How Not To Save The World

Let’s not pretend anymore, shall we, dear readers? I suck at updating this regularly. I’ll go through spurts of inspiration, update once a week, maybe once a fortnight, but then I run out of stuff to write, I’m too busy doing other things and the next time I write to you all, I’ll invoke the word LIFE in those precise capital letters and blame it for my silence. So how’s about we start again and accept a simple premise – I’ll update this when I update this. It could be next week, could be three months from now. Who knows. But I haven’t forgotten about you guys, those who still do read this.

Now to set aside the disclaimer and get to the business of explaining the title. Today is a tale of my latest Dungeons & Dragons exploits. Though I feel I should call them my latest misadventures. We spoke of them some time ago and of course, there have been more sessions, more fire and mayhem to add to the anecdotes. This anecdote carries the very simple warning in the title. If you want to save the world, this is how NOT to do it. So, without further ado, an account of our last two sessions and how the events of these should not be duplicated if you want to save the world.

At the start of the first session, we are in pursuit of a traitorous noble. This noble assisted members of a secret organisation in orchestrating the assassination of the Royal Family and several nobles of the court. They succeeded in offing the King (alas) and a couple of major nobles, in spite of our efforts to save them. But this does not end the world, though it is quite tragic.

We pursue and corner the noble. There’s a bit of a bust up, he ends getting his unmentionables bitten by a fox and then through circumstances I can’t recall right now, meets his ignominious end. Probably from the profuse bleeding from aforementioned unmentionables. Then...this shit gets REAL. Somehow, the evil secret organisation intent on bringing about the apocalypse have a GIANT FREAKIN’ CITY hauled by a dirigible. I say city. Huge tanks of a poisonous gas capable of killing a deity, plus ample underside armour and living quarters for the crew.

There are various bits of fun that happen on our way up to the dirigible (including me now owing another member of our party a ship due to my terrible helmsmanship), but it’s what happens on the dirigible that’s the real fun. Notably, my fire mage, in an effort to do...well...I can only surmise Something because I really don’t remember what my precise reasoning was, decides that setting himself on fire INSIDE THE POTENTIALLY COMBUSTIBLE LABS NEXT TO THE POISON TANKS is a great plan. Only it forces the evacuation of non-essential personnel (i.e., the scientists who could stop the gas from being released) and also forcing the dirigible to follow plan B – instead of going to the island with the scary demented goddess that they’re trying to kill with the poison, they will fly over the capital city and drop all the poison on top of it.

There’s a mad dash to the control room, where a pitched battle between some guards, a fire mage, a Halfling rogue, a Drow assassin and a six foot eight barbarian goes...well, a little for the worse really. While we manage to whittle down the guards, in an attempt to finish one off I hurl a fireball at her. Pretty natural move for my fire mage, one that generally elicits the “oh gods” response from my companions and leads them to queue up behind me, just in case. Of course, in the tradition of this evening, I roll a critical fail. Thus my fireball misses the guard and hits the control panel for the dirigible. The guard goes to the panel, it explodes in her face, creating a gaping hole in the dirigible’s control room. Which we’re all in danger of being sucked out of. And that’s how that session ends.

We pick up our next session in our state of distress and luckily our rolls aren’t so bad, so we manage to escape the dirigible through the intervention of some helpful, albeit bloody sneaky, deities, but we don’t manage to stop the poison gas tanks from hitting the ground and exploding...within the dispersion radius of the capital city.

OOPS.

But this isn’t where it all goes horribly wrong, dear readers, oh no. It gets much, much worse from here.

So the main thrust of our quest is that there’s a goddess of destiny, whose goddess lover was murdered, sending her utterly insane and making her want to right the world by enforcing people’s archetypal destinies, regardless of those niggling complexities of LIFE. Now we’re on her island and in order to gain access to her temple, we need to don one of forty masks that represent a destiny or some aspect of. They’re grouped into categories such as Mind, Body, Emotion, etc. These masks are thoroughly, positively BRIMMING with magic. They’re dangerous. We’re warned thus, but we have to put them on to enter the temple. So what do I do? I notice that one lonely, uncategorised mask bearing the name “Eternal”, with its wispy, shadowy apparition-like qualities and say “I’ll have that.”

