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Dr. Aeon and the Wrath of Achilles (#31899)

The players are summoned by Mender Lazarus, one of the guardians of the time stream, who says the balance of power in the player’s timeline is, was, or will be upset. Dr. Aeon, the chrononaut mad scientist for City of Heroes‘ premier villains, Arachnos, went back in time to the Bronze Age, to interfere in the course of the Trojan War. Why is he siding with the Trojans and assailing the Greeks with his high-tech weaponry? Therein lies the mystery.

What follows is a lot of fighting, because hey, it’s an MMO. You beat up everything from Trojan soldiers and a river god to super-soldiers with mechanical spider legs coming off their back like Doctor Octopus’s tentacles. In an ideal world, I’d post video from City of Heroes to YouTube, but you’re not allowed to make ad revenue on the game for legal reasons. So I’m posting screenshots.

Mission 1: The Strange Case of Dr. Hamilton

Mender Lazarus, one of the guardians of the time-traveling society Ouroboros, has much to explain to the player. But the full details will have to wait. He wants the heroes to look into a break-in at Paragon City University’s Steel Canyon campus. If you’re thinking this sort of thing is below the pay grade of Ouroboros, you’re absolutely right. Except… it’s not.

The superheroes rush over to PCU to find Arachnos have kidnapped… a mythologist?

An Arabian superhero heads down the marble-floored halls of Paragon City University. No enemies are present yet.

In the basement is an Arachnos arbiter, left behind to cover the spidery villains’ tracks. Bonus points if you know the comic book reference of Operative Shanower!

Mission 2: Evening the Odds

Dr. Aeon has gone back in time, using the mythologist Dr. Hamilton as a guide. Mender Lazarus has tracked him to the battlefield outside of Troy (the Troad). It’s at the point in the war where Achilles has abandoned the fight. (I use the spelling closer to the Greek, “Akhilleus.”) The Greeks, or Akhaians, as they were then known, are getting captured by Arachnos and interrogated for what they know.

The heroes drop down into the Troad and fight their way through the Trojan ranks to reach the best fighters amongst the Greeks. It’s an all-star cast that Arachnos has captured: Menelaos, Odysseus, Great Aias (a.k.a. Ajax), and Makhaon, the Greeks’ healer.

(Nothing like a good foot sweep to knock down a Trojan archer.)
(Menelaos, Great Ajax, and Odysseus, as well as our hero in white.)

Mission 3: The Heroes Strive With Gods

The balance of the fighting has shifted. Aeon tries to keep the Greeks hard-pressed, but the gods themselves are influencing this war, and more champions take the field. The heroes rescue Diomedes, who warns the player about the chief enemy on the field today: Aineas, the son of Aphrodite.

The player takes on Aineas! Surely a demigod can’t be too tough.

When he’s low on health, Aineas’ mother attempts to save him. If the team is big enough to fight an archvillain, Aphrodite herself appears.

(Aphrodite, goddess of love, sex, and sea foam. The sparkles animate.)

If the team is smaller, she sends her handmaidens, pictured here.

Amid all the fighting, Dr. Aeon has killed Patroklos, Akhilleus’s cousin, best friend, and in many interpretations, his lover. Akhilleus loses his freakin’ mind and starts on a rampage.

Mission 4: The Clash of Man and River

The rampage is cut short by Dr. Aeon, who has placed temporal disruptors around the battlefield in order to change history. Arachnos captures Akhilleus temporarily, though as the dialogue indicates, he’s about to break free when the heroes rescue him.

(Achilles, with his famous shield.)

It’s time for a team-up. But, as an Arachnos captor points out, what are they going to do, kill the entire Trojan army?

Spoiler alert: Yes, yes they are.

The rampage is the longest mission in the arc, as the players plow through a ton of enemies named in the Trojan epic cycle. Relative shlubs like Asteropaios and Lykaon go down first, and by then the Skamander river is so choked with blood that Xanthos, its river god, attempts its revenge.

(Xanthos, a.k.a. the Scamander River God. The blue slime is water animated to drip.)
Ever seen CoH’s Water Blast power set? Now you have!

But that’s not all! Prominent allies take the stage, like the Amazon princess Penthesilea…

(Penthesilea, princess of the Amazons, with double labrys axes. Way to represent, girl!)

…and the son of the dawn goddess Eos! His name is Memnon, prince of Aethiopia.

(Memnon, son of the Dawn and sporter of awesome dreads.)

Each of them call on Dr. Aeon for help, but the villain is gone, leaving them to face their fates alone. Interestingly, the players find Dr. Hamilton amid all the fighting, and Troy’s star quarterback, Prince Hektor, reveals more as the players fight him.

(Hector, prince of Troy. The spear looks more like a naginata, but it’s the closest I could get.)

Hektor says he knows where Aeon has gone, but to preserve his honor and spare the lives of his people, he’s going to throw the fight. The player makes it look good, defeating him as per normal gameplay. When the mission is over, Dr. Hamilton and Hektor let the player in on the Arachnos plan.

So What’s the Plan, Exactly? Enrage the Death Machine?

The reason Aeon interrogated all the Greeks he could find and killed off Patroklos was because he wanted Akhilleus to be visited by his mother the night before the battle, as the story goes. Akhilleus’ mother is Thetis, a sea goddess who is responsible for Akhilleus’s famous powers.

When Akhilleus was an infant, Thetis dipped him in the headwaters of the River Styx, and wherever the water touched, it made him immortal and invulnerable. Because she held him by the heel while she dipped him, that heel is his one weak, mortal part, the proverbial “Achilles heel.”

Dr. Aeon’s plan was to capture and interrogate Thetis for the location of the Styx’s headwaters. And now he’s taken his best commandos and dipped them in the Styx. He’s going to make an army of super-soldiers who cannot die.

Mission 5: The Isle of the Styx

The player goes to the island of Skotados to rescue Thetis. The player battles normal Arachnos enemies, the nymphs of the Styx (the river of death), and the now-invulnerable Arachnos soldiers. It’s a tough fight (the super-soldiers are a mob of all bosses), but Akhilleus and Hektor are there to take their revenge on Aeon, and having them both on the players’ side is a combo that the gods never saw coming.

In the end, the player drops Dr. Aeon off with Mender Lazarus, who will enforce the sanctity of Earth’s timeline. What he does to Aeon is only hinted at, but it’s probably NSFPC: Not Safe For Paragon City.

And that’s our show! Hope you enjoyed this little excursion.

If you’ve made it this far and actually have a City of Heroes (Homecoming) account, the arc is #31899. Just enter that into the search bar at the Architect Entertainment interface, and the arc should be playable.

See you around the city!

Big Trouble in Little Rokugan

The worst job in the samurai fantasy nation of Rokugan belongs to the Crab Clan, who must maintain the Kaiu Wall to keep out the demonic armies of the Shadowlands. One particularly disagreeable duty is to scout out the blasted wastes and spy upon the enemy. When the ronin Seikansha sought this out, he discovered a portal to what he thought was Jigoku — Rokugan’s Hell.

This was not the case. When he followed a strike team of misshapen creatures into this distortion of time and space, he emerged in the laboratories of Paragon City’s Portal Corporation. The oni, goblins, and other servants of evil had no clue where they were — but wasted no time kidnapping the local humans to gain their secrets.

My approximation of the L5R shugenja Seikansha, featuring the Wings of Fire and Katana of Fire spells.

Alone, Seikansha knew he could not face all the enemy at once. But the language of heroes is universal. If the people here — however strangely dressed — seek to defend their home from the Shadowlands, they are no longer strangers, but brothers and sisters. It’s time for a team-up between samurai and superheroes.

“But wait, is this okay copyright-wise?”

