Eight minutes to spluge

Spluge is a word I created. It means to type random thoughts so as to ease the enormous pressure on my brain-thing. I think. Anywho, I like to wander around and think about it, dolphins have no hands, and yet they still swim without lettuce is the only vegetable that is never sold frozen or canned, only fresh. Tommorow I'm going to start the 10 in 10 challenge. Ten significant pieces of writing in ten days. I think that the most tasty thing in the field of battle would have to be the food. Corpses and dirt may very well be good, but I would rather feast upon hardtack and raw stew. My mind is speaking in riddles but my fingers tell a different tale. It calls to those who cannot hear and bids them farewell in the strictest sense of the word. I cannot keep typing, alas, because my eight miutes is almost up. Anyway, I don't have as much in my head, I huge-spluged last night.

Political Opinions

No, I am not going to say who I support, or which party I think is better. I simply want to rant about the way the president is treated. For eight years, former president Bush was called everything from idiotic to conivingly evil. This, in and of itself, is perfectly fine and legal, due to the First Amendment. However, when this message is being put across, not in words, or arguments, or any rational way whatsoever, it changes. When you draw a cartoon showing George Bush as a big-eared buffoon, or when you have such pictures on your website, you're no longer really saying that he is incompetent, you have moved on to showing how idiotic you really are. There is nothing wrong with practising your Constitutional rights, but degrading someone for no reason other than you disagree with them is despicable. To say you disagree, and then move on and obey the law passed or accept what happened because he was elected by the majority of the nation is mature and a much nicer thing to do. George Bush is not the only president (former or not) to recieve such critisism, whether it be earned or not, but he seems to have gotten the most. You may not agree with me on these views, but, if you comment and tell me how wrong and stupid and (insert your own expletive) I am, then you're just showing how little you think about others, and how selfish you really are. I would, however, like to welcome any comments of a rational and mature nature, whether you agree or not.

Voltaire

"Let us read and let us dance- two amusements that will never do any harm to the world." -Voltaire

(Not so)Lucky Larry Bites the Proverbial Dust

I ran another Call of Cthulhu scenario for the same player as before, again playing Larry. This time, he got a letter from England (his native soil) to come and investigate a man's dissappearance. When he arrived he immediately set to work looking around and reading various papers that the man had in his desk (including the infamous play, "The King in Yellow"). When night fell, he discovered a body and set off into the nearby woods hot on the trail of the killer. Unfortuanately, the killer happened to be a warped and horrible terror of the Cthuloid type. Larry was killed, and his little dog too.

Enter Adolf (no, he's not a german), a bounty hunter from America currently working off some problems in the British police system. He was called by Larry directly before he went into the woods. After a short interrogation of the lady of the house, Adolf went off after Larry. In the clearing he found Larry's body (as well as that of his dog), but no horrible monster. On his way back to the house, Adolf saw someone climbing in through and open window and soon chased him.

Inside, Adolf confronted Larry's killer and, eventually, killed him. He then picked up a few things and left. One of the things he took was an old tome, written in latin. Although he could not read it, Adolf soon found a student at the nearby college that agreed to translate it for him. Unfortunately, the student was driven insane by what was written in the tome, and hauled off to a sanitarium.

Collect Call of Cthulhu

This evening, I ran my very first Call of Cthulhu scenario! I had one player with his English occultist investigator, Larry (called 'the Lucky' by me). I have the basic rules that are downloadable from the Chaosium Website. I ran the sample adventure 'The Haunting' that is in there, and it went great! Larry did the required research and digging, didn't find everything but knew pretty much what was going on. After searching the house he killed the undead evil in the basement and emerged victorious into the light.

Points of interest:

• Larry asking three seperate times for information about the kids. Each time I told him the exact same thing.
• Larry ignoring the thumps, scrapes and tappings coming from the upstairs bedroom. When he eventually looked around in there he decided that the blood dripping from the ceiling wasn't interesting enough to investigate.
• While battling Walter in the basement, Larry tried unsuccessfully to shoot him with the nice shotguns that Larry brought with him a total of four times.
• The enchanted dagger repatedly missing Larry (at one hit point) due to his outstanding luck (which is why I call him Lucky).

Everything went great. Afterwards Larry told me how much he enjoyed the game, and expressed interest in playing again.

Translations!

-The man goes to the child.
Weory Runmas Yeoryng

-You go to the men.
Runman/Runmal Weoriph

-We inform the men. The men run to the women. The men tell the women
Instratak Weorik. Weorin dashas Mameoriph. Weorin Instratas Mameorik.

Note: If you are serious about learning this then you should, out loud, say the declension and the conjugation. Maybe even make some vocabulary cards for the words. The repetition of the words with the endings helps you to memorize them.

Traanslations!

A note on Da. The to be verb is peculiar in the fact that it uses the Predicative Nominative. Simply stated, this means that the direct object of Da uses the nominative case as opposed to the normally used accusative case.

