baroque_mongoose | Entries tagged with athos

When I was able to travel easily, I used to go and see Porthos a fair bit. Porthos had parties now and again, and they were very much introvert parties; that sounds like a complete oxymoron, but in fact it worked. The key to a good introvert party (apart from the food, of course, but that's a constant across all decent parties) is that you have something for people to do, so that there are no awkward silences. And what Porthos would do would be to arrange readthroughs; he'd have several scripts on hand, including a lot of Round the Horne and Blackadder and other similar things that could easily be split up into short separate comic skits, plus a few interesting one-offs. I don't know whether he was the one who actually wrote the mashup between The Goon Show and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but I would certainly not have put it past him; and I have very fond memories of singing the Ying-Tong Song, as Willow (who was using it to cast some sort of spell, I believe), as a result.

And, of course, there was The Old Grey Barn. I have mentioned before that Porthos is half Russian; I've no idea where he found this sketch, but it is a 1920s parody of all the gloomy Russian plays ever written, and consequently it is absolutely hilarious. We'd pretty nearly always finish with that, and just occasionally we'd even do it twice over the course of a party, as we all enjoyed it so much.

So, whenever the conversation flagged, Porthos would hand out some scripts. I have never seen Blackadder, but I rapidly got myself permanent dibs on the role of Nursie because apparently I nailed it just from reading the script; I did know Round the Horne pretty well, and I usually ended up being either Julian or Sandy, because, again, I could do the voice. (Side note: I have only ever known one gay man who actually talked like that, and when I first met him I couldn't entirely believe he was real. I'd always thought That Voice was a stereotype invented by straight people. Apparently not!)

I haven't been able to get to one of Porthos' parties for a good long time now, but when I started thinking about my 60th birthday, I decided that I should like a party. The only problems with that were that I have a tiny flat, and almost everyone I wanted to invite was a long way away - in fact, it was entirely likely that d'Artagnan would be on another continent at the time.

Then I had the idea. Why not do a readthrough... on Zoom?

Rather than having little snippets, I decided to go with a full script; and so I wrote Applied Draconics, a comic piece about a small and peaceful kingdom that needed to deal with an approaching dragon. It contained the inevitable royalty and knights errant, an evil Chancellor (basically the Evil Grand Vizier character transposed into a more western-style setting), a clever bard, a couple of women pretending to be men for reasons (one of them kept her knitting in her codpiece), and all that sort of stuff. I got a rough idea of who'd be attending and wrote it to suit, so that everyone would have either one major part or two or more smaller parts adding up to about the same length.

Of course, it didn't work quite as planned. Athos, having originally been very keen to play the evil Chancellor, bowed out; he loved the role but couldn't face the amount of peopling it was going to involve, which was very sad, because he and d'Artagnan have never actually met and I was hoping that would be the moment (quite apart from the fact that he'd have had tremendous fun playing the villainous Lord Mountpleasant). My brother-in-law heroically stepped into the breach, and in his case that really was heroic, because he's high-functioning autistic and he can't people any better than Athos can. (Athos is not autistic. He's just the sort of person who, if he likes you, really does like you, but he doesn't like most people, especially not in numbers.) One person, for some reason, never got any of the e-mails till it was too late, so he also had to be replaced; but we managed to re-jig using the existing cast. It went very well nonetheless, and much fun was had by all. The only thing was that I'd made it a little too long, so we didn't have as much time to chat afterwards as we'd have liked, but that could easily be fixed next time.

We had some good actors. Porthos is always excellent, and had a lot of fun playing the upper-class twit Prince Percival. One of my friends from church is brilliant at the kind of roles that really need to be hammed up to the maximum, so I gave him Glxpnx the Demon and he rose magnificently to the occasion. And d'Artagnan... well, he was very nearly playing himself as Oscar the Bard, but he did also have to fill in elsewhere, revealing a talent for voices at least equal to that of Porthos. (He was, as it turned out, on a different continent; he attended from Toronto.) But, being the modest soul he is, he was trying to disparage his own ability.

"Nonsense," I told him. "You're a very good actor."

"Oh... I'm not sure about that..." he demurred.

"Of course you are," I said. "Why else do you think I gave you an Oscar?"

Yes, indeed, d'Artagnan. I absolutely knew you were going to do that. :-D

Anyway, I wrote a sequel the following year, and once the current magnum opus is finished I'll be writing another one for this year's birthday party, because it is now a tradition. I wish I'd started it a lot sooner!

Current Mood: cheerful

It happens. You haven't GM'd (or even played) for a while because circumstances happened, and all of a sudden you find you have an enthusiastic group who are all ready for you to write them an exciting adventure to get into. But you're rusty... really rusty, in fact. You can't even remember exactly how Damage Reduction works. What do you do?

