Sandwich Rations

I officially have more capped characters than I have since vanilla. ^_^ (I had four by the time Burning Crusade came out — Agnesdea, Ovistine, Trisia and Nancie; I had two when Lich King came out — Teuthida and Ovistine.) Now there's Teu, Nancie, and — *fanfare!* — Ovistine.

Dinging 80 comes with such a high price tag. 300g got dropped at the priest trainer! I'm also in the process of picking up materials for Jeeves and my Wormhole Generator. (Mining. So much mining. So very, very much mining.) And Ovi would love an epic gyrocopter of her very own. At least she already has dual-spec; Nancie's still waiting on that.

I think I'm going to bite the bullet and race-change Trisia (my previous mage, L63, herbalist/alchemist-in-training) to be the new Li'l Teu. Not only will I pick up five levels, I'll get free 150 riding (well, that used to be more meaningful than it is now…) and access to my hoard of caster heirlooms. At that point, it'll be time to say goodbye to the second account. I never actually upgraded that account to LK, either, so frankly, a race change is cheaper than doing that — at least at this point.

I have been secretly playing Ovi up the last few levels as, um, shadow. It turns out shadow is ridiculously fun; I won't mind having a shadow-oriented Ovistine around a bit in the upcoming months. In fact, it's kinda nice to have realized that, because it means instead of having a character that makes me think "but… I've got an endgame healer", instead I end up thinking, "Well, hey! A shadow priest! You don't see many of those around nowadays." Whether that'll end up being useful in the long run or not, I'm honestly not sure, but I'd love to get her some playtime soon. I find myself terribly tempted to try PvPing with her, too.

Hey, speaking of dwarf shamans! Were we speaking of dwarf shamans? Oh, who am I kidding; I'm always speaking of dwarf shamans these days. Did anyone else notice that the Earthen in Loken's Lackeys and The Earthen Oath are, kinda, dwarf shamans? Well, they're Earthen, but they have shaman-esque abilities: Lava Burst, Earth Shield, Earth Shock. Maybe another way of discovering a dwarf's innate shamanism has to do with exploring their ties to earth (the element, rather), and not just "well, Wildhammer dwarves are closer to nature, so it just makes sense". (Not that there's anything wrong with Wildhammer dwarves, mind you!)

At the risk of making myself /boggle, I gave a look to the /played time on my three most-played characters.

Teuthida (L80, raiding main): 62 days, 20 at L80.
Ovistine (L75, RP main, main up until late in BC): 67 days
Nancie (L80, current favorite for soloing): 19 days, 1 day at L80.

(A small note: I was deeply relieved to see that Ovistine's /played still outnumbers Teu's. I can still hang onto the idea that Ovi is my main if her /played total is higher, right? Right?)

This doesn't take into account my original main, my other half-dozen alts, or any other characters I've played up to 20-ish and deleted. All told, that's more than 3552 hours, and a little under half a year spent doing nothing but playing World of Warcraft since December 26, 2004. And if anything, I'm more interested in playing than ever — lately I've been really interested in crafting, getting some of my alts up to 450 in their respective professions and mining a ton of Saronite for Valinar's blacksmith, Vaelen. I have also been doing some crazy things, mostly involving RP gear ("Today's project: soloing the Slave Pens for a drop off Quagmirran."). Nancie's treks into Scholo and Strat are over for now (exalted with the Dawn!), so it looks like I'm back to leveling and dailies.

Having something a little different to do can really energize me, and I think that's important to keeping the game fresh for me. I don't mind the bank space I'm using for Nancie's RP gear, or the time I spent in Scholo and Strat trying to grind rep (omgwow SO MUCH RUNECLOTH). I am not quite prepared to go hunting Alliance rep with her, but I know when I'm bored of leveling and dailies again, I have other goals. Ovistine needs to go tromping across the world so I can pick up her Explorer achievements. Nancie will probably want to pick up the rest of her Lightforge set and finish converting it into Soulforge. Someday Agness will finish leveling up her Inscription. Having become a heck of a lot more interested in the Scarlet Crusade and the Argent Dawn of late, I want to go replay those starting DK levels (and I have just the DK character in mind with which to do it).

I should really make a list.

Thanks to last night's RP, this is the image that greeted me on login this morning:

Ovistine Lighthammer in full 8/8 Virtuous, wielding Benediction.