Funny thing… yes. According to the guidelines of the current rights-holders of Legend of the Five Rings, Fantasy Flight Games, fans (such as myself) can create content so long as it is not sold for a profit. Since City of Heroes: Homecoming is entirely powered by volunteers and doesn’t charge for its services, no laws have been violated.

So… let’s rock!

Part 1: Face the Horde

Once the player starts the Architect Entertainment arc, it creates a hologram contact for the first mission.

“If you would turn back the darkness, come with me. There will be lives and souls to save.”

Here, the heroes retake the Portal Corporation building from the foot soldiers of the Shadowlands Horde. Since it’s just the first mission, I thought we’d ease into it with familiar enemies from L5R and a simple task: rescue the scientists of the Portal Corporation. The liberated scientists are eye-witnesses to the crime.

Who are we facing? Let’s zoom in on the bad guys with some beauty shots from the character creator!

Bakemono (goblins):

Bakemono Warmongers (goblin shock troops):

A shot of the City of Heroes character editor, showing a goblin with a double-headed staff.

Hyakuhei: intelligent zombies of the Shadowlands that were once samurai. I particularly like the zombie bones in the hands and the rusty katana option.

For bosses, we have Rokugani ogres. Since “ogre” and “demon” both more or less translate as “oni” and they share a number of similarities in traditional Japanese mythology, I gave these brutes the name Yabanjin no Oni. Yabanjin means, roughly, “barbarian” or “savage person.”

A blue-skinned, horned oni (Japanese demon) holding a hammer of molten rock.

A Missing Expert

Back to the action. The heroes rescue two researchers who are able to tell them what’s going on, only to find their supervisor is missing: Tina MacIntyre, Portal Corp’s key expert on alternate dimensions.

Where would they take her? Seikansha says when the Shadowlands needs to grow its power, the first place that maho-tsukai (blood sorcerers) go is to the local graveyard. There, they can animate the dead to fight for them. In Rokugan, this is less of a problem, as they cremate their dead. Surely a worldly civilization like Paragon City does the same?

“Um, yes, bad news…” says the player…

Part 2: Digging the Grave

The heroes head to Peregrine Island’s graveyard to rescue Tina MacIntyre. There, they find Rokugan’s worst nightmare. When Tina is freed, she says the oni and goblins snatched weapons from Portal Corporation’s security teams and the SWAT department of the local police who deal with superpowered beings.

In other words, that sound of approaching feet is going to give way to bursts of assault rifle fire, grenade explosions, and the zapping sounds of beam rifles. The Shadowlands Spec Ops team may not have a lot of experience with these weapons, but thanks to modern technology, they’re pretty much point-and-click.

Even the lowly shlubs have automatic weapons:

And their buddies pack beam rifles that can disintegrate their targets:

The zombies created by maho-tsukai have found themselves some chainsaw swords… and in this close-up, you can see the porcelain masks that let their bodies animate.

When the heroes rescue the Tainted Tina MacIntyre, she confirms their plan… they’ve taken a small army back to Rokugan… with weapons enough to devastate whatever medieval troops are in front of them.

Part 3: The Guns of Yojin

Those troops are in Yojin Province. In case you’re not up on your Rokugani geography, that’s the land immediately outside Otosan Uchi… the Imperial capital.

The good news? All seven Great Clans have soldiers stationed there. The bad news? Six out of the seven are blaming the Crab for failing to contain the Shadowlands threat.

Fight, Grab, and Rescue

The heroes have a threefold mission.

  1. Find and confiscate the stashes of weapons from Paragon City so the Horde can’t use them.
  2. Rescue the Crab scouts who were tracking the Horde and got caught by the Great Clans. There are six different Clans and six different Crab allies to free.
  3. Take the fight to the demon in charge, Hoshasen no Oni.

The weapons use City of Heroes’ “weapon stash” icons, which admittedly look out of place in the hills of pseudo-Japan, but they’re supposed to!

The scouts to rescue are from some of the samurai families of the Crab:

  • The Hida are known for tough shock troops.
  • The Hiruma, usually scouts.
  • The Kuni, often shugenja and witch hunters.
  • The Kaiu, known for engineers and battle-masters.
  • The Yasuki, who are mostly courtiers and merchants. They aren’t present here.

Here’s a Kuni, captured by the Unicorn (Ki-Rin) Clan. They have a mix of the samurai families of the Utaku, Shinjo, and Ide. The Utaku Battle Maiden is the armored one on the left, a literal girlboss. The Shinjo is an archer, and the Ide is a courtier who knows how to use a dao (Chinese broadsword). They’re minion-rank. As with all CoH adventures, the more players are in the team, the more enemies they will face. Since there’s only one player here, the mob is only three enemies.

After the Kuni is free, she joins the player and fights on their side.

The Kaiu warrior, a big tanky type in heavy armor with a tetsubo, has been captured by the Lion Clan. The Matsu family form the minion and lieutenant ranks of this mob. The highlighted one is a gunso, or sergeant, who specializes in katana moves. The other two are ashigaru, foot soldier spearmen.

If there were more heroes in this mission, there would be more enemies. In that case, there’d be Kitsu family shugenja (priest/wizard) and a boss, the Akodo family tacticians.

But don’t forget the real enemy! Amid all the beating down of other Clans (Phoenix, Scorpion, Crane and Dragon are not pictured), there’s still plenty of Shadowlands enemies, none more notable than the Hashasen no Oni.

Pictured here in the character creator (because taking screenshots is chaotic while getting your butt kicked), the Hashasen fights using weakening energies. In the parlance of CoH, it’s radiation emission, but the description themes it as debilitating energies of the element of Corruption.

When it falls, the Hashasen no Oni tries to crawl in a specific direction… a tunnel opening leading far underground…

Part 4: Six Shaku Under

Seikansha and the players draw a logical conclusion — there were too many Shadowlands troops compared to the ones he saw in Paragon City. They had reinforcements, and they came from the tunnel beneath Rokugan. Does it go all the way to the Shadowlands? Or is the Horde using some other method than simply carving out a 200-mile tunnel? The player vows to find out.

The Shadowlands have, of course, underestimated their enemy. Samurai are no great spelunkers, but if there’s one thing Paragon City knows, it’s fighting enemies in caves! The heroes set bombs throughout the tunnel system, wiring it to blow. Sure hope they wrote their final haiku before coming down here!

It turns out the enemy are guarding a ritual altar, and that spilling blood on it will create a gate… not between worlds, but to Jigoku itself.

There, the five servants of Fu Leng responsible for this plan are known as the Star of Darkness. They must be destroyed, or the forces of Hell will continue to surface in the caves, and from there, assail Otosan Uchi until it falls.

Part 5: To Shatter a Star

The portal takes the players to Jigoku, a burning hell where the Star of Darkness has retreated to plot their contingency plans.

The heroes will find new enemies to face here, including dozens of minor oni not seen outside of Jigoku.

The stars of the show are the five points of the star. The Hikarabita no Oni lashes a burning whip and summons demons in an attempt to vanquish any foes who refuse to die. Using thermal powers, it sucks the moisture from its victims, leaving dessicated husks.

Genso no Oni mocks samurai by dressing and fighting like them, creating fear and darkness wherever it goes. Because City of Heroes adds on special effects with Dark Armor powers, fighting it is like fighting a cloud of darkness. I got a clearer picture of it in the character creator.

The other bosses include a fallen Moto samurai (a family of the Unicorn Clan largely taken by the Shadowlands).

Topping things off is, of course, the archvillain of this plan, the pale princess of the Shadowlands, Doji Nashiko.

Who’s that, you ask? Right-click on her to find out!

