House of Ainsley: Out-of-Character Discussion

I have to get to bed myself, but I'll be working by myself on a Wednesday night/Thursday morning, so there probably won't be a thing going on. Maybe I can actually get ahead on this forum and its many topics.

And isn't it funny how things come up and a campaign's course steers to accommodate them...like, say, spinning one of a recently created player-character's magic items from a trivial goodie to a long-running side quest? Stay tuned on that one.

(And if I could get the relevant brand-spanking-new topic stickied, that would be so very lovely. kthxbye )

As you've all noticed, I've been gone for about two weeks or so. I'm back--at least for the moment--and I figure that an explanation is due.

It was around that time that my mother called me from St. Louis, saying that she was going to be staying at my father's lakehouse (about five miles away from this house, which Dad also owns). I wouldn't normally have any problem with this; Mom stayed at the lakehouse alone last year (while Dad came back to living with me at this house), I get along well enough with Mom (despite my past issues with her clinginess and manipulative tendencies) and it gave Mom and Dad a chance to completely resolve any issues left over from their divorce about 30 years ago.

But this time, Mom said that my brother Craig, my sister-in-law Bobbie, their two sons and my sixteen-years-younger half-sister Laura would be coming along and staying with her at the lakehouse as well. She had already talked this over with Dad, and he was perfectly happy with the arrangement; he does love to see Craig and the grandkids, after all.

I, however, am the farthest thing from happy with the arrangement. It was about five years ago that Mom and I were working for the same millionaire lowlife, managing five of his apartment complexes. Said millionaire lowlife decided to cut corners by firing both of us, meaning that Mom and I lost both our jobs and our homes in one fell swoop. Laura lost her home as well--as she was living with Mom before the firing and eviction--and oh, did she blame me for the entire mess (in many a vulgarity-ridden and heavily insulting tirade, I might add). I still have all of the emails, too. And if I could have recorded the verbal battles for posterity, I would have, just to remind myself of what an irredeemable little bitch she is. Laura also has a history of cussing Mom out and verbally abusing her, even to the point of making Mom break down and bawl several times, which makes Laura even less respectable in my eyes. That Mom continues to love Laura after all of that honestly baffles me. Mom explains it away as unconditional love. I just think that Mom's being Laura's doormat. There's no such thing as unconditional love, the way I see it; everyone and everything has limits and should have limits.

In conjunction with that, Laura's father (Stepfather #2 after the aforementioned divorce) is the one fraction of a man whom I hate--in the truest sense of the word--above all others on this planet, due to years of bullying, torment, misery and various incidents of abuse (countless psychological, several physical and one sexual) suffered at that evil and completely unforgivable bastard's hands during my childhood and teen years, and to this day, if I could feed the rotten bastard feetfirst through a tree chipper--alive--and get clean away with it, I probably wouldn't hesitate for a second. We're talking seriously bad blood here. And Laura (who, on the contrary, was treated like Daddy's Little Girl; she was the Evil Stepfather's own flesh and blood, after all, while Craig and I were not) carries far too much of her father with her for me to ever accept her. All in all, I could go the rest of my life without ever saying one more word to Laura. She's dead to me, completely dead. But that does not sit well with Mom at all.

So after the sudden joblessness and homelessness, Mom and I found our way to Craig and Bobbie's house. Despite being a blood relative, Craig didn't want Mom and me living there, but Bobbie talked him into it. Laura stayed there too from time to time, but being a social floozy who doesn't have the sense to place family above friends like normal people do, she spent most of her time living with various friends from high school. It didn't take long for feathers to ruffle in a big way; during the 1.5 years that I was living in Craig's basement, numerous hurtful things were said against me (and a few against Mom) by Craig and Bobbie. I wasn't in any place to say anything back, so I didn't; it's not my style anyway, and if I have a problem with someone--as demonstrated with Laura, her father and elsewhere--I'd rather internalize my anger and sit across the room and stare at them coldly for a half-hour straight than externalize my anger and give them a half-hour-long fiery and cussy verbal blast.

What really gets me about Craig is his apparent zero sense of consequence. He thinks nothing of tearing strips off my back one moment, then sitting down with me and using me as a sounding board while he merrily babbles about his fantasy football league (or various other topics which don't interest me in the least) the next. Even after that one night where his PTSD kicked in and he started punching the crap out of Bobbie before Mom and I jumped in and saved their marriage didn't seem to matter; I was still the bum living in his basement, and Mom was still the bum living in his guest room.

