Hermit

"Well, sir, when a Indian Daddy loves an Indian Mommy VERY MUCH..." -Private Smartass, right before the arrow hit him in the head.

Obligatory Fantasy race:  Sluagh
 

Villain: The Lich  Kaj-Mordu, called "The Mountain King" reigns in his great lair waiting for a chance to break free,. and bring forth his armies. Voiced by Jack Palance!
 

Weapon:  I nominate the Glaive from Krull.  Incredibly magical, and nearly useless.
 
Comes with two instruction manuals:  
 
How to Throw and Catch Glaives for Fun, Profit, and Personal Defense
How to Wipe your Butt with a Hook
 
 
 

The one major change I do support is passing a new Apportionment Act, substantially increasing the membership of the House of Representatives(and, by doing so, increasing the size of the electoral college and diluting the population distorting effect of adding two electors per state for the Senate).  It reduces the likelihood of a "fluke" EC win and popular vote loss while making the House more representative of the diversity of the population.  Third party candidates would also have a more meaningful chance of winning, running in smaller congressional districts.  And I'd package it with provisions for non-partisan, independent redistricting commissions to cut way down on partisan gerrymandering.  

NPCs by Drew Hayes
 
Like I've said, I likes me some escapism. This is a book that looks at what happens to our game worlds when the PC's TPK.
 
Good cast of characters, some nice inside jokes for gamers.  

Villain: The Lich  Kaj-Mordu, called "The Mountain King" reigns in his great lair waiting for a chance to break free,. and bring forth his armies. Voiced by Jack Palance!
 

Monster That Threatens the Entire Kingdom: The Jabberwock. Created using practical effects by Weta Workshop, in conjunction with Adam Savage.

Dude, I would sell a _soul_ to have a head _full_ of grey hair....  
 
 

Consort: Maureen O'Hara will be playing a Queen thrust into a marriage of peace and union as a new kingdom forms from two. Queen Badiya is not pleased by this arrangement, and being from a warrior culture, is not ready to surrender her heritage up for the sensitivities of a culture of overly refined pampered aristocrats!
 

Can't hear it without thinking about my brother.

Music Pick:  The Music of Savatage so I can use this
 

Last nights Democratic Debate proved one thing above all.  
 
Tom Steyer is actually a character created by Donny Most.  Welcome back, Ralph Malph!

With the King cast into the role of hero, well, the Our Hero option becomes 'our sidekick' for me.
 
Sidekick Pick: Danny Kaye as Colby Todd, Court Jester and the King's best friend.
 

 
 

With the King cast into the role of hero, well, the Our Hero option becomes 'our sidekick' for me.
 
Sidekick Pick: Danny Kaye as Colby Todd, Court Jester and the King's best friend.
 

 
 

Monster That Threatens the Entire Kingdom: A Balrog, voiced by Jeffrey Combs
 

 

 
...and i believe that will catch me up.

Greatest Warrior in the Land is Basil Rathbone channelling Sir Guy of Gisbourne

I had only one episode where I used music for sanity maintenance, sort of.
 
My last year of grad school kind of went wonko.  Just like everyone else at the university, I'd been supported on university money for an improperly long time.  Everyone (including the honchos of the departments who paid their students) ignored that rule, and nothing had ever came of it.  Until ... the university finally got the software fixed to connect the machine that said how long a student had been there with the machine that said if they were on the payroll, two systems which had never before talked to each other because they belonged to two separate offices.  But then they did talk to each other.  And since the rule had always been in place, it wasn't a rule change with any chance of being grandfather-claused in. So ... I had my funding cut off on New Year's, 1986.  I had about a month's notice that this would happen.
 
About three weeks before New Years, Congress enacted the Gramm-Rudman Deficit Reduction Act, which was the first of the omnibus across-the-board horizontal-cut federal funding reductions.  Because that was the first of these things, no one knew what it meant, and lots of things were held back or made up on the fly.  The National Science Foundation's Astronomy Directorate, not knowing if they were going to get the money in their budget for the purpose, shelved their postdoc program for the year.  Now, I didn't think I was going to get one of those anyway, but that program was one of the leading job sources for freshly minted astronomy PhDs, and suddenly, that year, that dried up.  Which means all the people "sexy" enough (i.e. working on topics that were Teh Coolness that year) who ordinarily would get direct NSF funding instead got pushed down into the less monolithic, scattered and random postdoc job market.
 
