Second thing is that Diamond Cascade is set to return. Yes, the game is afoot once more, the defining moment so far probably being the use of a Dragon Orb as an improvised melee weapon with which to hit a dragon (as opposed to using, Oh I don’t know, maybe one of its LEGION OF DRAGON-RELATED POWERS perhaps?). In preparation for the resumption of this illustrious[1] and unforgettable[1] epic narrative, the previous Diamond Cascade posts have been re-vamped, including: Elimination of the nearly ALL of the bizarre character sequences that suddenly rendered the early episodes almost unreadable following some software upgrade or other; Elimination of TWO or THREE of the several thousand spelling mistakes and typos that riddle this un-proofread series; integration of the infamous INTERLUDE ON THE ELVISH BORDER sequence, and best of all, now available in ALL-NEW CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER. Although you can still do it backwards like it used to be if you want.

START HERE >>>>> Diamond Cascade And The Quest For Some Bat Shit

Oh, it’s a bit sweary and Father Christmas gets killed at some point, so best keep away from children.

Yes, Yes, I’ll write something about World Building again soon. I know I promised…

[1] Words do not necessarily mean what you think they mean. Terms and conditions may apply. Occasionally when some words are out of stock, and equivalent word will be offered as an alternative. Check with your local dealer for eligibility in your area. Etc. Etc.

The King of the Crags is to be published in Poland (probably) next year by Dwojka bez sternika, who recently published The Adamantine Palace. The Thief-Taker’s apprentice, meanwhile has been acquired by Proszynski, who also brought out (are bringing out?) Wolfsangel. I think it would amuse my thief-taker to be in the company of a werewolf. Possibly this is an excuse to visit Poland…

There have been some reviews recently.

The Adamantine Palace first: “…fast, furious and action packed…” Vilutheril

And finally, a couple for the Order of the Scales: “Great Stuff” Falcatta Times and “enthusiastic … brilliantly executed … heart-thumping dragon action” from LEC Book reviews.

For the handful of you following the adventures of Diamond Cascade, there will be a large hiatus shortly (we played the last session last week and left everything on a total cliff-hanger – which I guess is what you get when you put the fate of the world into the hands of a bunch of chaotic thieves and wizards, most of whom are carrying negative wisdom modifiers (and believe me, when it comes to party actions, those modifiers do stack).

I had a go at a couple of other projects to replace Diamond Cascade, but they were rubbish. In fact, everything I write at the moment appears to be rubbish, but that’s what rewrites and editors are for, so no worries – yet. There might be some cartoons instead. Which will also be rubbish since I can’t draw. But it’s my blog, so nyer!

]]> http://www.stephendeas.com/poland-new-reviews-stuff-1462011/feed/ 0 http://www.stephendeas.com/diamond-cascade-to-the-victor-the-spoils/ http://www.stephendeas.com/diamond-cascade-to-the-victor-the-spoils/#comments Fri, 05 Nov 2010 11:05:28 +0000 Stephen http://www.stephendeas.com/?p=1444 Beyond the corpse of Captain Shark-face, a bounty of treasure awaits. Chest upon chest of it. Like a gang of starving street-urchins set upon a rich man’s table, we fall upon it. . .
. . .BOOOOM! goes the first chest in a ball of fire as Wizard Daftboy smashes it open . . .
. . .HISSSS goes the next as the Halfgit forces the lock. . .
. . .SMASH goes another as Crazy Dwarf throws it down the stairs. . .
. . .TING goes some poison-dart-like-thing as it narrowly misses Shifty’s face

Eventually, someone bothers to look through Captain Shark-Face’s personal stuff and finds the chest keys under his bed. After we’ve smashed them all and set off their traps. After we’ve been charred, poisoned, mangled and, in the case of the Halfgit, tripped so far out on hallucinogenic gas that there’s probably no coming back. All but one chest is smashed. We have no means to carry most of this treasure. The tide is coming in. The only ways out are either underwater and full of sharks or up through a tiny hole in the ceiling that’s almost impossible to reach.

Still, eventually we do. (Am I the only one who can Spider Climb?) So now we’re down to trying to pitch the one tent that we’ve got with us on a windy cliff-top in a storm. That’s about when it occurs to most of us that we never found the thing we were supposed to be looking for in the first place.

