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Bitten by a Different Kind of Bug
My kids are like anybody’s kids – if they don’t have something to do they get bored. Bored kids don’t like being bored and it seems like a flip of coin between doing something constructive versus something undesirable. My kids like the pets too much to shave them and they’ve been brought up with a respect of sharp objects, explosive, and things that burn. Mostly because they’ve seen what happened to me when I stabbed, burned, or tried to blow myself up. Experience, it turns out, is a great teacher.
So that leaves being obnoxious and fighting with one another. Well, in my desire to put a stop to that I pulled them aside one day and gave them some paper and their dice bags. It’s been a while since we broke out Dungeons and Dragons but my son had told me he felt he was older now and could handle it better. In an effort to make them feel a little more invested I made them into their characters. The familiar trope of you fall asleep in your bed and wake up in a pile of straw kind of thing. You and I know it’s overdone but they’re young, they didn’t know any better.
I don’t have the time to plot of elaborate adventures and campaigns these days, unfortunately, so I went with stuff right out of the box. The adventure is called The Lost Mine of Phandelver, or LMOP by anyone who knows it. We tried it once before, briefly, but they’d pretty much forgotten all about it. This time things are different.
For example, we’ve got my daughter, the 12 year old human girl swinging around a great axe (hey, it’s fantasy). Instead of reacting to her brother she can now channel her barbarian rage into slaughtering evil monsters. Then there’s the almost 10 year old boy wearing a chain shirt, shield, and a magical long sword he recovered after they struck a deal with the scary one-eyed monster beneath the manor house. (what deal? Well, they agreed to feed him all the bodies they found in the rest of the cellars beneath the manor)
My daughter’s at the wonderful pre-teen age where she’s not allowed to show excitement about anything, yet she asks about when we can play next every time. Likewise my son, after we finished this weekend, was eagerly looking forward to playing next Saturday. I had to remind him we had plans that night, so he was quick to offer up Friday night instead. That might not work either, but I promised him we’d get something in.
One of my initial concerns when we started this process with only two players was that they’d get steamrolled unless I really pulled my punches. Well… they found a way around that. I did introduce two powerful NPCs that showed them the ropes and helped them survive a goblin ambush. They turned that around quickly though – one captured goblin soon became their unwilling guide. By the time they cleared out the goblin hideout the goblin became their new scout / servant. They’re even paying him as a henchman! I’m not sure if it helps that he’s only a little shorter than they are, or if they just like the voice I use for him.
With Bokbok’s help (he’s the goblin) they’ve gone on to defeat the Redbrands (thugs and bandits that controlled the town of Phandalin) and accomplish a few other minor tasks. Nobody can believe these kids are accomplishing this, but they’re rising to local heroes quickly. Just as unlikely are the goblin servants (they’ve got 2 now, the second being a rather cowardly goblin named Droop who sounds a little like Dobbie from Harry Potter and has devoted himself to being their cook, cleaner, and helping them in any non-combat role he can).
Last night they even struck out for the run down castle that the goblins came from. Bokbok helped again by mentioning he’d heard of a secret way into the castle. Some searching uncovered the way in and they managed to dispatch the goblin king’s guards before taking a wrong turn into a tower that had been turned into a pen for a hungry and enraged owlbear. What’s an owlbear? Glad you asked! Imagine a full size grizzly bear and give him the face of an owl. Yes, it’s a magically inspired creation and very vicious, especially when hungry and abused.
Well, with the door thrown open the owlbear rose up and screeched at them before charging. My son leapt out of the way. My daughter…well, she’s an animal lover. She spread her arms wide, blocking the door fully, and invited it in for cuddles. The scars from its beak and claws won’t be fading any time soon as she was dropped to the floor in a puddle of her own blood.
My son rallied and tried to smack the owlbear on the back of the head with the flat of his sword. His reasoning was that they could knock it out and take it prisoner to tame it. When I pointed out how ferocious and savage it was he countered with, “Is it a girl? She’ll look cute with a pink ribbon in her hair.”
Bokbok knew better and the goblin dragged my daughter out of the way. Free at last, the owlbear charged out of the castle into parts unknown and they then had to stablize and nurse my daughter back to health.
A few rooms later they discovered the goblin king (a Bugbear – kind of sasquatch like for the non-fantasy crowd). He had a pet wolf and evil elf working with him. They boy charged the king and Bokbok had to fight the elf. That left the wolf against my daughter. Her heart melted when she heard he had a name (Snarls). The wolf attacked and she tried to calm him while she herself was covered in her own blood from her prior injuries. On the second round the wolf lunged for her throat but she slipped to the side and wrapped her arms around him. She held tight and found the magical spot behind his ear, scratching it just so. In seconds his rear leg was kicking and he mellowed into her. Yes, she rolled a 20 on her animal handling. The wolf was now her pet.
When Klarg, the goblin king, later smacked the wolf with his mighty morning star on the side and made him yip she went into her fiercest barbarian rage yet! The kids, goblin, and wolf survived the day with no fudging of rolls from me. They’d taken their weakness of only having 2 members for their adventuring group and recruited others to help – a goblin and a feral wolf. I’m a little scared to see what they do next!
My son wants a pet now too. He’s trying to talk me into a giant war turtle. When I laughed at the thought he reminded me, “Hey, this is fantasy!”
I’d ask what have I done, but I have to admit, I’m impressed.