I am not claiming any credit for the answer because I stumbled across it by sheer accident; but what you do is this. You write a story.

I mentioned a little while ago that I had started writing a D&D-based story with the Three Musketeers and myself as the adventuring party... wheelchairs and all, incidentally, though Athos' wheelchair and mine are both magically enhanced in the story. (They don't propel themselves around by magic because there is no canonical spell to do that, although it's certainly not beyond the bounds of possibility that one of the characters could devise one. They do, however, have inbuilt defensive capabilities.) Generally when I play D&D I play a character who doesn't have any significant disabilities, but I thought for the purposes of the story it would be intriguing to have everyone as the most faithful rendering of the original that works in the D&D world. So, for instance, the story version of me doesn't have a stoma because there's no way anyone in that world would; on the other hand, the story version of the friend with the alpha-gal allergy still can't eat red meat, but it's now because of a magical geas which prevents him from doing so, rather than an allergy (as allergies don't seem to be at all common in the D&D world). And then, of course, there's the fact that d'Artagnan's character is the bard, naturally, and bards tend to have travel spells, including interplanar ones; the D&D universe has a number of "planes", which are best described as interconnected parallel realities, each of which has its own particular features. In real life, d'Artagnan avoids air travel as much as he can for environmental reasons, so it was great fun to make his corresponding character have strong reservations about "plane travel"! (Again, the reasons are different in the story; the bard's reservations are due to the fact that it's genuinely dangerous. You can meet some seriously nasty things on alternative planes.)

I am having a huge amount of fun with this story, and it's definitely going to end up being a full-length novel; but the crucial thing is that I have to keep researching. At every turn, more or less. The party needs to get to Place X ahead of the people they're currently following, if possible? OK... let's go and see if there's a spell for that (ah, yes, there is), and if so, who's likely to have it (oh, the bard, that figures). The bard can bring the entire party with him as long as they're all touching him, but there's a problem with that because they're travelling in a cart. It's reasonable to assume that the cart will follow if he takes the horses with him, but what about the people in the cart? The books don't answer that question, so then I have to write a little section where he tests it out using the cat who is accompanying the party, because if the cat falls to the ground from the height of the cart's floor he won't take any harm, whereas two people in wheelchairs definitely would. The cat is successfully transported with the cart, so the bard returns and everyone gets back in the cart, including the stone golem, who normally walks alongside.

The party is now travelling extra fast relative to the Material Plane (which is the basic "world as we more or less know it" reality) because they are, despite the bard's serious misgivings, on the Plane of Shadows. I check the books again to see what they might encounter there. Aha - nightcrawler. That's pretty fearsomely unpleasant. What spells are they going to need? Check, check, check... ah, well, before they do anything else at all, the cleric (that would be me) is going to need to cast Consecrate over the entire area to neutralise the creature's massively evil aura, and that requires sprinkling the area with holy water and scattering powdered silver over it, and how do you do that when you're sitting in a wheelchair inside a cart with a worm-type thing the size of a respectable dwarf hall approaching at some speed and you know it can easily swallow you whole, wheelchair and all? Oh, right. You get the sorcerer, who's also in a wheelchair, to cast Mage Hand a couple of times to take care of the sprinkling and scattering side of things. Then the wizard can start throwing actual attack spells, but he gets blasted with... [check creature's abilities again]... oh, yes, Cone of Cold, pretty nasty from a creature as powerful as that, he'll need healing before he can try again. And so on, and so on. And by the time I've written four pages of gripping encounter, I know a great deal more than I did before.

It's not just encounters. Pretty much anything that happens raises questions like "is there a spell for that? If there is, who's casting it? Is it an expensive spell? (If it is, the characters will usually be looking for another way round, the exceptions being emergencies like the Consecrate spell mentioned above.) Is it possible that someone other than the characters may be casting a spell here?" And more; it isn't just spells, though, despite the fact that this particular party is heavily magic-biased (any melee fighting they need to do is done by constructs or summoned allies, because none of them is any good at it). It's all kinds of little bits and bobs about the D&D world. It's almost like learning a language by immersion, or, in this particular case, re-learning it.

And now I even know how Damage Reduction works.

Current Mood: creative

Athos has a lot to answer for. Yesterday he sent me this link: https://www.routledge.com/Making-Mathematics-with-Needlework-Ten-Papers-and-Ten-Projects/belcastro-Yackel/p/book/9781568813318 So I may have accidentally bought the book in question.

