Of Miracles and Soulbonds

So we had our little miracle of life occur on Tuesday, May 1st, at 6:46 pm Central time. Avery Timothy Linn Sullivan entered the world via c-section delivery, due to suspected (though non-existent) placental abruption. At 33 weeks gestation, he weighed five pounds, six ounces and was eighteen inches long. As I type this, he is still in the NICU, but doing better every day.

Being that early, his lungs weren't quite as developed as they ought to be, so his oxygen and CO2 levels were a bit off, and he still needs to get the hang of sucking milk, but he's making progress.

This is my second child, my wife's fifth, and the sixth child in our household. Hers, mine, and now ours. Three boys and three girls, so we're a regular geeky Brady Bunch. Both of my offspring have had to spend some time after birth in the NICU; this trip is significantly less stressful than the first. When my daughter was born two and a half years ago, her biological mother (not my beautiful amazing wife) was, unbeknownst to me, a junkie, and she was born addicted to heroin (the junkie tested positive for heroin, amphetamines, and PCP, the baby tested positive for heroin). Needless to say, I have full custody of the child. But that time in the NICU was awful, because we didn't know what was going on (the addict wasn't exactly forthcoming about her drug use), and as it was slowly figured out... well, it's a pretty awful feeling, seeing your baby go through that. All in all, it was a sixth-month process to ween her off of a regular oral liquid morphine dosage.

So, I guess if my first kid pulled through after dealing with that big mess of terrible, this kid has it easy! By the way, my daughter is doing great now. There are some concerns that she may fall somewhere on the mild end of the autistic spectrum, but she's incredibly bright and clever and I'm sure she's going to do just fine.

We haven't played D&D in months at this point. Once things normalize, and Mama and Avery come home from the hospital, we'll be in a better spot to continue the campaign. The kids and I have continued to play plenty of Magic: the Gathering, and if any of you keep current on Magic trends, you'll have noticed the title of this article is a bit trendy.

"Miracle" and "Soulbond" are the names of two new mechanics introduced in the most recent Magic expansion set, Avacyn Restored. I just thought it was quite appropriate that this new set would be released this week, just a few days after I've experienced a miracle and soulbonding of my own!

Avacyn Restored also marks the first time I attended an in-store pre-release event, on Saturday, April 28th. It was $25, and you got six packs from the new set to open up and use to build a "sealed deck" for the little tournament they had going on there. There were maybe twenty people playing at the shop I went to (the Fantasy Shop in Florissant, MO), and I brought my oldest daughter, Alex. She's 11, and was by far the youngest person there, but she had a blast and was making everyone laugh because she's damn witty. She likes Magic but hasn't gotten terribly into it (although she is more excited about it now, after having such a good time at the pre-release).

Personal side-note about Alex: She's the oldest, and she's been through a lot. She was old enough to really remember (and still has a lot of pain from) her mom and dad getting divorced, and the roller-coaster of moves and everything else that happened before I came along. While my wife's three younger kids took to me pretty quickly, she has been reluctant to really be able to trust that I'm actually going to stick around and be a real dad. Taking her (and only her) to this Magic event (that all the other kids would have loved to go to) really meant a lot to her and was an awesome little bonding experience, even though we didn't spend a lot of time together while there. Just the fact that I took her, and she was able to have fun and be herself and talk to all kinds of different people, meant the world to her.

Anyways, I really like "Limited" Magic. There's a lot to be said about a player's skill when they have to make the best of what they wind up with in the packs they open. Randomization is the great equalizer.

It's kinda like rolling your stats 3d6 in order, when you think about it. You gotta take what you get, and make the best character (deck) you can with what you've been given. Sometimes it makes a lot more sense to run a fighter (aggro deck) instead of a wizard (control deck) purely because of the roll of the dice (draw of the cards), even if you prefer one over the other.

