So I’m sitting here, not literally pacing, but certainly doing so in a mental fashion.  The old caged-lion feeling is there, just under the surface, and I don’t seem to be threatening the clock enough to force it to move forward.  I’ve tried readjusting my wristwatch, but it doesn’t – in fact – turn time forward.  So I shall simply wait.

Patience is a lot harder to maintain at this proximity.

Sarah said nice things about me in her LJ, which I would link if I hadn’t been reprimanded for doing so before.  She’s got a very subtle way of stroking my ego in oh such nice ways.  Any wonder I fell in love with her? ;)

By the way Sarah, I entirely agree with you, and pretty much mirror the feelings and thoughts in your last entry.

Also, Jared’s got an interesting discussion going over at his own blog on the subject of Chivalry.  It’s made me think a bit over the past few days on the subject.  Just idleness, I suppose.

Well, for the most part anyhow.  Still a few items here and there lounging about which I need to use tomorrow morning, but the point remains that the packing is done.

My heart is beating at a few rates higher than what could be determined to be normal, and my thoughts vacillate between the hands of the clock (or in our world of digital wonder, the pixels of the readout), and gift wrap.  The last, of course, is slightly tongue-in-cheek, and entirely symbolic.

I’ve been bored for the past month.  There’ve been periods of good, bad, fun, worry, but mostly just boredom.  That would be the primary emotion.  My only respite has been the few times we’ve managed to play a good session of D&D and the hour or so that I get to talk to my girlfriend every day.

And now I get to go see her for a week.

If I am incomunicado during the next 7 days, I am absolved from blame.  I will be busy.

A thought, however, can’t help but invade my typically bleakly humorous mind.  Am I crazy for spending a good chunk of my savings to go visit for a week?  Well, we’ve already determined that I am crazy.  I fell in love with this girl and I agreed to continue a relationship despite the fact that I’m not going to spend any significant amount of time with her for at least a year.  Anything further than that year is entirely shadowed – the year could easily extend itself into three.

I seem to recall myself begging for a week if a week was all I was going to get.  Well, if I have to wait a year now, if only to get a week, then… I think I will.

Am I crazy?

Sure.

But I wouldn’t have it any other way.

If only for hearing hte tap tap of the keyboard against the resounding silence of the hotel room.  It’s become increasingly clear to me over the previous few days that isolation isn’t necessarily good for me or the soul – I haven’t really gotten any productive work done, even though I’ve managed to sit down and finally do things that I’ve meant to do before.  Almost all of it has been directed entirely towards the Starbound Campaign Setting I’ve been working on.

It’s funny how much I’ve put into the Starbound setting and yet only really about 30% – 50% of it can actually be considered “mine.”  The rest I’ve stolen or borrowed in part or in whole from other people.  Actually, thinking about it, the entire concept is stolen from elsewhere.  It really is a mish mash of things I just find interesting and that I think could work well together.

But the sad and rather true part is, now that I’ve managed to write the damn setting, I’m starting to regain interest in running a fantasy based campaign.  I’ve been reading up on the old school adventures – Temple of Elemental Evil, the Tomb of Horrors – and, well, I want to see if I can properly run one of these classics.  The only adventures I’ve ever run that I would consider classics are the Faction War, I6 Ravenloft, and The Death of Van Richten.  See, part of the fun I find in DMing – that’s Dungeon Mastering for the uninitiated - is getting to tell your story.  It’s to entertain your players, and to get your characters involved in an intricate web where they may very well weave their own stories.

So I tend to stick to making my own adventures.  In the Mystara campaign, I only used three ready-made adventures: two introductory adventures way back when we started to get the players – and myself – comfortable with D&D, and then the aforementioned Ravenloft (which is still, in my opinion, one of the best damn adventures ever designed.)  I make my own adventures, and I like to vary things a lot – from out and out dungeon crawls (again for the unitiated – when you explore a tomb or other strange location, generally refered to as the “dungeon”) to event-based stories like the Ghosts of Rebellion (for my players, this was Van Hosten’s first appearance.)

But then you have these adventures – like Ravenloft (renamed, to avoid confusion, House of Strahd), the Death of Van Richten, the Faction War – which are evocative, chilling, entertaining, and simply can’t be beat.  So I find ways to incorporate them into the game.  In the Mystara campaign, the heroes were trapped in the Demiplane of Dread and had a stop over with a gypsy who told them the story of the House of Strahd – literally while the played the adventure.  In the Ravenloft game I ran, the PCs found themselves trapped on the island-assylum which held Van Richten and through fate managed to help him return for the final confrontation at Richten Haus.  In my planescape campaign, I centered it around the Faction War, so that from the beginning the players were facing the increasing threat and brewing tension between the vying factions of Sigil.

They’re great stories, and that’s really what DMing is all about.  It’s about telling a great story.

Now I like these premade adventures because they allow the heroes a lot of leeway.  In Ravenloft, you have the description of the castle, room-by-room, and what the PCs encounter within, as well as ideas for what the vampire Strahd will do at certain times if allowed.  In the Death of Van Richten, the PCs have to come up with the plan to escape the island and they have to uncover the secrets of Bleak House (admittedly, the in between section with Baron Metus is a bit dry, although when I ran it I had the fortunate side effect of having JP around to NPC Baron Metus, which resulted in an interesting series of encounters which I could have never duplicated.)  In the Faction War, you have the events that occurr, and the PCs can pretty much choose to participate or ignore them, change the course of the events, or just go with the flow.  And the story simultaneously allows and doesn’t allow change – it’s structured such that the major events will happen regardless of the PCs actions.  In fact, I remember we skipped an entire chapter of the adventure simply because the PCs didn’t follow the right clues to get to it!

So I find myself looking back at some other classics and I feel like running them, because I know that there are people out there who haven’t heard these stories yet.  And every person brings a different thing to the table, a different experience, a different reaction.  And the story literally changes with each telling, not through exageration or wrong-reporting, but simply because the story is meant to change.

Anyhow, I have too much free time on my hands, that was my point, if I had a point.  I’ll go back to my corner now.

I have just crystalized my vision for the sequel to the Mystara campaign…

It’s a lot sooner than I had previously expected, but damn am I excited about it. I mean I had ideas, some of which I had shared with the group, but now… now all of the bits and pieces came together into a coherent whole completely unexpectedly.

Be forewarned, adventurers! The Birth of Sorrows is yet to come…

Today’s bunny.

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