Wednesday, August 9, 2023

Challenge: Strange Dreams

(This post is part of the Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge. You can find links to other writers' answers over at Long and Short Reviews.)

Prompt: The strangest dream that I've had recently.

Okay, so... this one's going to need some background. 

I play a lot of Dungeons & Dragons. And I like playing weird, non-standard characters. So when one of my groups offered to run a one-shot adventure for low-level clerics, I jumped in. 

The hook is basically that the priest in this one small town has called for help from nearby temples to deal with a plague of undead, and your character's temple has responded by sending, well, you. Not terribly experienced or powerful, but advanced enough to turn undead and drive them away. They felt it would be safe enough since it would be an interdenominational venture and there would be other clerics around, and this way you could gain some experience out in the world.

So I pulled together a character. Only this character is a kobold -- one of the weakest races in D&D, generally speaking -- whose clerical focus is on Arcana. Moreover, because he's a kobold, he doesn't belong to any of the temples that were asked for aid. So he's just going to show up because some of his people overheard that there was a thing going on, and he wants to make the Big Folk think better of his people and his temple. 

And then I wrote a whole page-long introduction for him, with him being given the job and accepting it, and the clan chief making it clear that his presence hadn't actually been requested by the other temples. 

Meanwhile, in my actual job in real life, I'd been coordinating with our network group to get the website for our local golf course switched over to its new hosting, which holds the updated Wordpress site instead of the antiquated HTML site on our outdated web server. This has been a much bigger project than it ever should have been, because the golf pros care about two things: playing golf, and teaching golf. They want a dynamic, up-to-date website that will bring in new players; they do not want to have to update that website or even have to think about it at all. 

So, y'know, it's been A Process. Mostly, and I am embarrassingly relieved by this, accomplished by a colleague in another department. So all I had to do, really, was make sure that we switched over from the old site to the new one. Which I did. 

And then I went home, wrote out the kobold cleric intro, and went to sleep. 

...And dreamed of changing over to the new golf website and the vital necessity of making sure that the site was accessible for kobolds. Apparently kobolds actually play a lot of golf, and they need to have the accessibility measures in place on the website so they can select their tee-times and schedule their practices or sign up for training. And by the lost god (don't ask, it's a kobold thing) in my dream we got it done. 

8 comments:

  1. LOL, what a spider's web of a story.

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    1. Drop random elements into brain; stir, pour out weird dream.

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  2. This made me chuckle, Michael. The human brain is a strange thing indeed. I've never actually played Dungeons and Dragons, but I loved the cartoon when I was a kid. Not so much a fan of the live action movies, though.

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    1. I liked the most recent one, but the ones before that were, um, less than stellar.

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