Tea Time--Vanity Blend

Cody and I went for Friday Tea again this week!

This week we tried Friday's Vanity Blend from her Etsy Shop.

Cody was surprised by the dash of blue.

 The tea brewed quickly & smelled fantastic!

We poured out two cups--the first one was much darker then the second for some reason.

Cody added a lot of sugar.

 And we served it up Brick Style which is a new invention for us.

A relaxing start to the weekend!

Final Session of The Bake--Longest Running 4E Eberron Campaign Ends

Final night at Vandale's Garage playing the Bake!

We started with Pizza

Spent longer then normal getting set up & arguing about tech stuff...We also spent time setting up our Epic Words stuff

The game was a total blast!

I have started using my pocket Moleskine for adventure notes--spreads things out more & I go through more books, but it ensures that I digitize everything eventually.

 The final Boss fight against a Shadow Elemental was awesome.

James made funny summary sheets to end the campaign, here is the one for my Shardmind KUBA

and here is our adversary Mindfeather the Mindflayer

I did roll two crits!

Podcast -- Round Table 91 - Goodbye WotC Forums

Here is the blurb

James Introcaso sits down with Dave Gibson, James Haeck, and Craig Haasis to discuss the closure of the Wizards of the Coast community forums. This podcast was recorded on October 7, 2015.

This is a totally great podcast focused on the loss of something that I once really enjoyed--the WotC Forums...here is the official release:

The Community Forums will be shut down on October 29. Thanks to all who participated over the years!

Choosing to retire a former foundation of our community was not an easy decision, but we feel that we must adjust our communications structure to reflect where conversations about Wizards of the Coast games are taking place.

Social media has changed significantly over the last ten years, and discussions about games aren't exclusive to company-hosted forums. The majority of community conversation takes place on third-party websites (such as Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and many other fantastic community-run websites), and it is up to us to evolve alongside our players.

We encourage past and current users to retrieve any information you want to retain from the Community Forums for both Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering. The shutdown will occur on October 29, 2015, at 10:00 a.m. PT. We want to provide enough time for our forum members to move their content, and we recognize that given our forum's vibrant user base and extensive history, this may take time. Any information still on the forums on the cut-off date will be deleted.

Thank you to all of our past and current forum users. You helped build our community into what it is now, and we look forward to continuing to interact with you on our many active social platforms.

I actually started this blog when the WotC Blog site got migrated & I lost all of my photo's...It makes me really sad to see the Forums close down even though I did not use them anymore--the WotC Novel club had moved to GoodReads a while back & I did not really have any reason to still be on the blogs.

James and crew did dedicate their cast to  Wrecan which was wonderful--I will never forget the first time I made his Post of the Week list, such an influential and inspiring member of the community. 

Podcast-- Game School #6: A Red and Pleasant Land

Game School talks with Zak S about the game A Red and Pleasant Land.

Here is the official blurb:

R&PL is an old school D&D supplement that allows you to play in a world similar to Alice in Wonderland. It is horrific and bizarre in all the right ways. The game book is beautiful and full of everything you’ll need along with some very novel ideas. Zak runs Satine through an encounter on a battlefield that is paralyzed in time and being observed by a vampire and his minions. She will find that they are not friendly and will have to use her wits if she wishes to survive. Will she survive the encounter or will the vampire take her to his dungeon? You’ll have to listen to find out.

Zak is fantastic on this--clear description of the game, his design motivation is wonderful, & the mini adventure he runs is playful and great. Satine does a great job playing along.

As always, Chad is a wonderful interviewer and really presents this material in the best possible way. A great episode...

eSports Arena Hearthstone Tournament

Jack & I went to eSports Arena in Santa Ana for the $500 Hearthstone tournament.

Jack was on fire and excited to play--first round he played one of the better players who crushed in him two games.

The second match was also a stomping by Mike, who was actually super friendly about it, but Jack started off 0-2 which is never fun.

Round three was also a loss, but he did much better.

The eSports Arena is an absolutely amazing venue--clean, state of the art, very fan friendly. The twitch live stream was also fantastic--MC's were funny & the games that were show cased were fantastic.

Jack picked up a Membership for the Month of January so we will likely go back and do this again next week.