Welcome back. I trust your weekend was good. Mine was a hoot.
You’ll recall that I had several things I wanted to do over the weekend. I accomplished several, and I wanted to share my results with you. Here’s what I came up with, goal by goal:
- Watch Rio Bravo
I did manage to do this. What did it contribute to my campaign? A couple of things. First, I like the fact that the bad guy (Nathan Burdette) essentially trusts his thugs to try to accomplish his goals. You see Burdette only a couple of times; usually, it’s his cronies. I want the arch-villain in my campaign to be like that. In fact, I want there to be waves and waves of assault, all sent from the villain, sort of in the style of Assault on Precinct 13 (a Rio Bravo remake if ever there was one).
- Read Poe’s The Telltale Heart;
Didn’t do it.
- Listen to my Phantom of the Opera soundtrack;
I got about half of this. I’m intrigued by the anti-hero/hero motif (always have been). I think that Eric, like Darth Vader, has “some good left in him.” Is there someone in my campaign like this, who can, at the last minute, turn from evil to good and help the party? I think so. Not sure who it is yet, though.
- Read a chapter of The Spine of the World;
Wulfgar loses Aegis-Fang?!? What is the world coming to?!? I like this. A great loss. An epic loss. A loss of very personal identity. How does this fit in? I’m not sure yet. Maybe the party will find an epic quest item, and use it for a long time, coming to rely on it, only to have it destroyed or stolen. Getting it back may even spell worse doom than losing it to begin with. Maybe it comes back cursed. Maybe it comes back more powerful, yet corrupting.
- Read a story or two from Worlds Apart: An Anthology of Russian Science Fiction and Fantasy;
Didn’t get to it.
- Flip through Worlds and Monsters;
I’m interested in the Tieflings being a lost civilization. I really like the idea of it. It may be that, in Lenryn, the Tieflings ruled the world in a long-forgotten age, before the rise of the Eladrin. Maybe Monty Fingers isn’t just the leader of the rogues guild, maybe he’s a rebel, seeking to undo Eladrin reign. Maybe he has connections, far outside The Dagger. Maybe that is what, eventually, leads the party from Halvinguard to Breveton. In fact, I think Tieflings aren’t underworlders, as I thought before; I think they’re definitely surface dwellers, and hold the spot previously given to greenskins.
- Talk with my friend Randy about his new campaign setting.
Didn’t get to it much, other than to say that we want to use a shared cosmology so as to make characters portable from one table to the other.
- Read through Rich Green’s excellent blog about creating his new campaign setting.
- Read through Shamus Young’s campaign journal at Twenty Sided.
Sadly, I didn’t get to either of these. Next weekend, perhaps.
Overall, pretty productive here. Now, you go and do likewise. Think about those creative activities you did over the weekend, and see what inspires you.
