The Adventures of Sneax & Elaina Emboo (Part 19)

Our Story So Far:
Sneax and Elaina went to collect on a debt for Draks, but found more than they bargained for.  Luckily for them, they met Nathaniel, a half-fire elf mercenary, and his companion Maleeka, a giantess of unknown origin.  But it turns out that Nathaniel works for Draks as well, and that he's in Wanderhaven to take Sneax to Ellesburg, a tiny timber town lost in the hinterlands of the Kingdom's northern frontier.  Sneax soon finds herself on a ship with her new companions, her friend Elaina far behind.

But that's only the beginnings of Sneax's problems.  Soon she and Nathaniel realize that the so-called "deal" Draks worked out is really more of a rescue mission.  They and their companions soon find themselves heading north, into the trackless wilderness in search of the goblin bands who've been raiding the local logging settlements, cutting off the flow of valuable timber to the heart of the Kingdom far away.  

Sneax is nearly killed in her very first battle, and that's only the beginning.  Trekking north, they find an abandoned logging camp and a pack of worgs stalking their trail...

If you're wondering, this chapter is my favorite part of this particular story.  All things considered, that almost certainly means that everyone one Earth who's not me will find it utterly indecipherable.

The Adventures of Sneax & Elaina Emboo (Part 18)

Our Story So Far:
Sneax and Elaina went to collect on a debt for Draks, but found more than they bargained for.  Luckily for them, they met Nathaniel, a half-fire elf mercenary, and his companion Maleeka, a giantess of unknown origin.  But it turns out that Nathaniel works for Draks as well, and that he's in Wanderhaven to take Sneax to Ellesburg, a tiny timber town lost in the hinterlands of the Kingdom's northern frontier.  Sneax soon finds herself on a ship with her new companions, her friend Elaina far behind.

But that's only the beginnings of Sneax's problems.  Soon she and Nathaniel realize that the so-called "deal" Draks worked out is really more of a rescue mission.  They and their companions soon find themselves heading north, into the trackless wilderness in search of the goblin bands who've been raiding the local logging settlements, cutting off the flow of valuable timber to the heart of the Kingdom far away.  

Sneax is nearly killed in her very first battle, and that's only the beginning.  Trekking north, they find an abandoned logging camp and a pack of worgs stalking their trail...

These next two chapters are my favorites, for whatever that's worth.

The Adventures of Sneax & Elaina Emboo (Part 17)

Our Story So Far:
Sneax and Elaina went to collect on a debt for Draks, but found more than they bargained for.  Luckily for them, they met Nathaniel, a half-fire elf mercenary, and his companion Maleeka, a giantess of unknown origin.  But it turns out that Nathaniel works for Draks as well, and that he's in Wanderhaven to take Sneax to Ellesburg, a tiny timber town lost in the hinterlands of the Kingdom's northern frontier.  Sneax soon finds herself on a ship with her new companions, her friend Elaina far behind.

But that's only the beginnings of Sneax's problems.  Soon she and Nathaniel realize that the so-called "deal" Draks worked out is really more of a rescue mission.  They and their companions soon find themselves heading north, into the wilderness in search of the goblin bands who've been raiding the local logging settlements, cutting off the flow of valuable timber to the heart of the Kingdom far away.  

To say the least, their first battle doesn't go to plan...

The Adventures of Sneax & Elaina Emboo (Part 16)

Our Story So Far:
Sneax and Elaina went to collect on a debt for Draks, but found more than they bargained for.  Luckily for them, they met Nathaniel, a half-fire elf mercenary, and his companion Maleeka, a giantess of unknown origin.  But it turns out that Nathaniel works for Draks as well, and that he's in Wanderhaven to take Sneax to Ellesburg, a tiny timber town lost in the hinterlands of the Kingdom's northern frontier.  Sneax soon finds herself on a ship with her new companions, her friend Elaina far behind.

But that's only the beginnings of Sneax's problems.  Soon she and Nathaniel realize that the so-called "deal" Draks worked out is really more of a rescue mission.  They and their companions soon find themselves heading north, into the wilderness in search of the goblin bands who've been raiding the local logging settlements, cutting off the flow of valuable timber to the heart of the Kingdom far away.  