I tried to get a picture of her at rest, but she can see through invisibility, so I got one of her in action. Here she is fighting the 8-ton Longbow battle robot I used to keep her busy to get the screenshot.

With Nashiko’s defeat, the players have driven the last nail into the coffin of this evil scheme. But now that Rokugan and Paragon City know of the other realms’ existence, who is to say what will happen next? Will the Emperor send diplomats or soldiers? Will they still remain isolated from all other lands when an existential potential threat to the Empire is just a portal away?

Create your own Architect Entertainment arc and let me know!

City of Heroes: Homecoming

In 2004, the massively multiplayer online role-playing game City of Heroes hit the shelves. A little awkward at first, it had a few laudable strengths. It wasn’t trying to compete in the same space as the innumerable fantasy MMOs. The costume generator kicked butt, assuring that ensured no two heroes looked exactly the same. It had mix-and-match power sets that made you feel like a superhero from the get-go. Who really wants to play a level 1 peasant with “tattered cloth armor” as your starting equipment every time? And, importantly, it continued to constantly improve with every new patch (or, as the game called them, “issues”).

One of these improvements was the capability to design your own player-created content. Using the “Mission Architect” system, players could create up to five missions in an arc. Each could use pregenerated maps, normal or customizable enemies, a selection of mission goals, and NPC dialogue they could enter themselves.

A shot of the City of Heroes character editor, showing a goblin with a double-headed staff.

Choose Build Your Own Adventure

Two notable types of adventures resulted. The first type was players designing the missions’ enemies for maximum experience gain. They ground out levels and loot as fast as humanly possible. Useful for condensing the time you spent getting levels, but overall, nothing amazing.

The second type of adventure unleashed the creative energy of thousands of players, as they spent hours polishing their virtual baby until it shone. I saw adventures where you descend into the Paris catacombs to fight the Phantom of the Opera. You could battle archvillains themed to the major arcana of tarot cards. One that I found particularly hilarious had you take the job of the Fashion Police, dueling enemies with the most garish costumes imaginable.

And Then the “Thanos Snap” Happened

Despite the love and money of a sizeable fan base, City of Heroes was shut down in 2012 by its parent company, NCSoft.

Unknown to NCSoft, however, a Secret Cabal of Reverse Engineers (names obscured to protect the criminals) absconded with the game’s source code and played in private for the following seven years. In 2019, their secret came out and they opened the servers up to players. Coming home was remarkably like the citizens of Marvel’s Earth-616 after their five-year absence.

A year or two later, NCSoft, who had moved on to other ventures, eventually gave the servers an official blind eye. As long as the private servers didn’t attract attention with bad (read: legally liable) behavior, they could operate and even create their own new content.

Due to differences in philosophy and general drama, several different teams managing their own servers have popped up. I use the Homecoming servers. Homecoming doesn’t try to preserve the game exactly as it was in 2012. Instead, it adds content for a better user experience. Though I haven’t tried to create official content for them, I have made use of their Mission Architect to create stories I think players could love.

So, Get to the Game Already!

So far, I’ve written two Architect arcs, each with five missions:

Dr. Aeon and the Wrath of Achilles (AE #31899)

The player tries to stop Arachnos’ obnoxious super-science expert from going back in time to change the course of the Trojan War. The heroes battle Trojans, Amazons, Aethiopian allies, a river god, and Arachnos soldiers with a certain… mythological edge.

Big Trouble in Little Rokugan: (AE #71669)

The Portal Corporation opens up a wormhole to the land of the samurai RPG Legend of the Five Rings. The oni of the Shadowlands steal weapons from Paragon City and intend to use them to conquer the Emerald Empire. It will take heroes from both worlds to stop them!

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In Which I Ring in the New Year with… Old Ideas?

In college, my wife introduced me to Leonard Cohen, whom I only knew through the song “Everybody Knows,” featured in the movie “Pump Up the Volume.” He was a heck of a poet and songwriter, somehow able to sound melodious and golden-voiced while at the same time bringing up images of a guy who only took the cigarette from his mouth long enough to insert shots of bourbon.

The last album of his that I bought is just called “Old Ideas.” I could relate. Sometimes a piece, be it a story or a painting or a song, just doesn’t gel 100%. Maybe it got crowded out by other songs that worked better, faster. Maybe it just got rejected by the market you thought it was perfect for.

It gets put on the shelf like an old bill, only to be filed away when there’s nothing else to do and only rediscovered when you move. But when that rediscovery happens, it’s amazing. You’ve forgotten something that once meant a lot to you, and it’s like connecting with a friend you haven’t seen in years. You don’t need to start over totally fresh… you don’t need to pitch yourself to them. You just pick up where you left off.

Here Come the (Anti-) Heroes

That’s what happened when I saw an anthology call for something called Pinup Noir: High Class Muscle. It was going to be 10 stories of gumshoes and enforcers with a moral code they just won’t break. I thought, “I had a story like that once…” and dug through my computer to find it. The catch was, I’d written it college. Even won a little undergraduate writing award for it from Asimov’s Science Fiction. Did I still have it, even after the last (mumble) years?

Oh, yes. Yes, I did.

Fast-forward to today. High Class Muscle has stories from Arizona gumshoes set in the 1940s, but now it’s also got my cyberpunk noir called “This Thing of Darkness.” It’s about Louis Whitworth, a chipped-up enforcer with a heavy martial arts background. He’s steeped in bushido, but the violent life of a samurai wears on him. He has attachments, which as Zen Buddhism tells us, are the cause of pain.

And by the end of the story, there’s a lot of pain.

A bearded bodyguard with a gun takes center stage on the cover of "High Class Muscle."

High Class Muscle just released, so here’s the link to it. By all means, shower it with reviews. Good… bad… they’re the guys with the guns.

Whoops. Meant to say “good review, bad review, doesn’t matter,” when I channeled Ash Williams from Army of Darkness. Ash does get beat up and kiss dames, but I’m holding off on calling him a noir hero.

EDIT: Having gotten my hands on a contributor’s copy, I can now add a shot of the original artwork that precedes the story. Here’s an artist’s interpretation of Louis!

A trenchcoat-clad African-American punk with long claws jutting out of his cybernetic right hand.

But wait, there’s more!

Did I Mention the Free Urban Fantasy Books?

In other news, my November and December were filled with refreshing progress on Civil Blood‘s sequel. I’m about 80% of the way through it now. It’s clocking in at 130,000 words, but I expect to add another 10-20k before edits slim it down to about 130k for a good first draft.

And it so happens Civil Blood will be part of the “Urban Fantasy Free for All” happening January 10th (which as of this writing is tomorrow). The organizers have over 100 urban fantasy authors who’ve agreed to give away their e-books for free for one day only.

Like UF? Find your next read there, and stock up with the next and the next. Like my writing? Download Civil Blood for free. Already got it? Tell some friends: a feeding frenzy would be awesome. You can sort by spice (i.e. from “cozy” all the way to “paranormal romance horny”) or tropes like “antihero,” “enemies to lovers,” or “Touch Them And You Die.” Check out the list of UF stories here at www.urbanfantasyaddict.com.

And as Butch Asks in Pulp Fiction, “What Now?”

I’m head-down in studying (more on that in a future post), and still trying to get more gainfully employed. That led to me updating my LinkedIn with all my publications, which I didn’t have on there before. So I’ve spent the last two days going down Memory Lane and posting links to the games I’ve detailed in my Writing Tour page.

Incidentally, I tried to fix Civil Blood‘s old and ugly product details, with some success. I’m not sure why, but the details (i.e. back cover copy) on the Kindle version have never looked good on a PC, and I suspect they looked ugly on a phone, too. I can only imagine it’s been turning off potential readers for who-knows-how-long.

