i hear the voices when I'm dreaming

* today is the last day of Canine Companions' livestreaming puppycam. F litter, lab/golden cross, six black and one yellow, 7-8 weeks old. Super cute, despite video glitches. I want a cuddle pile of puppy...

* I want to figure out how to art-ify my D&D characters, but a) I can't ever figure out clothes, b) faces are hard, and c) my last two aren't even humanish -- current character, Ayla, is an owlin monk, and my previous character, Ek-ko-ao, was a xotlxotl [basically humanoid axolotl] drakewarden ranger. I tend not to do actual humans, but elves can be drawn as slender pointy-eared humans, and dwarves and halflings also are human-faced. I had trouble trying to draw a previous character (Bria, half-orc ranger with a pet velociraptor) partly because of jawline and teeth, though to be fair I couldn't even get my dwarf fighter drawn, so gah.

* also my weekly alphabet art project didn't get very far lulz. half-finished dragonfly is still half finished ...

* how the fuck is it almost April, wtf

* which also means it's almost Phoebe's bday \o/

* my dog poem book idea is one poem closer to completion -- 7 down, 13 to go.

Tomb of Annihilation finished -- with only three players remaining (having lost one to scheduling, their replacement to general attrition, and one to computer issues) I didn't expect we'd survive, but we did, and the guy who fell in lava afterwards didn't even die, so yay us.

We started end of June, so it took like three months...

(the dm will be running a new campaign in the same time slot so I get to keep gaming, yaaay)

I need ttrpg-y icons. Hm. For now, WoW is close enough :)

Ensnaring strike is awesome. Granted I can't use it willy-nilly, because I only have two slots per long rest.

Fighting a t-rex ... ES, plus it failing the roll, means advantage on attacks! ... but then it retreated when close to dying, and we decided to spare it. It just wanted to be with its babies! I mean ok this started when we robbed its nest, but still.

This is the highest level I've gotten. Next week, L7.

(That's Dungeons and Dragons, not Do Not Disturb, lol)

I'm doing Tomb of Annihilation (a premade adventure that is rather on the deadly side, playing with a rather good DM). It's set in a jungle so I went with a ranger -- can't get lost, can forage for food and water, bunch of benefits -- but I was planning on doing archery-focused rather than animal companion.

Was *planning*.

Then it turned out there are dinosaurs.

DINOSAURS. 😍

A few sessions back we had dinosaur racing: each of us us had the option of picking a dino to ride, with different speeds and different features. (In a basic summary, the faster ones required a higher roll to persuade them to move; slower ones were easier but couldn't go as far.)

The one I was riding was a deinonychus named Jungle Princess, which (we were joking) suited my character too. (She's a half orc; not very princessy but definitely suited to the jungle.) And one of the other (npc) dinosaurs in the race chose violence against Jungle Princess, so we as a group healed her and defended her and decided we were going to buy her.

(I wasn't even the one to suggest it ... but definitely didn't argue!)

At the end of the last session we got to level up to Level 3, which is where Rangers get their animal companion if they so choose. Which I pretty much had to.

Turns out raptors a) have a multi attack (bite claw claw) and b) pounce, where if it charges at least 20ft and claws an enemy, there is a chance of knocking it over.

Basically, it's freaking AWESOME 🤩

(I also unintentionally foiled two of the mechanisms in the game -- normally, as the group is trekking through the jungle, we'd have to do a survival check, and certain values would mean getting lost; but since it's my favored terrain the group can't get lost as long as I'm conscious. And of course the food and water collection: I can forage quite well in the jungle!