To say the least, their first battle doesn't go to plan...

The Adventures of Sneax & Elaina Emboo (Part 15)

Our Story So Far:
Sneax and Elaina went to collect on a debt for Draks, but found more than they bargained for.  Luckily for them, they met Nathaniel, a half-fire elf mercenary, and his companion Maleeka, a giantess of unknown origin.  But it turns out that Nathaniel works for Draks as well, and that he's here to take Sneax to Ellesburg, a tiny timber town lost in the hinterlands of the Kingdom's northern frontier.  Sneax soon finds herself on a ship with her new companions, her friend Elaina far behind.

But, of course, that's only the beginnings of Sneax's problems.  Soon she and Nathaniel realize that the deal Draks worked out is really more of a rescue mission.  They and their companions Zelda and Maleeka soon find themselves heading into the wilderness in search of the goblin bands who've been raiding the local logging settlements, cutting off the flow of valuable timber to the heart of the Kingdom far away...

The Adventures of Sneax & Elaina Emboo (Part 14)

Our Story So Far:
Sneax and Elaina went to collect on a debt for Draks, but found more than they bargained for.  Luckily for them, they met Nathaniel, a half-fire elf mercenary, and his companion Maleeka, a giantess of unknown origin.  But it turns out that Nathaniel works for Draks as well, and that he's here to take Sneax to Ellesburg, a tiny timber town lost in the hinterlands of the Kingdom's northern frontier.  Sneax soon finds herself on a ship with her new companions, her friend Elaina far behind.

But, of course, that's only the beginnings of Sneax's problems...

The Adventures of Sneax & Elaina Emboo (Part 13)

Our Story So Far:
Sneax and Elaina went to collect on a debt for Draks, but found more than they bargained for.  Luckily for them, they met Nathaniel, a half-fire elf mercenary, and his companion Maleeka, a giantess of unknown origin.  But it turns out that Nathaniel works for Draks as well, and that he's here to take Sneax to the hinterlands of the Kingdom's northern frontier.  Thus, Sneax finds herself alone on a ship with her friend Elaina far behind...

The Adventures of Sneax & Elaina Emboo (Part 11)

Our Story So Far:
Sneax and Elaina are off to collect on a debt for Draks, and already there's trouble.  Now we meet Nathaniel, a half-fire elf mercenary, and his companion Maleeka, a giantess of unknown origin...

The Adventures of Sneax & Elaina Emboo (Part 10)

This week we open the second act of The Adventures of Sneax & Elaina Emboo and with it we transition into a completely new phase of the story.  This piece, "The Priest of Loki," takes place between six to eight months after the close of "Fire Elf," which is why it appears after "The Caravan" in this collection--to give a sense of the passage of time between the story elements.

I wrote "Fire Elf" when my girls were eight and ten.  It's definitely a kids' story for a kiddo audience.  However, almost a year had passed before I sat down to work on "Priest of Loki," and by that time my girls had grown quite a lot.  They'd seen the movie The Avengers and begun developing wholly different interests in terms of entertainment.  I even taught them to play Dungeons and Dragons, using the playtest version of the new 5th Edition ruleset.  For this reason, the next phase of this story reads quite differently from that first part.  It's aimed at the same audience, but the audience itself was changing even as I started writing the story.

I tried to change with them.  You'll have to judge for yourself how successful I was.

The Adventures of Sneax & Elaina Emboo (Part 9)

We finished the first part of my book last week with the final chapter of "Sneax & Elaina and the Fire Elf".  This week we move on to Part 2, "The Caravan".

I've run this part of the story before, but I keep going back to it and making little changes to it, so I honestly have no idea whether or not I've ever published the "final" version here.  Regardless, this is one of my oldest fantasy stories.  I wrote the first draft while I was still on terminal leave from the Army way back in 2000 and decided to include it in this particular collection back when the book itself was designed to be an anthology of disconnected stories.

That anthology--Tales from Danno's Lair, or whatever I wind up calling it--is still sitting in outline in my notebook.  I still want to do it.  But this book became something different about midway through.  I finished Part 3 of the book, "The Priest of Loki," realized that I'd written two parts of a three-act play, and redesigned the book as a whole to accommodate a new, more coherent single-story structure.