New Year. New face to put on things.

And when it comes to old ideas, let us keep only the good ones.

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In Which I Donate Something Special

The cover of "Hairballs, Hiccups and Hope" shows a smiling family of four in a spaceship.

A few years back, I joined a Discord server for a short story writing community. I knew a few of the writers’ works through the Books of Valor anthologies, and they let me know about upcoming anthologies, most of which are through Raconteur Press. With my head down in Civil Blood‘s world this year, I haven’t submitted much, but one anthology stood out.

It was a charity anthology — a writer, Lori Janeski, was badly injured in a car accident, and her friends and family put together an anthology where the proceeds would go toward hospital bills. The editor, Amanda Montandon, wanted stories themed around survival and hope.

Now, I’m trying to minimize the time I spend on writing that’s not Civil Blood-related, and I had a story that already fit the bill. “The 10:40 Appointment at the NYC Department of Superhero Registration” was right there, with its reprint rights available and everything, so I sent it in.

I didn’t hear back for months. What I didn’t know is that Amanda was struggling with her own health, having been diagnosed with Stage III breast cancer. This was all the more poignant, because “The 10:40 Appointment’s” ending hinges around oncology, that is, the medical specialty of dealing with cancers.

But Amanda never gave up. Now, almost a year later, the anthology has been published.

“Hairballs, Hiccups, and Hope” collects 13 short stories, about cats, brownies (the fae kind), kissing frogs, Alzheimer’s patients’ brains uploaded to spaceships, and of course, a hapless regenerating superhero who wants to be called Doctor Awesome. He does not get everything he wants.

It is available through Amazon for Kindles and paperback here.

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In Which a Hepler Scores a Sweet Gig

Ashtaroth from Diablo IV holds flaming weapons.

If you check me out on social media, you may notice my Bluesky and Twitter aren’t particularly self-aggrandizing. When I found “chrishepler” taken on Twitter, I decided against calling myself “realchrishepler” and went entirely in the opposite direction. My wife, Jennifer Brandes Hepler, had recently gotten Internet famous for all the wrong reasons.

Some background, for those who don’t know the story:

Back in the day, Jennifer was a writer on Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age 2, and was active on the BioWare forums. This led to a notorious harassment campaign, basically a GamerGate kind of thing a few years before that movement ever happened.

Why? Well, she wrote a companion character for DA2 who was a) attracted to the player regardless of gender, b) made the first move in romances by hitting on the player, c) gave minor disapproval points if you turned him down, and d) was the best party healer. Some of these were decisions made in the writers’ room, some were systems and mechanics decisions that came together only in the final product. But the end result was, she got all the blame for writing The Gay Guy That the Game Forces You to Bang.

Jennifer got her own Reddit thread as “the cancer killing BioWare.” Doxing and death threats followed, along with a dissection of an old interview in which she said “you know, the part of the game industry I find hardest is putting enough time aside to play a lot of video games.” That, of course, became the evidence that she was Even Worse! Fake Geek Girl!

I think the one lighthearted moment in the whole mess was when an old acquaintance from our college science fiction club read the news. We’d grown apart from him, and neither of us were particularly friendly by the time we’d left Baltimore. But his reaction was “Fake geek? Jenny was writing Shadowrun LARPs with me when there were no Shadowrun LARPs. She founded JohnCon while these idiots were still in diapers. If she’s not a real geek, no one is.”

Anyway, to make a long story medium, the gaming press picked up on the harassment, and it made enough news that when she and I left BioWare, there were a few more articles written about her. And when I was picking out my social media handles, I knew that no one Googling “Hepler” was doing it to find me. So, I just called myself “theotherhepler.” Irony, yes — it’s my last name, she married into it. But she’s always been better at this writing thing than I have, and more famous for it.

Case in point:

A photo of Lilith from the Diablo franchise, with a caption reading "Welcome to Hell, Irvine," and Diablo IV's release date.
Kinda harsh on Irvine, don’t you think?

Jennifer Hepler is now Narrative Director on the Diablo Franchise

Fast forward to 2025, when the fine folks at Blizzard were looking for someone with lead-writer and writing-director chops. Jennifer’s been doing similar work at another company for a few years now, on an unannounced franchise with a similar vibe, so her work caught their attention. It also didn’t hurt that this year, a lot of Dragon Age fans were looking back and saying, “What made DA: Origins work so well?” Jennifer, who coined the phrase “dark heroic fantasy” that the Origins marketing team ran with, had answers prepared for questions like that.

I could go on all day about how competent my wife is. Since BioWare, she’s worked on Game of Thrones: Ascent (more darkness!), cranked out awesome choose-your-own-romances for the Choices visual novels, edited I don’t-know-how-many other writers, and spoken at GDC summits in which she broke down how she approaches the nuts and bolts of exposition. (She’s super analytical about story structure.) And yes, she’s great about researching the projects she’s on so she doesn’t screw up the essentials. If you’re going through Hell, she’s the writer you’d want plotting your way out.

And me?

I have some gigs, but they’re nowhere near as impressive as the news about Blizzard. I mean, Diablo IV alone was a megahit, to say nothing of Blizzard’s other massively successful online games. It’s one thing to know that intellectually and quite another to see a nine-foot Lilith statue on the company campus grounds.

Meanwhile, I’m working with an indie studio, Quintessence Games. As with the last two indie studios I helped out, our primary focus is to build what the industry calls a “vertical slice.” Basically, early in development you build a mini-level that showcases the kind of gameplay it will have, the kind of art style you want, and the general flow of how it’ll all come together. You then show that to higher-ups and investors, and if successful, you get your game off the ground.

I’ve got high hopes for our project. It is not, however, a good time to be in video games unless you’re sitting on a megahit. More of the companies that can afford writers have been laying off their staff, sometimes by the thousands, in an effort to goose their stock prices. Short-term gain is the only gain in town.

Indie companies have been scooping up some of these writers and focusing on creating games, but in 2024 there were literally thousands of indie games released onto Steam. It is impossible to play all the games released in one year, and difficult to even play a representative selection of a given game’s genre. Standing out from the crowd is a Herculean task, and so working for indies is best done part-time or while lining up future opportunities for employment potential when the contract is done. In other words, my job is work all day, search and plan all night, just in case.

As for spare time… sometimes I have been playing prominent video games that I should’ve played long ago.

A couple of times I took a moment to protest the current political climate (that’s a pile of posts on its own).

I caught up on Ursula LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, which I’ve never read before.

And, because I’m considering expanding my day job options, I’ve tried a little training for extra skills such as working in the Unreal Editor and copywriting.

Some of these activities felt like a chore — others were comfort food in a world that is becoming defined by its complete lack of comfort.

That means Civil Blood‘s sequel, once again, has been delayed. I hit the milestone of 100,000 words, but the velocity has been at a snail’s pace and the plot is demanding many more scenes than the outline anticipated. Being a political novel about vampires, everything that happens on the news makes me reconsider how I want to explore the themes.

I don’t expect the rough draft to be finished by the end of the year, but I am hopeful. I’m going to do my best to avoid writing The Winds of Winter II: Lady Stoneheart’s Boogaloo — we shall see.

In the meantime, I look forward to seeing what Hell holds.

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In Which I Give Some Birthday Shout-Outs

It’s not my birthday, but I wound up celebrating it anyway.

Our family made the trek to where I grew up, near Washington, D.C., with some in-laws coming to town as well. We were all set to have a lovely brunch one Sunday morning. No sooner did I walk in than 20 people I know through high school, college, and work are there, yelling, “Surprise!” My wife and my mom had been planning it for a month or more, and it turned out really great. I hadn’t seen half the people there in more than a decade.

