I’m a big fan of basing my characters on literary figures, and that’s what I’ll be doing with today’s post. I’ve always had a thing for clowns and jesters, and with 4th edition D&D, there’s a great opportunity to make a character based on one such character–that is Pocket, from Christopher Moore’s excellent and hilarious adaptation of King Lear, told from Lear’s Fool’s perspective.

Pocket has to be one of my all time favorite fantasy book characters (technically the book is a fantasy-comedy-parody thing. Whatever). Hilarious, rude, rakish, slutty, and yet strangely noble, Pocket is also a character who is unusually small and has to rely on his wits over brawn in a Might is Right world. Being a man of 5’5″, I do relate.

Pocket’s main strengths are his brutal, sharp wit, and his daggers cleverly hid on his body. His only possession other than his knives is his Jester’s rod, who speaks for him on occasion. Pocket, and the novel, is immensely vulgar and crude, and cannot help but infuriate just about anyone he runs into, though somehow manages to be about every woman in the book. What could be a better figure to base a character on?

So, my 4th edition D&D Character.

I have to say: I am no power gamer. In building this character I have not always decided on the “best” choices for gameplay, but the best choices for roleplaying the character from Fool. Still, I still think this is a definitely a playable character.

I decided against naming him Pocket though, just because I can’t make him 100% that character anyway. I named him Azdak, from Bertolt Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle, a character that is different, but still a rakish vulgar yet noble rogue. His wand is still Jenkins however. Valentine is his last name, pronounced Val-en-teen, not tine. I ripped that off from a Decemberists song.

Race: Half-Elf. It was between this and Human, but I went with the half-breed because I needed Dilettante for his knife-throwing because I didn’t want go into the paragon multi-classing. That is the other option though.The Dilettante ability is the Rogue’s Sly-Flourish. I love the extra Charisma damage on it, and I want to be able to mimic Pocket’s knife-throwing ability.

Class: Bard. Of course. And obviously, the Virtue of Cunning and the wand is the way to go. No sword for this guy.

Skills: Arcana, from the class. Trained skills: Acrobatics, Intimidate, Bluff, and Insight. I didn’t want to go with Diplomacy, unlike most bards. This bard is a provoker, not a diplomat. Stealth is also out because of the Jingle bells. I also get Thievery, with the thief multi-class at first level.

Feats: This is where the heart of the build, and the hardest decisions go. I probably won’t put all the one’s I’ve picked, but here are a few:

Psychic Lock & Beguiling Enchantment: The first gives a -2 to an enemy’s next attack if I hit with a psychic attack. The second delivers a -2 to any attack against me until the end of my next turn when I hit that enemy with a charm attack. Together, then (and they do stack), my enemy takes a -4 to hit me, and a -2 to attack anyone every time I hit with a psychic and charm power. Like my primary At Will, both build-wise and roleplay-wise: Vicious Mockery, which gives monsters a -2 to attack rolls, and is both Charm and Psychic. That’s right, a -4 to attack anyone, and a -6 to attack me. Because of how hard I just made fun of them.

Sneak of Shadows: My rogue multi-class ability, which allows me to use sneak attack on my Sly Flourish Dilettante ability. Only once per encounter, but I can only use my knife throw once per encounter anyway, so it works out!

Duelist Panache from Dragon Magazine allows me to be more of an acrobatic by adding my Charisma modifier to my acrobatic and athletic checks; Bard of all Trades, which helps my untrained skills A LOT; and Friendly Deception, which allows me to use my Word of Friendship with my bluff checks. Plus a bunch of others, of course.

Items: Master’s wand of Vicious Mockery, which makes perfect sense for a jester’s rod. This allows me to give an adjacent monster a -2 to attack whenever I hit with my Vicious Mockery. Skald’s Armor is great, because it adds to my bluff and diplomacy, already high, and allows me to avoid damage. To keep the flavor, I picked leather over Chainmail.

This depiction is already getting too long to be interesting. Basically, it’s a fun sounding controller, played more for flavor, though still effective, I think. Now I just need someone to DM an awesome game where I can play him. Especially with my friend Tyler, who has made an equally awesome Monk named Daniel Rand (Reference).

You know, I think most people underappreciate the amount of work it takes to bring 5 or 6 people together every week for 5 or 6 hours to play a game of D&D. Especially when those people all have different work/school/social schedules. Or rather, I think most people never think about that at all.