"The Caravan" is the only piece of the original design that remains, and I had to leave it in because I wound up making further use of our heroes, Tand'lion and especially Vedra, later in the story.

The Adventures of Sneax & Elaina Emboo (Part 8)

Our Story So Far:

Sneakatara Boatman was abandoned as a child by parents she never knew.  Life in the orphanage was tough for a tiny girl with few ways to defend herself, so she lit out as soon as she was able.  But the streets of Docks District are no safer than life was at the orphanage, and now the loathsome street criminal Russitan Lassiter has Sneax at his mercy.

Elaina Emboo is a rich girl from a merchant family, but her controlling father already has her entire life mapped out.  Elaina envies Sneax's freedom without truly understanding its costs.  Still, she agree to help when Sneax asks her to head up to the Old Church to meet with Lassiter.  

Sneax and Elaina get the scare of their lives when they realize that Lassiter has an appointment with Draks, the fire elf, that he and Draks are working to import an illegal shipment of DISTILLED TIGER ESSENCE into Wanderhaven.  But when that shipment goes missing?

That's when things start getting crazy...

The Adventures of Sneax & Elaina Emboo (Part 7)

Our Story So Far:

Sneakatara Boatman was abandoned as a child by parents she never knew.  Life in the orphanage was tough for a tiny girl with few ways to defend herself, so she lit out as soon as she was able.  But the streets of Docks District are no safer than life was at the orphanage, and now the loathsome street criminal Russitan Lassiter has Sneax at his mercy.

Elaina Emboo is a rich girl from a merchant family, but her controlling father already has her entire life mapped out.  Elaina envies Sneax's freedom without truly understanding its costs.  Still, she agree to help when Sneax asks her to head up to the Old Church to meet with Lassiter.  

Sneax and Elaina get the scare of their lives when they realize that Lassiter has an appointment with Draks, the fire elf, that he and Draks are working to import an illegal shipment of DISTILLED TIGER ESSENCE into Wanderhaven.  But when that shipment goes missing?

That's when things start getting crazy...

The Adventures of Sneax & Elaina Emboo (Part 6)

Our Story So Far:
Sneakatara Boatman was abandoned as a child by parents she never knew.  Life in the orphanage was tough for a tiny girl with few ways to defend herself, so she lit out as soon as she was able.  But the streets of Docks District are no safer than life was at the orphanage, and now the loathsome street criminal Russitan Lassiter has Sneax at his mercy.

Elaina Emboo is a rich girl from a merchant family, but her controlling father already has her entire life mapped out.  Elaina envies Sneax's freedom without truly understanding its costs.  Still, she agree to help when Sneax asks her to head up to the Old Church to meet with Lassiter.  

Sneax and Elaina get the scare of their lives when they realize that Lassiter has an appointment with Draks, the fire elf.  

Then things start getting crazy...

The Adventures of Sneax & Elaina Emboo (Part 5)

Our Story So Far:
Sneakatara Boatman was abandoned as a child by parents she never knew.  Life in the orphanage was tough for a tiny girl with few ways to defend herself, so she lit out as soon as she was able.  But the streets of Docks District are no safer than life was at the orphanage, and now the loathsome street criminal Russitan Lassiter has Sneax at his mercy.

Elaina Emboo is a rich girl from a merchant family, but her controlling father already has her entire life mapped out.  Elaina envies Sneax's freedom without truly understanding its costs.  Still, she agree to help when Sneax asks her to head up to the Old Church to meet with Lassiter.  

Sneax and Elaina get the scare of their lives when they realize that Lassiter has an appointment with Draks, the fire elf.  

Then things start getting crazy...

The Adventures of Sneax & Elaina Emboo (Part 4)

The Sneax & Elaina Emboo experiment continues!

This is my daughter Hannah's cover.

Our Story So Far:
Sneakatara Boatman was abandoned as a child by parents she never knew.  Life in the orphanage was tough for a tiny girl with few ways to defend herself, and she lit out as soon as she was able.  But the streets of Docks District are no safer than life was back at the orphanage, and now the loathsome street criminal Russitan Lassiter has Sneax at his mercy.

