Stories
In less than a week, James will be moving in to our new apartment, and in less than a month, I will be joining him. Our apartment has a spacious kitchen for my cooking, brewing, charcuterie, pickling, and canning.
Even before I move in, I plan on getting the freezer I had staked out for my brewing and brining climate control system, and I plan to get a batch of cider on fermenting. Perhaps later, at my leisure, I plan on getting a decorative garden-gnome to set on or beside the freezer.
I've told many of you the story of how the Gnomish food joke came about, but I feel the occasion warrants a full telling of the story. There's not much to it, really; it comes from a tabletop fantasy role playing game run by my friend Billy (liamtheruiner).
In the very first game he ran, I played a Gnomish engineer by the name of Eliott Bumfuzzle. The fellow pictured in my LJ icon looks nothing like him. Eliott was two and a half feet tall--short for his race, who average around 3 feet--and looked more like an older Wallace Shawn in the face.
Eliott was very absent-minded, but very focussed on his engineering tasks to the exclusion of his social skill. He was unreasonably fearless in combat given his small size and lack of martial skill, but he usually made up for it by being behind the wheel of a large and intimdating catapult, balista, or juggernaut. He usually entered combat with a very distinctive, high-pitched, manic laugh best transcribed as "HaHAAAAhahahaha!", a sound which alerted friend and foe alike that, one way or another, chaos was about to ensue. Eliott was known for his reckless strategies, and at one point pointed one of the Gifted canons of the gods--which had the power to destroy continents if used wrong--right at the ground in the center of an enemy camp in which it was being held, and shouted, "People of Vesturia and the Drow nations! Do you want to die today?!" Almost imediately, one of the other party members, a court jester, quipped, "so what do we do if the subtle plan fails?"
Being that I knew within five minutes of beginning to play this character that I was playing someone just a little off-beat, I knew that his preferred cuisine would be equally bizzarre. But the thing is, he didn't eat anything I didn't already like. Some of my favorite foods are salty, sour, fermented, spicy, pungent, aged, dried, cured, or similar. I eat capers out of the jar. I eat anchovy paste out of the tube. My favorite pizza ever came from a pizzaria in Edinburgh, Scotland, and was topped with capers, haggis, and blue cheese. It could only have been better if it had kalamata olives on it.
So I decided that Eliott loved the most bizzarre faire I was known to eat. But what surprised me was that the reputation stuck, and every NPC Gnome in the game from then on ate that style of food, and sometimes worse. One day, I decided to concoct a Gnomish cookbook (which is still in the works), and, in the foreword, ostensibly by a Gnomish character I played later in a one-shot, I actually came up with a decent biological explanation as to why Gnomes eat this way.
So now that I find myself in the position of "potions-maker" for my family, the more traditional image of a gnome--that of industrious tinker, magician, and chemist--is even more apt. The fellow in the icon above does not look like my old character, but maybe Eliott has served his purpose, and what remains is something more suited to the task.
But I still like the strong flavored stuff for myself. <(8^)
Even before I move in, I plan on getting the freezer I had staked out for my brewing and brining climate control system, and I plan to get a batch of cider on fermenting. Perhaps later, at my leisure, I plan on getting a decorative garden-gnome to set on or beside the freezer.
I've told many of you the story of how the Gnomish food joke came about, but I feel the occasion warrants a full telling of the story. There's not much to it, really; it comes from a tabletop fantasy role playing game run by my friend Billy (liamtheruiner).
In the very first game he ran, I played a Gnomish engineer by the name of Eliott Bumfuzzle. The fellow pictured in my LJ icon looks nothing like him. Eliott was two and a half feet tall--short for his race, who average around 3 feet--and looked more like an older Wallace Shawn in the face.
Eliott was very absent-minded, but very focussed on his engineering tasks to the exclusion of his social skill. He was unreasonably fearless in combat given his small size and lack of martial skill, but he usually made up for it by being behind the wheel of a large and intimdating catapult, balista, or juggernaut. He usually entered combat with a very distinctive, high-pitched, manic laugh best transcribed as "HaHAAAAhahahaha!", a sound which alerted friend and foe alike that, one way or another, chaos was about to ensue. Eliott was known for his reckless strategies, and at one point pointed one of the Gifted canons of the gods--which had the power to destroy continents if used wrong--right at the ground in the center of an enemy camp in which it was being held, and shouted, "People of Vesturia and the Drow nations! Do you want to die today?!" Almost imediately, one of the other party members, a court jester, quipped, "so what do we do if the subtle plan fails?"
Being that I knew within five minutes of beginning to play this character that I was playing someone just a little off-beat, I knew that his preferred cuisine would be equally bizzarre. But the thing is, he didn't eat anything I didn't already like. Some of my favorite foods are salty, sour, fermented, spicy, pungent, aged, dried, cured, or similar. I eat capers out of the jar. I eat anchovy paste out of the tube. My favorite pizza ever came from a pizzaria in Edinburgh, Scotland, and was topped with capers, haggis, and blue cheese. It could only have been better if it had kalamata olives on it.
So I decided that Eliott loved the most bizzarre faire I was known to eat. But what surprised me was that the reputation stuck, and every NPC Gnome in the game from then on ate that style of food, and sometimes worse. One day, I decided to concoct a Gnomish cookbook (which is still in the works), and, in the foreword, ostensibly by a Gnomish character I played later in a one-shot, I actually came up with a decent biological explanation as to why Gnomes eat this way.
So now that I find myself in the position of "potions-maker" for my family, the more traditional image of a gnome--that of industrious tinker, magician, and chemist--is even more apt. The fellow in the icon above does not look like my old character, but maybe Eliott has served his purpose, and what remains is something more suited to the task.
But I still like the strong flavored stuff for myself. <(8^)