I had a definite "WHOA" moment on seeing that. I'm so glad I kept that armor and that weapon! Talk about your blast from the past…

Every so often it's good to do a check-in post for characters — I should probably do this more often than I do. There's been some serious turbulence for some of my characters, so at the moment, their status:

Teuthida: Unchanged, IC and OOC.

Agness: IC, still struggling with what to say about her shadow powers, and still avoiding thinking about the fact that she isn't as strong in the holy arts as she used to be. OOC, 76 and momentarily on hold as the Boomstick RP picks up.

Nancie: IC, still in flux as I work on the Wrathgate story. OOC, dinged 80, has an epic flappy, maxed out her mining and jewelcrafting, working on her Argent Dawn/Crusade rep (well over halfway through revered with both), and is collecting RP gear like crazy. She's got a set of "Wrynnforge" (it's Lightforge recolored in blue and gold), and I've got an eye out for a set of Moutaineer's Garb (you have to assemble it in pieces, mostly from AH drops), as well as giving a look around for the kind of armor she wears in her nightmares. Working on it! I really like the idea of being able to have visuals for the Nancie biography. (Yes, I'm working on that. No, I'm not on schedule. No, I don't care.)

Ovistine: IC and OOC: SHE'S BACK! \o/ The main of my heart has returned (and made me wish I'd registered twirlybraids.com instead, or in addition). IC, Ovistine has gotten her arse out of the library and taken on a role in the search for her good friend Homrend, recently killed by a mysterious group of Dark Irons and unable to resurrect because his spirit's been trapped by Hakkar (who always did bear a grudge). She knows there's a bargain that's going to have to be made to save him, and she knows what she's going to have to give up, but it's not going to stop her.

OOC, Ovistine is out of her rut, having pushed past 73 as well as getting one of those nice Cold Weather Flying Tomes. She's now 75 and I'm able to be very choosy with her quests, avoiding awful things with pitiful drop rates in favor of quests that are of more interest, both to me and to her.

I had actually been pondering the things brought up by this post on WTT:RP: what quests would Ovi do for real, and which am I doing because she's 75 and Disc/Holy and boy howdy I do not want to have to kill 93 bears for their asses, I'd rather just take a necklace to the dudes on the hill?

Ovistine is actually the first character in a while who's had an opinion about quests, and I think that's got a lot to do with how she got where she is. The short version: because Teu was my raiding main, she got pushed to 80 first, and that left Ovi constantly having to explain her absences. Eventually, I decided she'd taken up a research position at the Cathedral of Light and has been working on the Scourge problem as well as looking into these Ebon Blade death knights Varian Wrynn seems so determined to support. That left me with a much more thoughtful, much more curious dwarf than I'd started with — so thoughtful and curious that she's beginning to think more seriously about archaeology and where the dwarves came from. The Explorers' League holds a lot more appeal for her now than it ever used to, and she's been distracted from her main goal (find Homrend. find him now) a couple of times by information about the Titans and an old battered journal of Brann Bronzebeard's that she found in Thor Modan. Where Nancie spent the last couple of levels in Icecrown fighting Scourge, Ovistine is likely to level up in Storm Peaks looking for evidence of the Titans.

(And at some point I really need to start writing and posting Wrathgate, and begging my RP crew's forgiveness for what will probably be an abrupt "WTF" moment for Ovistine; the main reason I'm not doing it right now is because the Search for Homrend/Dark Iron Chaos storyline is moving so fast that I'd really rather not put something else into the mix. Also I'm procrastinating. Again. >_>)

I've been working on the Nancie Lighthammer biography since November 1st (I'm behind on my projected count but still confident that I'll finish the story itself by the end of the month — whether it takes up 50,000 words is another matter), and although I'd really like to be as canon-compliant as possible, there are some things that are really hard to reconcile with the game — and therefore really hard to reconcile with my story.

• Dwarf paladins. Okay, I understand that Uther was The First Paladin, and that in spite of the fact that, say, draenei clearly had paladins (Vindicators) long before they ran into the Alliance, it's generally accepted that dwarves did not.  Fine.  I'm working with that (and it's got some neat twists that will add to my story in the long run) — but it's annoying that canon kind of shoehorns people into either having characters who were "battle clerics"/"battle medics"/"something that looks like a paladin and quacks like a paladin, but is not, in fact, a paladin" — or having them forced into being relatively young characters.
   