This junction of badness ... the need to get finished ASAP, but very poor employment prospects over the timeframe that implied, was bad enough.  Then at the end of January, on what was a otherwise glorious sunny day both in Florida and in Austin, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after leaving the pad.  This again hit the whole astronomy racket hard; not only were seven astronauts killed, but at that time the well-over-budget and already-delayed Hubble Space Telescope was supposed to be launched in a Shuttle the following September, and now that was on indefinite standby.  That cast a few shadows over another big employer, on top of the serious demoralization it dealt to the whole community.
 
For these perfectly rational reasons, I battled depression the next few months.  I had already put everything else in life on hold.  I'd gone over to a fourteen-hour-day schedule, getting up about noon, going to the department to interact with advisor, librarians, bureaucrats, etc., as needed, going back home to eat, then back to campus to work on the thesis until 3 or 4 AM.  First thing I did on waking each day was an emotional inventory to see if I could function that day.  It was ten or twelve days between times when the answer to that was "no".
 
I was willing and able (time-wise) to lose one day at a time to that, but I wasn't willing to lose two.  Now, the previous summer, before my roommate had finished and lit out for his own postdoc, he'd made a 90-minute cassette for me (largely according to my specifications) which we called the "Hope/Despair tape", because one side was full of songs we associated with negatives and the other with more inspirational things.  I used this for active mood manipulation: I'd listen to the despair side, trying to push myself all the way down, bounce off that bottom, and then use the hope side to provide an extra shove upward so that I'd be able to work the next day.  Make no mistake: I understood what depression was, I understood that I was not doing the right things to recover from it, and I understood I was disregarding some on-campus resources that were intended to help students recover from it.  I did not care about those.  My thinking was that the problem would go away as soon as I finished the thesis and had a real job, and those other options consumed time that I desperately needed to solve the root problem.  So, from January through May, I stayed home as needed about three times a month, did drudgery in my apartment -- what better circumstances to clean your kitchen? -- and listened to the tape. 
 
The tape wore out over a decade ago (having lasted that invaluable several month episode plus a few years), and since not everything on it was something I had selected, I can't recall everything on it, though I'd recognize it if I heard it again (unlikely, since a lot of it was obscure even at the time).  It should be in a drawer in my basement somewhere, but I haven't gone looking for it since my cassette deck died shortly into this century.
 
I do remember the Despair side included
Kindness (At the End) by Renaissance, one of the most bombastic yet most final breakup songs ever Let Her Go Down by Steeleye Span, which is *not* about oral sex Five Miles Out by Mike Oldfield (because my interpretation of that song's last few seconds is ... No, they don't make it) and it closed with Mist, by Mannheim Steamroller. That last requires a bit of explanation, since only a few people associate that with utter desolation like I do.  There had been an anti-alcoholism public service ad on the Austin TV channels where that had been the background music; the ad ended with the end of Mist and a real fade-to-black that will always be a "and now I lay me down to die" vision for me.
 
The Hope side included
Working at the Car Wash Blues by Jim Croce (which opened the side: a resolution to escape, albeit with no vision of how as yet) Wonderful Land by Mike Oldfield Hi-De-Ho as covered by Blood, Sweat, and Tears ("Lay it on, children") the 4:16 of Vangelis's Heaven & Hell that isn't about the Inferno Realization, by Pat Moraz, with which that side closed And all I can say is: it worked.  I lost a minimum number of workdays.  I got the thesis done, defending on the last Tuesday of May.  Less than two weeks after that, I got a second phone call from a professor at Indiana (who passed away last April, coincidentally) offering me a postdoc there.  He'd called me up a few weeks before that about the postdoc.  As I found out after the fact, the thing that nailed down that job for me was my response in that phone interview to one of his first questions; that sentence was, "Yes, I defend next Tuesday."  The tape had got me through in the irreducible amount of time I'd needed. The depression has never come back. 

High Priestess: Glenn Close!