The vacation was an unqualified success, with everyone from my side of the family getting some time in to see me, my wife, and the kids. We saw museums, participated in my brother’s favorite hobby, and I gained approximately two pounds in a week from my sugar guzzling. But on the plane ride home, I had time to think.

I Have My Come-to-Zeus Moment

Of our family, I had the last flight out, and it was from DCA, also known as Reagan National Airport. In case you’re not aware… I hate flying.

I don’t puke or anything. I don’t refuse to get on planes. I just talk to my seatmates to have something to do because I know my life is in some stranger’s hands for a few hours. Nowhere is this more obvious than when I’m flying out of Reagan National specifically.

In the best of circumstances, National is not an easy place to land — the pilots have to follow the Potomac River because they can’t use airspace over the Pentagon on the south bank of the river, or the White House and Capitol, which are both close (as planes go) to the north bank.

Air Florida Flight 90, 1982

Once in the 1980s, ice formed on the wings of a Boeing 737 passenger jet and it plowed into one of the bridges spanning the Potomac, 30 seconds after takeoff. Every time I went into town as a kid on I-395, I could see the discoloration in the nearby reconstructed bridge where new steel had replaced the old. Of course, since it’s 2025, this time around my mind was on the fatal crash in January when a plane coming into DCA hit an Army helicopter on maneuvers.

Intellectually, I know that air travel is technically the safest kind of travel given the long distances compared to cars and the relatively low number of incidents, let alone full-on fatal crashes. But when I’m on a plane, my brain isn’t so easy to convince. Here’s a few reasons why:

We Focus on the Negative

The human brain remembers negative outcomes better than it remembers positive outcomes. This makes sense as a matter of evolutionary psychology: it’s important to remember “The lake has no animals left to eat,” much more than “I ate a frog a day at the lake for exactly 65 days.” One’s a problem that could necesitate a change in behavior to survive, and one’s just the status quo.

I don’t know how many planes I’ve taken, but it’s probably in the high-double- to low-triple digits. And the flights I remember most are:

  • That time when I flew to Columbus, Ohio and we came in for a landing… and then the pilot pulled up. Not telling us anything, we left the runway behind and the GPS map showed us headed toward Chicago. We eventually turned and came in for a landing again, and he pulled up again. Coming over the intercom, he said, “We’ve got some conditions on the ground we don’t like, but don’t worry, we have enough fuel to do this one more time.”
  • The flight from DC to LA that went through Colorado, where there was a clear blue sky and the worst turbulence I’ve ever experienced. The plane would drop ten feet on a bump and whole crowds of passengers would scream or gasp. The completely-full flight was batted around like a toy from every direction. The pilot climbed to get above the rough air, and it didn’t work. After about a half hour of nerve-wracking flying, he descended 12,000 feet and got below whatever was causing it, and from then on it was fine.
  • A three-hour flight from Shenzhen, China, trying to outrun an incoming typhoon, followed by a twelve-and-a-half-hour flight to the West Coast of the U.S.. There were at least 8-10 solid hours of turbulence on the second flight, to say nothing of being seated next to the bathroom. Every flush turned into that vacuum-sucking noise and it felt like my seat was being smacked.

Fairly vivid examples? Yes. Also, outliers. Many of my flights have had nothing remarkable to report. “Oh, gosh, the seat belt sign came on for a half hour over Nebraska, but that was it.” Unmemorable… and ideal.

Failures Are Publicized, For Good Reason

Once, when I asked a flight attendant how long the pilot expected turbulence to last, she said “Don’t worry. Storms don’t bring down planes. When they do, it’s so rare, it would make the news.”

While I appreciate her efforts, that voice in the back of my head says, “Okay, and I watch the news all the freakin’ time.” I watched September 11th, 2001 live on TV, and the airline industry workers were just as flabbergasted as everyone else. There’s a long list of aviation disasters (and near-misses, and deliberate attacks) beyond the ones I listed above. And when a plane goes down, the death toll can easily be everyone on the flight. You’re in a 65-ton metal tube going 500 mph at 35,000 feet.

But on the other hand, I used to live in the flight path of an airport. I heard the planes coming in to land every ten minutes or so. And they got it right more than a hundred times per day without a hitch. No news cameras. Just skilled people doing their job.

And Now What?

And, of course, because I’m slugging away at a political novel, I’m tuned in to the barrage of social media and news sites that tell me there’s been mass layoffs at the Federal Aviation Administration. The White House says it’s fewer than 400 people and they weren’t essential. Politico claims to have found 130 people who arguably are essential. (For context, there’s about 45,000 FAA employees.) What do I think?

  1. Taking politicians at their word when they’re covering their butts is a fool’s game.
  2. I never get on a plane and say “Wow, what a nice safe feeling this is, all made possible by deregulation.”

If you let a corporation like an airline legally cut costs, they will cut costs. They will put the rules back after some incident makes them put the rules back. And I don’t want to be that incident.

And On That Cheery Note, the Shout-Out

So I wanted to give thanks to my family for putting together the surprise, and my friends for showing up. But I also want to praise the airline staff that make trips like mine possible.

That flight attendant giving the boring demonstration has bet their life that the pilots will get everyone to their destination in one piece.

Those pilots have bet that they can handle an aircraft the weight of a battle tank and put it down gently enough that there’s only a minor bump when it hits the tarmac.

The air traffic controllers, the radar technicians who track weather systems, the maintenance staff, the marshallers (that’s the name for the traffic-directing person on the runway waving glow-sticks)… somehow they make it all work, day in and day out. And most of us never even see them mess up. They’re good at what they do.

I can’t get the laid-off ones a job. But I can remind people that they’re out there every day, trying to keep untold numbers of people safe.

Let’s do right by them, okay?

Mass Effect Codex, Galaxy Map, and Item Descriptions

Story time.

When I was writing for Star Wars: The Old Republic, BioWare Edmonton’s design director called me into his office and said “How do you feel about working on Mass Effect 2?”

My response was, “Um… why? Do they need me?”

ME2 had six writers on it already. But it turned out that three of them were leaving the company when they were done writing the dialogue, and a fourth one broke his shoulder slipping on an ice rink at a kid’s birthday party. The grunt-work writing remained: the Codex entries, the Galaxy Map, the weapon descriptions — essential words to make the game function, but nothing as glamorous as writing characters the audience would love.

So I took over the non-voiced text from the previous IP expert, Chris L’Etoile, starting with the Galaxy Map. I said, “This works like Star Wars, right? Ice planet, swamp planet, city planet?”

In response, Chris sent me a chart of the minimum molecular weights of gases retained by a heavenly body. This was important to get right, he said, because 90% of the 300 planets on the map were not going to be able to support life. They were going to be barren rocks with gases, just like in the actual Milky Way. My job was to turn them into something interesting and accurate at the same time.

“Uh… does your audience actually care about this?” I asked.

“Yes,” Chris replied. “This chart is why you can’t terraform the Moon. Even if you pumped in all the oxygen and nitrogen you needed to create an atmosphere, the weak gravity means it’d float off into space. You need to know that, because this is the way we did it on Mass Effect 1 and some of our fans on the forums are astronomers. They’ll know if something is off and they’ll tell everyone. By the way, remember that BioWare’s CEOs are doctors, so they’ll know if any alien biology doesn’t work. Good luck!”

That was my introduction to writing hard science fiction, or at least harder than I’ve seen in any other space opera video game. Video games, as a rule, are soft science fiction, with plasma guns and teleportation and all kinds of tech that would require huge leaps in science but makes for easy narrative grease.