• Dwarves and the Light in general. Canon differs on the Light and its relationship to paladins.  The RPG sourcebooks all treat WoW paladins as classic D&D paladins, who lose their powers if they do bad things.  This is more or less backed up by Of Blood and Honor, although it's made clear that the Light can be giveth, and the Light can be taketh away — sort of, unless emergencies arise.  Frankly, dwarves in general are less "follow the Light blindly even though you can't see it, touch it, smell it, or swing a pickaxe at it", and I'm not at all sure how a dwarf paladin is going to react when she recognizes she's done something immoral.  (Well, I know how mine is going to react…)  Dwarves and religion are sort of hard to pin together at all, although I've seen some lovely things from dwarf RPers who touch on the connection to the Makers and Order for Holy powers/connection to Chaos for Shadow powers.  For younger dwarves, of course, this gets easier: a dwarf raised around humans is perfectly well likely to have some influence from her peers…
   
• Magni Bronzebeard and the War of the Three Hammers.  We have an approximate date for the War itself, but how long has Magni been king?  How old is Magni?  Dwarf lore, why are you so difficult to pin down?  (Actually, I suspect it really isn't dwarf lore in particular that's hard to pin down, it's just what I'm looking at right now.)  While I'm at it, I can't tell precisely how long the Explorer's League/Guild has been going, and what the hell happened to the rest of Muradin's expedition after Arthas grabbed Frostmourne?  Did they all end up with Baelgun, and did Arthas kill all of them?
   
• Dwarf ages.  I've seen some suggestions that dwarves reach adulthood at 40 and are more long-lived than humans.  Okay, I can't deal with the idea of an infancy that lasts four years at all (let alone the thousands of years it could conceivably last for elves), so I'm going with the ElfQuest school of thought here: they age to young adulthood rapidly and just stay there for a really, really long time.  I am more or less scuttling the "adulthood at 40" concept.  (Maybe that's when they start being able to vote.)
   
• Dwarves and written language. I took one look at this page on WoWWiki and more or less thought "Oh, screw that."  Look, I can put up with the idea that the humans introduced the dwarves to the Light — maybe (although since it really does seem like different races have different relationships to the Light that lead to similar skills and abilities, I don't see why the dwarves can't just have had those different relationships from the beginning).  I can put up with the idea that, before there were humans and before there was the Alliance, there were no dwarf paladins.
   
  But the idea that the dwarves had no written language before the humans came around can bite me right in my dwarf-shaped rear end.  Excuse me, humans, but you do not get credit for everything in the damn world.  Let me guess: the dwarves didn't have fire before they met the humans, either.  Or wheels.  What's next, we find out humans introduced the dwarves to boomsticks?  And beer.  Humans definitely introduced the dwarves to beer.
   

  Obviously, everyone has their pet class/race/etc., and humans and orcs were certainly the focus of the Warcraft world for many, many years.  It makes sense that their history is richer and deeper than everyone else's.  But why make a race as unflaggingly cool as the dwarves and then say "Oh, hey, everything the dwarves did?  It's really just because humans did it for them."  And written language?  Come on.  How do you have a race as advanced as the various types of dwarves and still say they've got no written language?
   

When it comes to canon-compliancy, I really enjoy the mental exercise of figuring out how my character could have fit into times and places without breaking obvious canon.  On the other hand, Warcraft spans so many things — the first three games, the novels, the comic books, the RPG books.  I'm sure the tabletop game adds things, and I shudder to think how much I'm missing by not playing the collectible card game (to say nothing of rocket chickens.  God, I want a rocket chicken).  But how much is definitive canon and how much is only sort of canon?  Is it like the Star Wars movies, where only what shows up on screen is really canon and the rest, while pretty neat, isn't confining on Lucas's need to make movies in the future?  Is it like Star Trek, where the show and movies are canon, and sometimes what happens in the books can influence and later affect canon — but only sometimes?

I dunno.  I've seen people who go both ways on this.  I've seen people who think if you don't stick to every piece of canon, including in the RPG sourcebooks, you're basically playing a vampire catgirl in Goldshire.  I've also seen people who don't feel constrained by the limitations the game puts on them (not every draenei RP backstory puts the draenei in question on board the Exodar when it crashed).  There's also the fact that canon doesn't always comply with itself — there are plenty of resources that say the Scarlet Crusade is a bunch of racist pricks who wouldn't piss on a non-human if they were on fire and they sure won't let 'em into their secret club (hint: We Like Red), but if that's the case, why do they have statues built to great Scarlet Crusade non-human heroes?  And how old is Anduinn Wrynn now?

