Happy 50% off chocolate day, on a Wreck-Free Sunday

Today and tomorrow are the days that are usually the best for getting cheap chocolate candy, most of the grocery stores in my area have hacked prices by half or more. Just stay outta my way. I WILL run you over.

The RPG group did not have a good night last night, as we lost two players to personality issues. My warlock could not hit the broad side of a barn with his eldrich blast, I had a bad case of bad dice. My perception and listen checks came out great, I could see and hear all kinds of things that the rest missed. So it averaged out. Also I finally had a chance to use my “you ain’t dead” cantrip spell, twice. Of course had I been able to hit my targets better that would not have been necessary.

I did the service this morning, as some of you may have surmised from the post from last Saturday entitled “Sermon”. I had some technical difficulties with my laptop in that while I could expand my active screen to both the laptop screen to the HD TV we have on one wall, and get audio out through the HDMI cable, I could not get the videos to play on the TV while leaving my sermon up on the laptop screen. They would not drag over to the TV and nothing I did would cause anything I had open on the laptop screen to move to the TV. The workaround was to mirror the display on both screens, have the remote for the TV at the podium with the lap top, and switch the TV off when I had to read the sermon and back on when I had a video to show. The problem with that was I could not read the sermon while the video was showing so I had to read stuff before that I was supposed to read during.

Now I have to get my head together for a sermon due the end of next month, for April Fools’ Day. My previous services on that day have varied in quality between legendary and Stoopid. My Banishing Chaos services tended towards the Stoopid, but some of my embracing chaos services tended to the legendary. The one where I used children to call the elements as Yakko, Wakko, and Dot Warner with one of the mothers in the church to be Hellooo! Nurse was one of the more legendary services I have performed. And the Meditation that turned into a game of Dodgeball also falls under that legendary tending to Stoopid or perhaps Legendarily Stoopid. So I have a high hurdle to surmount of my own creation.

I leave you with this link to a very pleasant video of people bicycling during a steady snowfall. What it Feels Like in Winter Cycling Paradise See, it can be done with the right equipment. Notice that most of those bikes were equipped with studded tires for getting traction on ice.

PSA, Opus

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My ears are freezing on a Wreck-Free Sunday

I’m writing this post today looking a lot different than I did yesterday. For one thing I changed shirts 😉 For another thing I got my head shaved for Spring. Also yesterday I buffed my old Warlock7 with a few new magical items from the new campaign, one of which was a stole (like a priest would wear) that upped my Eldritch Blast from 4d6 damage to 6d6, and the new group also added 3 to all my stats retroactively, because one of the treasures they got added 3 to all party members’ stats. This raised my dex to an outrageous-for-humans level of 21 (the max for normal humans not magically enhanced is 18) as well as enhanced all of my saves because some of my saves were pretty abysmal before the upgrade (it’s a wonder Sparrow survived long enough to reach level 7). Also group rules required me to reset my HP to maximum based on the +3 upgrade I got from their treasure. This was a major help because my HP went from 37 before to 63 after the upgrade. Again, it is a wonder Sparrow ever survived to reach level 7. I was playing Sparrow way out of my pay grade. Or his, at any rate well above what his stats should have allowed him to survive.

At any rate we had another Searing of the Sheep ritual to banish Winter this morning. I’ll let the pictures tell the story.

It was a grey overcast at the start of the ritual.

Lighting the chalice and the god/dess candles.

Protecting my clothes from tiny bits of cut hair.

The first cut is the deepest.

My “barber” is having fun while my arms are trapped.

A “mow-hawk”

And now the beard is gone.

Making the final buzz

The hair piles up.

Nobody wants to see my lip

And once again we have banished Winter from Texas for another year.

PSA, Opus

We had an early-morning RPG session on a Wreck-free Sunday

Because the DM had to work last night (and so did many of the players) we moved the game to Sunday morning. It was amusing watching a bunch of sleep-deprived geeks try to process tactics before coffee. Some had problems not walking into walls before coffee, which made me glad I was not riding with those people on the way to the game.

Once we got established in the game world there was the problem of finding which way to go to the place where we needed to be as our transport could not put us exactly at the place we needed to be for technical reasons related to magic in this game environment. While trying to get oriented as to where we were and where we needed to go we ran into a band of goblinoids (goblins and hob goblins) that numbered about 200. Well actually we managed to get a raiding party of about 18 separated from their main party by weather and pretty much did a curbstomp on them. We did this in spite of some characters acting down to their stats for wisdom and intelligence and having a screaming argument within earshot of the camp site for the raiding party while we were trying to ambush a foraging team as part of a campaign of terror against the goblins.

What we had planned was to take out the goblins and hob goblins in ambushes when we could get them separated from the main group in ones, twos, and threes. What we ended up doing was setting up an ambush when one of our main group was followed by the goblins that attacked the main group when he came to tell the ambush party about the main group getting attacked. There was a path from the main camp to the river where they gathered their water supply so we sent 4 party members down the path to take out the one hob goblin supervising the slaves doing the gathering and free the slaves. The idiots had their shouting match just after we took out the slaves’ guard and freed them.

What we did was hide in the heavy woods along the path to the river and when the slaves came up the path we took out the guard with a synchronized attack that had him down in one round. Then while we were clearing up the scene to let us take out the next group the screaming match took place and alerted the rest of the goblin raiding party, so we continued our plans to set up the ambush for a larger group up to the entire 18 goblins and hob goblins in the raiding party. We had a Warforged set up in a spot about 60 feet from the Soul Knife, Beguiler, Druid with a wolf companion, and my Warlock. When the second group from the goblin party came out following our Gnome Wilder warning us about the stupids in the main party we were already close to having our kill zone set up and just had to adjust our tactics to handle more opponents. The Warforged would wait for the second goblin to pass its location before attacking from cover while my Warlock would attack the first goblin down the path at the same time. We took out both in 2 rounds and put the rest of the goblins in complete disarray and unable to get their shit together to mount a counter attack against us. Within 6 rounds we had wiped the entire group of 7 goblins out.

Meanwhile the rest of the group was taking on the other 10 goblins and hob goblins with only 2 fighters who were guarding the non-combatants of our party. Now these were not just fighters, they were serious classes of sword fighters that could fight well above their levels of threats and they managed to kill another 7 of the goblins while driving off the other 3 with serious amounts of damage. The reason we even had non-combatants is they were needed for the quest we were entrusted with at the start of the module. So they stayed out of the way and let the fighters do their thing. While the fighters were doing their thing the goblins got in a lucky shot on one and nearly took him out and caused him to have a “come to Goddess” moment. After he was revived he was marked with the sigil of the goddess that the original shouting match was about.

After the game session I moved to the church where we had our Yule Log ritual. We wrote out our wishes for the upcoming year, what we wanted to get and what we wanted to get rid of and placed them on the Yule log we consecrated and charged last week then burned everything in the fire pit out back to send our wishes to our various deities so that they could be granted.

Then I went home and wrote this blog post.

PSA, Opus