On my way to Salt Lake City
Ramen Sandwich Press will be at SALT Con Summer this weekend
If you can afford the extra time it requires, trains are a more civilized way to travel than flying these days. You get to see the world at ground level, the way humans are meant to experience it, and no one expects you to take off your shoes at the security checkpoint. I’m carrying a Swiss Army Knife in my pocket so I can open the boxes filled with our show merch when I set up my table at SALT Con. Good luck trying get one of those on board a plane.
However, it will take me about 36 hours in total to get from Los Angeles to SLC. I rationalized the expense by figuring that I would work on the train, maybe finish up Lair of the Storm Giant on the way. It was a sound plan in theory. But I forgot to upload the file to iCloud so I could access it with my iPad. Now I can’t access it until I get back to my desktop setup. However, I did bring a blank notebook with me, and I knew that I still had to build out the final location and write most of the epilogue. So I did something I have not done in a very long time: I composed by hand, using pen and paper. I’ll just transcribe it into the master file when I can.
And if I can. There’s a problem with moving trains — they wobble as they go. It’s even worse than using a mobile device in a moving car, when the location of your pointing finger to the touchscreen is always shifting. My handwriting is appalling even under the best circumstances — just ask anyone who has had me sign a book for them — and trying to use it under these conditions produces something more akin to a writing system used by space aliens than the Latin alphabet.
Nonetheless, one hopes for the best.
I certainly hope I can figure out what I wrote when it comes time to transcribe because I came up with a neat little twist for the last encounter/epilogue. I won’t spoil it, even though it doesn’t affect the player characters directly and it only happens under a particular circumstance (which the DM could probably engineer without railroading). I’ll just say that when your boss monster is a red dragon, you have to work in some treachery and nastiness. That’s specified somewhere in the Monster Manual, I think.
Writing the boss encounter in isolation from the rest of the module like that did have the odd effect of putting Sophia, the storm giant hermit-philosopher who drives the action, out of sight and somewhat out of mind. For a brief moment, I forgot that the red dragon isn’t really meant to be the focus of the module. Working out its motivation and actions was just too much fun.
In any event, I expect to finish up the D&D version of the module shortly after I get back to my desktop setup, when I can access the master file again. Crowdfunding will follow ASAP after that, so stay tuned for the announcement.
In the meantime, wish us luck at SALT Con Summer this weekend. I am cautiously hopeful that it will be a good show for us; it looks they’re expecting well over a thousand attendees and their Facebook group is keeping up a lively chatter. I’m looking forward to my first actual visit to the state of Utah, although I may not get the chance to actually see the Great Salt Lake — it doesn’t appear to be the sort of thing where you can just park by the side of the road, walk down to the shore and say, “Ah, there it is.” Our table will be located just to the left of the main entrance. Even better than wishing us good luck, drop by and say hello if you’re at the show!