Chaos Shuffle

 So it's been a few years since I've played Warmachine (the Privateer Press game, not the Marvel guy), but there's a part of their Iron Kingdoms lore that always seemed really cool.  They've got dragons that fit the usual description: big, winged, fire-breathing reptiles that each come with a godlike superiority complex.  But if you manage to kill a dragon in the IK world, there is a large crystal at its heart that contains the <i>actual dragon</i>.  The athanc crystal holds their true identity, and any biomass they accumulate for a body is just a fun means for hauling that big rock around.  "Aha!" you may think, "so to kill the dragon completely you have to break the magic rock! That's a neat complication to your usual dragon fight." And then you'd find some way to break the athanc and learn a very important lesson.  Breaking the crystal doesn't destroy the one dragon. It just makes MORE dragons. This lesson was first painful...

Greeting fellow travelers.  As the land of micro-blogs decays under the rule of an unfit leader, I join the diaspora of people returning to good old-fashioned regular blogs and RSS feeds for reading them.   I don't make any promises as to what you'll find on this particular blog.  I'm a 30-something dad of two with interests that range from science and wildlife to tabletop nerd-games to  mythology and occult-ish topics.  I'll try to keep each post on one topic at a time, but the mix will probably be randomized (hence the name Chaos Shuffle).   If nothing else this will be a good place for longer-form writing and getting into the habit of stringing more than a few thoughts together at a time.  My small kids are determined to interrupt any attempt at adult conversation in our house, so I need the practice.