I had to learn the rules before I broke them, so I learned all I could about planetary formation and the early stages of life on Earth. Then we got to the Codex entries on weapons, and I had to figure out how to make things sound awesome and match up with what the combat team wanted. I did this through the game shipping and 9 pieces of downloadable content. I also headed up the team on the Cerberus Daily News, 365 player-facing entries that had to be important enough to seem newsworthy but inconsequential enough that we didn’t complicate the writing of Mass Effect 3.

By the time Mass Effect 3 rolled around, I was designated as “the writer who cares about the science,” and was dubbed the de facto IP expert. I did what I could to make the game and its accompanying DLC (another 9 pieces) as consistent with the laws of physics as possible.

Below are some examples I’m proud of.

The Thanix “Cannon“

The Thanix weapon you get for your crew’s spaceship is an example of the writing “iceberg” in ME2: a lot of effort, 90% of which the player will never see. We knew that we wanted the weapon to be adopted from Sovereign’s main gun in Mass Effect 1, and that it was super-advanced. The Reapers had a civilization millions of years old and technology that should sound awesome.

It couldn’t just be a laser, because how boring would that be? Further, it shouldn’t be a particle beam (you get that as a hand-held weapon in the game), or a microwave/maser weapon, or anything we’d heard of before. On the other hand, it still had to make physical sense and look like a directed-energy weapon, because that’s what the cutscenes in ME1 showed. So the bar was high.

I ended up scouring pages from the U.S.’s Defense Advanced Research Project Agency and ultimately a 1951 book by Arthur C. Clarke from which a DARPA project (MAHEM) was inspired. Yes, it was an old idea… but if an old idea is grounded in physics, it still works.

Palaven, the Turian Homeworld

I like this one because it’s an example of literal world-building. It’s also an example of where the Codex and Galaxy Map overlapped, and I had to say similar-but-not-identical content in two places.

We met turians in Mass Effect 1, and Chris L’Etoile’s codex entry mentioned that their homeworld had intense solar radiation, more so than Earth. This is why turians look metallic — their life evolved to incorporate metals in their organic processes so that their silver carapaces reflect away the damaging rays.

But when we finally got to go into the system in Mass Effect 3, I had a conundrum. How would their plants work? Turians breathe nitrogen and oxygen just like humans, and their plants photosynthesize the same… so if the plants were metallic, wouldn’t they be handicapping their energy source?

That’s when I researched my butt off, and found out how Earth’s life deals with intense solar radiation. I wrote that bit about shutting down metabolic processes during the day and repairing the damage at night because lichens on Earth do that already. That’s how good science fiction works — you find a factual core around which you can wrap a narrative.

The Geth Plasma Shotgun

I bring this one up in interviews a lot because it’s an example of being a team player. The combat designers wanted an “unshotgun” that could operate at longer ranges and charge up for higher damage. They spent a lot of time and some art resources on it and they had really good gameplay reasons: certain classes that could use shotguns were due for a buff and would love this weapon. It was the “energy shotgun,” or the geth’s “Plasma Shotgun,” since ME1 mentioned that geth sometimes plasma-burned Alliance soldiers.

Here’s the thing: plasma weapons, in physics terms… are bullshit.

I know they’re in a lot of science fiction, but there are reasons real-life weapons manufacturers aren’t making them. Yes, plasma is hot and would burn enemies. But you don’t fire “bolts of plasma” and certainly not “shotgun shells of plasma.”

Plasma’s a superheated gas. A stiff wind would blow it back in your face. Nor is it easy to magnetize it and fling it, especially with enough force to do much to an armored, moving opponent. It’s orders of magnitude easier to make a gun or flamethrower that does the job better and cheaper.

But… my job is not to make other people throw out their work. So I didn’t say no, and I didn’t give up. Giving up is not in my workflow.

I talked with a physics teacher I once had who now works at NASA, and with a science-fiction conflict-simulations group, and we brainstormed over e-mail. The result is what you see up there: room-temperature superconductors, miniaturized into toroid-shaped shotgun rounds, that are charged up and flung at the enemy. When the high-energy conductors break apart on impact, the energy is released, flash-creating plasma.

Pow. The Geth Plasma Shotgun that made the writing, art, and combat teams happy. And players got that sweet gameplay we all wanted. They freakin’ loved it.

Asteria

This was a little throwaway entry in the Galaxy Map. I wanted to include it because every science fiction property in the world has habitable planets that are filmed on a back lot in Southern California or something similar. The air is hardly ever a problem, the animals look like pets from a store like those snakes in the Dagobah swamps… they’re just not alien.

So, I made Asteria, which is a habitable garden world… except the numbers are 95% right instead of 100% right. It’s just a little off-target, with too much CO2. Not enough to totally prevent humans from adapting, but retaining enough heat to feel worse than Earth. And advising visitors to, almost literally, bring a canary like it’s a frickin’ coal mine.

This detail was possible because the player can’t land on Asteria, so we didn’t have to expend resources on some weird mechanic showing it off. You don’t want to go there? Super. We give you just what you want, and get text that evokes versimilitude to the universe at the same time.

Bekenstein

I wrote this one up for the Kasumi: Stealing Memory DLC, the planet where Kasumi Goto takes you to an arms dealer’s fancy party. Having seen farming colonies like Eden Prime in Mass Effect 1, I thought it’d be neat to make the planet the equivalent of the humans’ New York or Tokyo. Its proximity to the Citadel made it all come together.

My one regret is that if you’re not from the USA, “more expensive than surgery” may not ring quite as true.

The Omni-Blade

This was an example of retroactive continuity and avoiding worse retroactive continuity.

By Mass Effect 3, we wanted a melee attack that was cooler and more unique than Shepard elbowing his enemy. Word came down from on high to make a “holographic switchblade.” Which, of course, doesn’t make sense. Early ideas (from someone I’d rather not rat out, since God knows I’ve had my share of non-starters) justified it as saying it was a form of “hard light.”

Of course, the previous two games didn’t have any hard light. No lightsabers, no holo-shields. And this wasn’t even newly-captured Reaper tech, it was a weapon Shepard has from the get-go. It was going to have variations based on Shepard’s character class, so the Alliance had clearly mastered it.

So, it was up to me to craft a Codex entry explaining what this glowing blade (or bludgeon, or whatever) actually was. And, as a bonus, I avoided saying they were just invented, because at the time we didn’t know if we were going to visit the First Contact War in another game or comic or whatever else the franchise needed next.

Thus, this entry: highlighting that Alliance soldiers, like real-life modern soldiers, rarely kill in hand-to-hand, but the Reaper invasion demanded new tactics.

And Let’s Not Forget the Cerberus Daily News

President Huerta’s Predicament

I wanted to have some news items from Earth, since ME1 and ME2 never took us there, and many players would want to hear what Earth life is like. Some of my biggest writing influences were in the cyberpunk genre, and though Mass Effect is more space opera than cyberpunk, the advancements of technology would change the world.

The Huerta stories explored this idea — that humans would use data storage in medicine, and somewhere, the law would need to draw the line differently regarding what “death” really is. Of course, the story grabs more attention if you give it enormous stakes, such as the Presidential line of succession. Incidentally, the Huerta stories showed up as a tiny mention in Mass Effect 3 with Huerta Memorial Hospital — a hospital named after a President who insisted he wasn’t dead yet. Welcome to the politics of the future.

Let’s end this sample with a bang — the final entry of the Cerberus Daily News when the collected peoples of the galaxy started to figure out that the Reapers were coming. This last entry left on an ominous note (if you were following the storyline ending in ME2 and/or the Arrival DLC) and the next thing the players would see was ME3 trailers that showed the Reapers attacking Earth. I thought this put a nice capstone on the entries and built the hype like we needed to.

