Wandering Adventure Party

Sunday night, Rob Reiner and Michele Singer Reiner were found dead in their home. I never met Mr. Reiner but his work was such an immense part of my childhood, especially The Princess Bride.

I was nine the first time I saw The Princess Bride, watching it at a friend’s house in a double-feature with Spaceballs both introduced as “two of the best movies” that I absolutely needed to see. My buddy Sean was completely right, and that double-feature would get repeated pretty much every time we got together all the way from fourth grade through college. I have worn out two VHS copies and one DVD copy of The Princess Bride. Did you know it’s possible to watch a DVD so many times that it stops working? I didn’t until I did.

And bits and pieces of this eminently quotable movie made their way into everyday speech for my friends. Poetry would be met with “Stop rhyming, I mean it!” “Anybody want a peanut?” We actually made a sign for a teacher in high school to label his classroom as The Pit of Despair. We would shout out during pick up soccer games “THERE WILL BE NO SURVIVORS!” in our best Fezzik.

In college, I took up fencing lessons specifically because of the duel between Westley and Inigo.

There’s plenty of talk about the amazing work Reiner did all through his career and how his first seven movies would be amazing to have on your resume at all, let alone as your first seven in a row. But, The Princess Bride has always been my special movie. It’s the one that I associate with preteen hangouts, its the one I associate with the need for a comfort watch I don’t need to think about during college and law school, it’s the childhood movie I was most excited to share with my daughter. It’s a movie friends of mine had quoted at their wedding.

I’m far from alone in my love of The Princess Bride as a comfort movie.

On its surface, it’s a movie about a guy chasing down the woman he loves to win her back from a creepy prince. But then you add the tragedy of grief in Inigo wanting his father back, you son of a bitch. Then you get into the friendship and banter of Inigo and Fezzik. Then you get scenes like Miracle Max and the fight “to the pain.”

When I was in law school, I took a course on Alternative Dispute Resolution. That’s stuff like negotiation, mediation, arbitration, the stuff you do so that you don’t have to do the work of a whole lawsuit. In the class, we had a section on the role of lawyers as storytellers. The professor started that section with the love story between Westley and Buttercup that starts the movie. During that scene, there is not a word wasted in the narration, there is not a shot wasted in the cinematography, not a single glance by the stars that fails to do its part to tell the story. Everything is just this well-oiled machine of storytelling where Reiner knew exactly what each piece was needed for. And that pacing, that intentionality, just continues through the whole movie.

So, if you find yourself looking at all that 2025 is serving up at the end of the year and thinking you could use some comfort, The Princess Bride is absolutely the film you should put on.

Introduction to the Forge

In the distant future, humanity has fled its homeworld and taken refuge in the Forge, a globular cluster situated 1,700 light-years above the galactic plane.

Generations ago, interdimensional beings possessed the dead of Earth and turned them against their friends and their families. When the situation seemed its bleakest, an iron pillar was discovered on Luna pointing humanity to mysterious gates among the stars. Exodus ships left Earth and passed through the gates to find a number of inhabitable worlds. Some of these worlds are sprinkled with ruins of a space-faring empire humanity has named The Ascendency.

There are those in the Forge who make their living traveling the stars in search of Ascendency ruins to try and unravel the secrets behind them. The most sought-after answer is how the Ascendency handled the balefires, great electromagnetic storms that course through the Forge wreaking havoc on the ships caught in them.

Eveline Hawking is one such Lore Hunter.

Eveline Hawking

Eveline grew up at her father’s spaceport, listening to the tales of spacers who came through. One day, faced with the prospect of staying rooted to the ground while others had adventures, Eveline stole away hidden inside the ship of a scout bound for the Outlands.

Not all the scouts took a liking to Eveline, but a retired lieutenant became a mentor and trained her to fly a ship and delve into Ascendency ruins. Among the projects LT helped Eveline with was building the Vigilant.

