I’m posting this at the end of the Indy 500 race as there is a substantial gap between the 500 in Indianapolis and the World 600 (excuse me the Coca-Cola World 600) in Charlotte. Ryan Hunter-Reay won, Marco Andretti was 3rd and Kurt Busch finished I think 6th to match his boss’ best finish trying for the Double of the Indy 500 and World 600. There was a big wreck 10 laps before the finish that put a lot of debris on the track, so to get the mess cleared up they threw the red to give them all the time they needed to clear away the mess. Then they had a total of 6 green flag laps to the finish, which was edge-of-your-seat exciting. Three passes for the lead in 6 laps! Wow!
The first race of the day was the Grand Prix of Monaco, which became exciting when something got in Lewis Hamilton’s eye in the closing laps and he had to drop off his race pace to a slightly slower speed that he could still see to drive safely, which allowed the 3rd place car to close up on him. While this was going on Hamilton’s Mercedes teammate was running away in first place, leaving Nico Rosberg the winner for the second year in a row. The actual racing consisted mostly of nose to tail pressure rather than side by side racing because of the nature of the Monaco street circuit making passing virtually impossible unless you can force the guy in front to make a mistake, which is something drivers at this level just do not do very often if at all…
Last night was RPG night and we decided to run the game that I play with the older version of Sparrow. Because of the nature of the setting Sparrow does not get the chance to engage the enemy very often, as the engagement distances are beyond the range of all his invocations and spell-like abilities, but this time we ended up in a ship to ship battle at close range as our flying squid engaged an undead white whale piloted by a litch (undead necromancer), getting me within fighting range and able to get a crippling blow against the litch, which distracted him long enough for another player to get a kill shot lined up from another ship in our fleet against the whale. Unfortunately this resulted in losing 4 characters because the kill shot was a suicide attack from the ship that killed the whale and the litch. We also captured the litch’s phylactery which meant he could not resurrect himself, the whale, and the undead crew on the whale. We lost 2 of our living ships, the shark interceptor and the squid salvage ship, but we had made enough money from our previous trading runs that we could replace both even inside the war zone we had stumbled upon. Oh yeah I almost forgot that we stumbled into a battle between our trade allies and another group and we intervened on behalf of the trade allies to route a physically and numerically superior force right before the whale showed up to drastically change everything. Also in destroying the whale we also ended up destroying all the salvage we intended to recover following the battle which made this a losing battle in terms of money. We won, but we lost money, which made it a shallow victory. Also we lost one character permanently as she was outside the secondary shield when the whale was destroyed and there was not enough of her left for our Spear of Righteousness to resurrect.
One thing that I have been able to do in the RP side of the game since my character lacks abilities or feats for ship to ship combat is I have taken over running the town brothel from the NPC proprietor. The previous proprietor had been cheating the girls, customers, and us by over charging and skimming the profits without paying the operating tax. I hired a house mage to ensure the girls were not under compulsions or otherwise forced into working the brothel (which caused us to lose about half of our employees) and a house cleric to keep any diseases from getting a toehold in the establishment. I have been staying true to my alignment by keeping everything in balance rather than strictly adhering to the laws, but because my character had a large say in the laws for our operation concerning brothels the laws mostly adhere to my dictates. The girls are happy, healthy, and making money, the house is showing a healthy profit, and the company is getting their tax on the operation so we can keep the lights on and the plumbing working. The brothel was the only profitable side of the company after the battle because we had the only functional house in the sector after the massive battle. Oh and the NPC that was running the house before I took over? He was given a lifeboat with a ring of sustenance and a year of life support and cast adrift… I don’t take kindly to people who abuse their power under me.
One other thing is we are spending months in travel time between encounters so that my character is now almost 30 YO or about 7 years older than when I started playing this character 4 years ago. We had been running pretty close to “real-time” between character aging and what was happening to the players, but this world has lengthy amounts of time pass between RP and combat encounters. So, Sparrow is aging rapidly compared to his player (me).
And now the World 600 is getting ready to start so to allow me to pay attention to the race and not get the post garbled I’m going to end the post now…
PSA, Opus
Witch on a Bicycle 