House of Ainsley: Out-of-Character Discussion

Man, you are always on to some new game. I'm still making time for Alien Swarm (which you introduced me to), and I'm still trying to get started on League of Legends....

Also, I'm just about finished with Keagon's intro here. He's in The Party now, but the link to "A Foxglove Legacy" is just a placeholder for the moment (it goes to "The Black Earth Below" instead); it'll get fixed as soon as I finish the post and copy the URL.

I also updated the rest of the party's status, too. Remember: if you check The Party and find that I forgot to update something, don't hesistate to send me a PM about it. It's easy to fix something like that once I get a reminder about it.

(I look forward to the party eventually coming together in the same timeframe, since I'll be able to trim The Party's lunar phase, season and time of day indicators from five down to one. It should make things in that thread a bit more compact. Everyone still gets his or her own location indicator, since parties do split up from time to time. And the hardest part of the merge and the end of Chapter Zero is going to be the shift from posting in Past Tense to posting in Present Tense. Force of habit always did trip me up in the past.... )

How else have I been screwing around lately, you ask? I'm glad you asked!


So how does this big, horrific mess look to you?

(Oh! That reminds me, Tal: We need a picture to turn into Keagon's pog. You can go ahead and pick out a nice jaguar pic too, if you want. )

Already sent you a link for the ranger. Will send a link for the cat tonight.

Groovy! I'll get to poggifying it right away. And A Foxglove Legacy is pretty much a few keystrokes from gettin' done, too!

Sweet!

I really need to close some of these tabs and windows I have opened to various Illusion Vale pages and edits and Inbox letters at the moment....

But someone on Deviant Art faved my Wand of Magic Missiles pic! And so, for whatever reason, I followed the link back to the post where Sylvea's deranged captive 'zerked out and died right before Donovon came back downstairs with the wand, and in reading that post I was reminded of how I needed a village for Sylvea's origin, so I came up with the village Dilsenilura, in Bardosylvania's Baleful Heart Forest. And then, as I recall, that was around the time where I decided, "Well, why not let Wraith decide where Sylvea and Ariean came from? Bardosylvania's a small but well-forested province, so I can just come up with four or five elven villages in Bardosylvania--most of which could expect to have some wood elf population--and let Wraith pick one based on whatever descriptions I can provide for the villages?"

So then a little bit later, I was coming up with the villages and I thought, "Hey, why not make one of those elven villages extinct, like if it were too close to Saturninity Hill and the earth-corrupting facet of the Ainsley Curse engulfed the village and destroyed it along with its forest?" And later, after fleshing out the elven villages--including the dead one--I tossed out a bard song with a possible story hook to maybe possibly perhaps somehow bring Karnoz and Sylvea together at some vague point in the future, not remotely conceiving at the time that two future characters named Keitha and Keagon might possibly be drawn together with Karnoz and Sylvea by this dead village, and that would be after I had given Keagon and Corwin something to talk about....

Yeah, that's how my mind works sometimes.

Anyway, Dilsenilura got lost in all that shuffle and forgotten, and I just now rediscovered it and fixed the post. It was once or twice after I came up with the new elven villages that I tried doing a forum Search for the old one, but the Search feature doesn't work here. Pester your host until they fix that, Wraith. And ask them if they'll add Lime to the text colors menu while they're at it....

I wonder if the Baleful Heart Forest does need its own elven village, even though Halraal is just across the hills and lowlands to the south. Come to think of it, where did all the elves from Ebirdaed--or at least the elves who were smart enough to get the fudge out of there as soon as they saw the forest turning black and twisted around them--go?

A penny for your thoughts.

Also, a Frabjous Turkey Day to you all! Except for you Australians, as you already have your own Thanksgiving Day, right?


