Posted by SandvichMan 4 years ago Report

Oh my god, yes! Thank you so much, you never knew how long I’ve waited for this moment!

Btw, sorry if I sounded rude just now.

[ Reply ]

Posted by IvesBentonEaton 4 years ago Report

No worries. I'm several paragraphs into the next story, "A Snake and Her Girl", and should have a sequel to "Dick" finished in the not-too-distant future.

Of course, this story and those two were about where they were for months and months, too. Sometimes the writing just…goes away. :/

[ Reply ]

Posted by 1ring42 4 years ago Report

Its good to see you back!

[ Reply ]

Posted by IddlerItaler 7 months ago Report

I like the description of Spellkeep. Some scenery porn along with the regular porn doesn't hurt. :^) Well, there wasn't a lot of porn in this chapter, but Onawella teasing Zōēā about her oncoming fate was rather erotic. I love me a good gloating villainess, even if she got thwarted in moments.

Rat people are cute. I assume hraat is the name of their species? It's curious how Atolha's first line is in broken speech, while she speaks more eloquently at the dinner afterwards. Maybe the panic had sabotaged her language skills, or she had a better translation or eloquency spell cast on her off-screen.

That lucky rod makes me think back to last chapter's afterword, where step 3 involved Zōēā getting lucky and summoning 3 arrowhawks.

“Your mother may be the only person more loquacious than mine.” That's a pretty cold line on Drandel's part, considering how worried sick and distressed both mother and daughter must've been after getting no news about each other for so long, and the recent events. "Your mother just gave me a list of everyone who died in your tribe. Boy, she sure is talkative!"

Huh, so the answer to what had caused the disappearances was a horde of mind-controlled black slimes. This is a fun coincidence since in one of my stories the protagonist ran into an elven tribesman and saved him from a black slime which they then fought together.

Just casually walking back from the Velnes to Spellkeep... Zoea made quite the progression.

[ Reply ]

Posted by IvesBentonEaton 7 months ago Report

• Well, when one has a permanent telepathic bond with one’s lover who is standing next to a good friend who is a pretty high level wizard/arcane professor, the response time is…rather quick.
  
• “Hratt” is, indeed, the species name. I sort of “borrowed” the name (with a pair of transposed letters) from a similar species in Chess with a Dragon by David Gerrold. And yes, her second language degrades when she is frightened.
  
• That “lucky rod” is a greater metamagic rod of empowerment straight out of the Dungeon Master’s Guide (version 3.5), page 236. The D&D game I played with the character who Zōēā is based on got one from one of the treasures in that game. (It might have been better in the hands of the party wizard, but I knew he was leaving the game soon and I didn’t want a 73,000 gold piece item to leave the party with him, so I called dibs. In the last session of the game, I used that toy along with boots of temporal acceleration (from the Magic Item Compendium, page 79—basically, a two-round time stop once a day), a ring of the beast (Complete Champion, page 141) and the Greenbound Summoning feat (Lost Empires of Faerûn, page 8—basically allows any animal summoned by a summon nature’s ally spell to appear with the greenbound template applied—in short, the animal becomes a plant creature with laundry list of really nasty buffs) to summon 1d3 greenbound tyrannosauruses—twice—using the rod each time to get 50% more of them. I rolled 2 each time to get a total of six. The battle was over shortly after that with three T-rexes gnawing on the boss monster and the other three chasing minions around the battlefield and snapping them up.
  
• I don’t write my characters to be absolutely perfect human (or whatever) beings. For wealthy individuals (like business magnates and dragonslayers) they will often purchase what I call a “life assurance policy”— basically a prepaid agreement, usually with a particular allied temple, to cast true resurrection if the “policy holder” meets an early demise (i.e., something other than old age). Death for them is more of a bothersome expense. If it had been brought up to him, he would have been embarrassed and apologetic. It’s not deliberate callousness on his part.
  
• The black slimes are called “feeding darknesses” and are basically renamed black puddings from D&D.
  
• Well, more like rode, and they could take a few shortcuts. Both druids and rangers have access to the longstrider spell, and the mass longstrider spell could affect their steeds. Zōēā could also wild shape into various faster animals for whatever needed faster speeds. And, of course, they teleported the last leg of the trip. Zōēā, as a druid, doesn’t get very good teleportation spells, but druids who can cast 7th-level spells can prepare master earth, which basically allows one to meld with the planet and appear anywhere else on it. Since this isn’t a conjuration (teleportation) spell, it will bypass magic hat blocks interplanar travel, like that which protects Spellkeep. (The Ordo Ars Magica doesn’t particularly like that.) Eventually, Zōēā will be able to cast that spell.
  

[ Reply ]

Posted by IddlerItaler 7 months ago Report

Fair enough about Drandel's line. I imagined it was a "powerful wizard disconnected from mortal woes" type of deal rather than a hint he was secretly evil or something.

Ah, yep, that's the name, black pudding. I also used that statblock in the game I ran. They hit pretty hard, enough to one-shot a basic tribal warrior, but lack any ranged counter so they'd be pretty easy pickings for a dragon. I gave them a ranged attack in the form of them spitting out the bones of their preys as if they were projectiles - it still wasn't enough to give the players any real trouble as they pelted the slime from the skies, but it added the risk that a lucky hit could break the concentration on their flight spell and send them plummeting...

About walking, I was talking about the return scene with Zōēā alone. The way it was written seemed to hint that Zōēā didn't bring a horse, and that those were still in the stables at the time Onawella's trap sprung. "She was content to walk rather than fly in bird form; she welcomed the time to think. {...} Her thoughts were interrupted by a cry for help. It came from the stables just outside of Spellkeep, where Langōval’s and Zōēā’s horses were being kept. {...} She got a long coil of rope and brought her horse, Lēawilnoth, out of her stall"

[ Reply ]

Posted by IvesBentonEaton 7 months ago Report

If you recall from “Talk to the Animals”; she doesn’t really need a horse; Langōval got it for her and she didn’t want to spurn his gift. (The horse did come in handy for carrying Būshān—snakes aren’t terribly fast—until she got too big.) But when a druid gets to 8th level, they can pretty much stay in wild shape all day, so she could just travel in eagle form, which is faster than riding.

The walk wasn’t to travel, of course: it was to have some time to herself and think. She could have flown out in eagle form to some nice place outside of Spellkeep and walked back thinking from there. I didn’t feel the itinerary was necessary; it was only needful to establish that she was (seemingly) alone and outside of Spellkeep.

[ Reply ]