Things between Bobbie and I got pretty sour, too. I'd offer to watch Drew (their first son; Alex wasn't born yet) or wash the dishes or whatnot, she'd turn me down, then she'd turn around, tear strips off me and threaten to kick me out for not doing enough. So sure, once upon a time, they loved me enough to pick me to be the Best Man at their wedding, and everyone in the family--Craig included--still lauds my reception speech as "the speech to end all speeches". Thank you, high school English literature composition, high school debate team and high school theatre. But those days are gone, and they'll never be back. Too much has been said, too much has been done and things are a serious mess right now.

So after I granted Craig and Bobbie their wish by getting out of their house and their lives, I moved back here to Texas to live with Dad, something that I hadn't done since visitation rights when I was 15 years old. And lo, how much came to light. After months of reuniting with Dad and Dad's side of the family, it became quite clear how much I had missed and how much I had truly endured. Dad's side of the family gets along ideally; his mother and father did a pretty good job at imparting a sense of family values with their children, and even though Dad and my aunts had their occasional disagreements, they never allowed such discord to blossom into anything big and earth-shattering. Mom's side of the family, on the other hand, is an orgy of gossip, politicking, backbiting and drunken stupidity, and that can be traced all the way back to my still-breathing maternal grandmother, who used to play favorites blatantly and pit her kids against each other constantly. Mom's in her 60's now, and I think she's just now starting to get over all that. Grandma still makes no secret of favoring Aunt Kris and Aunt Karla (and their broods) over Mom, Craig, Laura and me. Grandma never got along with my Dad, and she allowed that dislike to carry over into Mom and Mom's offspring, even years after Mom and Dad split. So I don't think I'll be attending Grandma's funeral when she kicks off in a handful of years. Let that old Borgia woman rot for all I care.

So these past three years living with Dad and his family have honestly been three of the happiest years of my life. And now, sometime during the first week of August, Mom's bringing Craig, Bobbie, Laura and all the horrid dysfunctional crap that follows with them down to Texas to pollute my pleasant little world.

I will not have it.

So for the past two weeks or so I've been scrambling to find a place where I can just disappear for a week; I don't want to spoil Dad's time with them, and past grievances are sure to boil up and do just that if I stick around. So away I must go. Sure, Dad wants me to take this time to patch things over with Craig and Bobbie, maybe even Laura. But I have absolutely no intention of doing any of that. Too much has happened and too many things were said for me to forgive them so easily. I tend to take a good, long while making up my mind about people and things, but once I make up my mind about them, the verdict's pretty well set in stone. It's just the way I am. I've put up with Craig's abominable anger management (or blatant lack thereof) for 30 years. I'll be damned if I put up with it one minute longer.

Even though I work at a resort and get half off the rates (meaning about $65 a night or so), that's probably one of the first places Dad and the gang would come looking for me. So the Mill Creek Ranch Resort is out. And after balancing the various pros and cons of all the other places within 20 miles or so, I think I've finally settled on the Orchard Trails Resort, just outside of Wills Point. For one, it's only $60 a night, flat rate. And for two, it's a nudist resort, so you can bet your last dime that they'll never think to look for me there...and even if they do, they'll never even attempt to set foot anywhere near the place. As a bonus, any issues I may have with my own body should be nicely resolved by the time I leave a week later. Who knows? I might even pick up a few new friends. After all, if you can sit around and chat with someone--without a stitch on either person, and with no hang-ups about it--and think nothing of it, then that's probably an incredibly stable, unreserved and guiltless friendship in the making.

So there's the battle plan: just fill my travel bag with toiletries and a few work uniforms and changes of clothes (since I'd still have to leave the resort to go to work, buy food, sneak home to feed the chickens and such), turn off my cell phone and lie low at Orchard Trails for a week or so.

The last time I made a concentrated effort to get away from a good-sized chunk of my family, I moved back to Texas. And the time before that, I joined the Air Force. And look how much good those two episodes have done for me. So I'm actually really looking forward to my first stay at a nudist camp. Granted, it's probably not as big and life-changing as moving to Texas or joining the Air Force, but I'm still confident that I'll come away from this having learned some new things about the world, my life and myself. I've been meaning to get out of the house more anyway.

And I'm not sure if one is related to the other here, but last week I finally reached that "sick and tired of being sick and tired" stage, and I resolved to improve the quality of life which this house has to offer. I finally unboxed and assembled that bookshelf that's been sitting in storage for over five years, I've bought another bookshelf (to help clear up the clutter around here) and over $120 in cleaning and maintenance supplies in the past week alone, and this hundred-year-old house is really starting to improve. I have aroma diffusers in every room, the troublesome climate control register in the living room has a new air deflector to help guide the air flow where it needs to go, I have a spotless floor from the new Swiffer sweeper I bought, I have spotless carpets and rugs from the new $45 Eureka vacuum cleaner, the new bookshelves in my bedroom have made a clear and easily walkable path through my bedroom (while diverting one of my baker shelves to the kitchen, where it's now eliminating kitchen clutter by holding a bunch of pots and pans)...things are really starting to shape up around here now. And Dad brought me an old weather-beaten chest of drawers, and I spent half of yesterday and half of today restoring it so I can use it...brushing and vacuuming away all the dust and cobwebs, applying wood glue to fix the peeling veneers, sanding and woodstaining the top, filling and sanding the cracks and separations, finding a screw to fix a broken drawer handle, and so on. That chest of drawers is really coming around now. I look forward to not having to dress myself from a few stacks of clothes piled atop one of my storage totes soon.

