Huzzah For Liver Damage And Paranoia!

I have ADHD, it is a problem. My focus can suddenly shit to something completely different with almost no warning. I imagine this makes it difficult to have lengthy conversations with me at times. Oh well.

Right now I should be focusing on the next scenario of the campaign and working on writing about Traith Harris. Instead, because of maybe three sentences Eric said last night, I am working my brain into a frenzy about converting the Fey to 4th Edition. This is not necessarily a bad thing, since technically the Fey are part of my current campaign and Avalon/The Grey Wastes are west of The Known World. (Side Note: I really need to work on a globe-sized map.) Its just a distraction from what I am currently working on, and between WoW and Prototype, I don't need another distraction pulling me away from writing and DnDing.

The Fey are basically the antithesis of my current campaign. They are a society that relies upon magic, having the cliched technological level of every pseudo-European medieval high fantasy setting out there. Swords and castles and everything they need is produced by magic, called Glamour. They are fun, there is no doubt of that, but a lot of their fun stems from the sense of superiority people feel when they play them I think. When something has roughly +12 to stats, resistance to fire and ice, is immortal, can see in the dark, regenerate, and turn invisible at 3rd level, that something is overpowered. People never really understood that, and if they did they certainly did not say anything about it.

I know the Fey are broken, I know they always have been. They were designed to be overpowered because they were designed to be a superior race to everything else out there (even though in my cosmology their power is dwarfed by that of the Eldarine). So when Eric says stuff like "The Fey were so much fun to play." I can only respond with "Duh, they are like three or four times as powerful as any other character of equal level." There is no way to balance them and still maintain their innate Feyness. You can try and get something approaching semi-balance between the races themselves, but there is no way to truly balance them and keep their flavor. Their flavor is their power, and arrogance. You strip their power away and they are a collection of funky looking humanoids.

The Fey were basically copy & pasted from Celtic myth, and that was intentional. If I had known they were going to be part of my little world beforehand, I would not have borrowed so heavily from myth and instead would have tried to create my own (mythology that is). In theory I could come up with new names for them and use the search and replace functions in Word to alter it, but I like the names. Balor, that is a good name. Cromm, good name, just ask Conan. These are good names, and I like them. Of course, there is always the option of playing the alternate spelling game and adding in apostrophes and producing stuff like Bail'Hor. I think I've reached a point though where I am too attached to the name Cromm Cruach and Bloody Head to easily give those up, and if I'm going to keep them I might as well keep the rest of it.

At this point, why bother worrying about names? The personalities I've attributed to the characters are my own. The story is my own, it wasn't lifted from Encyclopedia Mythica (good website!). Cromm isn't even really an elf, he/it is a giant mound for the sacrificing of shit. in like Scotland or somewhere across the pond. In myth the Sluagh are the restless human dead, not the undead servants of Cromm.

I think I will definitely change Oberon's name and perhaps Titania's as well. I'd have to do some research but I believe their connections to Celtic myth are somewhat tenuous. I vaguely remember reading that titania was a catch all term for daughters of titans or something. Oberon was a version of some knight by the name of Auberch or something along those lines. I can't remember, it has been a while since I spent any time looking at Celtic myth and legend. It might be prudent to look into it though.

Side Note: I just ate an entire bag of cola flavored gummi candies (shaped like old school glass Coke bottles), I feel funny.

I guess this issue of names has been bothering me lately because I started the story of Cromm with the intent of ripping off Celtic myth, and now the story of Cromm and the Fey has stepped away from that original intention. My writing style has evolved and changed just as my personality and likes and dislikes have, so I guess it is no surprise that something I started writing half a decade ago is not necessarily turning into what I had intended to turn it into back then.

Time to get ready for work here, perhaps more writing on this topic will occur, perhaps not.

Music: Ultimate - Gogol Bordello