Happy holidays! Productivity has steadily been creeping to a halt as the holidays near, but by golly, I’m going to keep pushing back and pressing forward! I may not have finished crafting the 108+ books I wanted to (I refuse to cut corners, so whatever pace I go is fine by me), but I am still making them. I’m hoping to reach the end of my small paper books before next week, so I can start on the medium sized ones. I’m really excited by the new printer I have! I’ll finally have medium books with LINES printed in them! This has been a struggle for me since I started crafting books in 2012.

Writing has been a bit sluggish, as I’m sure you Positivity Camp fans have noticed. I’m hoping to work on another installment of that today, so you’ll have a new chapter for next week. I’m also working on writing book two of my MAD trilogy. It took a year to write the first book; I’m curious to see if I can write the second in a similar fashion.

Well, that about covers the fun artistic things I’ve been up to lately. I haven’t had time to type up any of my recent misadventures or epic successes of others or myself in Dungeons & Dragons campaigns, but I do have a funny true story to share that relates to it. If you’re looking for a laugh, check out the story below!

Here's the story of how a paranoid relative made me super aware of my surroundings as we discussed campaign matters. Kind of makes me think about how players forget their surroundings in-game too, like when the party accidentally talks about the severed head they’re carrying, and they’re in some innocent villager's house with a wide-eyed child listening...

The meal began as a simple catching up among friends, and by friends, I mean my D&D group which consists of my husband and my favorite uncle. Now, normally, we talked about common everyday things that most people wouldn’t be terribly interested in or wouldn’t care to try following. This day, however, I was worked up over an undead dog that kept terrorizing our group.

“I want to murder that stupid dog!” I said. “It needs to die.” I kept talking for a while about what I wanted to do to the dang beast. Nick, my husband, added his own suggestions. In hindsight, it felt a lot like I rolled a natural one on my perception check and Nick rolled poorly.

Not only was I blatantly and loudly proclaiming my desire to murder a creature, but I’d done so with the waitress walking up behind me. Even when she came up to the table, I kept chatting away about how we could trap the dog and how much it deserved to die.

I still remember the shocked look of disbelief on my uncle’s face. My husband wasn’t much better. Still, once I was scolded, he quickly took uncle’s side. Despite that, talk of our next conquest continued. (I really am bad about moving on to different topics.)

“Well, fine, if we can’t talk about murdering an undead dog, then what do you want to do next in the campaign? We need supplies. Can we talk about that?” I suggested.

Uncle, the poor fool, readily agreed, just so long as we left the undead dog out of the conversation. Well, I did stop talking about the dog; however, I switched instead to talking about how we didn’t have any spell books…and how we could kill someone who had what we needed and then loot their corpse. If nothing else, we would have money and some items to sell.

I really don’t know how uncle managed to remain so calm. I do vaguely remember his jaw dropping as Nick and I began plotting a way to kill a merchant, steal their goods, and then make it back home in time to use Kindness, a character’s axe, to behead his ‘father’ – which we really didn’t give any context to. Speaking of context, we meant the father of Nick’s character, who in all fairness, is a jerk who burned our village and murdered everyone in it before poisoning his daughter, Zeno (Nick’s character).

To this day, I have not learned my lesson. I continue to talk about stealing, killing with Kindness, and finding a way to obliterate that pesky no-good undead-dog, George. Uncle, meanwhile, keeps lookout for waitresses and does his best to add context for anyone listening in. Isn’t he just the best?

Have you ever had an awkward moment in a public place as you accidentally mentioned murdering, stealing, or plotting vengeance for a campaign? Feel free to share in the comments below!