So things have been pretty stormy around here for a couple of weeks. But now, with a plan to get away for a week or so, the money to do it and a house that's just about as clean and pure as I want it to be, things are finally coming back down to some semblance of calm. If all goes well, I'll be posting for Karnoz, Keitha and Sylvea tonight while I'm at work. I might even post for Corwin as well, if SEAMUS can get back to him beforehand.... *POKE*

(And thank you for stickying the Marbol's Magical Chess Set topic, guys. I also notice that we received a short-lived spammer during my absence. I guess that means IV is officially big-time, huh? )

I hope all goes well for you Ainsley, really. If i were there, you'd come stay at my place - for as long as you'd like.

*pet pets the DM*

There, there, some nice posting in zero chapters will cheer you up

*wink, wink, nudge, nudge*

Hey, SEAMUS! I don't see anything about you offering me a place to stay for a week like Wraith and GD have offered! I'm just too much of a scruffy-looking nerf herder to linger over at your pad in Minnesota or Wisconsin or wherever the heck you hang your hat, huh?

On a completely different tangent: Hey, everybody! Look what I scrounged up over at Hastings:



(Goddamn, I think I need to shave my chest....)



SEAMUS had mentioned Pathfinder, so I thought I'd pick it up and thumb through it. And it's everything he talked about and more; I ended up skipping those last remaining expansions for The Sims 2 (which I'd originally come to Hastings to buy in the first place) and bought this Pathfinder core book instead. I was that impressed with it. Thanks to the open license of the d20 system under Wizards of the Coast (who bought out the time-honored yet lawsuit-happy TSR and were in turn bought out by the utterly abominable Hasbro), Paizo basically responded to the shameful travesty that is D&D 4th Edition (which, so far, has absolutely fallen far short in both attracting the WoW Kiddies it was designed for and retaining all the old grognards like me, GD, SEAMUS and anyone else who cut their teeth on AD&D, the Red Box and Chainmail...) by reincarnating D&D 3.5 into Pathfinder. I guess you could think of Pathfinder as "D&D 3.75", as it encompasses all of D&D 3.X while throwing in a few new things here and there...new Prestige Classes, new Domains for clerics, new special abilities for specialist wizards, et al. And there are a few things that are completely changed as well ("Wait a second...elves are taller than humans now?").



(Hurray, splayed pinky toe on the half-elf babe's right foot! I love attention to detail in artwork. Not pictured: half of the possible race-sex combinations. Including the female half-orc, whose loss is a tragedy for us all. Sorry, Wraith. )

(I think I preferred the sepia-toned sketches from D&D 3, though. It gave the look of the races, weapons, armor and equipment an archaic feel that Pathfinder's full-color artwork simply does not convey. Que lastima.)

One of the most major changes involves a completely new pantheon: out with Pelor and Erythnul, in with Sarenrae and Rovagug. This is probably something to do with copyright issues, as many of the deities from D&D 3.X were holdovers from ye olde Forgotten Realms setting, and Paizo might not have acquired those rights. Or Paizo just felt like doing their own thing. Either or. But seeing as the House of Ainsley campaign is too far in to go changing gods around all willy-nilly, I'll just be sticking with the D&D 3.X pantheon. I do have to admit that I would prefer "Pharasma" over "Wee Jas" as the name for the Goddess of Fate, but...maybe next campaign.



It's also a pretty thick book (and for $50, it had very well better be). It incorporates both the Players Guide and the Dungeon Masters Guide, but it doesn't include any Monster Manual. No biggie; between my D&D 3.0 Monster Manual and Libris Mortis: The Book of Undead, I already have plenty of beasties and beasty combinations ("A stone giant dhampir? Seriously?") to throw at y'all.



I may incorporate snippets from Pathfinder and feed it gradually into the HoA campaign (starting with things like new spells, Domains and Prestige Classes), but I certainly wouldn't foist a radical overhaul on you guys by tossing the whole Pathfinder system in all at once. Besides, there is still plenty of material from D&D 3.0 and D&D 3.5 that I presently use and which remains perfectly functional. So if it ain't broke, don't fix it.