In fact, I liked the idea of the "sealed deck" format so much I decided we'd explore it even further in-house here. Alex and I both kept our cards from the pre-release separate, and today, upon full release, I purchased 18 fresh booster packs, six each for Kanaan, Chloe, and Aiden to crack open and start building their deck for a little league play. Each of us will play each other twice (to start, we may keep it going for a while after we finish the first set of matches) (and I have a full schedule written up, due to OCD). Every time a player earns two match wins, they get a fresh booster pack to open and add to their collection to draw on for their sealed deck. I'm also going to make it interesting, by allowing the kids to "trade out" cards from their sealed pools to the general collection at a rate of two-to-one; for example, they can trade in two of their uncommons for a single uncommon from the household's general collection (Whenever we decide to end the league, all the cards they've opened up will wind up in the "general collection" anyway... Magic cards are pretty strictly supervised in this house, purely because of the terrifying amount of Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh! cards I find laying around the house all the time; I would have a come-apart if I found Magic cards under the sofa). Also, whenever they've earned a fresh booster pack, they can instead choose five commons and two uncommon cards from the general collection (so they have control, but get half the amount of cards and no rares, like they would from a booster pack). And finally, they can select a booster pack from any set currently on sale at the Florissant Fantasy Shop (which is pretty much limited to Innistrad, Dark Ascension, Avacyn Restored, and the 2012 Core Set).

So, all in all, it should be interesting. I'm really hoping I can help them build up some deck-building skills with this little league exercise, and also introduce them to the concept of the "metagame". I know "metagaming" is a bad word in D&D-speak, but in competitive Magic, it refers to the local "scene", i.e., what types of decks are likely to show up at any given constructed tournament, which ones are strongest, and, most importantly, how to build your deck to compete against those other ones. Often, it's as simple as knowing to sideboard certain cards against certain styles of deck. In this case, they'll get a taste of it because they'll be able to see every match (if they want to), so they'll be able to see each other's strategies as the season progresses and potentially make changes as they see fit (and have access to the cards they need!).

This has been a fairly lengthy post. If you made it this far, thanks! I'm not sure how much time I'll have moving forward to post D&D material, but as soon as we get a session in, you'll get a play-report. If anyone is interested in how our little in-house Limited Magic league progresses, leave a comment and I'll start posting about it as it happens!

Still Alive!

Whew, it's been a minute since last I had anything of value to say here, and that doesn't look like it's going to change anytime soon. My wife is quite pregnant and high-risk and has been in the hospital for the past two weeks. The baby's not due until early June, and we don't anticipate her being able to come home until little Avery arrives. This means I've jumped headfirst into the role of SuperDad for the five kids at home, getting them ready for school in the morning, getting the two-year-old to her babysitter each day; off to work and then back home, pick up the two-year-old, make sure kids are getting their homework done, cook dinner, shuttle one or several of them to whatever activity might be scheduled for that night, do laundry, clean the house, take care of yard work, pay bills, get the kids ready for the next day... and try to find some time in there to actually go visit my lovely wife in the hospital.

Needless to say, there hasn't been much time for gaming lately. I've been scratching my fantasy-gaming itch with some Magic: the Gathering (I try to sneak at least one game in per night with one of the kids before bedtime).

Hopefully, we'll get to play some D&D with the kids on Easter. That's gonna require me to get ready, but I bet I can wing it. We'll see. We've got a ton of board games and card games and such to fall back on if I'm not prepared by Sunday. I've got a lot of work to do around here and my brain is not currently functioning well on D&D levels due to everything else that has to run through it, so it's kind of a crap-shoot.

And that's all the news that's fit for digital ink!

I'm Tumbling Now

In an effort to keep A Pack of Gnolls focused on D&D and other RPGs, and not sully its good reputation with all that CCG silliness, I've started a little blog over on Tumblr that will be specifically about Magic: the Gathering.

You can follow me there at Mana Burns.

I'm regularly getting distracted by deck-building, but I am also still working on Hyrulian Adventures, more Microlite material, and more stuff from my kids' game to post as well.

Sentimental Sunday

I was in a fairly nostalgic mood this morning, and started flipping through my recently acquired Palladium Games Heroes Unlimited 2nd Edition. I picked it up for super cheap, along with Ninjas and Superspies, at the Fantasy Shop's Used Gaming Auction in January. 

Looking through it, I am confronted with the same thoughts I have every time I look through a Megaversal book: how the crap did we ever figure this out, or run it, or have any fun with it? Maybe these books only make sense when you're in middle school and high school. I have so many issues with lots of the system, from skills to combat, SDC vs Hit Points, that I don't even know where to begin. 

I do remember having some completely ridiculous fun with the system though. Perhaps it had more to do with the company I was keeping than the game, though. We always went completely over the top with our Supers games. 

I used to have a nice little collection of Palladium stuff: Palladium Fantasy, Systems Failure, Nightbane, and a couple other Heroes/Rifts items. I put them in the Fantasy Shop's Used Gaming Auction a couple years ago and only got ten lousy bucks for all of it; I didn't think I'd ever use any of it. I'm still pretty sure I won't ever use it, but a Microlite-type Heroes game could be pretty fun, especially with my goofball kids. 

