This week I got to return to writing. Not reviews, comics, tweets, or autofilmbiography posts, straight up fiction. A friend of mine needed a small passage written for his D & D game. The characters in his campaign had just finished their first act, and I had to write something that would help set the mood. They had just killed a God, lost a party member, and were fleeing an exploding volcano. “Make them feel it all,” he said.

It was a complicated to weave all those emotions together. I’ve always had an easier time writing when listening to something that helps inspire me. I re-watched a few scenes like Aeris’s death, both of Vegeta’s deaths, and of course, Gandalf’s death. I eventually decided to go with this music over Gary Jules’s Mad World

I saw someone post a question on a Facebook page the other day asking what game made you cry. I’m pretty sure this has never happened to (except for a very emotional game against the Minnesota North Stars in Blades of Steel). So it didn’t help me to rewatch Aeris’s death as much as I thought it would. Has a video game ever made you cry?

Only Vegeta’s second sacrifice had the poignancy for me. But more than that it helped with some basic imagery and concepts, like one voice (Vegeta’s) representing an entire planet’s, which is one way to read all that screaming in Dragonball Z.

I hope my friend’s D & D campaign went well. Regardless, it felt good to return to that kind of writing. Perhaps I should keep it up as a way to strengthen other writing, and not risk losing those skills completely.