One Year, Again.
Journal 52, 30 May to 5 June
This will probably be a short post, or maybe I’ll find words pouring out of me, I don’t know. This week started with a worry, became good, and then crashed hard.
At the beginning of the week, I felt like my cold was coming back and I was having trouble sleeping… but negative covid test so, I skipped out on writing and just stayed in bed to read and write notes. That was fine.
The Up.
A family member has been battling cancer for over a year now, and we finished their last round of chemo and blood testing shows little to no signs of cancer anymore. It was a reason to celebrate and be happy. Finally, some good news.
The Crash
And then my brother—who has battled illness for a long while—abruptly started to lose that battle. Fast. As I type this, he’s in a hospital bed, no visitors allowed, battling for his life. And there is NOT a gods damned thing I can do about it. All I can do is think about the “What ifs.” What if I forced him to go the hospital sooner? What if I had worked out with him years ago when the problems first started?
And I know my other brothers and my mother are going through the same things. Battering themselves for things they should have done, could have done, wished they’d done.
I’m sorry.
I know this is a blog where I talk about stories, word counts, and writing issues. I know the handful of you that come here every week are just looking to cheer on the numbers and give me a little support. I thank you for it.
Instead of raging, I want to talk about my brother. Because we both wanted to write for a living. We both gamed and told stories and worked at writing half-heartedly through our younger years. So, I want to take the time to tell some stories and try to find a glimmer of light in this dark time.
Anthony Xavier
I mean I just called him Tony, but being a big comic nerd he loved to go by his middle name once we got out of high school.
I should clarify that we met in high school, he was one of my best friends, and that I had troubles at home and when I left home, his family took me in. So, I might be the adopted brother, but we’ve been brothers for almost 30 years, and we’ve lived together for the last decade.
I got Tony into role playing when I found him stealing all my Palladium Rifts and Robotech books after a sleep over. (He refused to give the books back but did pay me for them eventually).
Between me, him, our younger brothers and our mutual best friend in high school we started playing D&D on the regular. Campaigning through multiple editions before everyone sort of split up and drifted their own ways.
Pandemic Gaming
It was during the pandemic that we started gaming online, and Tony had been unable to go to games due to disability and illness. But thanks to roll20 and the horrors of the pandemic he came back to my regular Tuesday Night Game. Tuesday game had been an institution since just after high school, and has been running regularly for over 20 years now.
Tony came back in and we immediately fell back into bickering. It was great though. I was so happy to have him back at the table. Online gaming opened up a whole new world for me and it was just great to have him back.
Characters and Story
I have a shit memory for characters. There is a reason why I keep all of my character sheets and notebooks so that I can recall games. I have played so many characters that they all kind of fade in and out of memory. But I do recall two of Tony’s that were great.
Kem and his Druid at the end of 3rd edition. I know I’m forgetting the characters name and that is making me sad, but as I said I don’t recall the names of all of my own characters, let alone the ones my friends played. I do find it interesting that I remember Kem from over 20 years ago, but the druid from just over 10 is a blank. I also think my numbers are actually closer to 30 and 20 years ago, but I digress.
Kem
KEM was a character my brother played in the very first version of my Shadow Elf campaign. (This game is mentioned all over this site, as it is the basis for my novels, hey I’m revealing stuff here… and if you go to the gaming page you can find more links).
So, the first SE Campaign was run in Forgotten Realms in second edition, back in 1996…8? I can’t remember if we started in high school or just after. In that game we used a bunch of experimental rules, that I’m certain that Tony absolutely broke to create KEM.
There were rules where you could mix and match classes and traits to custom a new class. It was some optional book or Dragon Magazine article. He took the barbarian HP and Speed, the Ranger tracking and survival skills, and the rogue backstab and a few skills and mashed them into a slightly short, double gladius wielding psychopath. Or was Kem a sociopath? It’s hard to remember.
Good Memories
What I do remember was him being a vicious fighter that hacked his way through enemies without a care in the world. A man who would make a smart-ass remark and then charge at the biggest target while shrugging off attacks. And late in the game he ended up with either matched dragonslayer short swords, or one was a dragonslayer and the other was just a super powered +5 machete of doom?
I do recall him landing on a dragon’s back and “playing the drums” with both blades while screaming insults.
And cutting down “Starvin’ Marvin’ and his Band of Barbarian Brigands” (this is comedy gold but you really had to be there for it) as they were mid threat.
Druid What’s his Name?
While Kem was a bit of a madman and is actually pertinent to my current novels (spoiler I recreated a homage version of Kem as one of the ‘heroes’ in my current works).
His druid. So, little set up, we were playing in a homebrew game (all of our games are usually homebrew worlds with special rules in each of them). In this world there was no common tongue, meaning that every character spoke a different language and there was a lot of warfare going on. Our characters were slightly better educated and spoke several languages so there was some overlap but we had a party of 6 to 7 players at this time and there was no single language that every character could speak.
During the early adventures, like 3rd or 4th level, we were sent into ancient ruins to find secrets. All of us were part of a peace talks coalition and represented various warring kingdoms and we were all on the mission together to promote some level of unity. I should also say that the game was rather primitive, so like a post apoc civilization, but full of primal and wild magicks.