I have always relished mathematical crafting. To be honest, most crafting is mathematical at least to some extent, but it's not always immediately obvious, and in many cases the maths has already been done for you by the pattern designer. Fitting together flat pieces of fabric to shape to a human body (or even make a plushie) is mathematical. Knitting is mathematical - you're making specific shapes out of tiny rectangles, which is rather more complicated than tiny squares (but knitting stitches are rectangular and there is no way round that), plus you generally have stitch patterns of some sort that need to fit neatly onto a row. That is pretty much just the background, though; some pieces are what you might describe as mathematical for the heck of it.

Case in point: the exponential bath scrunchie. It's a very effective bath scrunchie, at that, and it is comfortable to use, as long as you pick the right yarn; a dishcloth cotton, or similar, is ideal. I don't often crochet, preferring in general the versatility of knitting, but I cheerfully crocheted one of these things. You start off with a small ring of chain stitches exactly as you would for a granny square, and onto that you crochet a suitably sized ring of either double or treble crochet, according to taste. For the next round you work two double/treble clusters into every space... and then you just keep doing that, so that the length of the outer edge doubles every time. (I think I used trebles, and I think I separated the clusters using one or two chain stitches to make it easier to see where the gap was. I no longer have the scrunchie.) So you end up with something resembling brain coral; it's a very convoluted ball of crochet which, mathematically speaking, has a fractional dimensionality somewhere between 2 and 3. Plus it's much nicer to wash with than those things made from plastic netting.

Then, of course, there are Moebius scarves (which I have never knitted, though I've occasionally nearly knitted one by accident; when you knit in the round, you quite often get a twist in the first row if you're not careful) and Klein bottle hats (which again I have never knitted, but the temptation is there - probably the only thing that has stopped me doing it is the fact that I'm not sure how I'd work the cables). I don't know if those are in the book; the contents list doesn't give a great deal away, but I am quite certain that there will be at least one project in the book that I will look at and think "right, that is it, I have to make that."

Watch this space...

Current Mood: creative

Today did not get off to a good start. How do I put this without being too gross?

OK, let's just say I'm inclined to retain water. On one side. To the extent that I own a couple of bra inserts, a larger one and a smaller one, and yesterday I needed the larger one. It augments the side which is not retaining the water by two cup sizes. And this morning, if I were going out (I don't bother with an insert if I'm not), I could pretty nearly get away with not wearing an insert at all. We're talking about maybe a couple of hundred millilitres of water which stopped being retained overnight, and that water, naturally, had to go somewhere.

Sibyl is a water hog. That's why, if I want to take in more liquid than usual, I have to diddle her by sipping it very slowly from a flask, so that she doesn't notice. Last night, she water-hogged in a pretty big way.

And now, there is unscheduled laundry. I really hate Sibyl sometimes.

Other than that, however, things aren't too bad. Yesterday was a pretty good day; I felt a bit woozy after lunch (I hadn't overeaten - I think it was just the excitement of finally being able to get to church which had caught up with me), but I wasn't too bad and I perked up later, which meant I could do a bit of knotwork practice and some knitting. And I have Ideas, courtesy of Ingvar.

Ingvar was the chap I mentioned a few posts ago who turned out to know Porthos; after a while it occurred to me that I probably knew where they knew each other from. It took me that time because I was around there too, but I don't recall Ingvar from those days (having said that, it was a long time ago now, so I can't remember everyone). We were all on the alt-fan-pratchett IRC chat, back in the day; that's how I first got to know both Athos and Porthos, and Porthos introduced me to d'Artagnan very shortly after that. (To my knowledge d'Artagnan was never on #afp, but he is a Pratchett fan too, nonetheless. It's the one thing, apart from very high intelligence, that all three of them have in common.) So Ingvar and I were talking about all that and trying to see who else we could recall that we both knew, and somewhere among all that he linked me to something called The Tale of Westala and Villtin, an epic comic fantasy tale about a pair of adventurers based on the two authors, with several characters in it based on other #afp-ers. Porthos is in there, with a sex change (it really can't be anyone else). Ingvar is in it too. I have not yet found anyone I recognise as being Athos, but I have come across a few other people I recognise, including Porthos' friend the tenor (who isn't d'Artagnan). It's perhaps telling that I think of him as "the tenor", but the writers of the tale thought of him as "the biologist" (he's both, of course); in the tale he appears as a mad doctor who does some fairly odd biological experiments.

I am enjoying this tale very much; and it is also making me think that I'd like to do a D&D-based fantasy story of a similar nature, with the adventuring party based on the Three Musketeers and myself. And, of course, if you're going to do D&D-based, then you need a race and a class for all your main characters. None of us is a natural fighter, but I thought of a way round that: I could have Athos be a cunning artificer who specialised in making fighting automata. That'd suit his technological bent. Obviously d'Artagnan has to be the bard, and if I'm not the bard I'm the cleric; that neatly left Porthos handling the magic, and I think he'd make a great wizard.

