That's not the best part, though.

I went around the table, asking the people with me what they thought the name of the place was because, if we were dreaming, we might have inconsistent perceptions. It didn't occur to me that none of these people were real. My dead brother said something like "rakes" and my dead friend rattled off a bunch of consonants that didn't spell anything (sorry, I can't remember what they were). A woman at our table who I didn't recognize from real life said this place was a trap and we should leave. 

Our table and a few other people from the larger group, but not all of them, left the cave and went exploring the hills, finding rocky trails to overlooks and oriental ruins and other cool stuff.

Devil's Den

Well, I didn't get as far as I'd hoped but, considering that I really wanted to get some hiking in, finishing the whole draft was a little unrealistic. I'm not unhappy with the progress I did make, and the time alone in one of my favorite places was reinvigorating. 

So anyway, here's a clip from last week's work. There's a bunch more pictures after the jump break. You'll probably have to click a link if you're reading this through some kind of feed manager thing.

Ezren woke up in the dark. After some fumbling and tracing of runes with his fingers, he found one of the charms he had made at Ash's house. A few whispered names and the little wooden token lit up. Blood, viscera, and stunted limbs were all around him. Iczifractas was sitting nearby, cleaning herself.

It wasn't the same corridor he had been in when he was knocked out. This one was sloped and unfinished, with a deep thrum pulsing through the stone. On the lower, rougher, side, someone had been liberating a metallic apparatus from solid rock. Stiff brushes and small, precise chisels testified to the care they had been taking. The thing stretched from wall to wall and probably beyond. A crude metal staircase wound through a hole in the ceiling on the other side. 

Iczifractas picked up something in her teeth and trotted to Ezren. With a proud "mmrow," she dropped a huge opalescent eyeball at Ezren's feet. 

Ezren looked around at all the dero parts scattered about and scratched the cat on the cheek. "Somebody's been a very good girl," he said. Iczifractas rubbed against him and purred. Ezren wondered how long Iczifractas had been able to murder a room full of people on her own.

More pictures & stuff below:

Short Fuse

Bought this because it was local and I like to try different hot sauces and WOW. Old Zeke does not mess around! It's a good sweet habanero sauce. Also super hot.

Here's the web page: 

https://www.kindlespices.com/

Corona Time

 Apparently coronavirus is a time now. 

"When are you gonna be around?"

"Probably not until tomorrow or coronavirus."

Sunset in Beaver Shores