All posts by Jen D

Talking About Baseball – A Night Story

Allston, MA:

/* “Look What You Made Me Do
Taylor Swift
Reputation */

The club was at the same time brightly and dimly lit: the moving lights of the club made it hard to concentrate on anything else if you were not dancing, shining on something for a moment and then moving on. The pounding beat didn’t help, nor did the smell of sweat and alcohol, or the movement of the bodies on the dance floor.

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I’ve Been Watching… Critical Role.

So I’ve started, finally, watching and catching up with Critical Role. For those that don’t know it, it’s a show of a group of voice actors playing Dungeons and Dragons (5th Edition). If you hadn’t guessed by now I’m a gamer, well, you probably haven’t been reading me very long or very well.

I just got up to episode 69, “Passed Through Fire”, and I’m enjoying it tremendously. While I’m not really big on 5th Ed, this is one of those things where the game system isn’t the situation. I admit I’m not really sure about what ‘with advantage’ and ‘with disadvantage’ mean, so I get a little lost with the system, but it’s the play that has me coming back. It’s got me feeling excited and pleased to be, hopefully, getting things stable and getting back to tabletop gaming again.

Plus the ‘wait I know that voice’ part really is cool. Admittedly, it was easy for me to hear (for my World of Warcraft playing readers) the voice of Illidan Stormrage running around in there when Vax’ildan speaks, or going (another WoW reference) “Wait, wait, is that Darion Mograine?” when Percy gets off a particular intonation. But some I don’t immediately get, so it’s cool, and I want to go tracking down some of their other work.

But the play… I just finished, as mentioned, episode 69, and it was great. They had to do a resurrection, which, gamers know, tends to be more of a ‘oh well’ after you’ve played for a while. But… I don’t know if it’s the first time they really did it, or that it came off some really dramatic stuff, or that, again, not really big about the rules, but this was great. The fact they roleplayed a lot of stuff, that these are not just a bunch of people working together, but friends, a family, really made it come together. Add in a confession of love that the recipient didn’t hear (because he was dead). They really seemed to be emoting, and all cheering when Percy came back to life.

And then there was a letter that they weren’t supposed to read, because it was supposed to be read posthumously, giving that question of “so if you come back to life what counts as posthumous?”.

It was really very well done, and it felt real.

I’m going to enjoy coming back to roleplaying.


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Reclaiming – A Scarlet Angel story

TUKWILA, WA:

Midnight and change.

Annaliese Korper sat on the broken chair in the run-down studio apartment in the worst suburb of Seattle. Mentally, she reviewed what she had, and admitted to herself it didn’t amount to much.

Four years ago, she’d had everything she could have wanted: a good job, money coming in, a nice apartment, and a night job as a superhero. She’d even, thinking back, had what looked like a relationship. But it hadn’t been, really. And that was the problem, right there.

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Shadows in a Tavern – a Lady Mara Hornraven tale

Waterdeep:

She lingered at one of the tables, red hair hanging in ringlets over her shoulders, eyes with a soft blue on the lids, and her dress both full yet clinging to her buxom form. She had been in the festhall for the better part of the evening, watching the show, refreshing her drink, and making small bon mots about the noble families of the city to the glee of those sitting with her.

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Sorry about earlier…

…if you were trying to reach the place, I managed to blow up my access and, well, the site stopped loading.

Thankfully, support at Dreamhost helped fix me up. The tech also gave me some tips for speeding things up, so I’m going to be poking around with that too.

I really do recommend them for hosting. If you want a new account here, please feel free to use my Referral Code. And you can tell them I sent you, although they may not know who I am.

Hopefully a new story will be out tonight or tomorrow, with Lady Mara showing off a bit of her skills – if not tonight, tomorrow. Thanks for reading!

Street Cleaning – A Story of The Night

BROOKLINE, BOSTON
11:22 PM

(Text surrounded in [square brackets] is spoken in Russian.)

The Model Cafe once had been a nice place to eat. That was years ago.

Now it was a dive bar, and the place to drink for more than a few Russian expats. Even on a Sunday night, a half-dozen of them were mostly drunk, boisterous, and unable to keep playing the darts game in the middle of the bar. A couple of the hot dogs the place was known for were in pieces on the floor and the bar, and the bartender was looking at the group dubiously.

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Some quick notes

  1. I’m going to try to start writing some stories more often – move to every other day, then to every day after I get in the swing of it. So expect more content soon.
  2. I’m still job-hunting.
  3. I don’t think I’m up for a Patreon kind of thing, but I set up a ko-fi account for a little spare change, if you want to send me a little something.