It all starts out well for me. Every fifteen minutes and I get plus one to all my skills, as well as plus one with all my attacks to hit. Pretty swell. When I get to about plus five, plus six, my DM pulls me aside and explains that I have gained the ability to teleport anywhere I want, at will, so long as I’ve been there before or seen it. But the mask is whispering into my mind...I’m starting to lose touch with my humanity (though, being thrice dead I’m not sure how close to living humanity I really am). I’m beginning to lose interest in the quest.

We go through the temple, we fight the High Priest and some freaky statues and we activate a big fresco that depicts the life and death of the goddess’s lover. In order to make the fresco do more and open the portal to the goddess (or at least the next part of the quest, I wasn’t sure it would lead us straight to the goddess), I touch the crazy crystal things that are actually shards of the goddess’s broken heart. In doing so, I gain a glimpse into the void, the eternal space, full of secrets, whispers and promises of endless knowledge. Suffice it to say, I become a little bit drunk on this and my fire mage really, really wants to get back to the void. So, we open the portal eventually and come upon the goddess, weeping for her dead love.

With my humanity fleeting, I stride up to the goddess, kneel down beside her and say “I have to know. I have to know everything.” My DM makes me roll for this. Bearing in mind, I’m on plus nine for all of my skills now. Doesn’t matter worth a damn. The unholy side of the D20 comes up. That godsforsaken 1. The critical fail.

The goddess reaches out and touches my face. That’s it, game over. Plus ten to all skills. Humanity: GONE. And to top it all off, I gain the ability to dissolve matter AT WILL. Holy frak.

My companions try to talk the goddess down, try to reason with her. The goddess goes a bit madder, producing a fantasy of her dead lover, their trickster god child companion, with my companions playing those parts (the barbarian becomes a tree, as there is no one else present in the fantasy for him to represent). My fire mage is unaffected, probably due to the creepy stuff the Eternal Mask is doing to his mind. Are his companions getting through to her? Is anything happening? Or is she just mad? These thoughts occur to my fire mage, his body covered in roiling shadows, how grows rather impatient. He wants the void. He touched eternity and he wants it. NOW.

“This grows tiresome,” he says, stomping forward, grabbing the goddess by the throat. “If you have nothing more to offer.” And dissolves the matter of the goddess. With that horrifying (at least to mortal ears) shriek of pain as her body dissolves into a black sand that flows away into the ether, the goddess of destiny is erased from existence. Released from her fantasy, the now-no-longer-a-tree barbarian, all six foot eight of this hulking, if naïve and innocent, barbarian comes up to my fire mage and declares that I just killed an innocent woman. My response? To back hand him. Not expecting much, this is a six foot eight barbarian after all. But no. I’m freakishly powerful now apparently. My simple back hand flings him across the room. As he hits the floor, it really, really does all go wrong. Not because he hit the floor. No, that just happens to coincide with a pair of giant hands ripping open the roof of the temple.

It’s Order and Chaos. Parents of the goddess I just erased from existence, creators of the universe, whose return might just herald the end of all things.

Ladies and gentlemen. This is how not to save the world. Do not become, for all intents and purposes, a demigod and proceed to erase a goddess from existence. As fun as it is (and damn proud I am of my role-playing), oh my gods it is a bad idea. Because I just summoned her parents. Who might just end the world.

Here’s hoping next session, I can do better. But I have no humanity and can dissolve matter. I might just try and kill two more deities...
DO NOT ROLL THIS AT HOME.

Rocks Fall, Everybody Dies

It’s a curious saying that floats around our D&D table. The general gist – piss off the DM, bad things will happen to you. And the party. At least that’s my interpretation. It could also be interpreted as a warning to check for traps – a warning our party failed to heed the last time we played, fortunately not to our untimely doom. Though there was this moment where we nearly brought about the end of the world, but then one of the best, lightning-bolt-from-the-gods, right-at-the-last-second critical success rolls saved not our bacon, but the world’s bacon too. And we like bacon.