(And I see now that both Wraith and I had forgotten that Sylvea had rolled that dead old man off the bed to grab up the icky bedsheets and make a "rope" for Donovon, since somehow the dead guy was back on the (stripped) bed when Sylvea turned him into a zombie. At least we both remembered that she had already pulled the broom out of him while chucking him off the bed. Yes, that's right...we remembered the broom but forgot the dead guy ending up on the floor after Sylvea yanked it out of him. Isn't selective forgetfulness great? )

Eh... selective forgetfullness works for me

Also, we had already (if you remember, which you probably don't because of the monster post you just pulled) decided on Sylvea's origin village. I believe its a PM somewhere, i'll try to track it down.

As for the search function, that's odd. It usually works... i'll see what's up. As for the lime green.....

Get back to you on that one.

EDIT:

Ha! Found it.. though the information on said village is mysteriously gone. Anyways, about a year ago I you gave me some choices and I chose Iberril.

Ring any bells?

And no, we don't have Turkey Day. Thanksgiving is foreign to us Aussies.... given we didn't have the influx of Puritans and Native Americans.

When you said that, I was afraid that GD might have deleted that post during the recent purge. But I found that post back on Page 18 of this topic. Of course, since the forum Search function doesn't work (at least, not for me), I had to do it the alternate way: go through this topic page by page, using the Windows Find function (Ctrl + F) and pasting a known word from the post in question for each page (in this case, "Erluon") until I got a hit.

The House of Ainsley wrote:

Behold! Bardosylvania, now with elven villages!

Spoiler:

In the campaign's present time, there are three (formerly four) elven villages throughout Bardosylvania. Specifically:


Erluon
A sprawling treetop village located in the South Ainsley Wood, Erluon is a frequent target for drow elf and giant attacks from the mountains and highlands to the west. Erluon's trade and protection once supported the human town of Boughbog until a villainous Ainsley 50 years past turned Boughbog for the worse....
Population: around 550
85% wood elves
6% wild elves
5% high elves
2% gray elves
2% half-elves

Iberril
Located in the Black Bog Forest to the South, this hardy yet primitive colony of wild elves has learned to incorporate the nearby swamp's moss and overgrowth to camouflage their village against all but the most discerning eyes.
Population: around 300
95% wild elves
4% wood elves
1% half-elves

Halraal
Among the northern edge of the Grimwood Forest, the spiralling walkways and treetowers of Halraal incorporate homes and halls both on the ground and among the treetops, her elvenfolk mingling with the humans of nearby Dark Grove Hollow more freely than many elves would prefer.
Population: around 450
55% high elves
20% gray elves
10% wood elves
10% half-elves
5% humans

Ebirdaed
Ebirdaed was once a thriving village of wood elves in the North Ainsley Wood, but the House of Ainsley's doom brought on a curse which poisoned the earth with mystic corruption and killed the forest. One year ago, the wood elf hero Cewyn Dulnibor led a party to reclaim Ebirdaed and free her from the Ainsley curse, with disastrous results.
Population: zero (extinct)
Formerly around 200 Population, with 80% wood elves, 10% wild elves, 6% half-elves and 4% high elves.


The parties most pertinent to this new information have already been PMed, of course.

No dwarven, gnomish, halfling or orcish settlements exist in forested Bardosylvania; those races typically comprise percentages of the populations for Bardosylvania's many human settlements. As one exception, forest gnomes are quite common in Bardosylvania yet exist as small, nomadic bands inhabiting the forests, never constructing any permanent settlements. Their nomadic lifestyle allowed the forest gnomes to escape without losses when the Ainsley Curse took root and blighted the earth upon Lord Darrovan's interment at Saturninity Hill.

But I certainly did remember Iberril as being Sylvea's "hometown" and corrected the post with the wand accordingly. As you may recall, I made the quoted post public but asked you and Keitha to send me your picks by PM, just to see if your choices matched up on their own; I figured that it was more important to let each of you pick a village based on your own ideas of your characters, without feeling obliged to make a choice possibly influenced by the other person's expectations. Hence, the double-blind choice via PM.