As for the races... there is no actual half-dwarf in D&D, but since there are half-elves, there seemed no reason why there shouldn't be, and it would entirely suit Porthos; so that's what he'll be. Half-elves and gnomes make the best bards, so I was going to have d'Artagnan as one of those (there are good arguments both ways), until it occurred to me that Athos would really enjoy being a tiefling (half-infernal). And I thought... well, if we're going to have a tiefling, it'd be a lot of fun if we also had an aasimar (half-celestial) so that we could have some Aziraphale and Crowley vibes in the mix, and aasimar would very much suit d'Artagnan; which also means that I get to be the half-elf (yes, you can have more than one in a party, but it is fun to have a mixture). And I do like playing half-elves. They're great negotiators.

Having established the characters, the next question is: what exactly is this lot going to do? That was easy enough. I decided that Lord Smallpiece of Ashwood's great-uncle Algy had gone missing, and he was very keen to get him back, not merely because of the obvious family ties, but also because Uncle Algy did such a great job of guarding the manor house at night.

Lord Smallpiece is in his sixties.

Yup. You got it. Algernon Smallpiece is a vampire.

So I was already churning this stuff round in my head when I found a few people who were interested in an actual D&D campaign. I thought "oh no, I can't write two at once... oh, right, I'm being stupid, I don't have to!"

This is brilliant. The story will feed into the campaign. The campaign will feed into the story. Both, I think, will be better for it.

All I need now is for Sibyl to behave!

I was talking with Athos on the phone yesterday, as I generally do on a Sunday afternoon; and we got onto the subject of a mutual friend who is no longer with us, and hasn't been for quite a few years now. Athos was able to get to his funeral, but I wasn't; so Athos was telling me about the music, which was... quite suitably unusual, from the sound of it... and incidentally involved Mitch Benn on guitar, since our late friend was a dedicated and enthusiastic supporter of the club run by that worthy, the name of which I forget. And there was this one particular song Athos mentioned that he expected me to have at the very least heard of, and probably to know.

I hadn't. I can't even remember what the title was with enough confidence to record it here.

I am, I have to say, pretty much with Aziraphale from Good Omens on this one. While I don't have a blanket dislike of all pop music, it is nonetheless a pretty good bet that I will dislike (possibly even intensely dislike) any given pop song, because there are certain very common tropes in pop music that I really can't stand. One of them is shouty lyrics. I like my lyrics sung, not yelled into a microphone, and I also want to be able to hear them clearly, or else what are they even there for? And the other one is an over-dominant bass and/or percussion line. I generally tell people, as I told Athos, that my limit as far as that is concerned is Sultans of Swing (which I do, in fact, very much like, as I do most of Dire Straits). If the beat's any more intrusive than that, I'm out.

That does still leave a reasonable amount; but, of course, it's finding it, isn't it? I dislike the other stuff too much to want to bother wading through it to find something I do enjoy, especially when I know very well I can listen to practically any early music (or folk, or 1920s - 30s dance band music, or a few other reliable genres) and I'll enjoy all of it. I do know I like OMD, since my friend Robin tried them out on me at university (he had amazing parents who let him listen to whatever he liked when he was growing up, so he'd already got a very good idea of his own personal taste). Where they really excel is in building up a track layer by layer. He also played me the Human League (some of that I liked, some of it less so) and Kraftwerk (intriguing in small doses, but a bit repetitive at full length). I found Dire Straits via another friend, Wendy, who was convinced I'd like them and turned out (as usual) to be quite right. And I'll quite happily take any other personal recommendations and give them a whirl. My ex-lodger, incidentally, was into Genesis and Pink Floyd, both of which, again, I quite enjoyed in small doses; too much of either, though, had an oddly depressing effect. Especially the Pink Floyd.

As for Aziraphale... well, it may be worth putting in my two penn'orth on Good Omens fanfic, and, indeed, fanfic in general, at this point. My attitude to fanfic is "you do you, but if it contradicts the official canon I'm not going to write it, and that's particularly true for established characters". That does still give a huge amount of room for manoeuvre: you can always put the characters into a situation they haven't encountered before and see how they react. For my Girl Genius fanfic, in particular, I've done a vast amount of post-canon stuff, because apart from anything else I'm very interested in how the characters mature and develop as they get older. (My version of Ardsley Wooster continues to develop mentally and spiritually, though his health isn't so good in later life.) But I have an absolutely ironclad rule that you do not make anyone act out of character; if they're going to do something they wouldn't normally do, they'd better have a very good reason for doing it. I'll never forget writing a Blake's 7 fanfic in which I had to get Avon to back down over something. It took me three rewrites of the relevant section before I could get that to happen in a way that was still totally credible for the character.

