View From the Bushes

When I was growing up, we had a huge cherry tree in the backyard and in the fall (at least I think it was fall, are cherries harvested in fall?) my uncle would come over and he and my father would pick what seemed like thousands of cherries. After they were done, every flat surface in the house would be taken up with bowl after bowl overflowing with cherries. As you can imagine, during this time I was allowed to have all the cherries I wanted. I took full advantage of this year after year until at one point I realized that although initially I had really liked cherries, I now hated them. The same sort of thing happened with DireKobold.

Now I believe that I have already mentioned this (though not in quite these terms). I have already talked about getting burned out, about maintaining (by myself I might add) a punishing schedule of three adventures a month, about pouring thousands of dollars into a combination of the two most marginal aspects of D20 publishing, pdfs and adventures... And as a matter of fact, that's not what I want to talk about today, that's just the necessary introduction to the topic: what I want to talk about is my rebirth.

Yes, I'm as amazed as you are about it, in particular because I had forgotten what it was like to burn with desire (try not to take that phrase out of context), because I've always had been excited about DireKobold, but I no longer remembered what it was to be passionate, and then a few days ago, suddenly and quite unexpectedly it just all came back. Of course, being me I decided that the best way to celebrate was to take a day off before jumping back in (which is why there was no entry yesterday).

Now I realize that telling you that the business is dependent on my mood is not very professional, and I apologize for that and for the long dry spell. I did the best I could to not screw any body and I tried to be as honest as possible. Those lapses of honesty I did experience were mostly due to an inability to be honest with myself rather than a deliberate attempt to dissemble. Of course, the idea now that I'm 'reborn' is to is to never again gorge myself to the point of enervation (I slipped that word in because I wanted to link to a message board thread on D&D and Vocabulary and enervate is a word I am only comfortable with because of D&D).

As proof of my rebirth, I offer you a new Xenogenic NPC: Hadak the Artificer, a dwarven artificer (wizard). I admit that it's not an adventure, but it is pretty cool (let me just tell you right here that spellbook generation is a real pain. Also, I noticed that I don't label which level the spells are, something I'll definitely have to fix at some point.) Also, Hadak fits in with the city/town project which I'm embarking on. I don't have much to say about it tonight (it's already pretty late) but I will be talking about it more in the next few days and weeks.

I'd post the editor's notes for Hadak here, but they're pretty long and since he's available for both full and demo subscribers you should just generate him for yourself and read my brillant prose. On that ludicrous note, I'll end.

Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero
Ross