The Big Ordeal
Tony’s druid was built with some arcane talents and I believe he wanted to prestige into Mystic Theurge. So, he would end up half druid, half wizard. As part of his build, he had a wolf animal companion and a bird that was his wizard familiar.
We started to explore these ruins and came upon a room that had ancient writing on the wall. And it was in three sections like the rosetta stone. Here on the wall was a key to translating languages. Now… we were warned that there was a reason a common tongue didn’t exist, and that we should be careful. BUT one of the players was specifically told about a secret and they were supposed to reveal this secret as we adventured. But of course, this player did NOT tell this secret.
There was a bit of player friction at the time. (Let’s just say there is a reason why all PvP and note passing and whispers have been banned and removed from our games. If you’re doing shady shit, it is openly talked at the table and metagaming is punished).
The big secret, that common tongue was cursed, like a tower of babel thing… and the thing that caused the apocalypse caused the curse. It was meant to keep us all fighting and separate. As such, the writing of the common tongue was equally cursed, which led to an infamous incident at our table.
The Incident
Tony saw the rosetta tablet and decided he was going to cast comprehend languages and learn the common tongue. The player with the secret half-heartedly tried to stop him, with a “No wait I already know what it says.” But he was really quiet about it, and later said it was because people never paid enough attention to him. So, he waited until just AFTER Tony cast the spell to say DON’T. The druid started to scream and stumble around the room clawing at his eyes, the rest of the party either froze or leapt to attack, and the secret holding character was questioned, and his only reply was a shrug and “It says, may cause minor eye irritation.”
It was not exactly minor. Any magic that tried to translate the words caused the water in the reader’s eyes to turn to acid. Tony was playing an aasimar, and as an angelic being was resistant to acid damage. Meaning at max roll the damage to his eyes was 1 or 2 pts of damage, but for the most part his eyes were just boiling acid and the pain was insane. We were all low level, and the smart-ass character was supposed to tell us about this curse literally weeks before this, but decided not to.
Tony becomes a Bad-ass
What followed was a bit of a roller coaster. Up down up and down and then finally awesome.
Tony couldn’t stop the acid, none of us could stop the acid. It would be eternal as it couldn’t really kill him, he had healing and decent hp and great resistance. But we were too low a level to break the curse.
He took out a knife and cut out his own eyes. Blinding himself.
This became a low as both character and player sulked and got pretty pissed off that about 2 or 3 games into this campaign, he felt his character was ruined. All of his plans went to shit and he was pissed.
But my brother is a stubborn guy. He flipped off the other player and used his familiar as his eyes. He delivered spells through the bird, attacks from his dog.
He changed up all of his plans. He stuck with druid, changed his feats to get blind fighting and then blind sense. He got better animal companions and used their senses as his own and then he just role played his ass off as a wise bad ass druid.
He even got chances to get his vision back, and refused. He didn’t need those eyes anymore. It was a total transformation over the course of the year and the campaign as he embraced the event and the changes. It was masterful.
And I feel like a shmuck that I can’t remember that character’s name.
Words
Last week I forgot to list my word count and where I’m at and all of that. Obviously, this week I didn’t get much work done. I started writing chapter 7 and suddenly had some heaviness in my chest and odd pains. I’ve had a cardiac event in the past and I was worried so I stopped writing and took care of myself, and it was NOT my heart.
Then everything else happened.
If you need to know my word count, well… the manuscript is sitting at 31839. That’s all the energy I have for that.
Tony was good with words as well. He got published before me, but like me he also was afraid to submit and didn’t put everything into it. His first story was published in Rifter Magazine, the magazine for Palladium RPG games. It was set in the Nightbane universe.
After that he scrapped a couple novels and then for close to a decade, he wrote the script the Fantasy Renaissance Faire that my other brothers run. Last time we talked about books and writing he was trying to convert all of those scripts into a cohesive narrative. We worked on world building and placing these events into a timeline, and using a character who is stuck wandering as an immortal with his memories erased, who keeps coming across the events of the faire every year as he tried to find his origin.
It was fun working through the problems with him, but the sessions were few and far in between and I was always sad that his enthusiasm ebbed and flowed. I really wanted to see him start to write every day, or at least have an output each week. I encouraged it. I might not be selling books yet, but I at least feel good that I make progress every week. And sometimes that progress is the only thing that helps me through a tough week. I wanted that same thing for him.
Outro
I thought this would be a short post where I just said “bad stuff happened” but this is the 2nd year anniversary of me writing these blogs. Two full years of word counts, stories, revision, and getting something done. But this was not short.
I got to talk about two of my brother’s characters, and the stories he crafted with them. And believe me, gaming is all about sharing a story. Exploring a world and character, surviving outrageous odds, over coming evil… or slaying the good (pretty rare as we seldom play the bad guys).
I was supposed to get in a write session today and celebrate my nephew’s birthday, but both of those are gonna be put off. Well, the writing is going to be put off. I don’t expect to get many words this week, just a heads up.
Thank you for reading this far.
Let the ones you love know it.