Oh, by the way, you’re welcome world. Fantasy world, but nonetheless, we saved your asses. You’re welcome. Just saying.

If you haven’t guessed already, today I am going to be talking about Dungeons & Dragons. It’s been given a paragraph of attention, once upon a many Moon ago. But one of my DMs (I have at least four, depending on campaign), Harlequin, queried my lack of a dedicated D&D post. In the interest of rocks not falling and everybody not dying, it seemed about time. Plus my conversion from D&D novice to D&D adept is now complete. Not only do I own the requisite Player’s Handbook, I invested in the Monster’s Manual and the Dungeon Master’s Guide. I’m a long way from making rocks fall and killing everyone, but the intent is now there.

In the brief paragraph written once upon a many Moon ago (a phrase I appear to be awfully fond of), I described my first steps into the world of tabletop roleplaying games. Here now, a brief overview of some highlights from the year that has been my first in the worlds of Dungeons & Dragons. First off – the heist caper.

This was something from our primary campaign, run by Harlequin. We’ve progressed to Act Two of her campaign’s story arc and we’re learning more about the nefarious big bads and exactly what we’re up against. But we need more information. The hitch – that information is in the heavily guarded Royal Palace. Wait! There’s an opportunity though. The Prince’s birthday. Under the cloak of the festivities we could sneak in, find the information...oh and rescue some of our comrades who had been unceremoniously captured. (My character, an undead fire mage who has died not once but thrice in the course of the campaign, was one of them).

Rolling a temporary player character, we plotted our way in, we planned our very own heist caper. Our rogue would gamble his way into gaining an invitation to the Prince’s birthday party (featuring a beautifully done poker rolling mechanic) and then help distract the Royal Family. How does he achieve this? Well, it wasn’t part of the plan, but...he led the Royal Family in raucous drinking song. That’s right. He got the King, the Queen and the young Prince utterly plastered and sang. Loudly. Which was fortuitous, because behind the scenes, the rest of us were busy killing people.

The heist was brilliant. It was great fun. I got to roll a different character then return to my original character, which was a nice change of pace and renewed my appreciation for the fire mage with a propensity for blowing himself up. And our plan for the caper was flawless! Well, nearly.

We may have forgotten to plan our exit route. This resulted in my undead mage being stuck in a water pipe (luckily he doesn’t need to breath) behind three others who kept getting stuck and the my temporary character, a Psion gnome, having to escape through the palace’s effluent pipes. Nearly drowning in them in the process. That boy is going to have some serious psychological issues with toilets for the rest of his life. So there’s a note for next time. MAKE A FRAKKIN’ ESCAPE PLAN!

Also in our campaign we’ve engaged in a little bit of piracy...a kind of side-mission, off the main quest, which resulted in our rogue reducing an entire Navy frigate to cinders. Suffice it to say, my fire mage is unimpressed with this demarcation of his duties as the party’s official burner of things. Oh and we now have a stake in a pirate ship. Sometimes a bit of mutiny can be a good thing. I mean, this pirate ship could find itself coming in immensely handy during our campaign.

But this isn’t the only campaign we engage in. Harlequin’s campaign has been referred to as a “homebrew”. The settings, the country and its cities, have all been devised by her. We also play a campaign run by Jester, who has set his in the worlds of the Forgotten Realms (all I really know is that it’s a D&D campaign setting and Jester is pretty much an undisputed expert on all things within the Forgotten Realms).

Within Jester’s Forgotten Realms campaign, I am once again rolling a fire mage. Does anyone see a pattern emerging here? Except, instead of incinerating himself to death, it would appear my character has a vested interest in killing the party outright. In our first session of this campaign, I decided that there was this one building that Jester had described in an interesting way. It seemed really, really important. But no one wanted to investigate it. So when everyone had settled in for the night and it was my watch, I decided to saunter off on my own and investigate. In the process lighting a torch and essentially summoning a company of orcs right down on top of my head.

Fortunately for me, one of my party didn’t trust me, remained awake and watched me sneak out. There was a neat bit of battling, I got a bit of a telling off, then we headed off to the big spooky house on top of hill, the spooky house that wasn’t reduced to rubble in a city laid to waste. I guess I was interested in entirely the wrong building...