-The man runs to the woman
Weory dashas mameoryng

-The boy is a child
Ory das yeory

-The men kill the child of the woman (Yes, I know, very bloodthirsty)
Weorin slavaz yeoryl mameoryt

MyLanguage (or Dracklerese)

One day as I was sitting there, doing nothing and quite bored, I picked up a piece of paper and a pen and began writing down a language as I made it up. After four and a half years of studying Latin and two years of Greek, I have some experience in how to do said thing.

According to experience, I started by laying out the endings for the different forms of the verbs (first, second, and third persons, singular and plural). These are as follows:

Singular Person Plural

-a 1^st -ak

-an 2^nd -al

-as 3^rd -az

In case anyone does not know, I will explain what the different persons do. When speaking in first person, you say 'I' (singular) or 'we' (plural), second person, 'you' (singular or plural), and third, he/she/it (singular) or they (plural). For instance, if I were to be saying that you tell me something (that I have way too much time on my hands, perhaps), then I would say 'instratan, or Instratal'. Insrata is the 1^st person singular form of what I said, it means Instruct or Tell. When it is put in the 2^nd person singular, the ending changes from '-a' to '-an', and when you change it to 2^nd person plural, it changes to '-al'.

Simple, isn't it? Alright, now that we have a verb (Instrata) to pay with we can get a little more coherent.

S. Person P.

Instrata 1^st Instratak

Instratan 2^nd Instratal

Instratas 3^rd Instrataz

Now I've written out the forms of the verb Instrata in such a way that we can easily see how the endings fit on the verb. Next I think we'll tackle the nouns.

If you have ever tried (successfully or not) to learn Latin, then you'll probably know that there are five different declensions, each one having a different set of nouns, making translating even harder because you have to know which declension the word is from. There are also four conjugations for verbs and one specifically for the 'to be' verb.

My language, however, is much simpler. There are a total of two declensions, one for common nouns and one for proper nouns, and one conjugation (of course, there are different endings for different tenses, but we'll burn that bridge when we get to it).

The Common declension is as follows (I am using the word 'Weory' to illustrate the endings. Weory means Man):

S. Case P.

Weory Nominative Weorin

Weoryt Genitive Weorith

Weoryng Dative Weoriph

Weoryl Accusative Weorik

Weoryg Ablative Weorint

I have put the cases of the endings with each set of them. The cases each have their own meanings that are put on the noun. Nominative is the subject case; when a man is doing something he is the subject and, therefore, in the nominative case. Genitive is the possessive case; when something is of a man (or a man's), man is possessive, and in the genitive case. Dative is the Indirect object case; when someone is doing something to something to or for a man, man is the indirect object, and in the dative case. Accusative is the direct object case; when someone is doing something to a man (such as telling) the man is the direct object, and in the accusative case. Ablative is sort of the miscellaneous case; if something is by with or from a man, then man is in the ablative.

That's quite a bit of stuff right there, in my opinion. So I'll leave it at that for now. Well, not quite, I am going to leave you with a short vocabulary list:

Weory Noun Man

Mameory Noun Woman

Ory Noun Boy

Meory Noun Girl

Yeory Noun Child, Charge, or Ward

Blany Noun Sword or Knife

Sava Verb Kill

Instrata Verb Tell or Instruct

Da Verb Am (Conjugated just like any other verb, unlike in latin)

Dasha Verb Run

Runma Verb Go

A note on pronunciation: All 'y's are pronounced 'ee' (speed). All 'i's are pronouced 'I' (Dinner). All 'e's are pronounced 'ay' (May). All 'a's are pronounced 'ah' (Ha). All 'u's are pronounced 'ooh' (food).

It's been a while

It has been a while since the last post, six whole months, in fact, but we've had a sad amount of gaming since then. I say a sad amount because we have not actually played every single week. In fact, we've had about seven or eight four-hour sessions since the last post.

Unfortunately, the Traveller game did not really work out, but my group ended up joining together with the other group (we were one group, but we decided that thirteen people is a few too many for one DM to deal with. This adventure marks the long-term joining together of the two groups). The new group includes:

Ragnarok the dwarven warrior
Rathgor the half-elf wizard/cleric
Nightmare the human warrior (of Soul Calibur fame)
Roark the halfling thief
Tordek the dwarven sorcerer
Zerrock the human thief
Ivellios the elven ninja
Another member who's name I cannot, at this juncture, remember the monk
and, finally,
Knight Brother Lord Astrant Caedin Indrike (That's me! Yes, I know, I have a very long name) the half-elven ranger.

There you have our group in its entirety. When we reformed the larger of the two groups was already in the middle of running through and looting The Cavern of the Undead. So we happily jumped in and helped to slaughter a few non-living buggers. It was a fair dungeon crawl. We killed, were killed, a bit, and looted the monies of the re-dead occupants. When all was said and done both Ragnarok and Ivellios died and came back to life through interesting means, each earning the title 'Wraith-Touched'.

Hooray! Another adventure, another post. I will strive to put out the next adventure soon. Until then, fare thee well.