The Vigilant was once a pleasure yacht called Once Upon a Weekend. Its upholstery was moldering when Eveline first came across it in a starship graveyard, but the frame was the most intact she found. She pulled much of the formerly plush and luxurious interior out, leaving a combination of ostentatious gold plating and bare-metal pragmatism. The result is a ship which looks like a slow cozy ride but holds a drive meant to handle double the weight.

Eveline dresses mostly in grease stained coveralls and dusty goggles. Life aboard a starship and delving into ruins just makes keeping nice clothes clean too much of a hassle. It is not uncommon to find her elbows deep in the internals of the e-drive or other starship systems keeping her baby going another day, speaking with Vigilant all the while like an old friend.

Opening Image

The Vigilant is planetside on Verdure, refueling. The depot at Luminus is surrounded by lush vegetation out to the horizon in every direction. The people of Luminus have long used the plant cover to hide their settlement from outsiders.

The camera zooms in a rush through the forward viewport on Vigilant to the cockpit where Eveline Hawking sits in the skeleton of a pilot’s seat, eating an apple with her feet resting on the console in front of her. Greasy rags lie on the floor next to the seat along side a pair of wrenches.

“May–storm–over” the radio crackles.

Eveline snaps forward and begins checking the signal information. It takes a moment to get the receiver calibrated to display information from the other ship’s transponder. The triangulation places the ship approaching orbit. That distance, no wonder the transponder codes are weak.

It takes a minute but the transponder codes finally come through as Eveline adjusts the narrowbeam comms and gets lucky in pointing the antenna. She blinks as she sees the ship name displayed.

The Rookery.

Lieutenant Sakir was like a second mother to Eveline when she first left home. And now she’s in trouble. Eveline snaps to her preflight checklist, skipping anything she thinks can wait in her rush.

“Rookery, Vigilant. I read your signal and am inbound,” she calls over the comms.

She punches the coordinates into her NavCom and punches the button to fire up the e-drive. There is a hum. And then nothing. The drive doesn’t kick in.

“Come on, not now, not now. You can do it.”

She pushes the button a few more times, lights flicker, a light hum, and more nothing. Then readings stream across the screen, a whole cascade of failures in the fuel and ignition systems. She can’t make any sense of it all. It’s like the ship says the e-drive isn’t getting any fuel, but the whole point of this stop has been to refueling and get some time for maintenance.

“Viggy, come on, what’s wrong. I can’t help if you don’t tell me,” she says to the ship.

She traces the failures back. Something must be wrong with the primary impeller, that seems to be where the whole sequence starts. It looks like its just not doing anything.

She gets up from her seat and runs back to engineering. She goes straight for the impeller and nearly knocks herself out on an open breaker box. Inside, the main breaker for the e-drive is open. Because the the maintenance She was doing around the ship. She closes the breaker, closes the box, and lightly hits her forehead against the box.

“Viggy, I’m so sorry, I shouldn’t have blamed you. Now we need to get out of here.”

She places a hand on the iron knife she carries.

“I will get to LT to help her.”

I’ve seen posts other places reflecting on 2025 because, after all, it’s December and the year is coming to a close. Things like the Endies from Thomas Manuel of the Indie RPG Newsletter come to mind.

The last time I tried doing one of these was for my old blog for 2023 and, given that was the year my mom died, it went in a whole different direction. This year has a pretty different tone, so I thought it might be fun to share some of the photos I took around places this year.

Some of the stuff will be photoless, because while my daughter and doing stuff with her is important and took up time, she’ll get to choose who and how pictures of her get shared when she’s old enough.

Work

Work has been a busy part of my life. Public Defenders are always busy. I’ve continued a term as the Chair of the Ohio State Bar Association’s Criminal Justice Committee and produced some continuing legal education presentations for both the OSBA and the National Association for Public Defense.

My work in Warren also gave me some cool photos when I went for walks during work breaks to recharge.

Softball and Baseball

A huge part of the year this year was  spent watching softball and baseball. My wife was huge into softball growing up and has passed the love on, becoming a coach to our daughter.