I could go on, explain in depth and detail all my D&D exploits...but then I think I’d be missing some kind of point. I’ll be honest, I went into this post not exactly sure what I was going to say. I think the general gist of what I’ve been trying to say with my anecdotes of fun times in D&D is that this is an awfully fun game. I thank Harlequin and Jester for drawing me into this world and I look forward to the raucous drinking song, rampant piracy and rambunctious escapades our parties will find themselves in during our various campaigns this year.

I love garlic bread, I could honestly eat it for every meal

It's a dull and dreary October day. After an unexpected extension of summer into late September, the United Kingdom's weather has finally returned to its status quo of unrelenting rain. On this particular October day, I was running through notifications on Twitter, a platform I rarely use except for when I actually get around to posting a blog update. I find a notification from about two years ago. I look at the drop-down list of blog entries and notice something that makes me want to hang my head in shame and almost makes me want to weep. 2012 - thirty-four blog posts. 2013 - eighteen blog posts. 2014 - five. Throughout this year I've evidently been pretty damn good at pushing things to the back of my mind and saying "Hey, I'll get around to that one day." And it makes me feel shame and want to weep for a simple reason - the decline from thirty-four, to eighteen and then the sudden rocks-fall-everyone-dies drop to five indicates a startling lack of writing discipline.

Today sees a vow to get back on the proverbial horse and smack some discipline into my writing life. I'm going to do that classic thing and set myself a goal of updating once a week. I was once good at that, back in university when I maintained a little blog for the purposes of scoring academic points (I don't think I scored that many). Suddenly, with deadlines and direction, it all falls mildly apart.

ANYWAY.

Wallowing in self-loathing, self-pity, one of the selfs, is not going to endear my writing to the ethereal Internet readership. Sitting my butt down and saying something interesting might. Though given the nebulous, subjective definition of interesting, this is something of a Hail Mary pass. Nonetheless, I shall soldier on.

I would like to say I've been up to a lot in the months of silence. But not really. I've watched a lot of TV, I've indulged in an addiction to a particular video game and I've been shockingly lax in my reading habits. About the only really productive things I've managed is slaving away at my place of gainful employment and proof-reading the first draft of my novel. I have successfully edited the first part now, but the rest of it is still sitting on my desk, waiting. Upon the completion of this post, I will be tackling that particular area in which I have lacked discipline.

As is tradition, I will talk about the things I've been watching and playing. Of course, given the months of silence, the back-dated list runs a little long so I'm going for the top highlights now with an option on further highlights in the coming weeks.

In my last blog entry, I mentioned being excited for a couple of movies. One of those been Guardians of the Galaxy. I was quietly sceptical in the back of my mind, not exactly sure what to expect but also quite hopeful after seeing the trailers and thinking "Hey, Chris Pratt might just be able to pull this off."

He did just that and more.

I ended up seeing Guardians in the cinema three times. Not a milestone by some movie-goers standards who will see a film ad nauseam (if I took a quick poll amongst my friends about how many times they saw The Lord of the Rings trilogy in cinemas I image the numbers would make mine cower in a corner in fear), but for me it's a big deal. Take Avengers. Until I saw Guardians, it was my favourite Marvel movie. Unfortunately, the words of Joss Whedon mildly betray him on this one - I quote from 2012's Firefly Reunion Panel at San Diego Comic Con: "I need spaceships or I get cranky." Avengers had the Helicarrier (which was awesome), but Guardians of the Galaxy had spaceships. And space. And Rocket Raccoon. And Groot. And Drax. And Star-Lord. And Gamora. And...well, it had the whole thing going for it. I fell in love. I have a Guardians of the Galaxy poster adorning my bedroom wall now. Only one of three movie posters I have and only one of two that I paid money for (the other one I paid for being Serenity, still my favourite movie of all time. Joss still wins there).

The other point Guardians of the Galaxy wins on is the soundtrack. There's a bit of a special place in my soul for music. While some of those I knew at university, fellow inhabitants of The Writerverse, shunned music and preferred to work in silence, I cannot abide working without music. Don't get me wrong, there are times when silence is a beautiful thing, where it can speak volumes louder than words ever could. But when I'm working, silence is an incredibly frustrating thing. I'm amazed I survived my exams in secondary school given the levels of enforced silence there.

