Spirit of Winter Veil

Posted by on January 9, 2012 No comments

This holiday season has been filled with interesting surprises. Gifts from people I have long since believed to have ignored or disregarded me has giving me good tidings with either letters or presents.

My granddaughter Lyraela sent a letter of a picture she drew herself. I suppose it was her own way of letting me know she still regards me with warmth and affection even if her damnable mother regards me with a cold eye. “I wish for you to believe that we are going to meet again” she wrote to me. Maybe. We’ll have to see what time says.

As for the mother herself, I received a box with a dead rat. How charming. Much better than the cut off boar’s snout she sent me last year. I do hope she enjoys the box of live spiders I sent her in return.

My crew has provided nothing but their insistent whining and complaining of the load of work we have ahead of us for the coming month. I have heard their woes and have decided to reduce the amount of work by having them load the remaining cargo for the rest of the morrow until everything is on board. That way, we will not have to load a few at a time each day but will knock it out all at once. I can tell they are grateful for this despite the sneers and glares received at my back. Perhaps next time they will know better than to expect a free ride out of this.

My gift to myself was finally being able to confront my son, Shadenii. I thought it best to tell him the truth about my identity when he introduced me to his fiancé. I no longer wanted to be under the guise of “J” and decided to come clean. Despite his shock and disappointment, he forgave in his own way and informed me about his … significant other … and the child that they are to share. I’m unsure how I feel about another man courting my son. But then again, I wasn’t sure how to feel about my daughter’s interest in other women. One I haven’t raised and the other I raised to behave like me. We make quite the family the three of us with Lyraela not included since she is perhaps the only normal one.


I guess the most noteworthy gift of all came from Aryssia herself. I received a box from her peppered with holes shortly after the holiday ended. She stated it was keeping up with tradition according to the letter that came with it. Whiskey, I thought. Bourbon or even rum. But no, her idea of tradition… was a cat. A black cat. Witty, I thought. In place of the brooch I now have a living and breathing feline to pester my feet at every waking moment. I was even scratched the moment I opened the box and purred shortly after. It has her temper. I now own a smaller version of the baker at my side. I am not sure whether to be frustrated or grateful … but I suppose it will serve me well on the ship. We have enough rodents to there for him to work on clearing, and I speak not of the men.

I had no intentions of celebrating this holiday. My idea was simply enjoying it in the comfort of my cabin with something warm to drink and warm in the bed. But now I find myself surrounded with more attention than I can ask for.

I promised myself never to celebrate it as it was a favorite holiday of my once beloved. She decorated the tree with crystals and gold, a tradition she called it. I had dreams of sharing it with her and a family… a morning waking up to surprise the children with gifts and feast on dinner later on that evening. It was a dream we both shared and spoke about nightly.

That day never came. The spirit of that day died along with her. I have no desire to relive memories I no longer can share.

Winter’s Veil is for family … and the dead have none.

Traitor.

Posted by on December 22, 2011 1 comment

Several weeks.

Several weeks living a lie. Pretending to be something that I am not. And for what? Security? Access? The ability to go within the city without fear of being incarcerated is a luxary, but I am running out of legitamete reasons why I should continue this. As the days go by, my options are turning towards only one goal. A goal that is getting increasingly harder to commit to with everything that is going on within this … Sunguard.

At some point I will need to make a decision.

I suppose my biggest problem is trying to learn where my daughter’s loyalties lie and where she stands. She remains oblivious to the fact that I have continued to speak with the baker. I wonder if this news will infuriate her or make her understand that there is no stopping a person who knows what they want. Though I wonder if I am being a fool by letting myself continue. Feelings itself is foolish.

I’m too old for this. Here I am nearing the pinnacle of my life span and caught up in a lovers tirade and a potential disagreement between both lover and daughter. A man of my age should not be even bothering with this. Those days are long gone and yet … I pursue. I wonder if continuing will drag me off course and pull in a direction that will only further delay what I am planning with the group I have nearly restored. Goblin, elf, human, and orc… a few more recruits and my fleet will be complete.

I won’t deny that being a ranger again takes me back to days I nearly forgot about. While Aestiah’s old companion Seraph is no wolf, he serves me well in battle and makes me remember why I joined the Farstriders in the first place. Sadly, that life is over.

I’ve received word of a shipment destined for Stormwind Ports carrying cargo useful for us. If we can intercept them, we’ll have just enough to finish up the last repairs on the ship. It looks like we’re back in business.

It won’t be long until Sunguard realizes there is a traitor in their midst.

Some OOC in my IC cup, please?

Posted by on November 15, 2011 13 comments

I thought I’d take the moment to slide OOC for a second and break the pattern of story after story to write a little about my experiences and rants regarding role play. I mean, the original idea behind this blog is to write both IC and any other things tying into WoW. Lately, that’s been mostly just stories. Nobody’s complaining, right? At least those that actually read my stories. I pity you folks…

How heavily does OOC influence your IC actions? I ask this because I’ve recently discovered that I tend to do this for a number of reasons.