During the Spring season from April to June and the Fall season from August to October, we spent so many of our nights out at the fields.

My daughter also took part in her first softball tournament where the parents had matching shirts with the kids and everyone had a blast over the weekend, even when the one game ended up going way past bedtime for the 8u girls. (Big shoutout to the 18u team who were playing after us and gave the 6 and 7 year olds the greatest cheer section you could ask for as they came off the field exhausted from a close, but tough, loss.)

In addition to the rec league softball, I watched a lot of the new Athletes Unlimited Softball League with my daughter, though our Bandits didn’t win it all this year.

Baseball was also a huge thing for me this year. I’ve been a Seattle Mariners fan since my first game at the Kingdome at age 5, and actually met Alex Rodriguez when he was dating my next-door neighbor before getting permanently called up from the Tacoma Rainiers. So this 2025 season that harkened back to the 2001 and 1997 runs at the ALCS was ridiculously exciting for me.

I also got to see the local team play twice this year, joining some friends for trips to see the Guardians in Cleveland.

We first saw the Guardians play the White Sox in September. Then we came back for my first October baseball game in the stands when we saw the Guardians play against the Detroit Tigers in the AL Wild Card.

The baseball season may not have ended how either the Mariners nor the Guardians wanted, but there were a lot of good games to watch. And the Mariners still made their best run through the playoffs in their 49 seasons.

Maybe this next season, my daughter will be old enough to start thinking about bringing her along to a baseball game or two.

Vacation

For only the second time since moving away from Michigan in 2015, and for the first time bringing the munchkin, I went back to the Mitten State.

My wife, my daughter, and I spent a long weekend in Douglas, MI, on the Lake Michigan coast. We had a blast visiting the beach and wandering around the town of Saugatuck doing some shopping.

We all had a lot of fun on the trip, to the point where we’re planning to make this an annual thing going forward, heading up to the Mitten. There’s also talk about getting her to the Big House for a football game at some point.

Non-Vacation Trip

So, the Michigan trip was just a we need a vacation type thing. 2025 actually started out with me taking a trip out to Seattle for an emergency. My little sister had a stroke, spent a week in the ICU, needed brain surgery. Hell of a way to start the year. I flew out to spend time with family and run around and do things.

Everything turned out mostly alright then, but it was definitely a hectic week right after New Year’s.

Gaming

We finished the first arc of my Eberron game early in the year, and since then we’ve been playing a 5e game with the premise “Oops All Bards,” which has a real title “The Ballad of the B-Team.”

Basically, we’re following behind an original party, cleaning up the messes left behind when they “saved the day” then blew out of town. We’ve also been the propaganda arm of the Miners’ Union, spreading the good word of how they’re here to help (no matter how much their A-Team screwed your town up in the process).

It’s been good to be a player again, even if the Obsidian vault on my phone is filling up with a new arc to the Eberron campaign and every other idea for a campaign that comes to mind.

Some of that campaign writing itch has also been getting scratched by the Ironsworn Starforged kick I’ve been on. I’m running a space archeologist who is looking for an answer to how the ancients dealt with the apocalyptic space storms that plague the sector. I really love Starforged and how well its gameplay loop and oracles work together to keep things moving.

Reading

I’ve been reading a ton this year, making some in-roads with a list of suggested reading for people interested in the Traveller RPG.

I really enjoyed the Golden Age of the Solar Clipper series by Nathan Lowell, about an 18-year-old kid who signs on with a starship and then the series follows him through a career where he eventually owns a starship of his own.

I also joined a science fiction and fantasy book club at my library, where I’ve read books like The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett and The Stardust Grail by Yume Kitasei. The selection has been excellent and actually had a bunch of authors I hadn’t seen before that are on my radar now.

In Summary

Flipping through the gallery on my phone and thinking about different things was a great way to remind myself about different things that happened this year. Work’s been especially busy with some cases that have been especially tough so revisiting some of the fun stuff was nice.

I hope that 2026 has a lot to look back on and celebrate too.