Moving away from the tangent (and creating a new paragraph just to emphasise the point), the soundtrack to Guardians of the Galaxy is awesome. In my last post I mentioned the joyous addictive quality of Blue Swede's "Hooked on a Feeling". This is but one of the many brilliant tracks on Awesome Mix, Volume 1, the official soundtrack for Guardians. Top tracks from this album include Redbone's "Come and Get Your Love" (played during the credits sequence at the beginning of Guardians, a beautiful and hilarious sequence), David Bowie's "Moonage Daydream", Elvin Bishop's "Fooled Around and Fell in Love" (many daydreams about slow-dancing with that one girl induced by this song, it will have a lot to answer for) and finally, The Runaways' "Cherry Bomb". The whole album is awesome, but these tracks are the favourites.

So, amazing soundtrack (sorry, Alan Silvestri. The Avengers score was great, but you didn't have awesome 80s music to back it up), spaceships and one final, teeny little detail - the film begins in 1988, the year of my birth. It wins points for that, it just does.

Staying in the Marvel spectrum for a moment is a movie now crowned as my third favourite of the Marvel Cinematic Universe - Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Absolutely phenomenal film. Not on the same level of hijinks, action and rib-tickling-ness as Guardians, but then this film is definitely not supposed to be that. It plays as a kick-ass spy thriller/action movie combo and knocks the socks off its predecessor, The First Avenger and deals some pretty spectacular critical hits to its brethren in the MCU. The acting, the action, the whole thing is brilliant from start to finish. It remains in third simply due to my sentimentality and attachments to Avengers and Guardians. I guess I have a thing for the ensemble movies. Bring on Avengers 2.

Next up it's time to talk about television and I'll be staying in the superheroes theme (tenuously) by talking about the recent UK premier of Gotham, the TV show based around James Gordon's rise as a police officer in the brutally corrupt, crime ridden locale of Gotham City. Unfortunately, gushing praise is not forthcoming. I have a few issues with this TV show.

First, I want to preface these comments with the editorial note that I am not massively invested in the DC Comics universe. I enjoy the Batman movies, Christopher Nolan's trilogy being a masterpiece of all the Batman movies to date even if they could have been mercifully cut short by an hour. Man of Steel was okay, had the gritty edge but...well, Superman isn't really about the gritty edge. He's the clean-cut, All-American Hero. Well, if Captain America didn't upstage him at every turn on that particular criteria.

One final preface, I'm going to go into some detail in my critique thus there may be spoilers ahead. Best to turn back now or skip a couple of paragraphs to when I talk about something else. Fair warning has been given.

Anyway, to the critique of Gotham. My first and biggest point is that I wish they had slowed down. Or made it a two-part opening. Great, we were introduced to whole host of characters - The Penguin, identified as Oswald and despising the moniker Penguin. Edward Nygma, the infamous Riddler, is at the moment a forensic scientist with Gotham City Police Department with neatly-hinted at psychological issues. We also saw a teenage Selina Kyle (aka Catwoman) in the opening and at the end. There was also a nice hint towards Poison Ivy, with a young girl named Ivy who seems to be obsessed with tending to plants being introduced as the daughter of a man framed for the murder of Thomas and Martha Wayne. Oh yes, they opened Gotham with the murder of the Waynes and having James Gordon and Bruce Wayne meet. Don't get me wrong, nice dynamic opening, but again this could have been much better as a two-parter.

Now we come to the critique of cast. I was dubious at first about The OC's Ben McKenzie being cast as James Gordon, a role that I'm afraid Gary Oldman has nail-downed so perfectly that beating his performance is a challenge McKenzie isn't up to. He may prove me wrong yet, but thus far I remain unimpressed. Next up is Sean Pertwee. As an actor, I like him. I think he's cool and I was intrigued to see what he would do with Alfred Pennyworth. Maybe I was expecting the poise and dignity that Michael Gough and Michael Caine brought to the role, maybe I'm too set in that being Alfred's manner, but I found Pertwee's Alfred a bit too...colloquial. He addresses people as "mate", shouts "Oi, Master Bruce, get your bloody arse..." (I trail off this quotation as I can't remember exactly how it goes) and so on. I have more hope for Pertwee given his established talent and pedigree, so I will be watching with great interest.

