Traffic Jam on the Highway to Hell

Traffic Jam on the Highway to Hell

Man, I like this title. Probably would’ve been better if I saved it for a Warlock-related story. Ah well, it fits for this thing, too. 

So I was in the military for a brief period of time. During which, I spent a summer in Afghanistan. It was… boring, mostly. Mind-numbingly boring. My mind had actually been numbed to such an extreme degree, that I began having some interesting dreams. Or maybe that was just the doxycycline they made me take every day. Either way, this story is borne from one of those dreams.

 

Heat.

A brutal, unholy assault on every nerve ending in your body. I thought I would adjust to it. Most of the people here probably thought they would. We haven’t. Continue reading “Traffic Jam on the Highway to Hell” →

The Tempest of Unknowing

The Tempest of Unknowing

Cael Irvyn is a Half-Elf cleric of Deneir I’ve been playing in a campaign for over a year now. Cael is a very emotionally confused character, and I think that shows in the kind of incoherent (…structure? Flow? I dunno, man.) of this piece.

He was raised by humans in the goody-two-shoes kingdom of Elturgard and never knew his Elven mother until his human dad decided to leave a note about her existing right before he died. Like pretty much every other half-elf in the history of D&D backstories (I assume), he never really quite fit in with the people who raised him.  

The Elemental Plane of Air, Present Day

It was difficult to see anything through the din of the storm. Cael could barely make out the serpentine shape of the Elder Tempest as it weaved its way through the squall. Even on a clear day, he wouldn’t have seen the pure elemental gale screaming toward him in time to raise his shield. The last thing he remembered was an eruption of thunder.

Continue reading “The Tempest of Unknowing” →

Nine Years Old, One Big Decision

Nine Years Old, One Big Decision

I’m taking a departure this week from D&D-related stuff to return to some regular old not-fantasy. This is a piece I wrote as an assignment for a creative writing class I took before I figured that college wasn’t the right place for me. I think the whole assignment was just to come up with a six-word, flash-fiction-esque title for a piece, then build around that. I don’t know exactly what drove me to write this personal account of a pivotal moment of my youth, but I’m totally sure it doesn’t warrant any further analysis.

 

There aren’t very many moments from my childhood that have really stuck with me. I imagine it’s pretty much the same for most people. What does anyone do as a kid that really matters, anyway? Continue reading “Nine Years Old, One Big Decision” →

Ministrations of the Wayward Mage

Ministrations of the Wayward Mage

I didn’t explicitly state it before, but if anyone gives a shit, Luke is a Wild Magic Sorcerer. Whenever he casts spells, there’s a chance for something random to happen. Maybe good, maybe bad, maybe neither!

As his Barovian adventure went on, he pursued some different paths. Mechanically, this was represented by multi-classing. This decision was much more driven by narrative, however. (Trust me, Sorcerer/Wizard is not by any stretch an ‘optimal’ choice.)

This scene took place after a wild magic surge-filled battle at a winery. Luke takes some time to reflect in the church of the Morninglord, at the edge of the small village of Vallaki.

Continue reading “Ministrations of the Wayward Mage” →

The Hero of Thundertree

The Hero of Thundertree

Early on in the campaign, we had a guest player jump in for just one session. I wrote this synopsis for him afterward, in case he wanted to take that information and just let me know (in broad strokes) how he’d like his character’s story to continue after being separated from the party. I’ve cleaned it up a little to make it more, uh… story-like.

 

Ryan the Archer always thought being a hero would be pretty cool. When he’d heard that there was a green dragon set up in the nearby abandoned village of Thundertree, he figured getting rid of it would be a pretty good way to prove how heroic he was. Knowing that he probably couldn’t dispatch of the beast on his own, he went to the frontier town of Phandalin to enlist aid. That’s where he encountered a group of adventurers who said they were heading to Thundertree anyway to speak to a druid named Reidoth.

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Gotta Get Up

So I was laying on the couch the other day, staring at the ceiling and practicing my self-loathing, when something jarring happened: I had a productive thought.

As evidenced by this site (which I forgot existed), I don’t appear to have written anything in like, three years.  Sounds about right; I’m a lazy sack of crap.

BUT WAIT, I actually have been writing stuff! But it’s all snippets of fantasy things, scattered all over my hard drive. A couple years ago, I started playing D&D because that’s what the cool kids do now and I would like to be cool. My friends wanted to be cool too, but none of us were cool enough to be the Dungeon Master – so I figured I’d just go ahead and do it until one of them realized they would be much, much better at it and take over.

Still waiting...

A-a-a-anyway, my productive thought was this; I should gather up all my little bits of D&D fiction stuff and shove it all on this site, so it’s all in one place. Then I can look at it and say things like “Dang, alright. I guess I do still write stuff.” Or “Wow, how have I written so much stuff and not improved at all?”

 

It’s Probably Nothing

It’s Probably Nothing

I used to be a hypochondriac. I’d just be worried, all day, every day. Y’know like; I have a fever and my neck hurts? Bacterial meningitis. Headache for three days? Ruptured aneurysm. Chest hurt for a minute while I was running three miles? Incoming heart attack! Not a fun way to live.

I knew for sure that I had hypochondria because I looked up the symptoms for it on WebMD. Which – they had a whole professionally made site listing symptoms and stuff but really, they could’ve just had a white page with big, black letters that said “If you’re here, you are.”

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Spare Change

Spare Change

“The reality we perceive

is the reality we believe.”

I can’t remember who said it, or if anybody actually said it, really. It might’ve been written down somewhere, or carved into the side of a bathroom stall for all I know. Either way, it just sounded like some sort of new-agey, feel good bullshit to me. But not to Terry.

Oh hell no, not that idiot Terry. A couple of months ago he saw this fake-ass documentary pushing the religion of some cult out in Washington state under the guise of ‘quantum physics’ and he just ate that shit right up. When I told him this dumbass line about rearranging everything, he ate that shit right up, too.

Continue reading “Spare Change” →