I Came to the Adventure Rules Monthly Update and All I Got was This Lousy Title

Our tale begins in an abandoned office. A cold metal desk dominates most of the small room, leaving little space to move about. Papers lie haphazardly strewn all over the desk, along with a half-consumed bottle of red liquid. A few cushioned metal chairs face the desk. Suddenly a man bursts through the door to the left. He is trailed by a chill wind and autumn leaves. He hangs a leather jacket upon a busted wooden coat rack and slams his laptop bag unceremoniously on the desk. Slumping into the tall leather desk chair, he takes some deep breaths before scooping up the plastic bottle on the desk and drinking deeply of the red liquid within. After a gasp, he places the bottle down with a hollow thud upon the metal desk.

“Sorry,” he mutters, “it’s been a long week.”

Greetings adventurers and welcome to whatever the heck this is. November has already been a crazy month (week?) and I imagine that it will only become more so with time. I know I haven’t posted for a couple of days so I wanted to take a moment to let you know what’s going on and what you can expect for the rest of the month. Hopefully not more melodramatic prose introductions, but if we learned anything from the October update it’s that you can’t trust anything I say.
First of all, thanks to everyone who voted in my poll last week. The reason I did not post on Friday was apparently a tie between forgetting and participating in Olympic training. For those who voted “Olympic Training,” I appreciate that you think I could be athletic enough or intellectual enough to compete, but alas that did not turn out to be the case. So if you voted that I totally forgot about writing a post, you are not only a more realistic person but you are also a more correct person.

The reason I forgot to compose a post to publish is because last week I celebrated a birthday – mine, specifically. Yes, I am now as old as the dex number of the most irrelevant Pokemon evolution in the series: Raichu. Freakin’ Ash and his never-evolving mascot have ruined this birthday for me, so to make myself feel better I picked up a copy of City of Mist, a brand new tabletop RPG that I am very excited to play. If you haven’t heard of the game but like the idea of playing superheroes torn between the fantastic and their mundane lives, you should check out the starter set and see if this game is your style.

“So Ian, what you are telling me is that you forgot to post because you were reading…rules?”

Why yes, adventurers, that is exactly what happened. I love tabletop games and specifically the mechanisms that make them tick, so I dived deep into the setting and rules of City of Mist and totally forgot about writing a post. Not one of my brighter moments, sure, but familiarizing myself with the game has been a process I’ve enjoyed. However, that’s not the reason I missed the post on Monday. THAT has a lot more to do with the birthday thing – specifically that I spent all weekend traveling in order to attend various birthday gatherings. Visiting family and friends kept me pretty busy, so I wasn’t able to get my thoughts together enough to write a post for Monday.

Things are crazy at work and I still am having a difficult time finding a house to move in to – I never anticipated when I got this new job three months ago that I would be house-hunting in November, but here I am. My work-related travel has picked up quite a bit so I don’t always get home at a decent time in the evenings, but for now that hasn’t heavily impacted my ability to blog. In the month of November, though, I anticipate this to be an issue more often, as I have a lot of afternoon meetings in towns that are two to three hours away from me.

Another very important thing that happened in the past week is that I completed the main storyline of Super Mario Odyssey, a very excellent Mario game which I highly recommend to fans of the platforming genre. I haven’t started exploring the post-game yet, but I definitely want to get more Power Moons and explore the remaining kingdoms. I have no intention of getting all of the Power Moons as I’m not a completionist by nature, but I’ll keep collecting them until it isn’t fun to do it anymore.

My big gaming priority right now is Dragon Quest VIII on the 3DS, which I just got this weekend for my birthday. The 8th installment of the DQ series is my favorite in the bunch, and it is the one that really inspired me to go back and play all the others. Unlike most long-running RPG franchises (Final Fantasy and Tales, for example), Dragon Quest has managed to keep my attention throughout the series and I’ve beaten every single one that I have played. Only Dragon Quest 2 and 3 stand between me and total series completion (the main series, anyway), and I have DQ8 to thank for that. I love the classic fantasy story, the mystery surrounding the player character, the goofy party members, and the excellent blend of classic Dragon Quest gameplay along with some new mechanics that make character customization a key part of the experience. Getting to experience the game again with new playable characters on a portable device is very exciting for me, and you can probably expect some Dragon Quest posts in the future.
I’m going to try to avoid any sweeping declarations for the month of November – after October I probably need to be grounded from promises for awhile. However, I do have one big announcement about a future thing that I want to share here in advance!

Earlier this year I unveiled the first major Adventure Rules community event, an event that I called Charming and Open. This event is all about a mutual exchange of questions, encouraging bloggers to share ideas and inspire each other to create new posts. The first Charming and Open was a lot of fun and the bloggers who participated really seemed to enjoy the event, so I’ve been wanting to bring it back. I told myself I would wait until the site had grown enough – no point in having the event again this year if all the same people asked questions, right? Well, in the months since the first event the following here has tripled, and I’ve met a lot of new folks who I would consider to be “active” followers of the blog. So with that in mind, Charming and Open is coming back!

I’m going to be posting about the event in more detail down the line, but for now what you need to know is that I will be accepting questions starting on December 1st at 9 AM EST, and will close questions on December 4th at 9 AM EST. My plan this time around is not to cut off questions by the number I receive but instead by a specific timeline – if I receive more questions than I can handle in a week’s time, I’ll simply spread them throughout the month of December. If you want to participate in Charming and Open, it will be very important that you submit your question during that time frame, so be ready for it and if you’re not already following the blog on WordPress or on social media, you’ll want to do that for when the time comes.

That’s gonna be it for today, adventurers. I look forward to posting for you all in the month of November and, for those of you who are also bloggers, I look even more forward to seeing the cool stuff you post! Thanks for reading and I’ll talk to you soon!