Slender Chess!

Eh, I'm not doing anything else, and this idea struck me as awesome and/or amusing while I was waking up around noonish today, so have a non-standard update!

Slenderman Chess

Pieces

Black starts with only one piece, representing Slendy - the queen.

White starts with the normal selection of pieces, and goes first always.

You will want surplus pawns of both colors.

Goals

The goal of the black player is to eliminate all white pieces from the playing field, while the goal of the white player is to prevent the black queen from being able to move (I'm not sure this is actually possible and would require playtesting, which I don't have the patience to attempt I think this might actually be only possible if you fill up the entire board a la Reversi with the amended pawn rules).

Rules 

This game is played with a standard chess board, (with as many pawns of either color as necessary: use pennies or something if you run out of pawns) and all rules not explicitly outlined here are borrowed directly from Chess (the, uh, non-Slendyful version).

The game does not end if the king is captured; black does not even start with a king.

The black queen (and only the black queen) can, at any time, teleport to any location on the playing field not currently under attack by a white piece (Slendy cannot move into check; it's called Offscreen Teleportation for a reason.) However, the black queen is not required to move out of check, and is allowed to capture white pieces that are not currently in a place that would otherwise be under attack.

When the black player takes a piece, remove the white piece from the playing field and replace it with a corresponding black piece (exceptions noted below), then move the new black piece to a new location of the black player's choosing that is not currently occupied.

When the white player takes a piece, remove the black piece from the playing field and replace it with a corresponding white piece (exceptions noted below), then move the new white piece to a new location of the white player's choosing that is not currently occupied.

If the black queen is captured, do not replace it with a white queen, but instead move it back to its starting point, instantly capturing any white piece occupying that space. Any black piece occupying that space will move instantly to a place of the black player's choosing.

Since the white player can't regenerate the white queen via normal methods, if the white queen is captured, instead replace it with a black pawn. The white queen can only be regenerated by a white pawn making it to the other end of the playing field. This feat can only be performed if the white queen is no longer on the playing field.





Soooo ... what do you think? I think it sounds like it might be amusing anyway - a cross between Chess and Reversi with a dash of Cosmic Horror. Feel free to adopt it and apply your own house rules!

Cooking Travels

So today's rant springs forth from my epic quest to level my cooking skill.

What. The. Fuck.

Okay, so firstly, I discover that everything trainable or even easily purchasable goes green at around 225 cooking skill. Which means that I'm going to have to buy recipes at the far ends of Azeroth, a nuisance in itself given that I've been Horde for this huge old chunk of playtime, and I have no idea how to get from Point A to Point B as Alliance - the problem being exacerbated by the whole problem caused by The Shattering.

Hello, wowhead. So my first excursion into purchasable cooking patterns reveals the other problem caused by The Shattering, which is to say removed NPCs and patterns.

What.

Well, apparently the things that made leveling this skill tolerable from 225-300 were utterly removed with the loss of the one NPC in the game who sells them. Namely, say, Nightfin Soup and Poached Sunscale Salmon.

And the NPC who sells those patterns also sells a few others, and all of them helped to get over a rough, awful patch of cooking levels. Why should these be removed? Because Blizzard saw fit to kill off a few NPCs just to drive home how inconvenient the end of the world is. That's all well and good, but I'm sure the knowledge they alone possessed has been spread about somewhat by the recipes they sold all that time!

So, I went to Tanaris for an NPC who is dead. Well, that's awesome.

This leaves Fishing as my only source of cookable materials - even the Auction House has nothing for me fully half the time.

So I go to learn Fishing, and that's annoying enough.

I discover that those removed patterns are the only use for half of the fish I'm catching. Fully half of them. Then there's the Plated Armorfish, which isn't even useful for obsolete cooking quests: it's an item for a removed Argent Dawn quest. Hooray.

And the one fish I've caught that's still useful for cooking has the lowest drop rate of all the fish in the game, as far as I can tell.

Well done, Blizzard.

Well done.