Well, the turkey-day weekend is now behind us. Whew… Next stop, Christmas Chaos!
As usual I didn’t do much with the time off besides relax and unwind, which is what most people should do given time off. This penchant people have these days for using the time off to work on other things besides work is going to kill them.
I didn’t make it anywhere for the feasting though I was invited to several events. Wolf and Lyon invited me down to Denver but with the USS Lincoln still out of action they would have had to come get me which is a four hour round trip. Besides, the roads, highway, and passes were all but impassable Wednesday night and Thursday due to inclement weather that caused several car/semi altercations and stopped traffic for hours. I was also invited over to Tina and Rick’s place to have T-Day with themselves and Jack, but I’m just not a big holiday kind of guy and declined by saying I was going to Denver.
So T-Day dinner for me was “Festive Nachos”, made with ground turkey rather than ground beef. We’ve got to stay in the spirit of things after all. 🙂
All in all I probably had a better weekend than most due to the lack of huge amounts of tryptophan in my diet.
I spent some time reading, writing, and doodling… Nothing earth-shaking to report, but it was nice to let the old imagination wander for a few hours here and there. I also spent some time in Shadowbane with the high level thief I play in a guild of cut-throats called “Nemesis”. We did some guild warring and whatnot and if that wasn’t going on I was robbing entire cities blind then running from the inhabitants of said city… A fun game, really.
Playing what amounts to a non-combat character in a game based on Player vs. Player combat is a challenge in of itself; playing that character well is doubly difficult. Fortunately Nemesis is not only a very powerful guild, but also very good role players with an excellent grasp of the game’s back story. There are a lot of racial tensions built into the game and it all centers on the “Game of Thrones”, so even the “Quake-ers” (players from FPS games who wouldn’t know RPing if it fell out of the sky, landed on their face, and began to wiggle) eventually get into it.
One thing that keeps Nemesis running is that the ruling class right now is a troupe of Minotaur warlords; virtually unstoppable 15 foot tall bull-men wearing full plate and wielding massive two handed axes. They can tear apart buildings with their bare hands, but are slow and not very bright being created by the Elves for labor and shock troops… Well, since the Minotaurs broke free of the Elven Empire there’s been a bit of a feud going on between them so we are at war with several Elven cities.
Right now I’m playing an Irekei thief. The Irekei are kind of an unknown race that lives in the deserts and might have some racial ties to the Elves; but mention this to an Irekei and you’ll usually wind up taking a dirt nap. The nice thing about playing Irekei is that they don’t like much of anyone as a general rule and only really appreciate folks who can offer them something. This leaves me, as a player, pretty much free to sneak up and back stab anyone I want.
And trust me, I do, and I’m damn good at it too.
If the racial tensions aren’t enough, there’s also a bit of a god war going on. A new being of great power which the humans call “The All Father” has recently arrived on the scene and has brought the humans up in power greatly. The Centaurs are divided in this, with some following this new god while the others still follow Kenaryn the Hunter. We Irekei, being the enigma that we are, follow something called “The Dragon”… We know what this is, but no one else does, so they aren’t sure whose side we’re on. Meanwhile the Minotaur, being a created race, have no one to follow; but rumors are spreading that a Lord of Chaos has offered them, as a race, his power in exchange for their servitude… Some time in December (with the expansion pack) the game world will see its first Minotaur clerics. This has me worried as an unstoppable mountain of muscle is bad enough, but if it can smite you with the power of chaos, that’s really bad.
That explains why I like it so much. 😉