Wednesday morning I drove to the dump to get rid of a broken-up old bench for my dad. I spun the pieces as far as I could get them into the trash pit, it only took a couple of minutes. As I was climbing back into Dad’s van I noticed that the almost-past-middle-aged woman in the next parking space over was having trouble dislodging rotten chunks of drywall from the pile in the back of her junk trailer. The wood was studded with nails. I looked at my work gloves, noticed that she was working with bare hands, and decided to help.

     As I came around the van pulling on the gloves I said something like “I know you could handle this yourself, but that wood is full of nails, and I’ve got gloves, so I’m going to help you take care of it.” And then I got a look at her face, and said, “And also I know you. You’re Elme. We used to play soccer together, when I was a kid, with John Kostenbauer and all those other crazies. My name is Rob.”

     It had been a pickup soccer game for grown-ups and teenagers, back before the high school had a soccer team. I played every week and so did Elme.

     She didn’t remember me at first. It had been twenty-seven years, minimum. Then it came back to her. As we worked she filled me in on the status (grandparents), or fate (dead three years ago), of some of the people I’d liked most.

     When we finished emptying her trailer I told her that for years I’d felt terrible about the last time I’d seen her. After I’d left Springfield Oregon for college, sometime during my freshman year, my Dad took me out to a pancake house for breakfast. I had no money. Dad was picking up the check. To my surprise, Elme was our waitress, I hadn’t even known that she worked there. We said hi, we talked a minute, and then when we left Dad gave her a nickel tip.

     Twenty-seven years later, I accidentally made it up to her.

This week WotC released Primal Power, a D&D sourcebook I’m very happy with. Some of the earlier power sourcebooks may have been too focused on mechanics; as I say that, I’m pointing the finger at myself.  

     Mike Mearls led Primal Power and I think the book gets the mix right, supplementing new powers, builds and feats with pages of roleplaying advice and background stories on the primal power source and what it means to play a primal character. A lot of us usual suspects worked on the book. I ended up writing lot more than had been expected during initial design. I had a great time working on powers and on the roleplaying sections for the classes, the spirit way, and the primal spirits.

     It was certainly the best use of my anthropology degree since the years I spent testing and writing for King of Dragon Pass. And as an exercise in a different style of D&D work, as much story-writing as mechanics-crafting, it was a good warm-up for some books I’ve got coming out next year.

     I enjoyed writing Primal Power so much that I couldn’t quite let it go: I just finished a ‘Barbarian Essentials’ article that will show up on D&D Insider sometime this month. There’s only a tiny bit of story in the D&DI article, it’s mostly character-building advice followed by some feats, fun new rage powers, and a bunch of magic items.

     While working on Adventurer’s Vault 2 I’d guessed that there were some fun barbarian-focused magic items waiting to be written, but I didn’t have time to investigate. This article gave me the chance to think about what types of effects players-of-barbarians would have the most fun with. Rage and the other barbarian class features felt quite natural to elaborate in the waist slot and hands slot, magic item slots that seemed to me to be seem open to a few more fun options. When I created some highly significant magic item powers I phrased them as magical tattoos, a new magic item type the dev team helped perfect in AV2.

     Tattoos for barbarians? Furious joy.  

 You should skip this if you’d prefer to dodge personal details, the type I generally leave out of an entertainment-blog, and will mostly un-mention again after this post, unless I find something entertaining to say about it.

     A couple days ago a Conor Obert song came up on random play on my iPod and I laughed out loud at the song’s perfect timing. “I Don’t Want to Die (In a Hospital)” is pretty much exactly what my mom was thinking at that moment.

      I’d driven down to Oregon ten days ago for Mom’s surprisingly celebratory 75^th birthday. She was stronger than she’d been since her stroke, and more talkative and energetic. I’d left Oregon happy about the visit and looking forward to coming back soon.

     Well, not this soon. Mom had another stroke just a few days later. Dad has been taking care of her mostly single-handedly, and he had no choice but to get her to the hospital. And, oh, she hates it in the hospital. She wouldn’t eat. She wouldn’t talk to the speech therapist. A glower spoke volumes.

