Austin's COVID Quarantine Routine 2020

Here's another routine article for you, now that it's a new and extremely memorable year for all of us.

Ballard Bucks

My wife and I decided this past week to make a household currency system for our kids. The newly minted "Ballard Bucks" could be earned by doing chores, reading, and making age-related accomplishments (like successful potty training), and could be spent on screen time and desserts, or cashed in for real money, or taken away as payment for us doing their jobs for them.

So far, it's a huge success! We have yet to make a list of all the things Ballard Bucks are useful for, but the kids are so far really motivated by them, and though we've had to make a shared Note on our iPhones to keep track of how many Bucks each kid has just in case they try to steal the actual bills, things have gone smoothly otherwise.

Anyway, I wanted to showcase the Ballard Bucks I designed. It was fun looking at existing world currency and taking bits from some of them. I never realized before how it must be to actually design currency. You want to create something unique, recognizeable, and complex enough to be hard to counterfeit. It should show notable symbols of the country minting the currency, as well as identifying numbers and signatures to prove its authenticity. Below is the first batch of minted Ballard Bucks. I added symbology of the Ballard family crest (the gryphon), my religion, myself, and some cool designs. In retrospect, even though I would be printing these out in black and white for cost's sake, I should have made it in color just for the sake of presentation on the computer. That would've been pretty cool.

D&D Spells for Heroes of Might and Magic

For the past two and a half years, I've been collecting ideas for 5e magic items and spells based on games and other franchises I'm familiar with. Last week, I decided to finally compile all the spells for one of the franchises, Heroes of Might and Magic, into an actual document that could be sold on DMsGuild or something. I'd love any feedback you have on balance.

My main goal when making this document, and in adapting spells from other sources in general, is to merge the franchise with D&D as seamlessly as possible. I take great care to look at other existing spells, to follow the tips for designing spells in the DMG, and to even do things like tweak the wording slightly in order to make it sound more like a spell that would be in an official D&D source. I also try to make the spells versatile enough and vague enough that each would fit into any D&D campaign setting, not only the one the spell came from.

Lots of franchises have spells that are more or less the same as D&D, such as fireball, cone of cold, and heal, so for these I just skip entirely and focus more on ones that would be a welcome, fresh addition to the game. In other cases, in the case of clone in Heroes of Might and Magic III, I change the name so that it's clear that it does something different than the existing spell in D&D that had the same name. Lastly, if a spell's name doesn't make sense given what it does in the original game, I use the name as inspiration for a brand new spell. For instance, in Heroes 3, a spell called forgetfulness causes half of all creatures you target to "forget" to use their ranged attack on their turn. Instead, I just made it a spell similar to modify memory, though not as potent.

Below are some of my favorite spells I adapted from Heroes of Might and Magic II and III:

My Favorite Hearthstone Deck of All Time

I've recently gotten back into Hearthstone after a two-year break, which is something I didn't think would happen. I really got sick of Blizzard making up crappy lore and making Warcraft, my favorite lore franchise of all time, even more messed up that World of Warcraft made it. What with Sir Finley Mrrglson, the "League of E.V.I.L.," and all that garbage. Well, now, they've gone back to their roots of lore bits like Outland, and the Demon Hunter is a pretty cool new class.

I rejoined the game playing mostly with an old Wild deck I made over the course of a long period of months a good 3 or 4 years ago: a warlock deck simply called "Mwoo hoo haa haa." I was delighted to find that, with only a couple of small updates, it is just as amazing of a deck as it was before I took a break from playing. Below is an explanation of the deck and the strategy I employ when playing it.