So even though Sylvea and Keitha didn't grow up in the same neighborhood, your pick of dark-wild-and-swampy Iberril and Jazman's pick of industrious-but-often-besieged Erluon suggest much about Sylvea and Keitha as individuals. So that's further character development for y'alls. I like to think that I made a wise move there.

You are such a tease! Everytime I see you on, I get all excited about my start in the HoA story.

Yeah, it's a funny story: most forums log people out or count them as being not logged on after they've been inactive for X amount of time. Illusion Vale doesn't do that, so as long as I leave even one window open to IV, IV shows me as being live and logged in. Which is why I have an Inbox full of PMs from GD asking "Are you really there or did you just leave a window open to IV again?"....

But anyway, I decided to break up Keagon's intro into smaller and more flexible chunks, so it's finally in the air now. And now I have to get on to work. Hope everyone had a snazzy Thanksgiving! I certainly did.

Hey, homies! Guess what eBay purchases just showed up on my doorstep today!



Heh heh! This is going to be awesome!

Oh, yes. I have plans. Big plans.

Sweet!

Ladies and gentlemen, behold! I now give you...more Feats!


From Song and Silence:

• Dash
(General)

• Disguise Spell
(Metamagic)

• Expert Tactician
(General)

• Extra Music
(General)

• Fleet of Foot
(General)

• Flick of the Wrist
(General)

• Green Ear
(General)

• Hamstring
(General)

• Jack of All Trades
(General)

• Lingering Song
(General)

• Multicultural
(General)

• Obscure Lore
(General)

• Persuasive
(General)

• Pyro
(General)

• Quicker Than the Eye
(General)

• Requiem
(General)

• Shadow
(General)

• Snatch Weapon
(General)

• Subsonics
(General)

• Trustworthy
(General)


From Ravenloft:

• Back to the Wall
(General)

• Cold One
(General)

• Courage
(General)

• Dead Man Walking
(General)

• Ethereal Empathy
(General)

• Ghostsight
(General)

• Haunted
(General)

• Jaded
(General)

• Lunatic
(General)

• Open Mind
(General)

• Redhead
(General)

• Reincarnated
(General)

• Voice of Wrath
(General)


Some of these new Feats may bear worth to some of you; taking Snatch Weapon later could give Keitha a very good reason to fight with a single one-handed weapon, and Karnoz might find Flick of the Wrist (and/or Quicker Than the Eye, in a few more Levels) to be crucial in dealing swift and unanticipated executions.

(Regretably, Sylvea won't be eligible for Haunted if Ariean ever dies, as Ariean's soul was consumed and destroyed by her passage into undeath. Sorry, Wraith; no soul, no geist. But hey, you still have a teeming mess of those undead-friendly Libris Mortis Feats to choose from, for what it's worth....)

And it may be worth noting that Libris Mortis came after Song and Silence, so Libris Mortis' version of Requiem (which only requires 8 or more ranks in Perform) supersedes Song and Silence's version (which requires 12 or more ranks). But none of you guys play Bards or aspiring Dirgesingers, so you probably don't care much.

And no, being of the male sex is not a requisite for Dead Man Walking. But I'm not changing the name for any of our female characters who happen to take the Feat. Take your womanly character's newfound emotional invulnerability and deal with it.

As for Horror checks, Madness checks and Curse checks, those and their related Feats are considerably more relevant to the Ravenloft setting and the Demiplane of Dread. So these Feats may not be all that important...or at least, not yet. But then again, you never can tell.

Muhuhahahahaha....

So use your browser's Search feature (Ctrl+F for Windows XP) and take a gander at these new Feats! You might just find something to strive for.

All right! I'm done with the play (our last performance was on Sunday), we're done decorating the house with all the annual Yuletide cheer, the office Christmas party's over and I'm almost done with all my Christmas shopping. I look forward to having more free time!

It looks like I have something in my Inbox; I'd better check it out and get back to posting. If I can't finish before I have to go to work tonight, there's always tomorrow morning.