So I'll have to ponder some kind of conversion. Yeah, I think I've got a bad case of gamer ADD at the moment, but that's par for the course. Hey, at least I'm never bored! 

My Gateway to D&D: Magic the Gathering

I've been working overtime through most of this week, including today, and along with a hectic schedule for the gnollpack, I haven't been able to make much progress on much of anything gaming related, but I have had some thoughts brewing. And hey, look at that, I didn't post for a week and just jumped up to over 100 followers here! Thanks people! 

To make up for lack of posting this week, here's a fairly rambling and long-winded one about Magic: the Gathering and D&D, with a little personal introspection to boot. 

I have been playing a little Magic: the Gathering every night lately, a couple games before bedtime with one of the minions. I find myself going further down the Magic rabbit hole these days. Don't worry, A Pack of Gnolls isn't going to morph into a Magic blog; I won't bore you with decklists or strategies or synergies here. 

However, Magic served as my gateway to fantasy gaming. Sure, I'd been playing Star Wars D6 and Palladium's Heroes Unlimited and Robotech with my buddies, but when Padre showed us Magic, my imagination really came alive. The old Dragonquest RPG was introduced to our little group soon after, and we were all hooked. 

I find Magic to be a loving homage to D&D. It is clearly drawing a lot of inspiration from its D&D roots, even to this day. There are dwarves and orcs, goblins and paladins, rogues and knights, devils, demons, skeletons, zombies, necromancers, fireballs, druids... The list goes on. If it appeared in D&D, more than likely it shows up in Magic, too. I've written about this before, but the current expansion, Innistrad, is quite clearly an homage to Ravenloft; its full of vampires and werewolves and zombies and ghosts, and is all about humanity on the brink of destruction at the hands of merciless undead and demonic overlords. And it's a lot of fun to play. A lot of the cards are awesome plays on horror tropes; one of my favorites, purely for its creepiness factor, is Village Cannibals. 

Magic was my gateway to fantasy gaming, so it will always have a place in my heart. I didn't play it for a long time; my original collection contains cards from 1994-1998. I only recently started picking up Magic cards again, when my in-laws gave the minions each a starter deck from the recent New Phyrexia and Innistrad sets. That's a good twelve years! The more I've played with the kids, the more I've gotten into it, and I started picking up boosters, deck-builder kits (220 or so cards for $20!), and Fat Packs. Now we've got a halfway decent collection going. Each of the kids has their own deck, and there are a few others I've put together that they all play with. What's really important is that we're all spending good quality time together. The kids are all pretty sharp and have challenged me on several occasions with their decks. 

I'm not a great Magic player; I'm about as good at Magic as I am at video games. I can do pretty well, but not great. I'm never going to be a pro Magic player; I'm not going to shell out ten or twenty bucks for a single card to perfect a deck. I love opening booster packs, and I'm really liking booster draft-type games. 

What's really ironic is that the things that I love about Magic are basically the same things that drove me away from 4E D&D. Character Generation for 4E is incredibly similar to building a Magic deck. You choose your role and power source, you find synergies within the various available options, and you put it all together in one package. I got sick of all that with 4E, but I'll happily spend hours doing the exact same thing for Magic, looking over the cards in our collection, finding synergies and combos and marveling at the art. 

It's weird, I know. There's just something viscerally satisfying about handling the cards. The same activity in 4E is a major chore on the computer screen with the Character Builder, and even more so with a hand-written sheet with the books open! 

Anyways, I know a lot of grognards out there can't stand Wizards of the Coast for what they've done with the modern incarnations of the D&D brand, and with the way they've treated their D&D customers through the years. I find myself in a funny position here. I thoroughly enjoy Magic, and I thoroughly enjoy old-school D&D. So I'm a bit of a contradiction in terms here, as far as my gaming is concerned. 

Actually, now that I think about it, that's how I've been my whole life. I was a gifted athlete who played at the top local levels in my chosen sports, but eschewed jock culture for sci-fi and fantasy geekiness. I was a liberal working-class kid who went to high school with a bunch of upper-class conservatives. Now I'm a union construction worker, and the people I work with all have hobbies that primarily include either firearms or automobiles, while I'm playing D&D and Magic with my kids. 

Yeah, I never made much sense to me either. 