I wish there were easier answers for all of this!  I would love a complete, detailed timeline marking down the birth and death of every major and minor character, plus when various things were built, when wars happened, and so on.  We'll probably never get that, because honestly, it's not easy for Blizzard to keep up with their own history.  Which probably says something about how hard it is for the rest of us.  It irks me to think I'm probably going to have to tack a note onto stories that says "By the way, I went with this canon, and not this canon, and also, dwarves are not in diapers for four years."  But I probably will.

When I first leveled up a character on my server, I was right in with the first of the rush. I was L60 at the same time most of the "first generation" were hitting L60, and so it was natural to assume that most people were at the same point in their timeline — they'd taken down the Defias at the same time I had, visited the Scarlet Monastery at the same time I had, went to Scholomance at the same time I did, and so on.

Not so clear-cut these days! With new alts being rolled all the time, events that are brand-new to one character are things I did four or five years ago with one of mine. How do you deal with a character who's just found out that the Scarlet Crusade is being run by demons? "Oh, I've known that for years." "…*splutter* You could have told me before I went in there." Or is the news new to you again every time you hear it?

The more interesting question I'm thinking about right now is whether it's feasible to juggle a timeline somewhat — could a character of mine level up to 60, 70, even 80, without ever tackling some of the quests that should come up at 30, 40, 50? In RP/IC, could I get a character out to the Argent Tournament before she finishes the Wrathgate storyline?

Even WoW itself does some bending, folding, spindling, and mutilating to give people the opportunity to do the same quests without necessarily being at the same point in the story. Take Drakuru — if you've done his Grizzly Hills/Drak'Tharon Keep quests, you get one quest when you see him in Zul'Drak. If you haven't, you get a different one. Either way, though, you have the same goals, and people questing together can definitely work together on them.

As NaNo approaches and I hammer down some of the details in Nancie's life, I find myself pondering what order she might have taken things in. There are some quests she probably would have avoided at all costs when she was supposed to do them, but that would make perfect sense for her character now. But it's a pretty twisty timeline, the likes of which might get me a visit from the Office of Temporal Affairs, and I'm hesitant to go for it if it seems too jarring. The fact that my character could have skipped past things, that they'd make sense for her now in a way they wouldn't have then, doesn't necessarily mean it makes good game-and-RP sense to put the timeline in a weird and unexpected order.

Until yesterday, the most /facepalm-worthy interaction of headgear with character model was on Teuthida, whose Conqueror's Worldbreaker Headpiece has a chain sticking down off the chin, with a little weight at the bottom of the chain.  I'm sure this looks fine on some races… if you're male.  If you're a girl, the chain goes directly through your boobs.  If it hadn't been for that, I would have loved to have my graphic on.  But that just looked uncomfortable.  Like a seatbelt, but so much worse.

Yesterday, though, I found something even more appalling.

Imagine you're a male dwarf with a particular beard graphic (short and tidy!), and then you get a Female Dwarf Mask.  You might try it on.

You might look like this:

Yes, folks, that's a female dwarven mask with a Fu Manchu mustache.  (I suppose it helps to have the same hair color, roughly, as the mask.)

Where do you stand on Blizzard-created NPCs?

(Leaving aside the obvious answer of "at the gryphon master, of course"…)

But seriously, now. Where do you stand on the use of Blizzard-created NPCs in a character's backstory?

This varies for me. It depends on a number of factors, mainly having to do with how important those NPCs are and how much use they get.  How am I expected to behave in-game around people with famous connections?

What I really love are characters who don't have famous connections — characters who are related to the tiny throwaway NPCs we see every day in game and never think twice about.  (Quick!  Name your favorite trainer for your class!  Okay, now name three other trainers for that class.  Can you do it?*)

Part of what makes WoW feel so rich to me are the fact that so many of these characters have first and last names and specific occupations, even if the occupation is "pie vendor".  What does Bimble Longberry do on her days off?  Does Myra Tyrngaarde have a son who loves baking?  How many kids does Vindicator Kaalan have?  Was Harbinger Haronem maybe a little bit of a bully when he was a kid?

Connections to characters like these make me squee; they're like finding extra easter eggs in the game.  I have a friend who RPs his dwarf as a member of the Thunderbrew clan.  Nearly everyone who knows him always barks for the Thunderbrews at Brewfest, and we've been known to say some rather uncharitable things about Barleybrew ales.  (I once had a quest bug in Brewfest, I submitted an in-character ticket, and the GM answered in-character… and my character found out people had been taking bribes from the Barleybrews, hence the quest not working!  Sometimes GMs are awesome.)