     So we’ve brought her home and enrolled her in Oregon’s version of the hospice program, a home health option for people who are expected to die within 6 months. Now that Mom is at home I guess that some elements of the situation have stabilized, but her health isn’t one of them.

     My presence has been somewhat shockingly necessary during the ongoing medical arrangements and discussions. I suppose it’s silly of me to be shocked, speaking calmly with medical folks and interpreting medical bureaucracy isn’t a skill-set the older generation trained up. My brother Eric is normally a big help at times like this but he contracted H1N1/swine flu while this was going down, so he’s had to stay away until he can be judged contagion-free.

     I’m OK, sad at first, but now past the sadness. I’ve worked through the reality that Mom is about to die, there has been enough warning. Helping my dad work through that, helping Dad survive, and at least being present for Mom, is about all I can accomplish.

     Life = good. Death = normal. It’s a good life.

I’ve got a quick D&D question and all anecdotal evidence is welcome.

I’m working on some new goodies for the sorcerer class. I talked my first thoughts over with James yesterday. 

    “I think one of the sorcerer builds is better than the others. The chaos sorcerer is too much fun.”
    “Only for a certain type of player,” said James.

    “You mean the kind of player who plays sorcerers? Look, when I played a sorcerer, of course I played a chaos/wild magic sorcerer. But so did the other guy in my group. And so did the player in the next campaign. And you, when you played a sorcerer, what did you play James?”

    “…A chaos sorcerer.”

I designed the basic class features for all four current sorcerer builds but I seem to love one of the children more than the others. I love the chance to spray chaos bolts around the battlefield until you roll odd, random access to powerful effects when you roll even, the feel of a character who knows he’s going to have an impact, he’s just not sure which type of impact, and how many there will be.

I’ve never played with or run a game for a sorcerer who wasn’t a chaos/wild magic sorcerer. I’d welcome both anecdotal corroboration and anecdotal contradiction. I’m not saying how I plan to filter the feedback through the design engine. It may not even be something I can make use of in this article. But the feedback will help frame the approach to the class in the future.

This blog started a couple years ago with the story of how I regained color vision. Here’s the link if you missed it the first time. http://robheinsoo.livejournal.com/775.html

 Over PAX weekend I confirmed something I'd half-suspect--my color sense fades if I don't use it 'properly.'

 We had Eric Lang as a houseguest most of PAX weekend. We played a lot of games, including my first-ever game of Puerto Rico. I’d never wanted to teach Lisa since the ‘little brown settlers’ that drive the plantation economy push my buttons, and if they push my game-reject button, I figured they’d push Lisa’s. With Eric as guide, we pushed past the brown settler tokens and had a good three-player game, with Lisa winning what I’d thought was a duel between me and Eric.

 Midgame, the color red joined brown as the game’s notable color. Eric said something about “Look at the red number on the counter,” and I said, “That number is red?”

 I picked the counters up. Looked at them closely. I could only see that the numbers were dark. Not red. Uh-oh. I’d been thinking that colors, in general, seemed muted, maybe, but I’d been setting the thought aside.

 The next day at work I turned on the Windows Media Player ‘alchemy’ visualizer while I was working. It had been a long time since I’d had it on. It started off muted and I thought, “Oh. Yeah. This is like it was before. I’m not really seeing color well, am I?”

 I typed on an MS Word file on the left side of my screen with the Windows Media Player program running on the right side. Thirty minutes later the visualizer POPPED, all of a sudden everything got bright. Wow! It was a mini-recreation of my original color-vision event. Instead of two or three muted colors (blues, yellows, some greens, reddish maybe) I had the full spectrum roaring at me.

 When I got home I dug into the Puerto Rico box for the counters I hadn’t been able to perceive properly. Sure enough, now the red numbers were obvious. No way to see them as anything other than red.

 So now I know that the condition is somehow ongoing. I’d suspected something like this might be happening because of an event in Hawaii a couple years ago when I’d been unable to see red flowers on the trail. I’d responded by turning on my laptop computer that night to watch the visualizer program for awhile, eventually saying “See? No problem, I can see all the colors.”

   But now I have to admit that I seem to require ongoing color therapy from the visualizer’s mix of rapidly flashing and intermingling colors.