It's not all bad things to say about the casting though. Donal Logue's character, Detective Harvey Bullock, looks set to become quite a complicated character - at least I hope the writers go in that direction. And the casting directors made an inspired choice casting The Wire's John Doman as mob boss Carmine Falcone. So there is some small hope for Gotham, we'll see if it delivers in the coming weeks.

Moving forward on the subject of television, we hit the works of Aaron Sorkin. Part of the reason I can give for my long absence from this blog is having binge-watched all seven seasons of The West Wing and becoming addicted to quite possibly the most brilliant, hilarious and dramatic TV shows he's created - The Newsroom.

Alas, The Newsroom only has three seasons, two of which I have watched. It is the story of Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels), news anchor for Atlantis Cable News, who doesn't ruffle anyone's feathers or do anything outrageous, until taking part in a Q&A session for journalism students at a university. His tirade about how America isn't the greatest country in the world (seen in The Newsroom's trailers) tears down his middle-of-the-fence image and with a new executive producer at the helm of his news show (Mackenzie McHale, his ex-girlfriend, played by Emily Mortimer) they re-vamp his image. It's a tale of cleaning up news, fighting the sensationalism and spectacle of modern journalism and returning to good old-fashioning reporting. Informing the public of what they need to be informed about.

And it is downright hilarious. There's tons of drama, tension and heart-wrenching moments, but in amongst all that is Sorkin's trademark brand of humour, seen throughout The West Wing and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. The Newsroom was aired on HBO and I wager that the third season is either airing or about to soon. Go out there and watch it. It's a thing of brilliance and beauty.

To wrap up this muddling essay, it's time to talk about gaming. But first of all, I'm not going to tackle video gaming. I'm going to talk about tabletop gaming and my introduction in the world of Dungeons & Dragons. It was a strange world I'd heard about a lot during my formative years and a former housemate of mine post-university insisted that I should give it a try because I would love it. In the latter stages of last year/early stages of this year, I participated in my first ever tabletop roleplaying game, a zombie apocalypse game devised by a friend call-signed Jester. He and his girlfriend Harlequin are the ones who sucked me into this world and are respectively Dungeon Masters of their own campaigns. That's right, after an introduction to tabletop roleplaying with a zombie apocalypse game, I was brought into the world of Dungeons & Dragons and now I am involved in not one, but two separate campaigns. Well, I lie. Three. Another member of our party is DM for his own campaign, of which I appear to be a Baron. And essentially party leader. Which I find most curious as I tend to shrug off anything that resembles leadership and responsibility. It's a character flaw.

So there we have it. I have now entered the world of Dungeons & Dragons. On a strangely tangentially related note, my other videogame addiction: XCOM: Enemy Within.

I have previously touched upon the subject of XCOM without going into much detail. A squad-based, turn-based strategy game set around an alien invasion of Earth where you also have to manage the resources of your central base, assign research, etc., it has proved to be very addictive. Currently I have embarked upon my sixth playthrough and it would appear to have infinite replay value. Many of the missions are randomly generated, but there are some fixed missions. But within those, the enemies themselves are randomly generated. Thanks to this, even though I know the layout of 90% of the maps used in every mission, the random generation of enemies means I am always on my toes. Suffice it to say, I highly rate this game and would recommend it.

I feel that now is a logical time to wrap up for today. Next week I will babble again, about what I do not know, but I'm sure I can dig something up that will be worth talking about. Before I go, the time-honoured context for title has been left until last (because it wasn't until now that I came up with the title). It's very tenuous, but put simply I had garlic bread as part of my lunch. Thus I quoted Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. Not very exciting as context goes, but there it is. Until next time, I leave you all with a favourite musical number (which I have posted before. But I'm going to do it again anyway, repetition be damned!)

(Song of the Mind: Battlestar Sonatica - Bear McCreary).