schneefink

Six more recs from Yuletide 2018 – better late than never.

The Realms of the Immortals by nirejseki (Tortall, Immortals Quartet)
57k, Rikash/Daine
Summary: Rikash knew he was signing up for a lot when he became Lord of the Stone Tree Stormwing nation. But joining forces with the extremely dangerous, mysterious, and oddly intriguing Veralidaine Sarrasri, the famous Stormwing Killer, on a road trip through the Divine Realms to assassinate those immortals stupid enough to risk the destruction of the world by working with Chaos? That's - unexpected.
Why I love it: I do this rarely, but when I finished reading this fic I immediately read it again and then had to leave a comment on every chapter pointing out my favorite parts because there were so many. The characters and their relationships are fantastic, the plot and adventure and action are great, and it's frequently hilarious. It's been a while since I read the books so I'm not completely sure how much of the worldbuilding is original, but the Stormwing culture etc. are also very well done.
Canon knowledge required: probably yes

( + Temeraire, Punisher, Venom, French History RPF, Sengoku Jidai RPF )

Soo it's past midnight and I haven't eaten anything except chocolate muffins today or done anything else productive, which is bad, but I did write almost 2k of an Inheritance Trilogy Harry Potter AU, which... happened? First chapter of probably several. Idk. I thought about a dozen times that Deka Arameri is such a Slytherin, and somehow Hermione was watching him, and then this happened.

Kingdom of Magic (Inheritance Trilogy/Harry Potter)
Hogwarts AU, WIP
Summary: The Arameri have always been in Slytherin. Nobody knows what precisely their ambitions are.

ETA: After a 1am dinner I feel very silly about this whole day. Ah well. I just need to write ~6 job applications in the next four days, it'll be fine somehow.

I went to the weekly anti-government protest today and a woman there had a sign saying "Don't you think he looks tired?" Which I loved, and I hope that at the anti-government protests in the UK (there must be some, right?, with how astonishingly and dangerously incompetent their government is) there are a LOT of those.

After I recently read N.K.Jemisin's "The Kingdom of Gods," I decided to reread the first two books of the Inheritance Trilogy and then also the novella and short stories.

( The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms )

( The Broken Kingdoms )

( The Awakened Kingdom )

( Shades in Shadow )

I finally ordered the pretty paperback version of The Kingdom of Gods and then I'll reread that, and in the meantime maybe 100K Kingdoms again. (I want to read more books but I don't want to leave this world yet, it's a problem.)
(Latest story idea: Shahar Arameri accidentally travelling back in time and meeting High Priestess Shahar Arameri, while Itempas is staying with her and Shahar1 is raising their demon child, and Shahar2 knows what will soon happen and tries to prevent it. She'll probably call on Sieh, and… okay Sieh will probably just arrange for Shahar1 to have a deadly "accident", that would solve so many problems.)

My resolution for February is to go for a walk every day before noon. Doesn't have to be long, 20 minutes is fine, and earlier is better. I can only skip days if LB okays it. (Like tomorrow, because we're meeting up at noon and will go for a walk later anyway.) Today at least it already seemed to be pretty effective, I had a relatively good day, so I have high hopes.

D&D tomorrow, and I have nothing prepared except that they will fight against a lot of undead, but hopefully that will be enough. ...except they're really well prepared and the castle is not that big... Maybe I should add a couple of ghosts. Or traps. Or both.

Ugh, I'm just procrastinating on going to bed again. Good night.

Well today was a wasted day, but I did finish catching up with Young Justice so far and enjoyed it.

But. Why the FUCK does Lady Shiva's costume have a boob window. What the fuck. Why is this necessary in twenty-fucking-nineteen. I don't care if she has a boob window in the comics, this is an adaption and you can change things.

( more the first half of s3 )

Sadly the second half of the season doesn't come out until June :(

I have Failed Adulting today - I have a new haircut, but didn't eat, or do anything else productive. (Except some D&D prep I probably won't need for two weeks yet.) It's almost midnight and I've only eaten three slices of bread, that's bad, but cooking right now is a bit late - on the other hand, if I don't eat anything now, that would also be bad.
Whyy do I always regress so fast when I don't have external structures to cling to. Arrrgh.