Hastings also had a couple of used previously owned Guidebooks from D&D 3: Tome and Blood (for Sorcerers and Wizards) and Song and Silence (for Bards and Rogues). I picked up the latter. I don't know why I didn't grab both; I just got $12 from selling eggs yesterday, so I'm sure the extra $10 cost for Tome and Blood wouldn't have killed me. It's just one of those things you don't bother to think about until you're standing out in the parking lot with a bag of books and the bookstore's already closed, I guess.



Song and Silence is pretty handy, though. It's a supplement for Bards, Rogues and various Prestige Classes related to the two, like Assassins. So Karnoz is really the only character who's going to benefit from this book (and the rest of you will have to hang in there until I buy Defenders of the Faith, Masters of the Wild and--for that entire one level in Fighter that Corwin has--Sword and Fist... ), along with the odd NPC here and there. But benefit him it shall, for there are a heap of new rules for rogues, new equipment (including a nice fat list of new Thief Gear items), new Feats, a list of new traps, some new rules on making and setting traps (including tricky stuff like onset delays and alchemical devices), a couple new things on poisons, some tidbits on organized crime (including Thief Guilds and Assassin Guilds) and some lists of new spells for Bards, Assassins and Arcane spellcasters in general. A lot of the spells are geared for stealth, deception, subterfuge and debuffing, always useful for hamstringing that angry Fighter who just won't get out of your face over that locket you just filched. "Oh, so the drow elves strip Karnoz butt-naked and drop him down a hole into the drider-infested labyrinth, huh? Good thing he hid a spare dagger between the bones of each of his forearms with that Absorb Weapon spell...."

Oh, look...rules for killing someone with a garrote, too! If Karnoz wants to jump up behind some lone straggler and do him in with one of the most silent means in the business (if you're in a place where all the resulting kicking and thrashing and struggling won't be a problem), he might want to take a look at this.

(All the same, don't try strangling a hydra to death. It never works. )

I really need to scoop up every last one of those Guidebooks, though. Just like I need to get back on the HoA campaign and get off this "Mom's bringing my evil siblings for a visit" business. Like tonight. Tonight should be good.

So expect a whole bunch of new changes to the House of Ainsley campaign. Some of those changes will be immediate, and some of them will be gradual.

And some of them won't happen at all.

Like that thing about elves and half-elves being shorter or taller than humans.

Suck it up, short stuff.

LOL, they look cool!

Wraith wrote:

LOL, they look cool!

The elves or the books?

Also, guess what else I just picked up? A new 320 GB portable drive for $20 off! How could I resist?



You know what this means? If all goes well, that means Gametable at work!

WOOHOO!

See you in an hour or two!

Well, the good news is that it works! Unfortunately, for some reason a bunch of the Environment pogs lose their transparency when I view them with Gametable on this computer, so I have boulders and mounds with green and pink around them. But they look normal when viewed with Windows Explorer.

I'll try redoing those icons with Paint Shop when I get home. Maybe that'll fix things. In the meantime, back to the game I go.

Okay, I'm hoping that I fixed the issue with those boulders and mounds now. I'll check again tonight while I'm at work. At least those were the only icons mysteriously affected by the "zero transparency" bug, and I'm still not sure why that happened.

Also, I was just taking a time-out to work on a few more Gametable pogs, and one of the critters on the menu is the vargouille (var•GWEEL), a flying monstrous head that likes to scream bloody murder, bite people, kiss them and turn them into more vargouilles. It used to be an undead variant (a flying vampire head with the esophagus and some of the other guts still attached), more or less), but for some reason it got changed into a hellspawn sometime after First Edition.



I just had to bring this up because the original vargouille closely resembled the penanggalan, a creature from Malaysian folklore; the penanggalan is a vampire--always female, for some reason--who goes out to feed off the living by detaching her head from her body; the head comes up with a length of entrails, innards and viscera still attached to it, making for a pretty grisly spectacle as the penanggalan floats around trying to bite people and drink their blood (or eat their flesh like ghouls do, according to some versions of the story; some of those stories also say that penanggalans prefer to stalk pregnant women or newborn babies like an inverse banshee). And once she's done taking care of her munchies, her head and guts may or may not return to be reunited with the rest of her body (again, depending on who's telling the story).

Yeah. The further you get from Europe, the weirder the vampires get.

My avatar on Gaia Online has an item called The Nightmare (The Nightmare 2nd Generation, for those in the know), which can be equipped to give your avatar various monstrous or nightmarish features. Two of those variations involve a penanggalan, one giving your avatar a penanggalan as a companion and the other turning your avatar itself into a penanggalan, like so:



Awww, isn't she cuuuuute?

Somebody else out there made a penanggalan in Spore, too: