Word cloud treatment time. And yes... there were a lot of salamanders.

We have written a fiction to go along with Hot Springs Island, and I've just finished draft #2. It's taken longer than I thought to get here, and it's ended up weighing in at 11 chapters, an introduction, and 16,131 words. According to wikipedia that's enough to be called a novelette.

Growing up, music was a huge part of my life. In elementary school I sang in a boys choir, and then in middle school, high school, and part of college I was in the band, in addition to doing some singing here and there.

+Patrick Stuart has me thinking. He wrote an excellent introduction to our section on elementals which I'll likely post up soon (the complete section on elementals intro and all), and he seems to have become my current blog crush. If you're not reading False Machine and you've somehow found my blog, go and read his pretty words.

Patrick is working on a project about the dark places under the earth, and in one of his recent recap posts about the subject he said this, and I haven't stopped thinking about it:

"13 the impossiblity of darkness  - This one is important. I still envision a Light Economy as being a very important factor in driving/limiting exploration and travel. Light is a quasi-currency in fact. Always running out, always needing to get more. This should also key into making the players obsessed with light and the kind of light they have. It should highlight an important factor which is the living, liquid relationship between light and darkness."

I'm very excited about this project because I like caves. A lot. You see, I'm from Texas, and we've got two key cave ingredients, limestone and water, to generate a ton of the things. I even went so far as to get married in a cave this past December on the day the world was supposed to end. Since I'm opinionated, and since blogging is kinda all about having public conversations with strangers I figured I'd go ahead and throw a stone down this well.

Light in caves sucks. 

To the estimable +Patrick Stuart,

Here's my take, for what it's worth, on "What to Do?".

Should you sell? Should you not sell? Should you piecemeal it? Or launch it all at once? What to do? What to do? I've been asking myself the same questions about the Swordfish Islands.

Crystals are awesome. Not because of healing auras and crap like that, but because of their geometrically regular form and symmetrically arranged plane faces. Hot Springs Island, being a place where water and fire duke it out beneath the earth, contains a number of crystal caves. A couple are being mined by an efreet, and one, hidden away beneath a lagoon, serves as the (perhaps last) refuge for a group of nereids.

The nereids have been on the losing end of things for several millennia, and many of their sisters are dead or captured. Until the last nereid is freed (or accounted for) the survivors have engaged in an unbroken lament, singing in shifts for a thousand years inside the Crystal Sea Cave.