I am down two picks I think. I am going to go with Lucy Lawless as my consort. 
 
A land in turmoil cried out for a hero.
She was  a mighty princess forged in the heat of battle.
The power.
The passion.
The danger.
Her courage will change the world."
 
And Mark Williams as the Priest
He is not your average priest
CES

(This is color text accompanying my previous pick.)
 

 
The Wizard Omar Haram -- played by Vincent Price -- is one of Prince Slick's most important counsellors, aged, experienced, and one who would also prefer not to be put to the sword, which Trp the Twrp is overwhelmingly likely to do if Trp offs the House of Slime.  So using arcane powers he has studied their adversary, determined that while those people haven't been thinking up front about a marriage of alliance, when they see what the marriage might be to there'll be some jaw-dropping and comments along the lines of "Yeah, I'll hit that."  There are some complicated issues involved, but Omar has spells in his grimoire that no one suspects yet.

I left my prepared text at my office Friday, but I have just about everything plotted out now.
 
Wizard: played by Vincent Price.  Text to come in a day (or more, if this place gets paralyzed by snow as is within the possible forecast).

"You wanted to see me, your most majestic?" The Patriarch said. There always seemed to be a smile on the old man's face, but the beard made it hard to tell if it was saintly, or smirking. There were times the King swore their family's spiritual advisor (And highest priest in the land) had a great deal of fun at his expense. The old priest had sained him as a child. He would be the one to place the crown on his head. And, well, he always gave good advice.
 
"Yes, Most Sage," He said using the honorific, "It's about my new wife to be, the queen? I... can't focus around her."
 
"Ah, well, not unusual, my boy," The Patriarch said after making sure there were no ears that could hear him before using the youthful comment, which was meant with affection, "She's quite lovely. Unfortunately the Gods only gave man enough blood to energize either the brain or the crotch...the sight of a beautiful woman has it rush to the latter and thought goes out the archway." A chuckle.
 
"I'm terrified of her," the King pointed out, "I think she wants to kill me, and bury me next to father."
 
"Yeah, I suppose that'll soften a scepter," The Patriarch agreed sympathetically.
 
"You serve the god of wisdom, surely you've got some advice?" The King said alarmed.
 
"Lock the stables, practice your sprinting?" The Patriarch said. Oh yeah, that was a smirk under the beard.
 
"I hear the sound of someone losing their tax exempt status I think" The king glowered.
 
The Holy man tisked, "Fine fine... now here's my advice."


High Priest/Priestess of the Major region In your kingdom:  Robin Williams, as Osric the 13th, Patriarch of the Church of the God of Wisdom (From the first World Creation Superdraft, God of Wisdom's creator- Old man)
 

I am generally a pretty stable kind of guy.  I had never really had any real emotional crises in my life that the music I listened to really provided support or encouragement.  Music for me was more about sharing who I was as a person.  Until I realised my life had changed.  I was no longer one of the young ones, no longer thinking about growing a career, had almost finished raising a son, had a decent salary and was coming close to owning my home outright and my marriage was comfortable but no longer an exciting adventure.  I think I was on the verge of being depressed as I suddenly realised my ideas for the future were all about things that were behind me, I had no personal ambitions for the future and my job was not likely to provide more advancement in responsibility or salary.
 
I think I was on the verge of depression.  That WAS a new experience but not a welcome one and not something I was equipped to deal with.
 
I found myself listening to Misplaced Childhood, the whole album repeatedly, and feeling better on the other side.  It slowly dawned on me that I was, for the first time, engaging with that album as relating to my life rather than just as a bit of music.  I realised that it was telling me that my childhood self, that happy forward-looking person, was still there IF I wanted to look for it.  That there was no reason I was locked into the future that my past self hoped and planned for.  That it was still possible to look forward, to have new hopes and ambitions and to approach the world with the same childlike (rather than childish) outlook that I used to have.
 
I am feeling much better now.  I still get emotional listening to the album, it means an awful lot more to me now, as a 54 year old man than it did to the 20 year old student who excitedly bought it months before going to see the band in concert.  I do not think I could possibly pick one track over any of the others.
 
Doc
 
PS: The irony is that my wife actively hates the album so I need to play it when I am alone in the car... 🙂