Winter’s Veil

Is it wrong that I was looking forward to the Feast of Winter’s Veil more than I was looking forward to Christmas?

Death to Onyxia!

Since everyone can’t get enough of World of Warcraft geekery, we killed the black dragon Onyxia tonight for the first time:

“Red Snow”

For those wanting me to get to work on The Novel, I’m currently in research mode and hope to start writing in earnest in the next month or two. In the meantime, there’s a few warm-up exercises I want to do.

Among them is this, a quickie little World of Warcraft piece. It’s for a contest to win two months of playtime, so I thought it would be worth knocking something out. “Red Snow” tells the tale of the battle of Alterac Valley from the point of view of my dwarven hunter character, Ringo Flinthammer. Hopefully it’s not totally incomprehensible, but it’s written for an audience already familiar with the world of Azeroth:

At last, the fire was crackling merrily. The dead tree had caught in the branches of another as it fell, which had kept the dead wood off the snow, and allowed the limbs to dry out nicely.

And with that, Ringo Flinthammer tromped through the snow to the corpse, while the great white owl watched patiently. Ringo took an axe from his belt and, gripping a dead limb distastefully, brought it down. The desiccated flesh gave off little smell as it parted, which in a way made it worse.

The body was four years dead, struck down in the early days of the Third War, a peasant from the Kingdom of Lordaeron, killed by an infection hidden in grain which was then turned into bread. They were not allowed to rest easy, however: The Lich King’s plague had jerked these corpses back onto their feet like hideous marionettes and marched off to war. Later, a faction of the damned had rebelled against the Lich King and joined the Horde, but at the end of the day, this was still an innocent victim of the cult whose body had been turned into a weapon.

Ringo chopped apart the body of the undead rogue, tossing each piece into the fire, one by one. The dwarf knew the shadow priests of the Horde could reanimate this corpse again, but he would make it as difficult as possible.

Read the rest here. It’s just under 3,000 words total.

I got published in a D&D book, again

Like last time, it pays no money, but it’s still kinda cool.

Suck Da Head, Squeeze Da Tail is a Dungeons & Dragons compilation whose proceeds benefit Habitat for Humanity as a way of helping out the victims of Hurricane Katrina.

I wrote the Swamp King prestige class to model the scary dude in the swamp who seems almost supernatural in his mastery of the environment:

They are figures of legend, moving through swamp and marsh as though they were kings riding through their realms.

Some are predators, hunting those who enter their territory with a mix of animal cunning and a mastery of their swampy domain. Others are heroes, protecting the weak who stumble into dangerous wetland territories. But most are mysteries, seldom seen, more known in rumor than in fact, lords of a domain few will ever penetrate and return to tell the tale.

The greatest of swamp kings are said to move through a swamp invisibly, able to appear and disappear at will and are said to command all the beasts of the swamp wetlands.

The five-level Swamp King prestige class starts on page 156.

BlizzCon: Save the Murlocs

The Murloc Guy was an absolute star at BlizzCon, and now all his wacky hijinks are compiled online at Save the Murlocs!

(For the uninitiated, a murloc is a small fishy biped that lives around Azeroth’s coasts. In recent years, they’ve been moving further and further inland, and the rumor is that something in the water is driving them in from their normal habitats. They’re encountered everywhere young adventurers go, and thus a lot of baby murlocs get orphaned. Blizzard gave away in-game World of Warcraft murloc baby pets to BlizzCon attendees.)

• Strange in a totally different way: The George W. Bush Speechwriter. Assemble sound clips from previous speeches (no “new-clee-ur,” alas) and make the president say almost anything you want.