Holy crap, Lolth is nasty! 😯
Dungeons & Dragons Roleplaying Game Official Home Page – Article (Lolth)
Just as a sample, I give you:
Dominating Rebuke (charm) * At-Will
Trigger: An enemy hits Lolth.
Effect (Immediate Reaction): The triggering enemy is dominated until the end of the enemy’s next turn.
…sitting around watching old Justice League cartoons and trying to figure out which role (controller, defender, leader, or striker) each character would fill in a 4E D&D game.
I wish I was making this up.
It’s been a while since I’ve foisted new reviews for The Conqueror’s Shadow on you. So I figure I’m due. 😉
Just click on the links.
From the Saturday Serial blog.
From Alec Austin’s blog. (This entry also includes his ruminations on several other books, and on his tastes in fiction in general.)
And, most interestingly, from NewsOK, which is an actual online news site and not a sci-fi/fantasy-specific hub. Always cool to get reviewed in something that borders on the mainstream.
A few minutes ago, I was washing dishes.
Not, for the most part, a particularly hazardous activity. Except when a plate decides, without warning and without obvious cause to suddenly shatter into four pieces.
There was no impact; I didn’t drop it. The water wasn’t that hot; my hands were in it. I was simply holding it in one hand, scrubbing with the other, and then suddenly I was holding only one part of it, and I was bleeding. A lot.
They are, thankfully, all minor cuts. Like, "band-aid and ointment" minor. It could have been a lot worse. But there are several of them–thumb, wrist, forearm–and they were all pretty free-bleeders. (Especially the thumb. Thought that one would never stop.) And this was a dirty dish that had been sitting in the sink, so antibiotic ointment was not optional.
There are, of course, those would say that I probably shouldn’t be aggravating them by typing up this entry. Such people are clearly neither authors nor bloggers. 😉
So, yeah, it hurts–again, the thumb especially–but I’ll be fine. It was certainly rather a bracing experience, though.
And speaking of short story markets, there’s a new sci-fi market. Lightspeed is an online magazine, focusing specifically on sci-fi (no fantasy) shorts. And they pay professional rates, too (though they’re closed for submissions until mid-July).
Wow. At this rate, spec-fic short story writers may actually have options again before too long. 😉
So since I still may (or may not) be in the mood to run something in the near future, I’ve been giving some idle thought to campaign ideas. And what keeps bubbling to the forefront of what’s left of my brain is to use the upcoming 4e Dark Sun setting as a baseline to build a campaign world that is actually Earth near the end of the universe’s life span, a la Clark Ashton Smith’s Zothique Cycle. But, uh, more desert/Barsoom-ish, as befits Dark Sun. The assumption being that, as the universe enters its dotage, the laws of physics have begun to fray and unravel just a bit, allowing for the appearance (return?) of magic.
So we’d still have a few scattered major city-states–ruled by Sorcerer Kings, as per the DS setting–but that are made up of a combination of medieval-style stonework and the last lingering, broken ruins of the steel-and-glass metropolises of the age of science.
What I haven’t yet decided is
A) whether to go ahead and allow the divine power source, assuming that the old gods of Earth mythology returned with the return of magic, or to keep them away as with Dark Sun proper, and
B) what the hell the campaign itself will actually entail/be about. But I really like the basic idea…