To recap:

Most of my stuff is covered in salt-water and is probably going to rot. There’s a big pile of treasure underneath me that we can’t reach and couldn’t carry even if we could. We’re out on an exposed cliff in the middle of the night in freezing rain and a howling wind with no shelter to speak of. At least I’m not too bashed up.

Unlike everyone else, who are either battered, smashed, bruised and burned or raving mad.

Our lift back to civilisation is waiting for us out at sea. Waiting for us to bring them a ship that we can’t sail and happens to be stuck in a tidal cave filled with sharks. We are at the wrong end of a cliff and the only way down involves being able to breath underwater and body-wrestle said sharks.

Oh, and we smashed up our only boat.

And this black pearl, the whole reason we came here in the first place, is distinctly not in our possession. Presumably its somewhere back in the submerged caves covered in salt water and yet more sharks.

And the only reason we were looking for the damn thing in the first place was to give it to some dodgy bloke who would then, MAYBE, tell us something about some shit about which I DON’T CARE AT ALL.

I’ve had enough. The rest of them can do what they want. Wolfgirl’s already pissed off somewhere doing her own thing and I reckon she had the right of it. Shifty, he’s got twenty-four hours to sort his shit out or he can stay behind. The rest. . . I don’t even know the rest of them. Wizard Daftboy, Mad Monk, Crazy Dwarf, Caleb Knight of Something, I don’t even know who these people are. What happened to my friends? There was a point to all this once, wasn’t there?

Maybe there wasn’t. Maybe I just wanted gold. Wine, women and song and a few friends to share it with. What am I doing here, out on this godforsaken cliff? Gods, Ebra, what am I doing?

As soon as we get back, I’m out of here.

And that’s when a band of orcs and ogres stumble into our camp.

NEXT WEEK: YOU PICKED THE WRONG BARD, OGRE-BOY

Here’s a shout out to all wizards who are really, really stupid. Not the ones who are just a bit stupid, but the ones who simply have no capacity to think before they act. Here’s the situation: You’ve just climbed out of an underwater tunnel that’s now filled with sharks, cutting off your only retreat. You’re in a dead-end cave with assorted aquatic undeady things that you know damn well can paralyse everyone around you and a pirate captain who just might well be nowhere near as human as he seems. The only decent swordsman nearby literally has his plate-mail pants around his ankles (underwater cave, remember). He’s also the closest thing you’ve got to a cleric (y’know – for the undead turning thing and for the making you better after you’ve had your head ripped off and your brains eaten and so forth). You have one spell left and no, it’s not Dimension Door. The only thing going for you is that Captain Eats-Elves-Raw-For-Breakfast seems to want to talk a bit before he feasts on your vital organs. Do you:

a) Parlay and see if you can find grounds for co-operation or at least compromise and barter?

b) Engage in conversation while your comrades strategically position themselves, readying spells and items for maximum tactical effect.

c) Engage in conversation while your tank at least pulls up his pants.

d) Magic Missile the fucker and then think about what to do next afterwards.

If you answered d), then you are clearly meant to be adventuring as part of our thing-we-laughably-refer-to-as-a-team. If your answer is e), do what it says in d) only without the thinking bit, then congratulations, you are, in fact, Wizard Daftboy.

So there we have it. And this is how yours truly came to be sandwiched between a gang of aquatic ghouls and a ravening pirate psychopath who also turned out to be a wereshark.

Hang on a minute.

Now if I hadn’t been too busy making aquatic undead heads explode with my swanky new arrows of explody-goodness (What? So I’m the only person with magic arrows?) then I might have stopped to wonder about that. A wereshark.

That works. . . how, exactly? As far as I can tell, the creature that’s happily ripping my so-called friends to pieces has turned into what is basically a big man with a shark’s head. With gills on his neck. Not having any trouble breathing, I notice, although I think he has to keep running and he might suffocate if he stood still for too long. Certainly seems to have the whole blood frenzy thing going for him, judging by the state of Mr Pants-Still-Round-His-Ankles.

I’m about as far as wondering what happens if you take a wereshark into a desert, and whether there are fresh-water weresharks and salt-water weresharks by the time it became apparent that ordinary swords and sticks and absurdly shaped dwarven axes aren’t actually having much impact. And, because in a moment of bizarre charity I gave the only other magic sword we ever found to someone who turned out to be a murderous doppelganger (I hate you, Stalker), I’m the only person with an enchanted weapon.

Bollocks.

