Monday, July 21, 2014

Phantom


Phantom can be taken to mean several things.



It could be talking about The Phantom, a mask wearing comic strip superhero that got his start in the 1930s. He’s the first superhero to wear a skin tight spandex costume, and the first to wear a mask where his pupils didn’t appear. Both of those have become a standard in the comic industry.

It could be talking about Erik, the primary antagonist of the 1909 French horror novel The Phantom of the Opera.

And, I’m sure there are plenty of other things I could point too… Hell, just Google the word Phantom and see how many responses it comes up with. I did just that, and it came up with 55,700,000 results in some .44 seconds. The first three things that I saw marked was a movie named Phantom, a car by Rolls-Royce, and the Phantom Fireworks Company. After that came the Wikipedia page Phantom which is more or less a disambiguation page that gives brief description of the word and then lists the number of different things it refers too. It’s a rather extensive list.

Anyway, in the context I would look at it in, a phantom is a type of ghost, which is a type of incorporeal undead which can be used effectively in both fiction and table-top gaming. I was looking for a specific link to a creature simply titled phantom to one of the SRD (System Reference Document) websites, but the search sort of came up empty. I got a Phantom Steed, a Phantom Fungus, a Phantom Trap, but no creature simply titled Phantom, and it would be my guess that the rules for a ghost and a specter would be the same exact rules you’d come across for a phantom. In fact, for a table-top game, or a work of fiction (any genre of fiction), the best use of the term phantom would probably be to describe a corporeal foe who is very stealthy and moves about like a ghost or specter would.

I can actually sort of see a villain like that. I’d leave him undead, because that would just go well with the name (and hearken back to The Phantom of the Opera where Erik had a face that looked like a decomposing corpse), and I’d give him two magical items: a cloak of greater invisibility, because how else would someone calling themselves the phantom want to get around, and a ring of incorporiality (yes, I just made that word up) which makes it possible for this corporeal creature to move about in the exact same fashion a ghost would. Using the ring he would be able to shift from the physical plane to the ethereal plane and pass through solid objects as though he were a, for lack of a better term, ghost. Give him a pair of boots that supply a bonus to his move silently check and he’d be damn impossible to find if you weren’t using magic to look for him…

Hmm…

I might have just figured out the proper antagonist for the adventure my Dungeon Crawlers are travelling through right now…

Shit…

This is a public forum.

You saw nothing!!!

Absolutely nothing!!!

It was just a phantom, a figment of your imagination, now go back to bed…

I know that’s where I’m going.

Ryan
7-20-14

Tuesday, July 15, 2014

Pikachu, Meatloaf, and the Holy Order of the Lampshade


I love my wife. Lol. That’s all I can say. Lol.


The above list is what my Cupcake gave to me for my topics for the evening. Well, except for the Holy Order of the Lampshade, that one I came up with on my own after seeing Pikachu and Meatloaf.

So… here’s a recipe for Meatloaf, and for the sake of this blog post we’re going to replace the 1½ lbs of ground beef with 1½ lbs of ground Pikachu. That’s going to be a difficult amount to get a hold of seeing as your average Pikachu is about 3 lbs which means that there’s not that much usable meat on such a critter. So… I’m going to say that you’re probably going to need at least 10 maybe 15 Pikachu to get the correct amount of meat. Then there are the fixins. I mean, what does one serve with Pikachu Meatloaf. Is that going to be good with ketchup, like normal meatloaf? And, what about the others additives to the mix, onions, peppers, I mean there’s a lot of different options and factions to take into consideration when you’re changing the main ingredient in the dish. Seriously, I don’t think what tastes good with ground beef will taste the same with ground Pikachu…

And, that brings us to the Holy Order of the Lampshade. They’re an order of paladins that happen to have Pikachu Meatloaf as a dietary staple. Day in and day out, these holy knights suffer the consequences of eating something that has the ability to produce a static discharge equal to 25,000 volts. That’s got to mean some terrible, terrible heartburn. But, maybe it also has beneficial side effects, like some form of elemental resistance to electricity and associated Air Elementals. Maybe it even gives them the ability to produce a line of lightning as a breath weapon, so long as they use the ability within four hours of eating Pikachu Meatloaf.

I think that’d be awesome. Again, though, it would probably be a hell of a heartburn problem, one that Nexium and Prilosec can’t treat so easily.

Anyway, that’s enough out of me today.

Now, go and enjoy a healthy helping of Pikachu Meatloaf, just don’t forget the glass of milk, one produced by Miltanks.

Ryan
7-15-14

Monday, July 14, 2014

A novel… on twitter…


I’ve been struck by the strangest of ideas, one that’s got me all twitter pated.