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In Which I Share Regrets and a Parable About Blessings

New Year’s is the time of the obligatory retrospectives, and I am not immune to the call of tradition. My writer friends are posting lists of the short stories they sold, or the final page of their manuscript’s rough draft, and other celebratory milestones. It makes me take stock and think about how much I’ve done… and also, how little.

Last year at this time, I was riding high with 75,000 words of my manuscript in the can, and a goal of 130,000 or so. But when 2024 ended, I counted it up and found I only reached the 93,000 mark. Honestly, as writers go, that’s not a lot of improvement. Sure, some of it required research, and it’d be hard to write a novel about a presidential campaign without seeing the new political landscape determined by November 5th’s election, but it made me ask, what happened? Was I just, as Brian Michael Bendis put it in Fortune and Glory, “the suckiest suck-ass in the history of sucking?”

On New Year’s Eve, I spent some time with the accomplished Whitney Beltran and a few other luminaries in the TTRPG space. Rather than just making up a sentence or two for resolutions, she had us fill out a party activity/personal growth booklet called YearCompass. It’s like 15 pages of conversational material about what you accomplished and what you didn’t, and it opened my eyes enough for an in-depth retrospective.

So Where DID the Time Go?

Part 1: Health

Well, I came closer to being the subject of a meme than I ever wanted, even before the term “brainrot” was a thing…

In January I had the double-header of dislocating my knee and getting laid off. My priorities had to be getting out of my leg brace so I could resume being able to drive, and then later, walk unassisted. Though I was able to get around without a crutch by the time of the Game Developer’s Convention in March, I still had an 11mm chunk of cartilage floating around in my knee. I got it removed via surgery June 5th or so. I lucked out and didn’t need donor cartilage. My surgery recovery was a lot shorter than expected, but still, the knee didn’t hold weight for a few weeks and it took a bit out of me. The rest of the family didn’t get off scot-free, either: besides having to help out with the things I couldn’t do, we also had a broken foot and some illnesses in the mix.

Part 2: Doing Those Adult Things

In case you haven’t been following the state of the video game industry right now, it’s at about a 20% unemployment rate. The Great Depression, at its height in 1933, was 24.9%, so while it’s not the literal worst it could be, it’s comparable. The least common positions to be hired? Game Designer and Narrative Writer. So believe me when I say when I got laid off from Airship, I didn’t know if I was going to get a gig in weeks, months or years.

Fortunately, I shmoozed to the best of my ability at GDC, and got a 13-week contract, writing for an adorable little New York startup called ThrivePal. I worked on a game that has yet to be announced… and then my contract was up. Back I went into the mix, and wound up at Eram Games, a Jordanian company working on another largely-unannounced project. As of now, my duty there is done and I’m back out on the streets.

Simultaneous with all of this was the discovery of mold in our house. Not only could we not live in it while it was being stripped and reconstructed, my wife found a new place that came on the market that fit a lot of our criteria. We could do a down payment, get a loan, put the old house on the market, and because it had appreciated in value (other than the mold), we could pay down the new place enough so that the mortgage was back to a sane level. Provided the old place sold. Right?

Actually… yes.

I was scared out of my damn mind with what we call “provider panic.” I thought the old house wouldn’t sell, or not at a level that the numbers would work, but they did. Was that the end of our crazy ride? No, not by a long shot. This year my son had a bar mitzvah in the middle of all this, and my daughter graduated high school, got her first summer job, and went off to college.

Part 3: Electioneering

As I wrote a few times this year, I was also hell-bent on writing literally hundreds of letters to eligible voters and tried my hand at recruiting new ones in person. I went to a local mall to register voters and took a bus trip to a nearby swing state to knock on doors. And, come November 5th, all of it was for nothing.

Well, not quite. I kept at it after the election, doing ballot curing by phone. In some incredibly tight races, we helped swing a Senate seat. So that’s not nothing, exactly, particularly if the other side has any infighting during their votes over the next two years. And, of course, this all meant I had a clearer view of a presidential campaign, which is the subject of Civil Blood’s sequel.

Part 4: Personal Writing

During the election, there was a part of me that had another gut check, because the tone of my novel could seriously need to change one way or the other. I’m trying to avoid writing something ripped from today’s headlines, because I’m aiming for the feel of a future time rather than five minutes ago. So some of my procrastinating was because I wanted to see how November 5th turned out.

I also got distracted by the chance to sell some short fiction. I wrote, revised, and polished two short stories, “Prisoner of the Freest World” and “A Jones For Your Affection,” each targeted to separate small-press anthologies. And will you be seeing them?

No.

No, you will not.

After writing, getting feedback, rewriting, and submitting the stories before the deadlines, neither anthology got enough quality submissions to launch. It’s theoretically possible that some magazine might like the material, but I’ve done a lot better with anthologies than I have with magazines that don’t specify what exactly they want.

So in many ways, this year hit me, over and over again. But I’m gonna take the “growth mindset” option here and count what blessings I do have, because my life could be a lot worse.

So What Was That Parable?

Chantal and Zelda’s homily is nice, but I was always partial to the story of Thor, Loki, and the giants who tested him.

For those that don’t recall, Thor and his pals journey to Jotunheim and meet Utgard-Loki, the king of the giants. Utgard-Loki asks Thor to wrestle his decrepit old grandmother, drink from their mead-horn, and try to move the giants’ sleeping cat. The thunder god who has no equal struggles to do each, and only afterwards finds out he was tricked by the giants’ illusion magic. He was actually wrestling Old Age, drinking the sea, and trying to move the coil of the Midgard Serpent.

The lesson here is that though you may beat yourself up for a lack of success, you might not be considering the reality of how difficult your struggles might be.

In trying to summarize my last year to Whitney and her friends, I mentioned I was feeling down because of how little I accomplished. Part of the YearCompass asked “What are you most proud of?” And I wasn’t sure.

Then Beth, one of the participants, said something to the effect of, “Well, if I were you, I’d put down ‘resilience.'”

So, I haven’t succeeded as much as I’d like to have, but I’ve been someone my family can rely on while we got hit with a few crises. I needed help with physical damage, but at least I held it together emotionally. And if you did, too, remember that in a year like 2024, that wasn’t a given.

Looking to the Future

Okay, so let’s give the forward-looking goals, if not actual resolutions.

  • I want to get employed again. With the game industry as grim as it is right now, I’m looking both in and outside it. That means training for alternative professions if I have to.
  • I want to finish the rough draft of Civil Blood’s sequel. Not necessarily a draft good enough to show other people yet. The rough draft is, in the words of some writer or other, “being able to tell yourself the story, before you can tell it to anyone else.”
  • If I find myself with free time, I’m going to polish my portfolio. I have samples for various formats that aren’t represented, and I can write more, so that page may be built up in the coming days.
  • I’m learning about SEO optimization, so perhaps this site will have some more visitors as I experiment and implement my new knowledge.
  • I haven’t decided yet on what I want to do with my social media presence. I want to cut down the number of hours a day I look at it, while also making myself visible on BlueSky, where I’m growing a following.
  • I may post more about my martial arts hobbies, which I haven’t mentioned on this page yet. I’m experimenting with Chen family tai chi, which is not as combative as some of the other arts I’ve studied. But it’s aces at rebuilding leg strength!

So let’s ring in 2025, and brace ourselves, ’cause we may need all the resilience we can get.

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In Which I Bite the Freaking Bullet and Knock on Doors

A box of letters aimed at swing states.

When we last left our intrepid introvert, I was writing letters to swing states to get out the vote. I kept that up until October 1st, the designated first day to send them out for maximum impact.