Obviously there’s only one thing for it – lend it to someone else for a couple of minutes – but that’s starting to be a problem. Caleb Knight of Something is lying on the floor with his plate-mail pants still round his ankles, only now it’s in a big pool of his own blood. The Mad Monk’s more likely to cut himself than anyone else, Crazy Dwarf. . . Well, he’s crazy, and that leaves Wizard Daftboy, who’ll probably just wet himself, and the Halfgit, whose most likely course of action would be to bolt back to the town and sell it as fast as she possibly could.

So this is how I end up toe to toe with Captain Sharkface or whatever his name is. I’d like to say I fought him hard and I fought him well and in the end I sent him to hell. But what actually happened was that Shifty snuck round behind him and stabbed him in the neck lots with a silver dagger. Apparently that works too.

Afterwards, there’s only one thing left to say.

“So am I the only one who can do any healing magic?”

NEXT WEEK: TO THE VICTOR, THE SPOILS

So anyway, there’s this big cave full of water and sharks and we’re on one side of it up on a slightly burned ship, and on another side of it, the tide’s gone out enough to reveal a half-submerged tunnel that’s clearly the way out and the only way we can get to it is either swim and be eaten by sharks or scramble around the rocks and hope we don’t fall in, and I’m like “So am I the only one who can Spider Climb?” And then when we manage that with some ropes and a bit of shark-distraction, I’m like “So, am I the only one with a light spell?” And then there was some more climbing (or falling, on the dwarf’s part) and then there were some caves that were still filled up with water and I’m like “So am I the only one who can breath underwater?” And then after all that there’s the shark-man thing and I’m like: “Oh crap, you mean I’m the only one with a magic sword?”

Admittedly there was the bit with the underwater corpse-things and then Wizard Daftboy and the Mad Monk were all “So are you telling me we’re the only ones immune to paralysis?” But none of the rest of us were in much position to answer that.

I do hope Wizard Daftboy gets on and has an accident soon so we can go back to the good old days where I’m the only one of us who knows magic when he sees it.

NEXT WEEK: SHIFTY VS. THE SHARK

[1] Anyone remember NPC Jones? CUDADS newsletter, issue 1, from about 1987 applies. Also my first official editing post…

Turns out that while me and the Knight Of Something were putting out the Wizard Daftboy’s fires and patching up those of The Monk’s victims who hadn’t been separated from any organs they couldn’t afford to miss, Wolfgirl had gotten back to talking the bloke who’d cause all the fuss in the first place. Turns out the captain of the White Wyvern is suddenly and unexpectedly short of a few hands, on account of some bunch of completely insane… Oh, wait, that was us. I don’t know how all this worked out. I was more than a little drunk, and then there was some other place and then another place and some more wine and some ale and maybe some brandy and some other stuff that frankly could have been anything and then there was the bawdy house with the mermaids, or maybe I made that up, and then something to do with the Halfgit and the discovery that three-foot-tall women can do things you really wouldn’t think of. Or maybe I made that up too. Possibly some mushrooms were involved. I’m not sure I had any sleep. And then there was supposed to be some other bar that was down the bottom of the cliff by the sea, only it turned out it was a ship and then I think I spent the rest of the day alternating between being passed out in a corner and throwing up over the side.

Apparently we’ve struck some sort of deal. In exchange for a ride to where Captain I’ve-Already-Forgotten-His-Name-And-Why-We’re-Looking-For-Him, we’re going to deliver his ship. There’s some sort of blah-blah about reefs and tides and secret channels and sharks and being back by a certain time and then there’s some rowing and all of a sudden we’re coming up to the shore and nosing our way into some half-submerged caves and there’s a ship in front of us, hidden in the cave. Can’t help noticing that the cave entrance is about twenty feet about the water and the ship has a sixty-odd foot mast. Maybe they take the mast down and row out? If any of us had a clue about ships or sailing, I’m sure that would help.

Mr sea-cave is suspiciously empty (apart from the sharks in the water), but that doesn’t stop us from  managing to smash our little rowing boat into a rock and sink it when a rather more appropriate course of action would have been to nose up to the ship and tied up gently alongside. Ah well. I know exactly how I’m getting back.

Mr sea-cave is also suspiciously devoid of other ways out. Mad Elf has a go at kicking something off by setting fire to the ship to see what will happen, but pretty much all that happens is that we watch our one and only remaining way out of here burn for a bit and then get the idea that maybe we should put the fire out. There’s some arguing and some searching and some shark-baiting, but I’m too busy sitting on a ledge making up a song.