Maybe some of this has to do with expectations.  If I have a tie to a specific tiny NPC, I don't expect people to know about that, any more than I would expect people to know that my father is a musician, say.  But it creates a potential bridge to open up connection or conversation — if someone happens to pick up on the reference and wants to run with it.  (Man, now I really want to roll up Myra Tyrngaarde's son, who loves baking.)

How 'bout you?  What do you think of people who use Blizzard-created NPCs in their backstory/history/current events?

* I like to train with Sulaa at the Exodar.  There's also… um… Farseer Nobundo… and that woman down at the lake in front of Stormwind City… and that guy in Ironforge near the Hall of Mysteries…

So I love sheep. I collect cute plush sheep. I try to get out to the spring fair in Puyallup to see the adorable baby sheep. The fact that there are sheep prominently featured in WoW makes me unbelievably happy.

I have two mages, neither one of whom has ever learned Polymorph: Pig or is interested in Polymorph: Turtle, Polymorph: Penguin, or Polymorph: Black Cat, because that would mean polymorphing something into an animal that is not a sheep. (In fact, they've both gotten to the stage in the Polymorph: Pig quest where you turn naga into tons of tiny little sheep, which then wander around at high velocity, and haven't turned it in, because when I'm feeling kinda blue, seeing fifty tiny sheep zipping around my computer screen can cheer me up pretty quick.)

I have also been known to make tons of extra Explosive Sheep and just have them wander around like pets. (One of them might possibly have pulled a boss in Zul'Gurub once. Luckily, my raid was very forgiving.)

When the Elwynn Lamb was announced, I was overjoyed! A pet sheep! I figured I would never unsummon it, letting it wander around and graze at its leisure. Instead, Blizzard decided it was the one pet that should get killed in front of its owner… time after time. When I found that out, I stopped bothering with the Argent Crusade dailies. I really didn't want to put in all that effort for a pet that would break my heart by dying repeatedly.

But! I have a thought. What if the Elwynn Lambs are actually sheep that have been reclaimed from Felwood's wild flocks of woolly fel sheep, and you're keeping them around to try to rehabilitate them? What if you've been assigned a protective wolf who will keep a close eye on that fel sheep to see if the demons have truly left it? What if the wolf is only killing the sheep because it's sensed the fel energies amassing, and it knows the sheep will attack you if the wolf doesn't get it first?

Yeah, okay, it's a stretch. But I want a sheep pet, dammit. And it so happens that I have run into evidence that fel lambs exist.

Sure, they say the sound those sheep make is a "snore", but when you first hear it, it sounds like some kind of demonic bleat that requires you to get that sheep back to the Cathedral of Light for an exorcism, stat. It's simultaneously adorable and horrifying!

(Really, my image of fel sheep is that they're sheep that act exactly like regular sheep, only their wool is chartreuse or sometimes a pale red — perhaps only changing color after the sheep reach maturity — and their eyes glow with demonic fire. Otherwise, they graze and wander the meadows like any other sheep. Their wool, however, once sheared, washed, carded, and spun, knits up into incredibly soft, unusually warm blankets.)

I keep saying I'm going to write the Epic Tale of the Lighthammers at Angrathar, and I keep not doing it.

So you know what's coming up next month? NaNoWriMo.

Now, Angrathar doesn't strike me as being a 50,000 word story. But if you were to go back across the whole of Nancie Lighthammer's life, starting from her days as a young battle cleric from Ironforge, back in the days when her name was still Ironhammer and she and her brother Brandur were on the front lines together, going through her war adventures, earning her name, getting married, having a daughter, going back to war, the near loss of her marriage and the compromises she and Geoffar made to make things work, and eventually, the trip to Northrend and the siege of Wintergarde…

Then you might have 50,000 words.

I'm going to be spending some time noodling over lore over the next couple of weeks before I get started, and I won't be surprised if I end up tearing my hair out a bit as I try to nail down the details. I'm also pretty sure that some things are going to end up retconned a bit — over the last four years, I've written bits and pieces of Lighthammer history, and some of it probably won't end up being exactly how it happened — but I think I'm going to give this a shot.

After all, the world needs more stories about female dwarves. A lot of them, dammit. If anyone can name me a book (better yet, a series) where the main character (main! not supporting!) is a heroic female dwarf, I'll buy it! If you can even name any books that showcase heroic female dwarves in supporting roles, I'll be pretty damn happy.

And with any luck, at the end of November, there'll be one more.