“They just want you to think they’re high brow,” said Mumford. Normally his crazy stories were easy to dismiss, but we were camping right near the edge of known elf territory, and so the three of us listened closely. We knew exceedingly little of elves.
World Building: Unnatural Disasters
The Temporal Storms From Elder Mayhew’s Existential Threats, Their Signs and Symptoms: The first truly definitive sign that a temporal storm is brewing is the appearance of the heralds. These men and women appear as if from nowhere, usually speaking foreign languages and typically in an advanced state of confusion. They are not heralds in the […]
World Building: Missing Persons
The Lost City of Potyr In 861, the results of the census of the Golden Empire revealed an anomaly; the population had decreased markedly for the first time in more than a hundred years. The drop could not be accounted for by war, famine, or disease. It seemed very much like someone had simply counted […]
Lost City
“The flag has too many crosses on it,” said Alexei. “What do you mean?” asked Feodor, barely looking up from his work. “It’s got eleven crosses. There’s one for each of the city-states that founded the Empire, you know that.” “Look at the flag,” said Alexei. “It’s got twelve crosses.” They were sitting in a […]
World Building: The Labyrinth
The Forest of Lost Time Until you try to leave, the Forest of Lost Time seems like any other forest of the mid-latitudes of Kerwin. The trees are tall, the undergrowth is sparse, and the light filters gently through the leaves. It is an idyllic place, marred only by the fact there there is no […]
World Building: Special Rules
The Time Machine The defining rule break of this world is the existence of time machines. These work according to some very specific rules, which in turn result in all of the divergences from our world (it’s otherwise the same as the real world). I should warn beforehand that this is a fairly large amount […]
World Building: Language
The Uttalak tribesmen are a curious sort, for they have no tongues. First contact with them has been lost to time, and it can only be imagined what trouble that must have been, for while the Uttalak (literally, speech-lacking in Miaran) are able to understand speech, they don’t use it themselves, and of course when first encountered […]
The Last Christmas, Chapter 5
Charles sat in his private viewing room, with Matilda right beside him.
“We’re outside of time, right?” asked Charles. “The viewer shows us everything that happened this year, but it’s not actually the end of the year yet. How does that work?”
“We extrapolate forward,” said Matilda. “We take the world as it was and simulate the whole thing forward from the moment that we left time.”
The Last Christmas, Chapter 4
The next morning, the very first stop that Charles made – after another enormous and varied breakfast – was to the List Room. Matilda stood by his side. He’d asked for Kelvin as well, but had been told that he was unavailable. He hadn’t actually thought that elves could be unavailable, but it was another data point to add to his model of how the North Pole worked.
The Last Christmas, Chapter 3
Charles awoke in the morning feeling more refreshed than he had in years. The bed was soft and fluffy, and he experienced a moment of confused bliss as he lay beneath the warm sheets, until he remembered that he was Santa Claus, and that the previous person to wear that mantle had been a monster.
The Last Christmas, Chapter 2
Though he was tired, he immediately went to the viewer. The controls were mechanical and extremely tactile, though smooth and polished. Charles supposed that there must be a team of elves which built and repaired the devices, unless they were simply conjured from grey blobs like the toys were.
The Last Christmas, Chapter 1
Charles wore the red and white suit, which didn’t fit his thin frame. The old man had told him that it would, with time, but Charles had always been as skinny as a stick. Still, if he grew fat in the coming weeks, it would be far down the list of miraculous things that needed solving.
Charting Advantage and Disadvantage in D&D 5th Edition
There are a lot of things that I really like about 5th edition, and one of those things is advantage and disadvantage. In D&D, the primary conflict resolution mechanic is the rolling of a twenty-sided die. Roll the d20, and see if you hit some target number. Modifiers to that roll (and to the target […]
Odds of surviving unconsciousness in D&D 5th Edition
So the new edition of D&D came out today, or at least the Basic Rules, which is more than enough to begin actually playing. When you get hit for enough damage to knock you down to 0 hp, you need to make death saving throws. If you roll a 20, you are back to 1hp […]
State of My Various Writing Projects, Pt. 2
That this subject needs a part two is surely proof something – either self-doubt or my inability to stay engaged with something for very long. Here are the other things sitting in my various Google Docs folders: The Time Detectives I love time travel. It’s one of my favorite fictional concepts. The elevator pitch is […]