Burrowowl

The Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil is a notoriously large adventure for 3rd edition Dungeons & Dragons. It revolves around an effort by depraved cultists of the ancient god Tharizdun trying to bring about the destruction of the world. Heroes interested in stopping this group (or even finding out what they’re up to) are faced with a number of adventuring locations, including a ruined temple (the broken down old Temple of Elemental Evil of yore), and ruined moathouse, a ghost town, a thriving small city, a run-down old mining town, and a 200+ room volcano-top dungeon filled with literally hundreds of baddies.

The module itself is quite well laid out, including a reasonably in-depth explanation of what all is going on at each location, and even going so far as to provide tactics that some of the baddies will use against a party of adventurers. It is also set in Oerth, the world of Grayhawk. That is all well and good, but personally I prefer the Iron Kingdoms.

Because the premise of this adventure, which can be reasonably expected to take a party of four 4th level characters all the way to 13th or 14th level before they’re done, revolves around a religious cult bent on global destruction, this poses a bit of a problem for a DM that wants to plug it into the IK: there are no IK Deities that fit the bill smoothly. Let’s take a look.
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While doing my monthly skim of a couple of hipster websites that my tragically overeducated buddy has exposed me to, I came across an interesting satire piece on the phenomena of weblogs.

A raised eyebrow and a couple of minutes later, this got my rusty old wheels turning about independant web publishers and their motivations. Do people put up free content out of some altruistic wish to further the boundaries of human understanding? In an attempt to further the understanding of a beloved pet topic?

For some web developers a personal website serves as a sometimes-veiled advertisement for professional services. I would apply this rather broadly to any people whose means of support rely largely upon web, graphics, or writing.

Would you really want to hire a web developer whose site sucks? Frequent updating of content encourages frequent revision, updating, and refining of the structure as well, allowing a web professional to showcase his talents where any search engine can find it. Frequent updates also make links to your content more likely, again improving search engine results for your site, reinforcing the illusion that you are “on the map.” In some way. Go ahead and google for Ben Brown, Jeffrey Zeldman, or Mark Pilgrim and you’ll find the right one right away.

But what can account for the manic-depressive personal sagas that litter the web? Tales of employment and romantic woe abound out there. Are the folks that maintain such pages just miserable spirits looking to escape the suffocating nightmare of this world through self-expression? Are they seeking the kind of virtual notoriety that web personalities (such as those listed above) enjoy?

This brings me to my own page. Bereft of social angst or burning passion for a web-related topic, where do my musings on D&D, Computers, Cartoons, and the Web fit in? Simple: personal vanity.

“Awake Saladin, we have returned. My presence here consecrates the victory of the Cross over the Crescent.”
– Henri Gouraud, 1920 upon French occupation of Damascus

Evil thoughts have been running through my head about how debates (formal or otherwise) are conducted these days. What to do… What to do indeed. You’d think that somebody would have figured it out by now.

It looks like the Perpetual War Portfolio has fallen behind the other major US stock indexes. Could it be that all that drum-beating by the US administration had expectations for performance a bit high?