There once was an elf, a very fine elf
And a very fine elf was he,
He sailed on a ship, went on a trip
And now he’s at the bottom of the seaaaaa
Playing with a shark?
Oh what a lark!

There once was an elf, a very fine elf
And a very fine elf was he,
By the light of the moon, he found an underwater tomb,
And now he’s an elf zombieeeeee
Eaten by a ghoul!
Oh what a fool!

There once was an elf, a very fine elf
And a very fine elf was he,
He said he was a wizard, now his home’s a whale’s gizzard,
What a sorry end for a fine fairyyyyyy
Don’t have a moan,
Just should have stayed at home!

There. See. Much more useful. Mad Elf Monk and Wizard Daftboy certainly seem to think so.

Actually, doing nothing at all would usually be more useful than anything we do.

Eventually the tide goes out and we get to figure out where the pirates went. On account of certain things not being underwater any more.

NEXT WEEK: NPC JONES – AN ASIDE

“The Valdas killed my parents.”

“OK. For some reason I’d been thinking it was a vampire. You said it was a vampire.”

“It was a vampire wearing the sign of the Valdas.”

“Ah.”

Not sure if Wolfgirl is mad, delusional or simply immensely unlucky. My parents were killed in much more normal ways, involving swords, rape and burning, I imagine. Rather I was here and able to speculate than had been there to say for sure but only to a cleric with that still-conspicuously-absent-from-our-repertoire power to Speak With Dead.

The Monk drags us off to some diviner to try and find out something about the Valdas. She’s way too expensive for any of us to afford, but The Dwarf sort of lost his purse last night after I choked him out and so I buy a question from her anyway. Easy come, easy go. I ask here where the creature that killed Wolfgirl’s parents can be found. Bleedin’ miles away, that’s where. “Upon the earth of his home he rests, by a river that runs bright red.” Well the only river I know that runs bright red is the Crimson River and that’s over the other side of the mountains, not to mention all the orcs and the slimies and whatever else is crawling around the borders of Osmuld. So in short, bugger that.

Ah well. At least I get a good night out of the diviner’s receptionist and what’s left of the dwarf’s gold.

NEXT WEEK: WELL, IT WAS ABOUT TIME WE HAD SOME PIRATES IN THIS STORY

Look, in the big scheme of things, in the grand world-spanning story of Diamond Cascade, greatest troubadour of the land, hero of the people, saviour of kings and crap like that, the whole sordid business of a visit to the North Coast will be a footnote. Diamond Cascade helped deliver a letter. Whooo-hooo. All the thieving and the drinking and the whoring and the less we talk about any of that the better, no one wants to know about that. Sure, there might be a little twinkle in the eye as I sing my made-up tale, but no one wants to know that what Diamond Cascade actually did was spend a month and a half so drunk he could barely remember what colour the sea was, routinely woke up in a pool of his own vomit, contracted several diseases and only left to seek his fortune again because he couldn’t afford to pay for a cleric to make them better on account of having spent half his money on strong drink and loose women and lost the rest playing dice. Even if that’s pretty much what I’m aiming for here. I don’t know why. I just want to forget the whole shitty business with Stalker and Holli. Wipe it all clean and start again. Gods know, I’ve done that enough times.

Ordinarily, that wouldn’t have been a problem. Stalker would have done the same and so would The Gnome, only with more sex and less drinking. But sometimes, when I don’t pay attention, when I least expect or, frankly, want it, my erstwhile comrades actually manage to achieve something. Maybe it comes down to having all this new blood around us. By the time I emerge the following afternoon, bandy-legged and a little sore around the edges, they’ve been up, had breakfast, tied their shoelaces all on their own and then gone to see someone who’s something to do with the ships about some of the stuff we’re supposed to be interested in and now, apparently, we’re looking for some pirate bloke called Serious who sails around on a ship named after a musical instrument and stole some treasure off the something-to-do-with-ships bloke, who will, in return for the return of said treasure, tell us some stuff that apparently we want to know. Or someone that we know wants to know. Or something. It’s all a bit confusing, and mostly what I pick up is the the Caleb, Knight Of Something doesn’t like the something-to-do-with-ships bloke one little bit on general principle. Can’t see pirates working out much better for him, but we don’t have time to get into that question, because by then it’s getting dark and (yes, look, I had a good night) we’re off to some place that has a name but which we’ll call Seedy Dive because that’s what it was. Seedy, loud, full of smoke and noise and the smell of beer and sex. And more naked people than you might have imagined.