Our last game, the undead one, petered out with only three games to finish, thanks to incredibly hectic and stressful schedule of our bard. Still, 9 months of regular, weekly play for five college students? Still an accomplishment I feel.

So we’re moving on to the next one, with three of the old crew and two new ones. That makes that same three the original three I started with almost a year ago now, and none of them even knew each other back then. Now, instead of playing characters that are strangers, they are playing old friends, and the vibe is working all too well.

It’s a planar campaign, 4ed. Outer planes with a pirate ship: Five PCs and four NPCs on the ship alone! I’ll give a run down on the characters later, but for now, as well as put up photos of the tenth crew member, the ship herself: Miranda, stolen not from Serenity but from The Tempest; We also have a Caliban for captain, and a few other characters will be popping up as well (namely, so far, Trinculo and Sebastian. Ariel just makes everyone think of the little mermaid). 

So we’re building her. Namely Adam, who plays the captain, but a few of us are helping when we can. 37 inches long, fully detailed…Well, the pictures will be up soon enough.

Also a brand new HUGE pack of minis courtesy Trollandtoad.com (and my student loans). 

It’ll be  brave new world.

Kate Beaton is the writer/artist behind “Hark, a Vagrant!”, the absolutely hilarious and brilliant comic, which mostly concerns itself with zany, but accurate, depictions of historical events, although it also has references to literature, original characters, and some autobiographical material as well.
I hesitate focusing on Kate Beaton being a women, because it’s a disservice to her, and to women, to call her “The Funniest Female Webcomic Creator.” She’s just one of the funniest webcomic creators, period. First of all, and the reason why I’m talking about her: She’s very smart. Her synthesis of historical events and figures is amazing, clever, insightful, and, yes, hilarious. Also: nerdy.

But, she is female, and, also, actually really cute. Add all those things together, and you definitely get the Countess of Nerds.

Oh. Go read www.harkavagrant.com right now.

Luckily, the week wasn’t a total bust, as one of my players started his first ever game (cheers)! It was awesome: we played monsters in a very cliché monster camp, hiding an ancient relic from heroes in a tomb, bu, of course, clearly advertising its whereabouts so as it attract the local hero population. Very tongue in cheek, very funny and great NPCs. Furthermore, the game is being narrated by a bard talking to his party, who just so happens to be the party in my game. yay metahumor.  I’m playing a narcissistic, self-serving, cowardly little kobold Warlock, and it is ever so fun. Sadly, with my rehearsal schedule being what it is,  I’m not sure when I’ll be able to continue this game, or my other player’s Cthulhu game.

I’ve decided to leave this blog with words of advice for players and GMs/DMs on every post, à la Sly Flourish (my first piece of advice, check out the blog www.slyflourish.com for better advice than I have). Probably most of it is ripped off from other, more brilliant DMs, but that’s the nature of art anyways. Yeah, I called DMing an art.

With NPCs: Try and make everyone your party meets unique: This doesn’t mean you have to flush out an entire backstory for Gerard the Barkeep or Moglugg the Ogre chieftan, but at least give them some interesting characteristic to help flush out “the world of the game”, and take notes on it so when they return to that NPC, it’s familiar. The one thing I hate DMs doing is speaking overly colloquialy with their NPCs: keep dialogue in the spirit of the game. And do try to do at least some voices.

Dungeons and Dragons: Game is going amazing. The best group ever just got better with a visit from my friend Jason from P-Town. He joined the team as a rather urbane Drow Warlock. Never have two guys pretended to be two lesbians in a D&D game before. Actually, that’s probably not true. But I promise it was funny and lighthearted, not creepy and sexualized.

My Obsidian Portal site is up and awesome: http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/relics-of-the-past . Recently I’ve just been updating characters, but I’ll probably keep a better log of the game too.

Twilight: I’m tired of people using the argument that I haven’t read it. I suppose it’s possible that only reading essays on the books does not mean I can really judge it, but I’ve been extremely reticent to waste my own time reading prose that I know is mediocre, having flipped through it at least. My issues go deeper than that though, down to the feeling in my heart that Twilight is, in fact, dangerous for girls. Not dangerous in  the way that Victorian England thought novels would be, that they would somehow cause the girl to fall into the realm of sin; No, I find them dangerous in that they tell girls they are incomplete without a man, that a man should set every standard for a relationship, that in sex a woman needs to change

So I have to read it. Because then people don’t get the easy way out of an argument with me. Why do I argue over such a seemingly inconsequential thing such a vampire novel/film? Because I care about what literature says, especially pop-culture, and especially fantasy/mythology. As I once drunkenly ranted to my roommate: “My love for Buffy makes my hatred for Twilight all the more profound.”