Kids' Campaign: Good ole-fashioned Dungeon Crawl

Today in my kids' campaign, they explored the caverns below the goblin caves. At the direction of Larry the Dwarf Cleric, they stayed to the right as they explored, coming across numerous forking passages. 

First up, a bunch of piercers fell off the ceiling, attacking them. Most of my attack rolls missed; I was rolling d20s out on the table for each player. The wizard, my 10-year-old son, insisted on rolling a d20 for himself, without realizing I was rolling attacks for the monsters. 

He rolled a natural 20. We spent the next five minutes as we both rolled low, him trying to knock the piercer off, and the piercer failing utterly to chew through the wizard's robes. He finally knocked it off with his staff and they avoided the rest of the piercers on the ceiling, and went into the next room, where they barely managed to avoid being caught in the filament-traps of a group of three cave fishers! This combat went quickly, although it seems the only time I roll criticals for monsters is when the wizard gets too close to combat and a monster snaps at him! 

They defeated the cave fishers and continued on, keeping ever to the right. The next foe they encountered was a big nasty roper. The roper snagged three of the heroes off the start with its tentacles, and started pulling them in, but they managed to make excellent attack rolls to slice through the tentacles and break free. They had to gang up on it, and nearly lost Snagger the Dwarf, but defeated the monstrosity and found the gems and platinum pieces in the roper's belly. 

They continued on around the map, and came to a maze-like series of passages. It wasn't long before they were attacked from two sides by some big subterranean lizards! And then a few rounds into the fight, two more joined the fray, led by their minotaur master! The fight was looking kind of grim when the minotaur showed up; the wizard dropped (lizard got a crit for 12), and Farmer George wasn't far behind. The minotaur circled around and charged the halfling thief, but rolled a two; I ruled the thief tumbled between the minotaur's legs and popped up behind it, granting her a backstab attack for extra damage. The two elves hit, with the first hit being a "ghetto crit" for maximum damage and the second elf scoring a natural 20! The 6+3 HD minotaur went down quick, and its pet lizards weren't far behind. 

After taking a few minutes to heal up, they continued on their path, ever to the right passageway, circling around the map. In the next chamber they encountered an Auromvorax! Since the book states that dwarves despise them, I gave each dwarf a roll to recognize the beast. Snagger made his roll, and knew that the monster literally eats gold for dinner. They started throwing gold pieces at it, enough to distract it for long enough to get by. 

This is when they started discovering the remains of a group of adventurers who hadn't survived the dungeon. They recovered a spellbook with high-level spells and a tube of scrolls containing several sheets worth of bad poetry. 

Having gone most of the way around the dungeon, they headed back up to the goblin lair and made camp for the night to rest up. Nothing attacked them in the night (the goblins had left, most being cowardly and having no desire to be around when the group opened the passageway down into the deadly caves). 

Further exploration the next morning revealed a hidden, ancient dwarven crypt. The dwarf cleric opened the passageway and down they went, finding a 1000-year-old internment containing several generations worth of urns and an altar, with a blessed dwarven warhammer floating above it. After saying a prayer to Moradin, the dwarf cleric took the warhammer. 

Saturday Night Magic in Florissant, MO

I've never really been one to do a lot of gaming at gaming stores. I played the Neverwinter season of D&D encounters at the St. Charles Fantasy Shop, but that's the extent of it. Since I've gotten back into Magic: The Gathering, I started looking at going to a Friday Night Magic event at the same shop, but it's a bit of a drive and the atmosphere at those events can be pretty hyper-competitive. 

However, about a week ago, I was getting some Magic cards at my much more local Florissant Fantasy Shop, and the clerk asked if I'd be interested in playing Magic there on Saturday nights. I was a little apprehensive, but the Florissant shop is a lot more laid-back, so I decided tonight to give it a shot. It was the first night they've organized it, and the turn-out was slim, about seven people altogether, but it was definitely pretty chill. More of a meet-n-greet, let's hang out and play a few games of Magic type of night. 

I brought my ten-year old son along. He did pretty darn well, and the other guys there were awesome about playing with him. He pulled off a very surprise victory in a rather ridiculous, drag-out game at the end of the night. 

So, if you're in the Florissant, Missouri area and like Magic, and are interested in a laid-back environment to meet some gamers and throw some cards around, I highly recommend Saturday night Magic at the Florissant Fantasy Shop. It's on North Lindergh, about a mile north of I-270, next to the Schnucks. We're in the back from six til ten!