Oh, and by the way, yes I’m still writing. Just so damn busy with work and life it’s hard to keep up my pace. Put out a couple more chapters last week / weekend for my next Dark Universe novel though! I’m thinking of titling it Confliction. It’s over 25,000 words in already, but there’s no quick and easy end in sight. Good for a quality book, bad for me wanting to get it into your hands sooner!
To learn more about Jason Halstead visit his website to read about him, sign up for his newsletter, or check out some free samples of his books at http://www.booksbyjason.com.
Fixed!
I used to play a tabletop role playing game called Shadowrun many, many years ago. We’re talking 1st and 2nd edition years ago, which is a lot. I think I may have even enjoyed it more than Dungeons and Dragons, but only one of my friends showed similar interests and we parted ways after our glory days of high school.
With that admission put out there, Shadowrun provided a lot of inspiration for me over the years in my creative endeavors. It’s flavored many of my books, including my various Dark Earth books, as well as my Wanted series, my Vitalis series, and even my Dark Universe series. But I felt like I wasn’t really doing Shadowrun justice even thought I thoroughly enjoyed each and every one of those books I wrote.
So I looked back into Shadowrun a few months ago and holy cow, things had changed! There were computer games written for it (I sampled them and they didn’t do much for me), and 3 more versions had come and gone. Naturally, I had to do some digging and I picked up what I could of the most recent edition of Shadowrun – 5th edition. It was nearly overwhelming trying to wrap my head around it all!
But my love of the setting conquered the rule books and, by the time it was all said and done, I knew I had to do something with it. I don’t have the resources (time, firstly, but also interested players and / or a game master) for role playing these days, but I do have a rabid imagination. So I created characters that were begging to be made real. And once I had them, I had to tell their stories. Turns out their back stories were intertwined, and the details unveiled themselves as I wrote the novel you’re about to read.
With all that out of the way, here is my first Shadowrun novel: Fixed. I submitted the first chapter to the current creators of Shadowrun and received a favorable response, even though they passed on it for now. I was invited to send any future works their way for consideration, but I may have satisfied my urge to write about Shadowrun with this novel.
So what you have here is a work of fan-fiction. Because I cannot and will not charge for it, it does not have a beautiful cover like my other books do. It also has no professional editing like my other books. If you do find mistakes, I encourage you to let me know so I can fix them.
I hope you like reading it as much as I did writing it. When you’re done if you haven’t already tried them, I encourage you to check out my other books. Some of those are free as well, so start there and see what you like! They can be found virtually anywhere ebooks are sold, and several are available on Amazon in print.
Enjoy, chummers, and stay whiz!
Click here to download the pdf for Fixed
-Jason Halstead
The Family That Stays Together Slays Together
This is an update on The Goblin Queen. From the story perspective, it’s getting there. I’m over 60,000 words into it and (I think) only have a few chapters left. Getting to those chapters is proving troublesome though.
I’ve been ridiculously busy as summer is upon me. Work is increasingly hectic of late and there’s talk of saddling me with more responsibilities (which may or may not be welcome, depending on how it plays out). I also spent the last couple of months cutting (dieting / exercising to focus on losing fat but keeping muscle) and did a good job of it, now I’m trying to build more strength and put muscle back on which means eating more and working out 5x a week, with at least 3 days having both an am and a pm workout in them. It takes a lot of time, effort, and discipline to do it right and not lose everything I gained when I cut the weight in the first place.
Oh, and we’ve got a new camper we bought this spring so we’re trying to get that out at least once a month and last weekend was one of those weekends. My son has baseball games and practices after school, and there’s been lots of house / yard work that has to be done.
All in all, everyday problems everyone has to deal with. For the most part, it’s simple enough to knock those things out. We haven’t had a chance to crack open any more D&D sessions since my last write up, but I’m happy to say that my wife is going to join us. After all, the family that slays together, stays together! Hopefully soon we can get her a character put together and continue the adventures. They’ve got much to do to finish off their introductory session, and then after that I have some really fun ideas to keep them invested and furthering their careers as fantasy heroes.
This is supposed to be about The Goblin Queen, but I can’t stop myself from sharing the idea I stole from some random reddit posts – I’m going to set up alternate versions of the Disney Princesses as a coven of witches spread throughout Kroth for the players to try to take out. They’ll meet a witch hunter when they finish their current story arc and he’ll enlist their aid (hopefully). If not, I’ll find another way to encourage them to do that. Then again, it is D&D and the possibilities are endless – maybe they’ll end up heading off in another direction entirely if they choose. Not a problem if they do, I’ll have the evil Princesses on standby.
Now back to The Goblin Queen. The good guys just triumphed over evil in the book! Yay! Except the victory didn’t turn out to be a battle like they expected, nor were they prepared for what happened when they struck down the enemy that had consigned their souls to the dark magic of the Order. Even worse was learning what comes after – they’d fallen into a trap that they might have survived, but at a cost that could be the lives of thousands of innocent people that they know and care for. The Goblin Queen has played her part, but the final victory they need rests in the outnumbered hands of a desperate paladin willing to risk everything for their faith.
Oh, the cover is coming along nicely too. We’re still trying to figure out the art work portion of it, but I’m in love with the design we’ve got so far. I’m trying for more of a cover reminiscent of Child of Fate instead of the recent covers in The Serpent’s War series that some people found harsh or disturbing (I loved those too, but generally what I like and what most people like are not the same).
Now then, back to work! This book isn’t going to finish itself.
To learn more about Jason Halstead visit his website to read about him, sign up for his newsletter, or check out some free samples of his books at http://www.booksbyjason.com.