That play was the biggest energy sucker, too. With my old job (at that gas station that got taken out by the tornado last January), I didn't have to work weekends, so doing rehearsals and performances on the weekends was okay. But now that I work weekends, Miracle on 34th Street basically amounted to Work Time, Sleep Time and Rehearsal/Performance Time. That sucked.

So did I miss anything while I was off supporting the performing arts?

Ha! looks like you missed my absence, I'm still catching up myself

Man...I just woke up about an hour ago, too. Is it Tuesday already?

I can't believe I just slept for about eleven or twelve hours. I thought I was getting sleep-deprived over the last two or three days from people waking me up, but...damn! Let me go scrounge up some food and I'll see what I can do this morning.

And welcome back, Wraith! Your team needs to get more assistants, just in case someone drops out in the future. You know they will, sooner or later....

being a redhead is a feat in ravenloft?

No, but having magical powers because you're a redhead is. Go read the Feat.

It sounds like it's a good Feat for one of those weird instances where, say, someone has red hair despite nobody else in his or her family having red hair, like the faeries were happening by when that baby was being born, and there was something that the faeries liked, so they gave the baby a blessing and poof! Magical redheaded baby.

None of the Ainsleys have red hair, by the way. Except for the odd faerie-blessed baby, perhaps. I think Banney Oshar (the one who allegedly had enough psychic perception to cut off all ties with the House, get the hell away from them and settle down somewhere in Dark Grove Hollow under a fictitious name) might be a redhead, but I haven't decided yet.

I may have a bereak in my posting again for a bit... I dumped a pot of boiling water on my foot and currently have 2nd degree burns on my toes. i'll do my best to keep up with my posting during the week but can't make any promises as my pain meds make keeping up at work hard enough.


now lemme know what the Duegarmeister has to offer.

Ooh, that's bad news. I've had my share of 1st and 2nd degree burns (one of which was a 2nd degree sunburn...thanks a lot, Galveston), and it's no fun. The last 2nd degree burn I got was back in the Air Force, when I set my hand (and half my body weight behind it) down on top of a live soldering iron. My supervisor SSgt. Indreland said he never saw me move that fast before.

It wasn't a very big burn, but it all turned into one fat blister the size of a soldering iron head. Considering that a soldering iron gets to about 400 degrees Fahrenheit easily, picking up a burn like that didn't take long. That's probably why scalds are so much worse than burns: as soon as you take your skin out of the fire or off the hot metal surface, the tissue damage stops. But that hot water gets in your clothing and stays on your skin, scalding away. I hope you weren't wearing a heavy pair of socks at the time.

So get well soon! Your Duergarmeister commands it.

The House of Ainsley wrote:

I hope you weren't wearing a heavy pair of socks at the time.

I was. getting them off was the worst problem (at the time) on christmas eve morning i got to go into "urgent care" (like the emergency room for non-emergency situation) becAuse my blisters got infected.they cut all the blister skin off and gave me a stinging cream and antibiotic prescrtiption... i'm still stuck using my last injuries pain pills to sleep though. the urgent care i went to was the only one open for like 2 counties so i got to spend 4 hours of my chrismas eve morning in the waiting room.

Well...at least it was a Christmas to remember...just not in the usual cheerful sort of way.

So how's the skin looking now? They still have you on burn ointment, I assume?


Also, my System Mechanic spontaneously rebooted my computer about two days ago, so I lost my Chapter Zero edits. Fortunately, I remember most of what I had typed, so redoing the posts from scratch shouldn't be too hard. I'll just focus on one post at a time this time (so my reptile brain doesn't think the job's too intimidating), from the oldest player post to the newest. Karnoz, coming up next....

And is it just me or are the forums running very slowly tonight?

Don't you hate it when you stoke your brains and come up with something new and original all by yourself, only to later learn that somebody else has already done it before, thus robbing you of that pleasant "Ooh, I came up with something new and original all by myself" feeling?

