Upon the Eve of Battle

This is what I'm aiming for.

This is it. The day before the (hopefully) grand finale session of my current D&D campaign. We decided to change things up from our usual short evening sessions and take advantage of the Fourth of July holiday to run a longer daytime game.

If planning is any indication, this last session is shaping up to be pretty epic. I'll be running my first ever battlefield adventure using the "think big, play small" rules described in Heroes of Battle. I've run large scale combats in my game before, but it usually involves my players and a limited number of allies against large collections of enemies. This is the first time where the battle will become more setting than action, and the dynamism implied in a spiky, armor clad dungeon of humanity and carnage has me a bit anxious. There are so many moving parts, I fear that they could just as easily go flying off into oblivion as lock up entirely in a giant, stagnant brick.

This game has been going since February of 2009! That's four and a half years! Seven players, lots of adventures, but one adventure arc! I bit off more than I anticipated when dreaming up the story for this campaign, and I'm honestly amazed that it has held together as well as this. But tomorrow I will need to earn the ending. It needs to be exciting and epic. A deserving climax to almost half a decade and 10 levels of play. For most sessions, I plan for the best, but if they fall flat, it's okay. Not this time. This time has to go well. It has to be exciting, and challenging, and memorable because there is no next time for this particular story.

Now, don't get me wrong, I have discussed the "what's next" with my players and most of them would like to continue with their characters in this world, tying up loose ends, moving on to bigger and better adventures. But the battle against the blight that has torn the Kingdom of Cydon asunder ends tomorrow. It needs to end well.

My brain is full of one of my favorite descriptions of the eve of battle. The calm before the storm. I leave you with the words of the Chorus from Shakespeare's Henry V IV i.

Make-it Monday: Aborted Painting Project and an Alternate Video

This past week was a whirlwind for me, between a work conference and business trip to Ohio. I immediately followed that up with a weekend of backpacking in the mountains outside Seattle. Before the camping trip I attempted to start painting the first of my Bones minis, but we are in the middle of a heat wave here in Seattle. With no AC in the house, The 90 degree temps in my craft space made it difficult to even get past a base coat. The paints for the minis were drying almost as soon as they hit the pallette.

Working towards a wrought iron candelabra with a rather sloppy base coat.
Don't worry, once the heat subsides, I'll tackle this again and it'll clean up nicely.

With the painting project unfinishable for the moment, I decided to change plans for my Make-it Monday project this week and instead worked up a contraption demonstration video for Minecraft. The video demonstrates a red stone device I worked up that can detect when an item dropper is full or empty and automatically turn on or off accordingly.

If you're not a Minecraft player, the video likely wont make any sense, so here's a picture of some deer we ran across during the hike to our campsite.

If you look close, you can see two of at least four juveniles accompanying the doe.
They're on the hill to the left.

Oh, and here are a couple views from our campsite. I love where I live!