Almirith's parents were from different worlds.  His father was Mindartis, an eladrin noble from the Birch Court in the Summer Kingdom.  Mindartis was young and adventurous, so he was often sent on missions abroad by his mother, the Birch Queen.

One of his missions was to determine the identity of a poacher who had killed one of the Birch Queen’s favored white harts.  Mindartis used his fey magic  to locate the poacher, but the poacher was not what he was expecting.  Rather than a foul goblin or tricky quickling, the poacher was a beautiful elf maiden.

Once again I am having issues with D&D Insider.  This time it is giving me the message "This service is temporarily disabled" when I attempt to login.  It's been like this for at several hours.

Hopefully it wiill be back soon.

Does this code look familiar to anyone?

Microsoft VBScript runtime error '800a0007'

Out of memory: 'CreateObject'

/global/utils.asp, line 298

Monday night I get home to check out a few things, look at e-mail and do a random sweep into the Wizards D&D site and I get this.

Ugh!

Hey there readers (and listeners!). I just wanted to make sure to shed some light on some blogs out there that we are getting some mentions from.

Firstly, of course, our very own Rob at his blog "A Hero Twice a Month". 

But we also have Questing DM. This blog is also part of the RPG Bloggers Network and has some great content and lots of links to other resources.

Finally we have Bibliophile Stalker. This site has so many links and interesting tidbits I don't know where to start. But if you are literary minded and like RPGs, then this is a great blog for you.

The feeds are up for Questing DM and Bibliophile Stalker. Check them out in the righthand column!

I saw this and was mildly amused. If only iPhone's weren't such closed systems!. I hope they make it for the Gphone!

Direct from GRRM himself:

"HBO has given the production order.

They will be filming the pilot episode of A GAME OF THRONES."

If HBO does this half as good as their Rome series I will never ever cancel HBO from my cable subscription to save money. 

How long have we waited for a serious take on a fantasy series where they were not hampered by the censorship of the networks? A really long time!

If it does well I hope we can expect at least a good 13 episode run of the first book or two. Wow! 

<rant>So I downloaded and installed the Character Builder closed beta. It doesn't work under Wine, because it relies on that hunk of crap, one OS platform,  DotNOT from Microsoft.

Hey Wizards! Have you heard of Java? QT? GTK? Open GL? Until you have a working and usable multi-platform client there is only one thing you can do...

Bite me!</rant> 

We now return to your regularily scheduled program where we can watch Wizards with their head in the sand.

Digital Insider #14: Character Builder - As hinted last week, the Character Builder closed beta will begin early next week. It will be open to Insiders and folks who signed up at D&D Experience, with the general public becoming involved at some time in December. [Wizards of the Coast D&D]

So the beta will start next week. I'm interested to know how well it will work, but only having levels 1-3 isn't going to be a good judge of that really. To really judge the product I would need it to at least hit around lvl 16 or so. That way I can see how the paragon paths and the mult-class feats will work. Just about anyone can sneeze and put out a 1-3 level character with pen and paper. 

The one thing that the article mentions that really scares me is the following:

I know this is repeatative but once again http://wizards.com is down while I've been trying to get ready for a podcast? Yeesh! Hey Wizards! Ditch Microsoft already will you? This is truly pathetic. If this is the kind of uptime we should expect from your D&DI stuff, then you might as well pack it in now. People are not going to take kindly to your site's uptime or lack thereof effecting their game sessions.