The Snow Falls

Well, it’s snowing again. It’s not supposed to be anything like the blizzard of a few weeks ago, though the snowfall estimates have been revised upwards a couple of times. Also, this time we have hot water.

Yesterday I got a summons for jury duty, reporting middle of next month. I’ll be mentioning that a few times here because things don’t become really real for me unless I blog about them.

I wasn’t intending to do two D&D supplements a row as part of my 40 things in 40 weeks, but the response to Clerics of Lesser Domains has been better than I’d expected, so I’m working on its follow-up, Warlocks of Other Powers. The Warlock is the class I have given the most thought to and actually have the most material already built up for. The highlights for the Warlock manual will include:

• New patrons, including a force of universal balance, a soul trapping object, a vampire lord, and primal spirits.
• New pact boons, including an all-seeing eye and a spirit companion.
• New invocations, including ones representing the things people typically sell their souls for (long life, worldly comforts, etc.)
• New cantrips, including eldritch strike, an alternative to eldritch blast that makes the pact of the blade a bit more viable as a melee build.
• New backgrounds, including Astrologer, Diabolist (a student of forbidden lore), Fortune’s Favorite, Spirit Talker, and Well-Kept. Fortune’s Favorite and Well-Kept might be taken by anyone (as can any background), but with a Warlock can be used to represent other, non-adventuring aspects of an eldritch pact.

If the primal spirit patron, spirit companion boon, and spirit talker background have you thinking of a 4E class that did not make the grade for a 5E conversion, you’re not far off.

I might have a few other [Classes] of [Adjective] [Nouns]s in me, although none of them are likely to come together for a while and I don’t plan on forcing it for any class that doesn’t seem ripe for such an expansion.

I’m not abandoning my own game design aspirations, just looking to get paid while I work on them. Actually, the release of the SRD 5.0 has shifted them a bit, as I really think the core rules for 5E are a great light chassis to build on.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write. Please leave any comments there.

Flash Fiction: The Stars Don’t Fall Here Anymore

The Stars Don’t Fall Here Anymore

By Alexandra Erin

 

The stars don’t fall here anymore. Sometime, one night three summers ago, they started giving our planet a miss.

What’s that old joke? They’re called meteorites when they hit the earth because if they missed they’d be meteor-wrongs.

Well, something went wrong, somewhere, because the stars no longer fall here anymore. If you go out into the countryside on a clear night during the Perseids or Leonids, you can watch them streak across the sky and then zig-zag off, pull a u-turn, bugger off to go streak across some other sky.

There’s less and less of them every time, too. It’s like word gets around, somehow.

No one knows how to feel about it. On the one hand, maybe it means we can all stop worrying about ever going the way of the dinosaurs, but on the other hand, maybe we shouldn’t be worrying about death from above when there’s something so wrong with the ground under our feet that rocks and dust and chunks of stuff from everywhere else have started taking a pass on it.

The stars don’t fall here anymore. No one knows why, or how, or what to do with this information, and now the stars in the sky have started winking out, one by one, a few hundred over the course of the night every night. The moon, bound by tidal forces to show her same face for billions of years, has started to inch around. Some people say she’s started revolving, but I think deep down we all know she’s turning her back on us.

Even the sun is a little colder.

The scientific implications would be profound, if only anyone could make sense of them. There are no answers to be had anywhere, no one to turn to and ask them. It all just keeps happening without any explanation, as if the whole entire universe is telling us, “You know what you did.”

The worst thing is, they’d probably be right, except it’s so hard to narrow it down.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write. Please leave any comments there.