Encounter-a-Day

I think I’ve finally found a solution to reconcile my desire to do world-building and my obligation to create encounters… Namely, by turning my world-building into hooks for encounters, as seen in my post on the kiln-born. I don’t know if I’ll stick with that same format of guidelines or come up with specific encounters… probably a mix of the two, as the mood suits me. I’ll likely go back and make encounters for some of the other races I’ve posted about already, though not necessarily all of them. I won’t revisit The Greenmarket because that’s basically set up as an encounter as is.

I’m thinking of starting another series on inns… Some may find them trite or cliche, but I think the inn is as much a fantasy staple as swords of sorcery. There’s also a lot of room for originality in there, whether it’s colorful characters you might find in the inn or even an unusual inn like Phil’s inn in a graveyard in Ptolus. I’ll probably call the series something lame like Interesting or Intriguing Inns… A regular paragon of originality and wit, I am.

I’m also thinking about getting rid of the fantasy tag for a couple related reasons. The vast majority of the posts on this blog are tagged fantasy, because that’s what I focus on. Thus, in the tag cloud the fantasy tag is always dwarfing everything else, which I find kind of annoying. I’m hesitant to do that, though, because it’s not something simple to undo. What do you think, is it really necessary or just extraneous?

Finally, here’s a couple links I’ve found in the last week for coming up with names. Kate Monk’s Onomastikon is absolutely incredible, although the website is somewhat poorly laid out (there are some semi-broken links), probably owing to the fact that it’s apparently been moved around a lot. I found a lot of people linking to it mentioning that it used to be at a couple different addresses… Anyways, I found it while trying to come up with a good Russian name for Finders, Keepers. Just look at all the stuff in there! For example, here’s a page where you can look up Russian names by origin, like Russian names of Greek or biblical origin. Incredible! I also found this website with a list of Masculine arabic names, and it has a companion list of Feminine arabic names, which was used in attributing the quote for at the beginning of the Greenmarket post.

By the way, apologies to anyone who couldn’t access the site earlier today, my provider was having problems. Seems to be worked out, now. Of course, if you’re unsatisfied with the level of service I understand and will provide you a full refund.

Update: I’ve had the WordPress.com stats PlugIn installed for a while, but what can I say… I’m a numbers junkie. So I’ve just installed a Google Analytics PlugIn as well. Yes, that’s right, I’m basically big brother. You wanna fight about it?