21 Eleint
Pelsot managed to break his arm today participating in the youth tourney. He’d been excited all morning for it.
Obviously most of the tournaments for Brightswords are meant for adults. One-on-ones, team bouts, and so on. The ones for kids work in rough age or size brackets, and this year Pelsot qualified for the lowest rung of the youth divisions. So, headstrong and inspired as he is, he signed up for it.
He made it to his second match before the girl he was facing took him down in two swings. One took out his knee, and the second was an overhead swing while he was on the ground, breaking his arm. She actually got disqualified for it; unsporting behaviour and egregious injury.
The injury itself wasn’t that bad and was mostly healed by the on-hand cleric. Still, a small fracture remains, and Pelsot has to carry his arm around in a sling for at least a week before he can take it out. It was the best the healer could do since they were just a novice. Apparently, the hosts of the tournament didn’t expect kids to go around breaking bones.
3 Marpenoth
For a day of invention, I didn’t actually get to see a lot of useful inventions.
Oh sure, there were certainly a lot of fantastical or fascinating things, but frankly, I already got a lot of that out of last year’s Day of Wonders. Automata like that are certainly interesting when you consider that the society around me still uses animal-drawn farming equipment, but compared to Dragon’s mechs they didn’t really impress on their capabilities. I’m sure she would have found them quite interesting though, since they weren’t tinkertech but rather complex clockwork.
My family was certainly wowed by a lot of the flashy stuff though. Light projectors (A fairly simple moving and rotating cover over a light enchantment), a large mechanical centipede crawling around (it had wheels in the bottom, the legs just wriggled for show), an automated stove (which had a half dozen arms to move food around as it cooked, but still needed to be manually operated, defeating the point of it). Something that did catch my eye though was a loom, which seemed to be some level of automatic.
More advanced than what I’d managed to glimpse in the city thus far, but still behind what existed on Bet. I was just glad that I could use my insects to weave individually and not have to figure out how to use a manual loom.
7 Marpenoth
At least the building is purchased and the renovations finished… after nearly a month.
There wasn’t actually a ton of work that needed to be done on it, mostly just for the paperwork. Other than the rotten beams and some general cleaning up though, there wasn’t a lot that needed to get done. Apparently, the carpenters guild was backed up on requests in the area, so they waited nearly an entire month to actually send someone after we had already put in the request when the city’s solicitor discovered it.
They also charged us a lot of money for the work. Nearly thirty Dragons over a mere two days. They had to get people to come in and do their own assessment (which we were charged for) even though we had city paperwork on what had to be done. Then you had the daily wages for the three people who came in to actually do the work of replacing the beams. We had to pay for the beams of course. Then we also had to cover the crew’s extra expenses for food and drink for the two days.
Part of me wonders if they just delayed it till Stoneshar so they had something to do with the day to be active. Meanwhile, I got stuck making mudforts with the other kids again.
If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
My hair is filthy, and I spent a decent while just soaking in the tub when we got home.
14 Marpenoth
Fuck the glassblowers trying to upcharge us.
Three Dragons for two vials?! That’s nearly what you get for just buying them from a random store. A little bit less perhaps, but I know the upsale on them is pretty high.
It must be because we’re a new buyer, but those prices should be criminal. I’d be tempted to actually file an objection to their guild if I wasn’t pressed for time. Getting stuff like that adjudicated takes time, time we don’t have with it already being fall and nearly winter.
If they maintain that price on future bulk purchases, I might be tempted to see about hiring someone to handle it for us. As is though, that takes both time and money that I would rather spend on other expenses. I was able to hang around and listen in on our proxy trying to deal with the glassblower though.
Some gnome named something like Nizzlepittle Polymoix Felgred Chelran Obstilat Proki Gelbottom. And that was an abbreviated list of them! He seemed decent at the craft though. I walked into his store yesterday with the excuse of looking to buy my mother a present. He had lots of interesting glass figures.
I bought a sort of rainbowy hummingbird, meant to be hung near a window to catch and reflect the light. I’ll have to save it for whatever next big gift-giving event comes up.
27 Marpenoth
I enjoyed something of a leisure day today, taking a break from working to set up the workshop. We’re getting a bunch of little enclosures made for me to store my spiders safely in once I manage to collect the right ones. For the last few days, I’ve been walking around the city and its outskirts trying to collect a bunch of different species of spider to test for various properties.
Some I’ll be keeping for harvesting the venom. I took out a book on the local species as well as one on poisons and treatment for them. I figure I’ll keep a few of the nastier species for breeding and milking. Researching though is a bit time-consuming, and involves a lot of guessing. The illustrations of the species aren't exactly the best in a lot of cases, so it ends up being me picking out whichever looks closest by process of elimination, rather than direct identification.
The other set of spiders I’m testing is for the tensile strength and other properties of their silk. Tensile strength is obviously important, but so is their ability to actually produce the material in quantity. So far, progress is slow because making test pieces with small groups is tedious due to a lack of scale. Trying to weave a decent test square of fabric is difficult when you only have a dozen or two of the same species.
Anyway, my “vacation” was really just hanging out with Orsik since the weather has been wet enough that my siblings and I have been spending most of our time inside our house, so this was sort of a nice break. There are only so many games we can play indoors, and at this point, I was getting a little bored of it all.
Today, I feel like I learned a lot though. I was asking him about the various types of wizards, which ended up spiralling into multiple lectures on a variety of different sects, political organizations, and outstanding individual archmages.
Perhaps the most interesting to me were the Red Wizards of Thay. A council of wizards, or liches in the last century or so, that ruled over the country of Thay far to the east. It was taken over after a civil war by Szass Tam, a powerful lich even by lich standards, after ravaging half the country with an army of undead and deposing the ruling council.
The country had quite a storied history, and Orsik talked about it for over two hours. From powerful and advanced wizard academies each dedicated to the different schools of magic to discussions about their historical animosity for their neighbours Algarond and Rashemen.
They are also of more local relevance, thanks to having some sort of embassy in Waterdeep. Orsik seemed to look at it with suspicion and animosity though with how he talked about it. Apparently, the Thayans had quite a negative local history on the Sword Coast, having done various evil wizard plotting in years past. Cities on the Sword Coast tended to accept their embassies though under various beneficial limitations.
They acted as workshops and stores that would sell various quality enchantments and magical goods at a cheap price into the local markets. They would also volunteer their local members into local military efforts. There are plenty of benefits to local leaders for accepting their presence, which was likely needed to overcome their fairly negative reputation among the local populations.