Dreams of War
Mar. 6th, 2004 02:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
terryclothOr, more accurately, real-time strategy.
It started as a dream about a bunch of people goofing around in a pool, discovering their magical powers and using them in mischievous ways. In particular, there was one young lady who was very very powerful, who was taken under the wing of a middle-aged druid and taught how to do all sorts of annoying things that eventually forced us all to scramble out of the pool...
...only to find that we were being attacked! The druid turned into a dragon, and the young lady followed suit, but they both turned into BLACK dragons -- meaning their breath weapons were useless against the army of black dragonspawn. I was really angry that they'd wasted their transformation like that, but they insisted that they couldn't be sure that their breath weapon would be useless. But they breathed on the enemy troops to no effect, and so I sent them off to go find something else to do while the rest of us fought off the army of powerful abominations.
The dream cut to the aftermath of the first part of the battle. I was sitting in my tent going over the battle map and trying to find some strategy that would let us not all die, discussing the temporary pause with my second (I think it was Sylphie from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
godkin) who was extremely annoyed that the battle had gone on so long that there was only an hour until the next attack was scheduled, which wasn't enough time to sleep.
Then the druids/dragons came in, all proud of themselves for having forced the enemy to retreat and give us some breathing room by setting all their ships on fire. They described the method they'd used -- their breath was useless, so they cast the 'berzerk' spell on the sailors, which made them turn red and run around wildly until they exploded in a fireball. I thought it was slightly clever.
They also mentioned that they'd chased off Calathazor, who I recognized as a very powerful dragon-of-some-color-other-than-black-but-definately-evil. They were surprised and grateful that he'd run off at seeing the two of them, since they knew they couldn't stand up to a real dragon, even together.
So I went outside and ordered the elf archers and spearmen to go take... something we were protecting... and hide it and guard it, so that the rest of the army wouldn't take the -1 penalty for having different species of units (I noticed as I said that that all the commanders, including myself, were weird-ass things, but that didn't count, so it was okay).
And then it was time for the next attack! And there, flying over the enemy formations, was Malachar, a huge evil powerful black dragon, and the leader of the enemy forces. The two druid/dragons knew that they were doomed, but no one else could even attack him, so they flew up towards what they thought was certain doom.
I was confident they'd be okay, though, since I'd seen the previews of the next episode and it showed Calathazor fighting on our side.
The moral of the story is that the wellspring of my imagination has been poisoned by popular (and for that matter, not-so-popular) culture, I think.
It started as a dream about a bunch of people goofing around in a pool, discovering their magical powers and using them in mischievous ways. In particular, there was one young lady who was very very powerful, who was taken under the wing of a middle-aged druid and taught how to do all sorts of annoying things that eventually forced us all to scramble out of the pool...
...only to find that we were being attacked! The druid turned into a dragon, and the young lady followed suit, but they both turned into BLACK dragons -- meaning their breath weapons were useless against the army of black dragonspawn. I was really angry that they'd wasted their transformation like that, but they insisted that they couldn't be sure that their breath weapon would be useless. But they breathed on the enemy troops to no effect, and so I sent them off to go find something else to do while the rest of us fought off the army of powerful abominations.
The dream cut to the aftermath of the first part of the battle. I was sitting in my tent going over the battle map and trying to find some strategy that would let us not all die, discussing the temporary pause with my second (I think it was Sylphie from
godkin) who was extremely annoyed that the battle had gone on so long that there was only an hour until the next attack was scheduled, which wasn't enough time to sleep.Then the druids/dragons came in, all proud of themselves for having forced the enemy to retreat and give us some breathing room by setting all their ships on fire. They described the method they'd used -- their breath was useless, so they cast the 'berzerk' spell on the sailors, which made them turn red and run around wildly until they exploded in a fireball. I thought it was slightly clever.
They also mentioned that they'd chased off Calathazor, who I recognized as a very powerful dragon-of-some-color-other-than-black-but-definately-evil. They were surprised and grateful that he'd run off at seeing the two of them, since they knew they couldn't stand up to a real dragon, even together.
So I went outside and ordered the elf archers and spearmen to go take... something we were protecting... and hide it and guard it, so that the rest of the army wouldn't take the -1 penalty for having different species of units (I noticed as I said that that all the commanders, including myself, were weird-ass things, but that didn't count, so it was okay).
And then it was time for the next attack! And there, flying over the enemy formations, was Malachar, a huge evil powerful black dragon, and the leader of the enemy forces. The two druid/dragons knew that they were doomed, but no one else could even attack him, so they flew up towards what they thought was certain doom.
I was confident they'd be okay, though, since I'd seen the previews of the next episode and it showed Calathazor fighting on our side.
The moral of the story is that the wellspring of my imagination has been poisoned by popular (and for that matter, not-so-popular) culture, I think.
