more D&D
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
Today The Boy's best friend came over and we carried on the long-running Dungeons and Dragons campaign with the two boys and The Girl playing. Their little party is on one of the moons of their homeworld.
Over the years, the party's had quite a predilection for being on the scene when a castle burns. They've also now freed a lich, a powerful type of undead wizard that found a sort of immortality through magic to keep his/her own corpse animated after death. I don't know who dreamed that up in 70's but they're great fun to play a Dungeon Master because you can play them like bored billionaires: powerful, egotistical, looking to do something with their time, and clearly a bit nuts. They then doubled down by freeing a titan-in this case the god of the "giants". One of the funny things about D&D is that it has followed the bizarre mash-up of poorly-understood western civilizations that exists in the English language, where for instance the chaotic counterparts to the gods in Norse mythology (the jötnar) have been turned into "giants". Anyway, so they freed the god of the frost giants and if that weren't bad enough they then accepted a side quest (despite having direct orders from their King) and wound up on the moon unknowingly powering up an orbital array of devices that are designed to keep magic in check*. Along the way, I've been giving them clues about the history of the world, in which the halflings were the original inhabitants of the planet and the humans, dwarves, and elves arrived through magical gate (former two) or by space craft (latter). The halflings I've patterned after homo floresiensis and the dwarves after homo neanderthalensis*.
*They don't know this yet, but then they also don't read this journal.