By then, I was so sick of writing ’em. The final tally was 100 letters sent early to new voters in Pennsylvania, and 740 more spread across the swing states. That’s Michigan, Wisconsin, an additional 100 to Pennsylvania, then bunches to North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada. And in case you haven’t seen the price of postage lately, the stamps added up to a sizeable bite of my disposable income. So I felt like I’d done my part and it was time to stop with the letters.

But that feeling didn’t last long. I didn’t want to wake up on November 6th thinking “Did I really do all I could have done?” So I looked around for events in my area that took more time than money. Canvassing supposedly has the highest-yield ratio of all the get-out-the-vote efforts, so I wanted to get in on the ground game.

I signed up to take a bus to a “nearby” swing state, canvass Saturday afternoon, get put up in a hotel for the night (Exhibit A of where your campaign donation money goes) and canvass all day Sunday. Then it’d be back on the bus and we’d be home by bedtime.

So I got trained over Zoom during the week, got up at 4:45 Saturday morning (oof) and met up at the local campaign headquarters where the buses gathered in the parking lot. Around 100 of us got on the road for a trip that took a lively four hours and change. I got to know my bus-buddy to ensure neither of us were to be left behind, and eventually we rolled into a little mini-mall in what looked like an industrial section of town.

My First Time Canvassing

The swing state town was big enough to matter, but the field office was a bit smaller than the one on Dem home turf. Trying to assign door-knocking turf to 100 volunteers, even with the handy app designed for the purpose, took some time. But of all the problems to have, “too much manpower” was a pretty good one.

I went around back to where a coordinator gave us some more training specific to the state, such as saying where the polling places were, the hotline for if a resident hadn’t gotten a ballot, and so forth. Then I got back in line to get my turf assignment.

While I waited, a steady stream of drivers grabbed volunteers going to clusters of destinations, and I realized every volunteer’s car was essential when they had a surge of people-power like this. My bus-buddy shared an Uber with some others and was gone well before I was ready. No problem. I said, “I’m not choosy, put me where you need me.”

I was given a turf 50 miles away.

About five minutes later, the team conferred and agreed that shipping me all the way out there solo wasn’t a good idea — they’d hit that place the next day with the bus and a bigger group of volunteers. Instead, I got a ride to their sister office a suburb over, got turf near there, and another ride to my destination.

On My Own

So there I was dropped, a few hundred miles from home, alone, on foot with a pile of flyers and an app telling me to knock on doors and ask strangers annoying questions. It was a warm day, and I’d brought my jacket because I’d prepped for my hometown, and at 6 am it’d been chilly.

The first person I canvassed was the easiest. He was standing out by his truck in his front yard, had already voted straight up and down the ballot, and thanked me for volunteering, saying “I don’t know how you guys do it.” We shared a smile: I had no idea how we did it, either.

Most everyone else on the 3-4 streets I hit had already been canvassed earlier by a related group, a PAC local to the state. Unfortunately, this meant that most people were kind of annoyed at having been bothered twice, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. It’s actually illegal for a political campaign to coordinate with an outside group, so we couldn’t share our data of which houses had been hit already. (Of course, if you’re rich and influential and your candidate wins, they might be corrupt enough to pardon you, so really, your mileage may vary.)

Some houses had signs saying things like “NO SOLICITING — REFER ALL INQUIRIES TO GERMAN SHEPHERD” and they weren’t kidding. Others were friendly and said yes, they voted already, so I could check them off. Rather importantly, that meant we could stop bothering them and focus on other, more persuadable households.

I hit 17 houses in total and was getting tired out and dried out. My bag was heavy enough to make my shoulder ache, I was sweating under my jacket, and oh yeah, remember how I dislocated my knee in January? The knee was fine, but the ankle started taking some stress. I had to stop and sit on the curb to drink a little water.

At the next few houses, I saw flyers identical to the ones I was leaving, and followed them until I ran into two other volunteers. They gave me a ride in their car and we coordinated — they were almost done. They’d take four more and I’d go in the other direction down the street to get the last two.

And Then There Was Jerry

The second-to-last house, no one was home. I was ready to give up, but I went to the last house and knocked anyway.

Answering the door was this 60-something guy I’ll call Jerry. I started off with the standard patter: “Hey, sorry to bother you, I’m Chris, I’m a volunteer with the state Democrats and (tired grin) you’ve probably heard there’s a really big election coming up…”

And Jerry lights up, comes out of the house, and plops down on a chair in front of his porch. Big smile. He’s like, “Yeah, yeah, tell me all about it.”

I thought he was messing with me, and got nervous because I’d have to remember my shpiel about what the presidential and Senate candidates’ positions were on any particular topic. I know my senator’s positions, but assembly members in another state? Oh, heck no.

But he said, “Do you have a ballot I can use?”

“Um,” I said, “we’re with the campaign, not the government. We don’t have ballots. The state should have sent you a ballot already in the mail.”

At this point, another 60-something guy comes to the door. Maybe a roommate, maybe a relative, maybe his lover, who knows? This guy says, “Oh, Jerry, you said you didn’t want to vote this year, so I threw out your ballot.”

“Oh,” I said, not adding the word crap. This was actually more familiar territory. “Well, there’s a couple of ways you can still vote. You can go to a polling place, like the student union at the local university, most of the public libraries… early voting’s still on until November 1st.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Jerry’s friend. “I gotta make this up to you, I’ll drive you tomorrow.”

I said my goodbyes, because they’d already covered the next part of the conversation, which was me encouraging them to commit to a plan, preferably voting early so they wouldn’t be stuck in a line on Election Day.

With my 19th house finished, I returned to the car, and said the words every canvasser wants to hear:

“I got one.”

Epilogue

The next day we had more time. My bus-buddy and I got successfully paired up. We handled maybe 50 houses, again coordinating with other volunteers when our turfs got too close or when another canvasser ran out of fliers and I ran some over. By the time the bus (and an Uber) got me back home, I was starving, sore, and tired. Yes, the campaign office had tons of pizza, water, and sugar, but the bus didn’t stop for dinner on its 4-hour return trip. At least I got to sleep that night feeling like I’d done a little something.

So I just want to say, if you’re out there canvassing, and it’s hot and the dust from the road is getting in your eyes and you’re thinking about giving up:

Push through.

Be as stubborn as those garbage bags that time cannot decay.

Go to that last house on the block.

You never know what might happen.

LINKS

I’ve posted this before, but I’ll post it again, because you might be reading this in the final week of this insane presidential campaign, and now is not the time to sit on the fence.

You can still volunteer for the ground game. Remember how I said canvassers have cars as a chokepoint? Bring some wheels to a big volunteer event and suddenly you’ll be everybody’s best friend.

Besides just Googling organizations in your county or city, Mobilize has volunteer events for canvassing, phone banking, text banking, and ballot curing.

What’s ballot curing, you ask?

This is when someone has made a mistake on their ballot that would render it invalid (in California, for example, a mail-in ballot needs the voter’s signature on the outside envelope or it doesn’t count). But if someone meets with the voter and gets them to reaffirm their ballot (i.e. calls them up or visits in person), they can say “there’s a problem with the ballot, fix it” and the vote can then be registered as valid. This matters a lot in super-close elections where sometimes as little as 500 votes stand between a potential representative and the U.S. House.

This process can be slow — people often don’t answer their phones or doors, so to make a difference, a campaign needs lots of volunteers, late in the game when the ballots have already been cast. And they need them done before the state’s deadline.

So HERE is a place to volunteer for ballot curing.

And don’t forget…

The Content Creator Team is the place to go if you’re a designer, videographer, artist, or meme creator. Yes, you read that right, you can meme for the team.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has this page here on being a virtual text banker. It’s like phone banking, but no speaking required!