And Scions of the Scholar are kept locked away in a Prison Library.

Well, today marks four weeks since I learned about Solaris' potential sale. I still don't know where we are with that. Much activity, then weeks of sitting around knowing there's activity happening somewhere else, activity that quite directly impacts your work, but not able to even see that activity. There is frustration to that. Whatever. There are worse things.

I explained the cosmology to someone on Saturday (at my monthly D&D game) and it went well. It's the first time I've tried to explain how the magic works to, well, anyone. They thought it was cool, and understood how the world worked clearly enough. He was even saying stuff like "Oo, that means they would want to know how the ascension worked and that means..." and I would follow up with Yes, and here's how I've worked that into the story. It's good to see enthusiasm for a project when really, it's just a bunch of ideas and a couple paragraphs.

I also feel like I'm getting my DM skills back. I used to be good at that, but I've been out of practice, and for the last few years there's been a lot of frustration associated with gaming sessions. But now I've had a couple sessions getting used to the new rules and am starting to remember the whole roleplaying thing. So that feels nice. And people seem to be enjoying themselves.

For those of you thinking about switching up from 3.5 to 4, allow me to offer my "positive review." A lot of the things that disturbed me about the game seem to smooth out the deeper you get into the level progression. And it takes the players some time to get used to the idea of how things work differently. At level one through four you're really kind of limited in what you can do. It feels like you're just using the same powers over and over again, because you don't have many powerful tricks in your bag. But the higher you get, the more stuff you have access to. The experience deepens. So it's good, and it's certainly easier to DM.