When Drakky Comes Marching Home Again...

So GoldenDrakon has been retired and released from his duties to the United States Air Force after 20-odd years of dedicated service, and he'll be taking the freedom bird out of Korea and coming home to the US of A next Monday.

Excellent work, old man! Bravissimo!

Even though Tiger, Taljor and I (and darkscholar (wherever he went), and Kevin and Lenny and all the other goons who used to hang with us...) couldn't have taken that long walk through the enlisted ranks with you, rest assured that we're still grateful that the Air Force got us all together and gave us what time we had. Or at least I am. I can't really speak for the rest of those hosers.

So...round of questions time, everyone!

1) What are you going to do with your time now that you're retired at the tender age of 41? Become a civilian contractor? Open your own restaurant? Run a fruit stand? Become a rodeo clown? Inquiring minds want to know.

2) What does Jazman think of all this retirement business?

3) How are the kids?

4) Are you bringing home any more boonie dogs?

5) Does this mean that all of us goons will get to posse up and meet at DragonCon in the next few years?

6) Did you ever put on Senior Master Sergeant?

Okay, come home safely. Your nation thanks you for 20-something years of doing awesome MWRS stuff.

*chuckles*

Not retiring, not yet. Just being paroled from my time in the ROK. I still have one more year to go, then retire at 24 years of service.

1) see above

2) Ask her

3) Alot bigger and noisier than I remember since I last saw them

4) I think they eat boonie dogs here

5) Beats me, what are you up to during the next DragonCon?

6) No and I never will. I am neither poitical enough nor special enough to merit another promotion.

Be careful with that 'old man' stuff. You're right behind me you know.

"Paroled," huh? I take it that you haven't found your time in South Korea to be particularly enchanting.

Welcome home even though after the election you probably should have stayed in Korea.

Let's just say that I was definatly a non-volunteer for this tour of duty.

It hasn't been all bad. This is the lifestyle I chose after all, so bitching about it seems hypocritical. Mostly thoguh was the fact that I had to leave my family for a year and Korea is no cake-walk of a tour.

And who ever was/is/will be the President, the USA will always be my home.

True.dat. It's not like we'll ever have a Third-Party President and a Third-Party-dominated Congress anyway, so we might as well get used to it, I guess.

So between GenCon and DragonCon, which one do you think would be the best for tabling an Old World of Darkness pick-up game? I have a few good ideas that I've been chewing on for years.

And I'd ask the Jaz if she'd drop in here more often. Where you at, Jaz?

And before you leave South Korea, would you kindly knock on NCSoft's door and tell Taek Jin Kim that he's a heaping trough of stale donkey semen for killing City of Heroes like the moron that he is? Thanks.

You know, I still have all the old Cabal and Unquiet Waters stuff you made. Can you believe that was all 2003?

Man, time flies. I still have all those notes, too. Changeling: The Dreaming is already loopy enough; add the oceanic Gallain and you're in for a real treat. The Merfolk and Murdhuacha have some serious problems with succumbing to Banality, after all, and the last thing you want to do is hit Banality 10, trade all your fishy bits for human bits and forget how to breathe water when you're twenty fathoms down....

(On a tenuously related note, how the hell did Sebastian the crab not only swim at all, but swim quickly enough and strongly enough to get Ariel to the surface before she drowned? Surely Flounder alone wasn't strong enough to do all the heavy lifting. It boggles the mind!)

But running a WoD campaign with Merfolk and Murdhuacha was something that I'd wanted to do ever since I picked up Blood-Dimmed Tides. The very notion of merfolk (and their naughty murdhuacha counterparts) who differed by the exact species of the fish or other marine creature who went into their faerie genetic make-up, so instead of a bunch of merfolk with a bunch of generic fish tails, you get a half-lionfish mermaid here, a half-clownfish merman there, a half-stingray mermaid over yonder and a bunch of half-octopus, half-jellyfish, half-crab, half-lobster, half-barnacle, half-clam and half-sea-cucumber people in the deep trenches waiting to kick their asses as soon as the humans stop screwing up their oceans...I found that notion to be very attractive in itself. And lo, Unquiet Waters came to be.

I still have all the stuff from The Cabal, too. Remember those sneaky reveals with some of my sketches and planning for various Cabal critters (in this plane of existence and others)?









Crazy stuff. I think the highest one of these that I did went with the character sheet for the Septimus of Greed, seeing as he was somewhere in Quinn's future and whatnot.

And damn...did I give that llimerasa some short thighs or what? I must have been having an off day with the pencils.

Man...nine years. I still keep clinging to the notion of firing those campaigns up again, but it's been so long and there's a lot of inertia to work against. On top of that, Cat's gone, Jenny's gone, Pierre-Luc's gone, whatsername who played Chaton is gone, Loki's way gone (and good riddance to her) and my Outlook Express broke when I upgraded ruined my computer with installed Windows 7. So I must admit that the idea doesn't seem too likely at this point.