My kind of place, if a little low-brow. I’m all for settling in and seeing whether I can score for free, but no, Wolfgirl has to go asking questions and find herself a pirate to talk to (given the track record of my companions, I make a big and generous assumption about the talking bit) and the next thing I know there’s half a dozen men moving in on her and Mad Dwarf is hurling himself at them like a rabid gerbil with an axe the size of a church and The Monk is right behind him, and I still haven’t got around to having the conversation with any of them that until one of them learns to Talk With Dead, launching into a homicidal mania at the first sign of… well, anything at all really, isn’t going to help us find things out.

So I try to stop them. As does Caleb, Knight Of Something and the wizard. Three against three. Admittedly with some pirates in the middle who are nominally in the fray too, but their role in this turns out largely to involve tripping over each other and getting serially stabbed and thumped, oft as not by accident, until they fall down.

It’s only later that I begin to wonder whether jumping on the back of a frenzied berserker dwarf and choking him out in the middle of a fight was such a good idea. At the time I’m too distracted by Caleb, Knight Of Something realising that the Wolfgirl he’s grappled to the ground is called Wolfgirl for a reason (two, actually), and Wizard Daftboy trying to stop the amazingly fast and agile Mad Elf by rolling an amazingly slow and cumbersome ball of fire about the place. And setting fire to the Seedy Dive.

Unfortunately, my dream outcome, in which Wizard Daftboy and Mad Elf have at each other, Caleb, Knight Of Something tried to separate them, ends up killing them both and retires to a life of sorrowful penitence somewhere far away, fails to happen.

NEXT WEEK: WOLFGIRL SAYS SOMETHING

No hurry though.

So Shifty takes us to some place he knows, The Flying Goose or some-such, not that I much care apart from needing to know where to stagger back to once I’m done partying. I have to admit, I’d kind of thought the whole letter delivering business was Shifty’s problem, since he’s the one carrying it, and the rest of us would be left to our own pleasures (or whatever substitutes for them in the case of The Monk and the Knight of Something). But no, there’s a mad dwarf (can we meet a dwarf who’s not mad, please, one day? Or mad in a has-a-fetish-for-stamps sort of way, instead of mad in a has-a-fetish-for-severed-heads kind of way? Or do dwarves have the same social management principles as the elves and the reason we only ever find lunatics is because they’re the ones who weren’t allowed to stay at home)? Mad Dwarf recognises Shifty but not before The Monk has to kick his butt in an arm-wrestle and thus piss him off (because the loony social outcasts of elves and dwarves getting together is, like, a total recipe for social harmony. Not). The Mad Dwarf has a  friend (Karallis Fane? But I’ll remember him as the man who thought that wearing a deep purple cloak over dark red clothes mad him look cool instead of making him look like he’d just crawled out from under a bad accident involving several tuns of wine) who has to show up and we all have to walk off to some swanky house run by some Lord Smelly Arse (Aros Reekiel, was it?) who then proceeds to ask all sorts of questions that I, for one, would prefer not to answer, such as ‘who are you and why did it take so long for my letter to get here and what have you been up to on the way’? We tell him some bollocks, but here and there the odd bit of unguarded truth slips out. On the plus side, Lord Smelly Arse shares our dislike for Durmijeron. On the minus, well, now everyone knows about the stupid riddle the Gnomes left for us.

Afterwards, Shifty and I go to a pawn shop and offload the shit we lifted from the dark elves while we were busy pretending to help the Gnomish Kingdoms. Got to say, the plus side of having half your old friends killed: You get to keep their share. Never seen so much gold. Ever. Or so many pornographic paintings of dwarvish ‘ladies,’ but that’s another matter.

Downside of half your old friends getting killed? New friends. Yes, The Monk, The Mage and The Knight of Something, all still here. Come on bandits, where are you when I need you?

After that, maybe some more shit went down, but if it did, I was in an alcohol, sex and I-have-more-gold-than-I’ve-ever-seen related coma, and it went down without me. Unlike my temporary friends Romana and Tallulah.

NEXT WEEK: SOME BANDITS WHEN YOU NEED THEM

Ah, man, can I stay? Can I just live here? Like, forever? Why am I running about getting myself nearly killed when I still have gold in my pockets and a place like this exists in the world. I so don’t want to leave.

NEXT WEEK: SHIFTY’S FRIENDS