Success, I have eaten something! I forgot that a) I did manage to go shopping today, so I have bread and stuff at home again, and b) I didn't actually need to cook something. Sponge brain.
(Hm, no, bad phrasing because sponge is often used as something that can absorb a lot, which mine today definitely isn't. Seaweed is a nice image, the appropriate amount of *pflatsch*, but "seaweed brain" is Percy Jackson. Pudding brain? Nah, sounds too delicious. ...clearly in its current state my brain isn't up to the task of naming itself.)

My brain feels like puree, which makes sense because I had two lectures today and did a lot of studying (and I'm trying very hard not to think about why I couldn't have started doing that last week because that's not productive.) So normally I don't like talking about things that I barely know anything about, but I feel like rambling right now (also because I still have things to do later.)

Because of a Yuletide fic (still one rec post to come) I watched Youtube videos about Sengoku Jidai, the feuding samurai warlords period of Japan, and then read a couple of wikipedia articles, and it's fascinating. So much backstabbing! So many alliances and betrayals! Everyone had so many kids, the better to use them as political pawns, and everyone was related to everyone and still had them killed sometimes, must have been fun family dynamics. Humans are so weird. And terrible. History is horrifying and fun.
I don't think I'll delve much deeper into this period because it's, well, not very uplifting, but it was a fascinating glimpse. (Though if you have any recs for not-completely-tragic novels about some of the historical figures, in English...)

(Btw, the author of "Tales of the Otori" was a lot more blatant in borrowing from history than I'd suspected. Yaegahara, really.)

I have three exams next week, and I have done basically nothing yesterday and today. *headdesk* Tomorrow a friend is visiting for brunch, which means I still need to plan brunch and should probably clean up a bit, and there's this to do and that to do and instead I've been procrastinating. Stupid.

Young Justice is back! Looks like three episodes every week, nice. ( Spoilers for the first three )

I think I'm getting better at this DMing thing! I was very nervous about yesterday's session because I felt I was way underprepared (also because the players could have gone in a number of different directions), and I did have to improvise a lot but it worked out fine. My players decided to split the party, but I tried to switch between the groups often enough so that nobody got bored, even the one guy who decided to be sensible and thus did not get into trouble.

One thing I'm quite proud of in my set-up is that my players are genuinely wary of the city guard. In the previous campaign I played in, as well as the campaigns I watched/listened to, the police was rarely a big factor, but here the party spends a lot of time in one city and the city guard is mostly competent, and half the party got into trouble and got an official reprimand in the first session and now have to regularly check in with their parole officer. It's harder to lie to the guard if they have truth and mind-reading spells :P So now every once in a while the party debates doing something and then decides against it because it would be illegal, which means many things are more challenging, which is great. The side-effect is that I constantly have to think about which things/spells are legal or not, and sometimes I almost forget (I got so used to Detect Thoughts that I almost forgot that using it without license and warning is definitely not allowed – to be fair my players could easily have guessed that and I don't have to warn them – so now they have to hope their parole officer doesn't find out…)

I thought that would be it, as far as complications with the guard go, because they were being careful. Then yesterday one of the rogues tried to break into a suspect's house, failed, and instead of wondering if there might be an Alarm or something similar she hung around for fifteen more minutes trying to figure out a way in. And when the city guard arrived they would have just asked her if she'd seen anything suspicious, if she hadn't when asked what she was doing here replied that she was looking for the very house the guard knew someone had just tried to break into. So they wanted to interrogate her as a witness at the guard station, but she remembered the truth and mind-reading spells and freaked out and ran away. She did escape but she wasn't disguised so now the city guard is looking her. And the party has a friendly contact with the city guard but now that just means he'll definitely recognize her and know who her associates are. *facepalm* That wasn't the plan. At least she didn't actually manage to break in, and she wasn't planning to steal anything just to look for information, but there will still be consequences.

(I wonder if the party will think to ask the Thieves' Guild for help with that. They decided to ask the Guild for help next time, even though they hate them, because they feel like they're stuck with their investigation – they found a person likely part of the kidnapping but she escaped – so now I have to decide what the Thieves' Guild knows, and is willing to share. Also I remembered that I was so wrapped up in their current quest that I forgot to leave more hints about the bigger plot in the background, I'll have to pay more attention to that.)

By the way, I invented a house rule that I'm very fond of by now: There are multiple people who could and conceivably might Scry on the party, but if I asked them for Will saves each time the players would know and it's hard to ignore that kind of meta knowledge. So now at the beginning of each session I ask every player to give me five Will saves for their character and then use these when necessary. It works as intended and is very convenient.

Do you have any favorite house rules?