Project Month: Phone Phast

It's been a few year since I've done one of these. Usually I do one in November or February, but this morning I woke up with the beautiful pre-fall weather outside and decided "why wait?" With the recent iOS update that tracks the hours you spend on iPhone apps and a couple of interesting videos about the healthiness of boredom, I got to thinking about all the time I waste staring at a phone or watching a tablet. What happened to the old days of waiting to look up something until you could get home to a computer or watching movies on an actual television through a VCR or DVD player? What happened to reading a magazine while on the toilet instead of swiping incessantly through Facebook posts that only give a nanoiota of delight each?

Heroes of Silvermoon, Chapter 5: Castle Mistamere

Contents:

1. The Cultist
2. Arena Games
3. Phoenix Sorcery
4. The Half-Moon Crucible
5. Castle Mistamere
6. Bringing Back the Dead
7. The Curse of House Lightwalker
8. Captured
9. Far from Home
10. Through the Underdark
11. A New Port of Kings

The Tale of the Heroes of Silvermoon

Chapter 5: Castle Mistamere

Heroes of Silvermoon, Chapter 4: The Half-Moon Crucible

Contents:

1. The Cultist
2. Arena Games
3. Phoenix Sorcery
4. The Half-Moon Crucible
5. Castle Mistamere
6. Bringing Back the Dead
7. The Curse of House Lightwalker
8. Captured
9. Far from Home
10. Through the Underdark
11. A New Port of Kings

The Tale of the Heroes of Silvermoon

Chapter 4: The Half-Moon Crucible

The Joy of Wanting

When I was a young teenager, I played a game called Runescape with my friends. It was one of the first MMOs available, so it was a real novelty to log in to my account (via dial-up), get together with my friends or other people playing at the same time from all around the world, and level up my character in a fantasy world. Runescape was a game that took a lot of time and work to be worthwhile. The old version of Runescape that I played back then has actually since become available to play, but I just simply don't have enough free time to get anywhere in the game anymore (if my old account hadn't have been hacked and then banned, maybe I could at least enjoy the level my old character had attained). Needless to say, Runescape was a big part of my early adolescence, and it's even the medium where I first used the name "Abelhawk."

Heroes of Silvermoon, Chapter 3: Phoenix Sorcery

Contents:

1. The Cultist
2. Arena Games
3. Phoenix Sorcery
4. The Half-Moon Crucible
5. Castle Mistamere
6. Bringing Back the Dead
7. The Curse of House Lightwalker
8. Captured
9. Far from Home
10. Through the Underdark
11. A New Port of Kings

The Tale of the Heroes of Silvermoon

Chapter 3: Phoenix Sorcery

Poem: "A Seasoned Part of the Country"

I normally hate free verse poetry, but I forgot I wrote this and how decently written it is, theme-wise and in terms of diction, metaphors, and flow.

A Seasoned Part of the Country

by Austin Ballard

It’s a fact in anyone’s book

That iced roads can swipe an unwary tire

And direct its path to a ditch

(The place every driver dreads).

I have furrowed a disgruntled brow, too,

When the thick, heavy flakes

Pile up like bricks on a wall

To blockade my shoveled driveway once more.

And yes, even when winter is over,

The trickling, drippy brown water

May seep and soak the dead grass,

Forming flat heaps that linger to the last.

All this while we stay inside,

With wet gloves, sick of hot cocoa

And weary of making snowmen,

Bored, and longing for the color green.

Such are the common laments in this town,

And they are valid.

But yet my address stays the same, and I imagine the pitiful opposite.

In other places, to the south or southeast,

—What a pity—the children know not the color white.

Just ice in iceboxes, snow on the old T.V. screen,

And water trickling out as sweat,

With nothing but sweltering more or less to look forward to.

At least I, in my chilly basement,

Can look forward to a change greater than mere temperature:

A revolving wheel of colors, smells, and pastimes;

Rather than just dripping with sweat or pool water day in and day out.

Heroes of Silvermoon, Chapter 1: The Cultist & Chapter 2: Arena Games

I recently switched jobs (from editing to coding! Woo hoo!), and possibly my only disappointment in doing so is leaving the first D&D group I was a part of, the weekly group I started with my coworkers about a year and a half ago. It was a slow storyline, since we only played for one hour a week during a lunch break, except for half a handful of outside-work home sessions. The campaign itself was extremely dynamic, since after each story arc, we switched the DM. It allowed the story to grow organically (albeit disjointedly), while giving each of us a chance to learn both DMing and PCing skills.

To preserve the story for my own enjoyment (and hopefully yours as well), below is a summary of the entire campaign of the Heroes of Silvermoon, from start to finish. I should note that I began the campaign in a Warcraft setting, and we later changed it back to a generic D&D setting since later DMs didn't know Warcraft lore, so there are some elements based on Warcraft names that stuck before the change and were kept in the story.

Contents:

1. The Cultist
2. Arena Games
3. Phoenix Sorcery
4. The Half-Moon Crucible
5. Castle Mistamere
6. Bringing Back the Dead
7. The Curse of House Lightwalker
8. Captured
9. Far from Home
10. Through the Underdark
11. A New Port of Kings

The Tale of the Heroes of Silvermoon

Chapter 1: The Cultist