I mentioned in a facebook post yesterday that a modern epistolary novel would be told using various social media outlets, and today the possibility came to me out of the blue. Write a novel using twitter. No one sentence can be over 140 characters, and it all has to be posted on twitter. It’s a project that could take months… starting of course with some idea to get a novel going in that direction. The last epistolary novel I read, and liked, was Dracula… so, maybe something along those lines.

A horror novel written on twitter… I don’t think it’s a breakthrough idea, but I think it might work, at least to get me a few more followers. lol.

To the drawing board!!!

Ryan
7-13-14

Sunday, July 13, 2014

Ghosts...


Alright, so I asked my lovely Cupcake for a topic and she said ghosts with a question mark at the end of it. I’m not sure why the question mark was there. I guess that’s probably an indication that she wasn’t sure, and I should take the post wherever I felt it was necessary to go. As for where that is… I couldn’t tell you. Lol.

I guess I could just start talking and see where that gets us.

Ghosts are believed to be a paranormal occurrence that is often cited as proof of an afterlife. The belief is that ghosts are the remains of a person’s soul, what was left over when their physical body died, and usually, it’s believed that ghosts are created when someone has a violent death or where they die in a way that they weren’t exactly ready for it. And, as such, their soul tries to continue to exist without the body, trapping their soul here on the material realm and preventing it from moving on to the afterlife. Even though the soul tries to remain on the material plane it isn’t one hundred percent successful. You see, ghosts are immaterial; they lack mass, and exist merely as a collection of energy that shifts between our plane (the material plane) and this other second plane called the ethereal plane. The ethereal plane kind of overlaps ours and exists basically as a field of energy that connects all life… yes… the ethereal plane is the Force.

Now, that’s pretty much what I know textbook wise about ghosts.

Have I ever had any experiences with ghosts?

I can’t rightly say that I have. Not one hundred percent to my knowledge. I’ve never seen one in person. I’ve never been in the room when a strange voice comes out from nowhere. But, that doesn’t mean I don’t believe in ghosts. Just because I’ve not seen one, doesn’t mean I’ve not felt one.

The ethereal plane, or the Force if you prefer, is something we’re all in contact with. And, as such we have the ability to “sense” certain things about it and our surroundings. That feeling you get when somebody is staring at you, and you’re not looking in their direction, that is information transferred via the ethereal plane. Or cold spots, when a suspected spirit is in the room it will drain the energy away from the point of its manifestation and anybody near that spot will feel the air get cooler. Think of it this way, heat is energy, if it’s getting cold the energy is going away. Then there’s the doom and gloom feeling. The moment when you simply know that something’s wrong, that there’s something that’s not natural in the same room as you. I’ve had that feeling many a time… usually in graveyards. This is why I stay far far away from graveyards.

Now… what else can I say about ghosts…

They make interesting enemies when it comes to table top RPGs. Why? They’re almost impossible for the PCs to hit without special weapons, and if used right, they can really force some wonderful role-playing moments. Convincing a ghost that it’s dead, and trying to help it move on to the afterlife; that would be a killer trip for anybody. And, often, the PCs will loot whatever corpses are left after a battle. This can make for an interesting recurring villain as a ghost will hunt down the person who stole from it and do whatever they can to get what was stolen back. And, in that same vane they can make excellent quest givers. I could cite examples of the latter in a wide array of games on the market today, and yes, many of those examples would be RPGs.

Now… what else… I could probably go on… but I really don’t want to. It’s getting late, and I want to go to bed now.

Gnite kids.

Ryan
7-12-14

Friday, July 11, 2014

Kickstarter


So, I started looking at Kickstarter a couple of days ago, and at first I brushed the thought aside. I was basically of the attitude that only people like LeVar Burton are able to be successful when it comes to crowdfunding. I mean really, can you tell me that LeVar Burton doesn’t have the money to do a little advertising and get a lot of people to know about it. But… But…

Then there’s this guy: Zack Danger Brown. Zack Danger Brown, if you didn’t check the link, is the guy who got on Kickstarter to make potato salad. That’s right… he’s making potato salad. His original goal for the project was ten bucks… and now he’s made somewhere in the area of $45,000 dollars. If I did the math right (and I probably didn’t) that’s an increase of 4,500%. 4,500%... Four thousand five hundred percent… I can’t… I can’t… I can’t wrap my mind around it, really I can’t.

Did he do it as a joke?

What was the point behind all of it?

I don’t know…

But, I get the feeling that if some guy can get on kickstarter to make potato salad, I can probably get on kickstarter and fund the publication of my book. (This is also another reason I decided to lengthen my project time.) And, I started looking at this and that, and I’m going to figure three months of time, writing full time instead of trying to split my time between a full time job in the exciting fast food industry and trying to get the story written while I’m dead on my feet.

And, I’ve looked at a couple of examples… maybe… just maybe… I am ready to take a step into this whole major kickstarter thing… Maybe…

Anyway, I’m going to stop flapping my jaws now and talk to you kids tomorrow.

Ryan
7/10/14