Lagumbay.com Reflections on Love, Rage, and Fear

Let’s talk about arts and crafts.  You see these hands?  They spent years of training in both spell-casting and rapier-based combat.  With a touch, I could draw the life force out of a creature within arm’s length.  For those further away, my hand can shoot necrotic bolts, fire, lightning, acid, or ice with similar results.  When I feel the need to see some blood, I draw my rapier and carve my way through opposition.  These are dirty, bloodied, calloused, warrior hands.

To show my more sensitive side, however, today we are using these same hands to knit a cozy cloak for Eberlinz Evil Twin.  You see, Ebbie’s a human ranger with a little bit of a problem staying on his feet.  He wields twin khopesh blades (also designed by yours truly), which I’m sure he’d love to swing around and hurt people with if only he weren’t so easily tripped by his enemies.  Because of this little issue, he asked if I could make him some sort of Cloak of Balancing.  “Sure can,” I enthusiastically exclaimed, “I just need to gather some materials.”

The first step is to decide on exactly what we’re going to make.  For Eberlinz, I wanted to give him something a little extra so today we’re crafting him an Unbalancing Cloak of Balance which not only makes him more surefooted; the cloak is so awesome it has a chance to knock enemies off their feet.  After deciding on that, we gather the necessary essences and collectible items to create the magical shards that would go into the cloak.  For our purposes, we have created an unbalancing shard and a shard of balance.

Shards in hand, now we look for a used cloak.  It is a good idea to keep a few old cloaks around just for crafting purposes.  Any will do, really.  We take the cloak, find the designer tag, rip said tag, and replace it with “Hecho De ElTechno.”  We then use a hot glue gun to secure the shards into place.  A little bit of cleanup and here we have a lovely cloak, hand-made and ready for the rigors of combat.

Up on the mast, there’s a lonely mote herd…

When people think of the Risia Ice Games, they think of sliding gracefully down icy slopes and gliding through the air through low-gravity jumps in search of assorted colored winter coins. They think of fighting fire elementals and renting ice skates. They think of the poetic snowfall in Stormreach Harbor the likes of which hadn’t been seen since a dragon terrorized Korthos.

Well, realistically, a lot of people ignore the ice games entirely, and for the longest time, I was one of those people. That was until I became involved in an obsessive-compulsive hunt for eternal wands. The basic idea is as follows: during the Ice Games, a character collects assorted coins, which gets redeemed for random items. Some of those random items happen to be crafting materials which when placed in the Risian Altar along with other ingredients, create or imbue weapons with icy properties. One of these possible creations is an Eternal Wand of Ray of Frost.

There was ElTechno’s wraith form and extended versions of “Jump” and “Expeditious Retreat” spells standing on a docked ship’s mast deciding on the best path to collect as many blue coins as possible in one leap. There was ElTechno cursing as his footing slipped, gliding back down to the dock and jumping back up to the boathouse roof for another try at a precision landing onto the ship’s mast. A successful jump netted three blue coins and a switch to another instance in the multiverse for an attempt at three more. This was repeated countless times to gather materials for him, and for members of the guild.

Thusly he herded the motes of winter, crafting recipes, an assortment of icy potions, and candy canes which he used as unexpected presents for guild and party members. After crafting the eternal wand, he embraced his jumping proficiency and continued herding motes of winter for various other recipes. He gave quite a few of the materials away and to those who were interested, he taught his methods of coin farming.

All of this was strange to the Drow rogue wizard who had lived a borderline sociopathic life.

Did you know that a Divine Union of Hirelings exists? Apparently so! In the last union meeting, countless speaker cards were filled out in order to address the issue of hireling maltreatment and abuse, with many hireling clerics speaking out against doing contract work for a Drow Wizard named ElTechno De La Biblioteca.

Yes, they spoke out against me and they made me sit through the whole thing. One cleric recounted the time when I cast Expeditious Retreat and Invisibility on myself and left her to run after me through mobs of hostile soldiers and scorpions. “I came back to pick up your soulstone!” I exclaimed. Another spoke of a time when I went for a swim through an underwater cave and left him to fight trolls and rust monsters alone. while someone else testified that I had locked them out to face Whisperdoom alone.  Yet another recalled a time I watched her get electrocuted to death by a trap I had jumped over. “That’s because most people would step away from the trap BEFORE healing themselves!” A few others spoke of being tactlessly commanded to use runes, open doors, heal others not specifically named in the contract, having to heal spiders and miscellaneous pets, and being injured numerous times by a summoned arcane skeleton mage. “You command Drow Scorpions as pets! Consider yourselves fortunate that Vulkoor has not manifested his wrath upon you!” I yelled in exasperation.

After a bit of gavel pounding, the whole episode ended with me being limited to non-union contracts over at House Kundarak. I wasn’t too worried since I knew a lot of the union clerics secretly moonlighted as bodyguards in House K. However, until the excitement that my name invoked wound down, I decided it was best to hit the realm’s Looking-For-Group Bulletin Board again for a while. Good thing, too, because I had found a group running the “Diplomatic Impunity” quest which in turn led to my being accepted into a guild.