I think you see where this is going. Everyone and their dog ships Aziraphale and Crowley. I do not. It specifically says in the book that Aziraphale (and, therefore, by implication, also Crowley) is not gay - he's just usually mistaken for it. And if he's canonically Not Gay, then he's not having a wild fling with Crowley. Stands to reason. I have not seen the TV series, but I understand that Neil Gaiman was heavily involved with that and rather went back on what was written in the book; well, fair enough, but if you're shipping those two you're doing it from the TV series and not the original book. I'm going by what I know; and, honestly, they're entirely fun enough as a pair of unlikely friends. Nothing more than that is needed. My one Good Omens fanfic (to date) can be found here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/72992726 You will notice I've rather pointedly not shipped them.

Obviously, many people differ. Which is fine. You want to write fanfic where the most unlikely pair of characters jump into bed, go on, knock yourself out. I won't be reading it, but I'm sure you'll find plenty of people who will. Nonetheless, I will not be able to stop myself from thinking: why not just write an original story?

On a lighter note... I have three best friends. I call them my Three Musketeers. Athos is, of course, very wise; Porthos is larger than life in all manner of ways; but my very best friend gets referred to as d'Artagnan, and unfortunately that doesn't suit him at all. He is much more of an Aramis. The only reason he got d'Artagnan was that if he were Aramis, I'd have to be d'Artagnan; and a d'Artagnan in a mobility scooter is somewhat more ridiculous than one who is actually a gentle, modest little man with a bald head and a lovely smile.

He's also a professional singer. Almost certainly the most outstanding one you've never heard of. Within his field he is world-famous, but his field is a somewhat esoteric one; and that suits him just fine, because certain things are expected of famous people and he isn't interested in any of them. He drives a car when he absolutely has to, but most of the time he gets around either by public transport, or, for preference, by bike; and he's quite happy to cycle the breadth of the country and back, though he's well into his sixties now.

And the other thing you need to know about him is he has a head like a sieve. Seriously. If he hadn't had that beautiful voice, he'd have ended up as the most absent-minded professor in Cambridge; as it is, he does always remember where and when he is supposed to be singing, but anything else - including rehearsals - can get vague to the point of mild dottiness. This is, after all, the man who once famously showed up to a rehearsal precisely one year early.

So... he's the main soloist in a concert at the Stour Music Festival, which is in the middle of Nowhere, Kent; we're talking quite close to twenty years ago now. And I go down there for the concert, but it isn't clear exactly where the church is, so I ask him for directions. In his inimitable style, he replies "the church is not in the village".

OK. That does not exactly tell me where it is, and there's no time to ask for further clarification; so I check into my hotel in Ashford and hope for the best. The church is about 8 km from the hotel, it's a nice day, this is well before I became disabled, so I decide I'm going to walk.

I walk. Eventually I get to the village. I ask a couple of people where the church is. They have no idea. I keep walking... and walking... and walking... and after a while I start to worry I've gone past it; then I spot a house by the side of the road, so I knock at the door to ask for directions. It's the right place to ask, as it turns out. A nice lady answers the door and explains that I just have to go down the little lane alongside the house, turn right at the end through the gate, and then I'll see it right in front of me across a field.

So I do that. And this field, as it turns out, is full of sheep.

I was born in the Lake District. I know sheep. At least... I thought I knew sheep, until that moment.

The sheep look at me. There's a momentary pause. Then, as one sheep, they all panic and flee to the furthest corner of the field. I'm... disconcerted.

However, there indeed is the church right in front of me; so I walk down the slope, sit down near the front of the church, and thoroughly enjoy the concert. After which I catch up with d'Artagnan, who's as mystified as I am about the sheep, and then I happen to mention I'm trying out a smartphone at the moment. He says, "Oh, yes, so am I!" and whips out an iPhone. My astonishment must be visible, because he immediately explains, "Well, it just turned out to be the thing that did all the things I needed it to best. And... it's got a metronome!"

Ah. A metronome. That explains everything.

I am already finding I don't like this smartphone (I am a competent touch typist, so I really hate phone keyboards); but when I get home I realise there is at least one amusing thing I can do with it, so I do this, and then I e-mail d'Artagnan to tell him I have done it.

"I downloaded a new ringtone," I say. "Bach. Sheep May Safely Graze."

It'd have been rude not to.