Speaking of it, here’s my list, in no particular order

1. Zombieland

2. Shuan of the Dead

3. Dead Alive (AKA Braindead)

4. Versus

5. Evil Dead 2

As you can plainly see, I’m not a huge fan of serious Zombie films. Zombies, to me, are comedy.

Part 2:

Astonishing X-Men on hulu: Very, very weird. It’s easily my favorite super-hero comic ever written, in no small part to Whedon’s writing, and Cassaday is possibly my favorite Marvel artists, but to see it all “animated” and voiced out is pretty bizarre…that being said, if you’re desperate for an X-Men cartoon (and let’s face it, who isn’t?) then it’s worth seeing. Especially if you have already read the comic and know how brilliant it is. If you haven’t, you could still watch the series, but try and reserve judgement until you actually read Joss Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men.

And Happy New Years everyone. I’ve bought myself a supposedly fantastic bottle of sparkling rose, and will be drinking that all night while wearing fancy clothes, because I’m not so big of a nerd that I don’t know how to throw a kick-ass fete.

It’s all very frustrating. Now that it’s cancelled, of course it’s getting good.

However, if I don’t see more Enver Gjokaj in films, I’m going to boycott movies forever. Fuck, this guy is really amazing.

Felicia Day. If it hasn’t already been done, I’m crowning her the Queen of the Nerds. Why? First off, she got her start, more or less, on Buffy the Vampire Slayer as a potential slayer in its seventh season. Followed it up with more Whedon projects, including the critically acclaimed Doctor Horrible’s Sing Along Blog, and the not-so-critically-acclaimed Dollhouse.

Then there is The Guild. It’s nerdy on so many levels. It’s a show about WoW, and if you’re reading this blog, you’ve probably seen it. It’s actually successful via donations on Youtube, so beat that. Even the way it’s filmed is nerdy, with the over the computer-screen shots making up the majority of the show, a voyeuristic look inside the world of MMOs.

She’s a double major in Mathematics and violin performance, which may be one of the nerdiest dual majors I’ve ever heard of, and she turned down Julliard.

Also: She’s smoking hot.

So, she comes out with this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urNyg1ftMIU

At the time of writing, this video has nearly six million views. She’s putting that lifestyle out there, and making it attractive.

So, on behalf of nerds everywhere, I crown her Queen of the Nerds

If anyone has any problems with that, please feel free to argue with me voraciously.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/showtracker/2009/11/joss-whedons-dollhouse-comes-crumbling-down.html

Figures. In all honesty, i can’t blame Fox. Their attempts at keeping the show up were noble, and it almost (not really) redeems them for what they did to Firefly. Although, I don’t care if they brought Firefly back for my birthday and allowed me to write episodes, I would still hate them for their politics.

My mother came and visited me last weekend from Portland. She brought a box of stuff I had in the closet, including a long-lost copy of Diablo II and Lord of Destruction. I installed them. I’m pretty angry about it. It’s like, “Hey! Happy 3 year anniversary of your sobriety! I bought you a VSOP Couvosier to celebrate!”

Ugh.

On the other hand, I got a bunch of Hans Zimmer soundtracks for my D&D game (see previous post on music in D&D). Gladiator is amazing for the game, as is Pirates of the Caribbean. I put them into play for the first time on Sunday, and it went over pretty well. A very role-play/skill challenge heavy session with only one fight, pitting them horseback against Gnolls. The rest of the time they interacted with two NPCs, a 1000+ year old Halfling Ghost Librarian, and a 348 year old Gnome who was protecting the tomb of an Elven Paladin. The next game is going to be them exploring said tomb, and will be ghost-written by my friend from P-Town, as the character whose tomb they’re exploring was his in a previous game. Exciting!

The best part is that my player (and roomate) who is a bard in the game has taken to writing down the accounts of the game in rhyming verse, which is pretty awesome.

On a final note, my miniatures I ordered off Ebay are coming soon, and I’m excited, even though my players won’t be seeing them for a while…

Pretty cute. I’d be honestly sad if they ever were to split up.