October 1 - Going Invisible 2
Everything in this song, from orchestration to lyrics, feels like a start. Where music and lyrics differ is in the nature of the beginning. The echoing choral nature of the music creates an impression of dawn, of a spiritual beginning, like a warrior in the highlands finishing his prayers before stepping out to see how he can defend his town from the bastard English. It's simple and it's holy. But the lyrics are a very different start indeed. They speak of darkness rather than light, not in a moral sense but in the sense of obscurity, the things that are easier to do from the shadows. There's a sense of Gyges of Lydia, whose ability to become invisible enabled him to commit terrible acts without being known for them, but there's also an air of revenge to this. The "it" that's being burned deserves to be. This whole damn circus deserves to be blown apart.
So, let's start with how I came to play roleplaying games. Which honestly should have happened decades before it did. I was so nerd family coded that I think most people assumed I played ttrpgs whether I did or not. I certainly did everything else. I had played Warhammer as a kid, I read a lot of nerdy fantasy and sci fi, I played a lot of computer rpgs, I managed thousands of hours in Kingdom Of Loathing. Hell, I met one of my best friends through participation in a wrestling e-fed. So obviously I played ttrpgs, right?
Except I didn't. For some reason this thing that should have been an obvious part of who I was failed to materialise. Might have just bean that I've never been good at that sort of social where other people were required, might be something about hoe American Dungeons And Dragons felt. Whatever it was, I blundered past several opportunities to play rpgs with people.
And then: the pandemic. And we were all home, and nobody had anything to do. And in mid March my friend Scott from my writing group posted on our Facebook that he was thinking of running a d&d campaign online and would anyone be interested. And I wasn't doing anything so after a moment of odd resistance I thought "might as well".
Six years later, I'm still in the offshoot of that game. And I run my own. And I play a bunch of stuff that isn't d&d. And I got back into painting miniatures. And I fell out of painting miniatures. And I've listened to, conservatively, about ten thousand hours of podcasts of Actual Plays. It's a big enough part of my life that frankly it seems weird that I didn't play them until now.