For starters, I’m a hardcore believer that IC = / = OOC. Anything that my character does should never been taken out of character and held against me as the player. We all live by this rule as role players and many of us claim to follow it. But how much does the average person obey this? Very often, though many will seldom admit it, we do bring our emotions to the table with RP when things don’t go our way. This tends to happen almost 99.9% of the time for someone who self-inserts themselves into RP and 50% of the time for people who have character empathy. No, this is not real time statistics, just me summarizing my personal experiences.

Now you’re probably asking what is Character empathy? Character empathy is being able to understand and feel for the character. Authors will tell you that some of their best stories were characters they could relate to or really feel as though they’ve brought them to life. Role players—as story writers—have the same experience. Having empathy isn’t exactly a bad thing; it allows you to write fantastic stories because you’re living their story through their eyes. But when you bring character empathy into role play, it can either create something utterly amazing or disastrously fail. I’ve witnessed how empathy can often make someone unintentionally bitter towards others about how things played out for their character or  feel such a deep level of attachment to the character that some people tend to confuse for out of character affection for the player. This is not to demean people who find love out of role players, but I will not dismiss that it’s often people confusing the player to be the character. I say this from experience and learning to later differentiate the two.

So how badly does OOC influence my in-character decisions? It depends.

I’ve tried the option of ignoring what sort of OOC feelings were showed because of character empathy and simply go with the RP. It was great and fantastic for me to progress with my story uninterrupted, but it was at the sacrifice of an unusual OOC level of awkward conversations, hostility, and general bitterness by players who were directly or in-directly affected by the decisions made. Sometimes it wasn’t even anything that affected their character, it was just pure and utter jealousy.  I greatly dislike when I am in a situation where I have to feel bad for playing my character a certain way or having them respond or make decisions that may or may not even affect another character. No matter how many times people may claim this is never the case, it’s always something that I can detect from a mile away.

The other option I’ve sometimes reduced myself to is actually stepping OOC and retconning or changing things to avoid potential OOC drama due to character empathy. Person A talks about how sad this is for their character and Person B gets the brute heat of their sadness for their character… and decides to change things so that things look up. This option isn’t a favorite of mine because it means going a route that generally leads to me being unhappy with the story progression, but I do this whenever I feel like one too many are unhappy with how things are going or if I am generally concerned about someone.  I know of role players who are not always vocal about their feelings. They’ll tolerate something to the ends of the world because they are simply nice enough to do it for your sake, but is that really how role play should go? I’ve only had to do this perhaps twice in my RP career, but it was never an easy decision. It means changing something your character normally wouldn’t do so that in the end it works out for the other player and you lose. But the benefit? I avoid the above scenario of OOC awkward. If I had to pick and choose which situation I’d rather be in, I’d prefer to remove myself from any situation that makes me uncomfortable OOCly. Some things are just not worth it, especially if it means having a great story.

I am not a fan of either scenario. If things were my way, everyone would role play honestly without changing how their character would normally respond. No guilt-treatment, no anger, no negative emotions whatsoever. Nobody changes anything and everyone accepts the consequences for their actions. So A and B can argue ICly and it doesn’t affect the relationship of the players out of character. Sadly, this is never going to always be the case. We are either doing something to appease other players if we know them well enough or ignoring their pleas for the glory of awesome arrpees. I know I have done both and neither situation is ever pretty. We don’t want to disappoint them, we don’t want to make them upset, but we still want to have fun. We can’t have it all, I guess?

I noticed that those who tend to not let out of character situations influence their RP at all period are the ones who generally are said to be heartless. I can’t imagine how hard it must be for anyone who is labeled  ’cruel’ all because they stick to the essence of what RP should be. I guess the question is, is it wrong to not show any sympathy towards the player if something happens or is happening that they don’t questionably like – even if they don’t openly admit it? Or should we show concern and know when to have a limit, when to stop and either change it or just cease it entirely so that the player can enjoy his or her story. And if we do, when is it too much? When is it too far? How far is too far with allowing the character to always get what they want to make them happy? Is RP really about give and take? Whatever happened to just multiple people telling a story? Is this like having too many chefs in the kitchen?

God, this hurts my brain. Y so frustrating, arrpee?

I know some will read this and be in denial that they do this—but admit it, you do. We all do. I’ve just written an entry explaining that I’ve done it myself on a few occasions. With so many different personalities to players in role play, it’s never easy to live that dream of IC=/=OOC. Because whether or not everyone chooses to admit it, OOC seems to always have some impact—small or major—on role play.

The solution? Stop role playing and just write stories. But you know I can never do that. Oh, the pain.