This one comes down to those soon-to-be-recurring NPC characters, Jana and Josia Ainsley. Way back when I was coming up with the overview of the Ainsley family tree and the bullet points on each of the Ainsleys, I decided that Jana and Josia should be special somehow. These two represent the absolute last generation--and the last descendants--of the Ainsley bloodline before the entire House bites the dust, after all.

So first off, they had to be twins. Superstitious beliefs--whether good or bad--have followed twins ever since we were cave dwellers...and conjoined twins, even more so. And with a dash of thematic supernature, Jana and Josia got their role: the outcasts with prophetic abilities whom everyone ignores because they're outcasts. Cassandra from Greek mythology sends her regards.

Of course, given the campaign's nature as being "blacker than the blackest black, times infinity," I just had to make things worse. All-around prophetic abilities would make things too easy--and too nice--for what few people actually bother listening to these kids. So Jana and Josia got the purely negative "voice of doom" kind of prophetic ability. They can't predict next week's winning Lottery numbers, but they can sure as hell tell you that your jealous ex-girlfriend is about to shove the love of your life in front of a speeding city bus, and they probably won't tell you about it until it's too late for you to actually do anything about it. They might as well be your classic banshees or doppelgangers with a power like that.

So then I had to ask myself, "Yeesh...besides being outcast womb-freaks born out of wedlock to a doomed House, what else could possibly make Jana and Josia any more fubared?". A long hobnob session with the voices inside my head ensued. "Well, I've already decided to make them conjoined twins. You know how some people get that 'phantom limb' syndrome after they've had an arm or a leg amputated? What if I did that with an entire conjoined twin? And since the supernatural's involved, make the dead, amputated twin an actual ghost who hangs onto her still-living twin like she did when she was still alive and attached?" "Come on...we're in a quasi-medieval setting! Surgery's still centuries away from being able to separate conjoined twins without killing them both." "What about using divine magic instead?" "Divine magic heals and restores people by returning them to their natural state. For conjoined twins, that is their natural state." "Okay...so let's say that one twin died, but ancient embalming techniques have kept that twin from rotting, so the living twin's stuck carrying the dead one around for the rest of her life...." "Whether they have one heart or two, all conjoined twins share the same circulatory system. It would be impossible to embalm the dead twin without killing the living one." And so on, and so on.

One detail worth mentioning here is that, up until I created Jana and Josia, everytime I had ever heard of a conjoined twin dying in the history of the world, the other twin died soon after the first twin died...by seconds, by minutes, maybe by hours at the latest. Chang and Eng Bunker--the original "Siamese Twins"--were the most famous example of that. So in the end, I said to myself, "You know what would hit a 10 on the Macabre Meter? Separating the twins' deaths not by seconds or minutes or hours, but by days. Can you imagine what that would be like? All of your brief life, you've had a constant and beloved companion in your twin sister. Now she's dead, and you're still attached to her--emotionally and physically--so you're stuck carrying her conjoined corpse around with you as a constant reminder of what you just lost, and you just know that you're going to follow her through the Shroud just as soon as whatever killed her flows into your body...and if it's not that, then her lifeless and decaying tissues are going to turn septic, spread to your half of the body and kill you anyway. Drink deep the overwhelming despair of being stuck in that situation!" "Yeah, but maybe I can do even better than days...." And that's how I came to the embalming idea, which sucked and got scrapped for its suckage.

So there I was, thinking that I'd come up with something completely new: conjoined twins who had led a pair of miserable conjoined lives which ended with even more miserable conjoined deaths--separated by three days, no less--and who return from their grave on the eleventh hour before the House falls, just in time to deliver their 'You're all going to die' message. So yeah, I was pretty proud of coming up with Jana and Josia Ainsley from scratch, particularly that grim detail about dying three days apart.

And then last night while I was Googling around after all the obnoxious New Year drunkards went back to their cottages, I discovered that yes, it has been done before. And in reality, no less. Minus the prophetic ability thingie.

