My Rite of Autumn

One of the great spiritual truths I've gleaned from my Pagan path is that the Wheel of the Year offers a good model for timing some of life's bigger tasks that are not directly tied to religious liturgy or agrarian life. One of the things I have been doing annually between the Autumn Equinox and Samhain is taking stock of my life, cataloguing the wins and losses over the course of the year, celebrating goals achieved and identifying new opportunities for spiritual growth.

OK, New Years' Resolutions are somewhat universal, and in a way, this is exactly that.

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A Steaming Heap Of First Day Of School Blog Fodder

1. Today is the first day of school. It's just quietly working grownups and NO TV ON at our lovely little home. And kitties.

2. Speaking of the kitties, two of them have now been spoken for and will be leaving us today. We rescue, we foster and we facilitate responsible cat ownership. We are not cat ranchers. We'll be down to a mere five cats -- three resident adults and two foster-age kittens.

3. Yesterday, I did something I wish I would have thought workable three months ago. What has changed is that the esteemed younger son is behaving much more responsibly. I took note of his respectful tone of voice and his compliance with my reasonable requests to keep the TV volume down, and I was trying to think of a reward to recognize this positive change.

After I caught a glimpse of one of our kittens wandering across the living room floor, the brainstorm hit: I handed him my digital camera and gave him a short lesson in its basic use.

His first solo pictures were of course the kittens. I also gave him a bonus course on how to use iPhoto on my Mac to import and enhance the pictures he takes.

4. Pathfinder Society at the Squirrel: New season, new characters, new adventuresome fun. We are up to four tables and well over twenty players now. I'm playing a pacifistic goody-two-shoes cleric healer and having a blast.

I've also been toying with some additional fun to play character concepts for Society play.

• Mezzo d'Foppe, the fabulously flamboyant actor-bard / duelist / fashion plate.
• Lo Ping, a monkish mobile speed daemon / two fisted acrobat / master of chop-socky philosophy.
• Rob E. Slay, alchemist. Cooks up his extracts, bombs and mutagens like any PF alchemist. For (ahem!) flavor, add Profession (Barbecue Cooking). Occasionally he confuses his cooking and alchemical ingredients.
• Rogue, a half-educated transplant surgeon. He only learned how to remove organs with a knife, not put them back.
• Monty, a scarlet-clad Inquisitor with a penchant for comfort and stealth. Why stealth? because if he is using stealth, nobody expects him . . . .

One week WoW-Free

I'm feeling pretty good about that right now.

What an I doing these days with my play time?

• Working on my new RPG campaign. Write-ups, plotting and scheming.
• I called both my sibs for the first time in years.
• I'm playing and will (soon) be GMing at our weekly Central Valley Pathfinder Society games
• Enjoying Jameece's company for things like Next Food Network Star, MasterChef, Hell's Kitchen and of course Grey's Anatomy. I am not that crazy about Glee and Chopped.
• Facebook games like Galaxy Online 2 and Monster Backyard.
• Kittens! Kittens! Kittens!!! (see above pics for the cuteness. Mom-less 2-week old rescued strays, getting bottle-fed by Chief Kitteh Mommy Jameece, ably assisted by the younglings.)

There is a time for everything . . .

. . . and the time for me to stop subscribing to World of Warcraft is now.

That's right. After just over five years, I'm hanging it up as a subscribing player. I'll still play occasionally, since now WoW has gone "free to play" to level 20. But my days of raiding and playing at level cap will end as of next month when my sub expires.

This is not a sudden decision; it's been coming on for the last few months. It's not because I cannot afford it.

Basically, I'm paying for a sub I am not using as much as I once did. I've logged into WoW maybe three times in the last week for maybe an hour or so each. Before this, I was spending in excess of 20 hours a week playing the game or reading up on the game or researching specs, raid strategies, gear, etc.

Now, with all I have going on, I have a different set of priorities.

There's also the fact that Jameece no longer plays. I really enjoyed playing WoW with her. However, she did not enjoy raiding, she hates PvP and is far more into the social element of the game. I like having her along for my adventures.

Finally, there are the changes that went in with the latest expansion. There's some awesome stuff in there . . . but when they dialed the difficulty up on normal mode raids, it hit a point where I could no longer keep up. My reflexes are not that good to start with, so I tend to stand in fire too much for the folks for whom this game is life. In the last expansion, I could keep up with the kids in terms of staying out of the bad stuff. I cannot do that anymore.

Even now that they dialed down the difficulty a bit on the previous tier's raids . . . I just don't have the time or inclination anymore.

Right now I am getting my game itch scratched through Facebook games like Backyard Monsters, Galaxy Online 2. I'm also active in the Central Valley Pathfinder Society, doing table top RPG at Fresno's most awesome game store, Crazy Squirrel Game Store.

I am not rage quitting and it is not goodbye forever. It's a sober recognition that now is the time to go do something else. After all, things change, people change, and under a different set of circumstances I could see myself going back to Azeroth.

Finding my Path in Fresno, Crazy Squirrels, Etc

After more than a year of not dropping dice around a table, I found a good group up here in Fresburg.

It's not my beloved Miresseia, and I'm not GMing. However, it's something I have long needed to do, and that's being just another player.

Our FLGS here, the one-and-only Crazy Squirrel Game Store, has become the nexus for a cell of Paizo Publishing's Pathfinder Society (PFS). PFS is organized play in the mold of the old RPGA -- adventures in a shared world with stringent rules about character creation, equipment and advancement to provide a uniform experience for players. Pathfinder Society uses the Pathfinder RPG rules -- think rationalized, streamlined D&D 3.5 with a lot more character creation options.

A quick example of the differences in terms of one class: the Wizard. In 3.5 wizards could have a familiar, with options as to which beastie you can have serving you. In PFRPG, "just a familiar" class feature is now called "Arcane Bond." A PFRPG wizard can have either a familiar OR a Bonded Object like an amulet, ring or staff that allows the casting of an additional known (not necessarily prepared) spell each day. Of course, you suffer penalties if your bonded object is not with you . . .

Every Sunday, about 20 of us gather in the CSGS game room, snag a couple tables and start playing our way through the shortish scenarios (3-4 hrs). Our GMs are awesome: Jack, Josh and James know their onions and are good at helping new players. I currently play Graylith, a generalist wizard with an risk-taking streak a mile wide, cat-like curiosity and who describes magical stuff in a techno-babble that would make a ST:TNG writer blush.

TL: DR -- I'm having fun.