Elaina Emboo is a rich girl from a nice family, but her controlling father has her entire life mapped out already.  Elaina envies Sneax's freedom without truly understanding its cost.  Still, she agree to help when Sneax asks her to head up to the Old Church to meet with Lassiter.  

Sneax and Elaina get the scare of their lives when they realize that Lassiter has an appointment with Draks, the fire elf.

Sketch in My Notebook: Marcus the Dispossessed

This week's Sketch in My Notebook is literally that.  I have no idea what to do next with this story.  At this point, it's just a character/concept sketch that I started by way of supporting an article for ENWorld's EN5ider Magazine.

Sketch in My Notebook

EN5ider is an online magazine that publishes freelance Dungeons & Dragons content under Wizards of the Coasts' Open Gaming License (OGL).  My article, which ought to be out any day now, is called "Priests of Misfortune".  It proposes a divine trinity of fate and the future--Fate, Fortuna, and Jinx, the goddess of misfortune.  It then goes into detail on the theology of Jinx and her priests while laying out what it takes to become favored of the goddess of calamity.

As you may imagine, I had some fun inventing my own religion.

I then invented this character, Marcus the Dispossessed, as a Jinxian priest, but...  Well, I just can't figure out what I want him to do.  Something nefarious, no doubt, but I've no idea what, exactly.

Got some thoughts?

Do me a favor, and leave them below.  Thanks!

The Bounty Hunter: A Cahokiantep Story (Part 3)

This is the third and last part of this story.
 -- Part 1 is here.
 -- Part 2 is here.
 -- Cahokiantep started here.

The Bounty Hunter: A Cahokiantep Story (Part 2)

Sketch in My Notebook

This is the second part of three for this story.  The first part is here.  You can find backstory on Cahokiantep here.

***

Most of the Pony’s patrons made way.  The voltans watched me come.  They didn’t move towards their pikes, though.  That was something.  The center voltan wore a blue sash with silver trim—the mark of a warrior-caste princeling.  I’d never fought a princeling before.  I figured the others for bodyguards.

The leader’s voice was deep and liquid, but his Basic was unaccented.  “What do you want, human fool?  Have you come to die on my blade?”

The Bounty Hunter: A Cahokiantep Story (Part 1)

“Cahokiantep is no more.  The city, the surrounding farms, the very bedrock itself… all of this is gone.  There are no ruins; the city wasn’t destroyed.  It has simply vanished.  

“What remains is indescribable.  It is a hole—a crater—more massive than mere words can convey.  Malthanisys calculated its depth at a distance of some five miles at least.  It reaches across the breadth of the city and beyond, into the sea.  We could scarce see the far side of the thing, even whilst standing at the edge on the clearest day.  

“We found an outland shepherd yesterday.  He spoke of a flash of blue lightning and a tremor to shake the worlds.  In his ravings, he whispered a name—Belarisarius, a being he calls ‘the Astral Dragon’.  None know this name, not even Malthanisys.  

“We will continue searching, but I fear that there are few answers to be found.”

 -- Sir Gustav Plantagaryean, from his report on the “Cahokiantep Incident” to the Royal Court of Wanderhaven, Kingdom of the Western Isles

Sketch in My Notebook: The Return of Dr. Necropolis--Chapter 15 (Part 2)

Frank McGuinness, the man who was once the notorious super-criminal Dr. Necropolis, escaped from Sing Sing Correctional Facility, robbed a bank, and got away with it.  He took a hostage named Chelsea.  Meanwhile, his former partner, the Russian super-criminal known only as the Siberian Tiger, resurfaced after years underground, with both Frank's ex-wife, Gun Girl Gracie, on his arm and Frank's greatest creation, the Neural Disruptor, wrapped around his head.

Against them stand Army Lieutenant Blaine Winters, the new Centurion of the N.Y. State National Guard's Enhanced Forces Division (EFD), and FBI Agent Tiffany Trujillo, once the superhero Titania. These two went with a SWAT team to confront the Siberian Tiger and Gun Girl Gracie at a bank heist in Brooklyn, but they got their asses kicked. Tiffany wound up in the hospital, a bunch of SWAT officers died, and Blaine would have died too if not for the prodigious gifts associated with his extraordinary genetic heritage.