Orthodox Christians should write and paint and sing and dance. We should make
movies and television shows. We should make clothes and produce textiles as art
as well (the fullness of culture is itself too large to describe in a sentence,
a paragraph or even a book). And in all these activities, they will be
expressive of the fullness of our humanity without having to stick an icon on
everything to prove its Orthodoxy.
-- Father Stephen in Glory to God for All Things
This is a picture of Lionel, my Useless Blob.
He's really here, jumping up and down. To adopt your own Useless Blob, click on him.
![[christian fandom]](http://www.valdyas.org/~irina/blog/graphics/page/cf125x125.gif)
2008-07-30
It felt very strange to be back in Valdyas, even though Sarabal is full of Síthi. It didn’t help that we were in Turenay rather earlier (in real time) than I’d expected and I had to take over almost unprepared.
Note: I don’t have much in the way of notes of this part; some of the facts may be inaccurate. If you were there and know better, don’t hesitate to tell me!
Athal’s last entry —well, the first part of it, because it’s another long one and I know that at least three people are waiting to read it— because we’re back in Valdyas and I’ve taken over the campaign again. I’m unlikely to stop posting roleplaying writeups, my own and others’, but this story arc is finished.
2008-07-09
Here’s Athal catching himself thinking like an Iss-Peranian, more than once. Fortunately, it’s likely that he’ll be on the next <shudder> ship home, and only because it wasn’t feasible to catch the one that was just leaving.
2008-06-19
Was this really only one day? I think yes, though we slept for a few hours in the middle of it. It did end around midnight— the in-world day, that is, we ended neatly at 10:50.
Unresolved questions: what on earth was Selle’s message? It must have been important. And who was it that called Athal “priest of Timoine, Anshen and Mizran”? Sounds like the merchant-guild sisters, but I’m not sure.
2008-05-30
The break in the story doesn’t coincide completely with the break in the session; we stopped just before the allies came in and picked it up again from there. It wasn’t long after that until we gained too much momentum to stop. At one point I was worried whether I’d be able to write the writeup in first person, because I was far from sure that there would be a first person to write from the POV of. Only the baby prince has script immunity, after all.
Thanks go to Prima for scanning the drawing when technology failed me. Athal and I had no words for it. Also, I was too busy virtual-fighting to take notes and my (and Athal’s) memory of the events of the fight is likely to be quite imperfect.
2008-05-29
I had such a spiffy title for this, but it went away, confound it. Posting in two parts to stop myself thinking I need to finish writing it all in one go; next one (with action!) coming today or tomorrow.
The session was interrupted by Raisse’s player trying (without success) to catch the last train, and when he came back we decided to have “just half an hour more”— and it got out of hand so much that we went on to what is probably the climax of this story arc. The GM had planned for the events to happen, but perhaps not precisely now.
2008-04-25
Writing this between services, waiting for eggs and prosphora and rye bread, things like that. If I don’t do it now I won’t do it until Easter Monday at the earliest, and it won’t be so fresh (and I know that some people are very eager to read it).
2008-04-14
Regular readers will probably have noticed the technical difficulties I’ve just been having. That slowed the writeup a lot: somehow I couldn’t set myself to it without a blog to post the result to. But now everything except comments seems to work again.
2008-03-13
There was too much wind for skating, otherwise this would have been the last writeup of the season written in the Skating Cafe (as most of the rest have been since October). I’ll miss my weekly hour of ambient noise that’s practically guaranteed to be nothing to do with me, so I can shut it out and be more focused than even in silence.
2008-02-28
We’d been promised a session that wasn’t all Guild work, and lo! it came to pass. Instead, we got culture shock, and intrigue, and more culture shock, and a doddering old man who can hardly be dangerous any more even if he probably was when he was younger, and a temple that was all too octagonal. And Raisse got a very large and fierce kitten. Oh, and did I mention culture shock?
2008-02-06
We did it right. My other half said that if he’d been a really nasty GM, he’d have made the ‘weak links’ break and/or betray us, but we were doing so well at that point that it would have complicated matters needlessly. Enough complications as it was. I-the-player was thinking ‘autistic’ for parasat (locked up in oneself unable to communicate) but Athal didn’t have the word, and probably not even the concept. Anyway, it seems to be something subtly different that neither I nor Athal has a word for.
I’m still baffled at the ephebe-like appearance of Timoine: the last time he appeared he was a seven-year-old redhead, gap-toothed smile and all. It’s like being tripped by the dream engine (which, instead of Athal’s nightmares, delivered more cats, though not green-striped like the night before).
2008-01-24
This is long; it was hard; I may have made some mistakes because I stopped taking notes after Raisse had gone to see the Khas. Also, it doesn’t really end because all the endings I wrote were cheesy. The story, and Athal’s dilemma, isn’t finished yet anyway.
Athal has discovered a tendency for culture relativism in himself, which is perhaps a bit modern of him (or me); also, he’s hesitatingly putting into practice what one of his mentors taught him, “sometimes it’s braver to admit that the other guy is right”.
2008-01-10
A slow start after the holidays. We started off doing administrivia
—translating what we’ve been learning since we left Valdis into skill points—
and Athal turned out to have picked up three points of Iss-Peranian, enough to
talk like a pirate tourist phrasebook. Also, more warcraft than
he thought he had as well as yet another point of seal-making skill (from
breaking the protection on Erday), causing him to remark that there are probably
very few people in the world who can get through his seals. To make a seal that
the Nameless can’t get through, and keep it up, takes a lot more.
2007-12-13
We went to bed at 2:45. Couldn’t stop when Raisse’s player was supposed to go and catch the last train, because it was in the middle of a storm; couldn’t stop when it was a reasonable bedtime (just past midnight) because it was in the middle of a battle. Finished about 1:50 but badly needed to wind down. Fortunately Raisse’s player had brought a bottle of whisky retrieved from a shipwreck (the story is in Dutch but starts with a blurb in English).
And I woke up at 6:37 from a dream in which we’d escaped the Khas only to end up in the hands of the Taleban.
(it’s really long, over 4500 words; I wish I could do that with ‘real’ writing, but then the events happen as I write them and with game writeups events have already happened and I feel like I’m hurrying to catch up)
2007-11-18
Hard to find a title for this that doesn’t give the whole story away.
I wrote part of this in longhand on the train to Utrecht, six pages, four of which standing up.
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