Honeymoon!

Greetings! We are a newly-married couple, arriving for our honeymoon. We may have gotten a little lost, though -- the roads around here don't seem to match the map. Is this the Haunted Castle of the Vampires, where we booked a three-night stay with scenic views and unique experiences? It is? Oh, excellent! Well, do let us come right in, I'm sure we'll be very comfortable here.

Recovery and Self-Care, 2025

Oh thank the dark and forgotten gods. 

I've been... not feeling well... for the last few days, mainly because I've been pushing way too hard with way too much stress for, I don't know, the last three weeks of May. I spent part of Monday just napping, took most of Tuesday off as an exhaustion/mental health day, and have just generally been feeling like I was right on the edge of making myself really, really sick (and I did have stomach/digestive issues, not to mention a truly horrible headache yesterday that may have been partly dehydration from the digestive issues). I've also been sleeping mostly in five-hour chunks, which isn't ideal. 

So yesterday I worked from home, but... cautiously, with breaks when I felt I needed them -- including napping for a bit of the afternoon and working to make it up in the evening -- and then went to bed with Beautiful Wife (also exhausted) at about 10:30. Didn't even pause to set up the CPAP, just climbed up and burrowed in. 

Finally -- finally -- had all the deeply weird, semi-narrative REM-sleep dreams that I've been missing. Woke up about 5:30, sweaty as anything, and just lay there thinking about random crap, the way I seldom have time to do anymore. Legit feels like I just shook off a fever, though I don't think I've actually been running one. 

The dreams were absolutely wild, too -- a three-part or three-element ceremony involving a circle of monsters (half feline, half canine -- so werewolves and were-panthers, maybe?) who had to move in and out and weave together in particular ways, a human at the center, and... something else that was important, but I can't remember it now. Probably wouldn't do me any good, since I don't seem to know any shapeshifters in real life and couldn't teach them the choreography anyway. Come to that, I don't actually remember what the ritual did, either, but  it was still pretty cool. 

I should put it in a piece of writing, somewhere. 

Next set of dreams started with younger-me and a whole bunch of other people in a fairly large house -- but there were a lot of us, so we were sleeping sort of wherever we could. (My parents showed up in this dream; my brother did not. I don't know if that means anything.) We were pulling together some sort of caravan, and there were a lot of decisions to make about what to bring and what to leave behind. Also, it was raining outside and the house had several significant leaks. 

Then we were actually in the caravan, and we were moving slowly because it was early morning and there were still traces of mist on the ground -- along with a lot of death and destructions -- fires, burned-down or smashed buildings, one truly spectacular corpse that was a badly-burned person(?) on a motorcycly, with the back half sunk into the ground. Looked like a war-zone, or the aftermath of a particularly bloody riot. Apparently the mist came out of the north, and it rises at night and anybody caught out in it dies -- or starts killing each other. 

Then we got to the place we were looking for, which was some kind of... factory? Power generation? Anyway, lots of cool ladders and bridges and big metal equipment. Also a couple of very friendly dogs, which turned out to be unfortunate because the dogs were helping to chase out some monsters that had gotten inside. The monsters were... weird. There was one like a two-legged balloon or egg. It did have a mouth, but it was awkward and not very dangerous, except that when it died it exploded into a small cloud of that death-mist, which did horrible things to the dogs until there was only one dog left. Unlike most of my dreams, I was both young (like, late teens maybe?) and unarmed, so I was avoiding the beasties by climbing ladders, jumping platforms, and like that. There were some other monsters too, at least one that stalked around like some sort of human-sized, featherless hunting bird, but at least those didn't explode into mist when they died. 

Anyway, I woke up before I had a chance to find out why we'd come there or what the workers were doing there, but it was intense and interesting and left me feeling more connected -- to my dreaming or myself, I'm not sure -- and just generally like I'd finally gotten a little bit of my breath back. 

Like I said, thank the dark and forgotten gods for that.  

Dracula Dreams

So in an attempt to make the changeover to Daylight Savings Time, I went to bed "on time" on Monday and took a Benadryl to make sure I went to sleep -- what with, y'know, my body still thinking it was an hour earlier than it actually was. And, naturally, I slept like a rock. 

So of course I had weird dreams. 

There were a handful of people using projected portals (think Sliders, if you're old enough to remember that one) to get groups of people to different times/timelines, with the eventual goal of destroying Dracula. (I think the groups that were being transported were basically refugees, while the folks with the gate-keys were the resistance.) There was a lot of running and screaming and chaos. 

After they departed, I found my way into the large building that Dracula was using as his castle in this era. (What era? Modern-ish. Couldn't tell you more than that.) I was spying from some sort of duct when he heard me, and let me tell you: 

Grating doesn't even slow him down; he just kind of oozes through it, like a shadowy T-1000. 

He's fast, too. No outrunning Dracula. I made it out of the building, but he caught me at the fountain.

Turns out Dracula doesn't feel pain. That's why he such an asshole: there's no good way to rebuke him when he gets deep into his bullshit. I was starting to ask him about that, and how he felt about losing such a fundamental part of his humanity -- we were definitely veering off into Get Dracula Some Therapy territory -- when the alarm went off and I woke up. 

I have absolutely no idea how the Resistance was planning to try to destroy him, but all things considered it's no surprise that it involved time travel. Something like that, it would probably require time travel.

Music: By The Rivers Dark

 Leonard Cohen: 

This really feels (like so much of Leonard Cohen's work) as if it should be the seed of a story.

Anti-Optimized: A Character Concept

So, I have this idea for a character.

He's fresh out of Hero School, having been schooled in the basics of dungeoneering, party dynamics, roles and tactics, and like that. He just... hasn't chosen a class.

I mean, well, mostly.

He'll start out as something reasonably solid -- Ranger, maybe. But for his next level he'll take something else: Sorcerer, perhaps. And then Druid. And then Rogue. And then Barbarian. And then Cleric. Bard. Wizard. Maybe grab the first level of a prestige class or two, if he meets the prerequisites and we're using the kind of system where that exists.

This is, to be clear, an absolutely horrible idea. In DnD 3.5... well, for one thing, in 3.5 my current DM would never allow it. He gets twitchy about us having more than three classes total. But mainly, what you'd end up with here was a character who was both tremendously versatile and (I think) suicidally underpowered... but also hilarious. I'm still relatively new to Fifth Edition, and the power scaling is very different there, but I think you'd still have basically the same problem, just not quite so much of it.

The thing with D'n'D is that as a general thing, you should pick a general role and stick with it. If you're going to cast spells, focus on casting spells. If you're going to hit things with a polearm, focus on hitting things with a polearm. If you're the one who makes friends with the townsfolk and talks your way past the guards, focus on those skills. It's not that an individual character can't be somewhat versatile, but if you try to do everything you're rapidly going to hit a point where you can't do any of it well enough to be of any use.

DnD generally expects you be versatile by working as part of a group.

And yet... I still love the idea of this hopelessly enthusiastic kid who just wants to try everything, and see everything, and get out there and Do All The Things. And I'd love to see if I could find a way to make him playable.