 Which means my condition is possibly a lot more interesting for a brain scientist than I’d thought. I’m going to mention the condition to a neuroscientist or two.

   In the meantime, I'm using the visualizer as much as I can. The world remains entirely colorful, and I'm grateful.

I’ve been off the blog path for ages again, mostly because of enjoyable work, far-ranging travel, and up to three soccer games a week. I return with this small offering, courtesy once again of my wife Lisa, whose banter exceeds my own.

A few days ago, Lisa said…

God’s Just Not That into You

Oh! The blaze!

Personally, I see God’s Just Not That into You as a coffee table book, a photographic record ranging between Sarajevo and Cambodia and the emphysema ward, with stops on dark streets in-between. Subject matter handled beautifully by one of my favorite books, Annie Dillard’s For the Time Being.

To be more true to Lisa’s style, I’m humming a few bars of God’s Just Not That into You as a country-western song, low baritone, sweet and true.
 

Well of course I’d say that. But don’t take it from me. Take it from my tow-truck operator.

Our blue Prius is presently in that special limbo reserved for cars that have not yet been ruled to be totaled.

Last night I was alone in the car, driving home with dinner when a black car streaked past a stop sign at an intersection where I had the right of way, no stop sign on a major through-street. My guess is that the people in the other car were looking at the fire engines working on a house fire halfway down the next block, but I’ll never be sure because they didn’t fess up. Instead they went into Jerry Springer mode as soon as I’d tumbled out of the door that would still open, on the passenger side.

     They said, “We stopped at that stop sign. And then you just came out of nowhere.” A number of eye-witnesses were as irritated by this lie as I was. One family of witnesses walked down the block to get cops from the fire, then stuck around to tell the cops that they’d seen the car blow past the stop sign. So they got a citation and I got to walk home.

Aside from some whiplash, I’m fine.

This morning we went to empty our maybe-totaled car before it gets taken away by the insurance people. As I was filling out paperwork in the towing office, the woman behind the counter started laughing at the notes the guy who’d handled the car the night before had written on the intake form. He’d written, “The back seat of the car was covered in D&D miniatures. I cleaned them up.”

And he had. He’d rounded up the various huge-mini boosters that had been scattered in the back, packed them into one big box and sealed the lid.

It’s so sweet I’m going to take them a few minis to say thank you.

To take a small slice out of a very busy week, over the weekend I saw dear friends who have been living in Italy. Unlike most in our circles, Chris and his wife Lucia both smoke like fiends, leading to a wonderful quote from the ten year old at the house who they were staying with, who walked into the house, took a sniff and said “Oh. It smells like Paris.”

      Still in the Portland phase of the week, I played soccer in the pickup game that my friend Mark organizes for the African refugee kids in SE Portland. Somehow the kids decided that my name was ‘Murdoch.’ Meanwhile, Chris, a man both tall and broad, immediately got the name ‘Giant,’ leading to another immortal line, uttered by an energetic tackler less than half of Chris’ size: “I’m not afraid of Giant!”

      And if you think I’m crazy about soccer, this week I heard about a new baby arriving in a portion of my extended family, a baby named “Timber James,” which gets better when you know that the recently retired mascot of the Portland Timbers, who fired up a chainsaw whenever the Timbers scored, was named Timber Jim. (Yes, Nicole, this family has even one-upped YOU.)

      Meanwhile, also in Portland, we learned a new euphemism, in which ‘working the night shift at the old folks’ home’ actually means that you work as a stripper. Insert your well-oiled dollar-bill jokes here. And when we tried to pronounce Blackwater’s newly rebranded name, Xe, we agreed that it must be pronounced like a death rattle.

      And speaking of learning, two friends, who will remain nameless, learned rather striking lessons this week, lessons I could not have imagined needed to be taught. One friend, when I pointed out a vulture flying overheard, was shocked that such an animal would be found anywhere near humans. As the conversation progressed, it became clear that the only thing she knew about vultures was that they survived on a diet of human corpse flesh. Not to be outdone, a second friend was several minutes into a conversation about people traveling in Transylvania and Romania before she admitted that she had always thought that Transylvania was in the United States, and that she’d had no idea it was in another continent until the conversation began winding through Europe.