We now go back in time to Daisy and Violet Hilton, whom you may remember as the conjoined twins in Tod Browning's legendary movie, Freaks. As I found out last night, these two girls were born to an unwed barmaid who couldn't--or wouldn't--take care of them, so the midwife who'd delivered them took them back to her family and their bar, figuring that she could use the twins to get rich. A sucky life for Daisy and Violet followed, with the midwife and her brood being absolute (and allegedly abusive) control freaks milking the twins for every penny they were worth. Eventually Daisy and Violet sneaked out, got a hold of a lawyer and sued their mocked-up family over the whole thing, and things got better for a while...Vaudeville performances, Freaks and a bunch of other nice performances. So then that all dried up, and their prick of a manager ended up abandoning them at a drive-in theater in Charlotte, North Carolina without a dime to their name(s). Fortunately, the townies felt sorry for them, took them in and gave them a job bagging groceries. It sounds like one hell of a descent from Vaudeville to me.

And then Daisy caught the Hong Kong Flu somehow. She died, but Violet didn't...not right away. The two had lived alone and only left their trailer home to go to work (since life as an exploited "freak" will teach you to do that), so Violet had to carry Daisy around the house with her. When someone finally decided to check in on them and figure out why they hadn't showed up for work in about a week, they saw that Violet had curled Daisy and herself around a heater vent, trying to stay warm. And that's where Violet finally died.

Judging by how much further along Daisy was in decomposing, the coroner figured that Violet had been carrying Daisy's body (or Daisy's half of their body, or whatever you would call it...) around with her for somewhere between two days to four days before the Hong Kong Flu finally ended her too.

Yes, they're still dead.

So yeah, it kind of sucked to find out that my "original" characters weren't really so original after all. But what really made me feel awful was reading about how Daisy and Violet lived and died like that. They were excellent musicians--that midwife saw to that--and their musical skill rated high enough to earn them gigs with Bob Freakin' Hope. And that scene from Freaks where that guy's making out with Violet, and Daisy's reeling like she feels exactly what Violet's feeling? That's one of the best bits of the movie, right there.

I can't help but feel that those two deserved tremendously better lives and deaths than what they got. I think it's safe to say that the saddest fates are those that take place in this reality.

Anyway, now that I'm suitably depressed again, I'm off to get some sleep and have yet more nightmares and despondent awakening ponderings about my own mortality. That estimated two or three decades before Aubrey de Grey can implement SENS can't come soon enough.

Ciao for now. Y'all have a good year. See ya tonight.

Okay, I just got back to my computer...just in time to go to work again. Chores, holiday clean-up and home improvement are really eating up my time here, and I still have to change the oil in both my car and Dad's truck sometime this weekend.

We'll see if I can catch up tomorrow morning. Let's keep our fingers crossed.

Okay!

So, I'm hijacking your thread for a second here, sorry HoA. But i just want everybody on the site to know the reason and logic behind my absence and soon to be reoccuring absence.

I'm just using this thread because I KNOW everybody's going to read it, lol.

Anyways, my net's been screwy. Besides the being 'overworked' thingy (which, yes, is still happening) whenever I'm home Shadow has been informing me that the net's been buggy all day. That's happened for about the last two weeks now and I've never been on. Let me tell you how much Aion withdrawal i'm having!!!


So, i panicked when I was told in a letter to re-enrol online for my tafe course! But after much hard work, and ranting and raving, i've been able to be on successfully for more than ten minutes (YAY). So i've rushed around doing that (OMG the amount of stupid boxes I had to check was IMMEASURABLE!) and finally finished and now i"m rushing around trying to catch up on things and let you know what's been happening to me.

I've also been told that the reason for the bad reception is (I have wireless because getting cabling put in is too expensive) one of the towers is bugging out in my sector. They've been trying to fix it... but well. That's bad tech for ya.

Anyways.... sorry guys. I'll try to get on as much as I can (I'm even forsaking Aion for a little while so I can catch up here when the net's working ) but i can't promise anything.

Please continue without me - i'll catch up when I can.

You're in good hands with GD here.