Adventures · Book Dragon · Floating Bookshop

Nora Hazelhart’s Floating Bookshop- Character and Setting

*A solo RPG Adventure based on Ella Lim’s Fox Curio’s Floating Bookshop.

Character Description (Very Wind in the Willows-esque:)

Nora is a Capybara who has traveled around the world and is far from home, ready for a slower paced life. Nora is a stout capybara who has world weary eyes and has some gray fur about her muzzle. Despite that, she is strong from a life of adventure and doesn’t like to stay in one place for too long. She has independent means to do as she wishes, as she doesn’t need very much to keep her content. She loves reading and meeting new people. She’s fiercely protective of young ones and other vulnerable folx and uses being underestimated to her advantage when needed. 

Nora was born  on the 12 day of Brink (approximately autumn) Moon. She is creative and capable. She’s particular about her comforts and how others treat her and happiest when going on adventures or creating new things. She enjoys tinkering and since she has been on her own, knows a lot of random knowledge about a lot of things. She always wears overalls- for the pockets, most are slightly shabby and patched with creative patches. She has many cardigans and sweaters, some of which she has made and others that were gifts. She always has a book close by and has a small pair of glasses that perch on her nose. On very hot days, she wears a visor hat that looks like an old time accountant would wear. 

Nora has been staying in Thistledown, which is the town at the top of the river over the Brisk (Winter) moon. While there, she has discovered an abandoned riverboat/bookshop. She’s able to buy it after the previous owner had passed away.

Bookshop Description:

Excerpts from Nora’s Journal titled

A Dubious Beginning

The roof was a splintery mess- a faded mess of patchy paint and dry wood. The sides of the boat looked intact, but definitely needed a new paint job and perhaps a deeper inspection by a carpenter or boat maker, just to make sure of its river worthiness. The window facing the dock was patched with what looked like oil cloth on the outside. Even the sign looked poorly. I could tell it was charmingly carved, but some of the letters and the sign itself had succumbed to the weather so now it hung at a lazy angle and stated “ook op” in faded wood letters. The whole boat looked a little hodgepodge and while I didn’t normally mind that look, it was a bit more daunting up close.

Struggling with the cabin door, which seemed to be swollen shut against the humidity along the river, I didn’t answer directly, just gave a vague nod in her direction. Then straining, I pulled at the door and much to my surprise, it finally gave way, almost knocking me back into the mayor. A poof of dust came out, making me cough and I cautiously peeked my head in for the first look at my new home. 

The first thing I saw in the dim light inside was books. Directly across from the door, I could see the edges of a bookshelf. Picking up my mage light lantern (open flames and houseboats don’t generally do well in the same spaces, after all.) A long curved desk sat to my left by the entrance with what appeared to be a half open door behind it.

Adventures · Life Posts · Simple Sundays

Simple Sunday- Love and Weirdness

“We’re all a little weird. And life is a little weird. And when we find someone whos weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutually satisfying weirdness- and call it love- true love.” ― Robert Fulghum, True Love

It’s slightly ridiculous to think that 12 years and a day ago, the Husband and I decided that we matched each other’s weirdness and decided to call it love. Since then we’ve gone through happy times, sad times, ridiculously goofy times, and above all, together times! Happy Anniversary and many more adventures to come to us!

Adventures · Book Dragon · Life Posts

Something New This Way… Floats?

Hello and welcome to a new and hopefully charming experience that I invite you to share with me. The more I’ve gotten into tabletop role playing games, the more I’ve realized how much I love the games that are either silly, cozy, mysterious (but not too scary,) or a combination of all three. In fact, my most recent friend game was run by my lovely brother and featured 3 of my friends and I playing as racoons in a trench coat trying to be a person to do peopley things. (Look. It was wonderful! We saved the world by accidently stealing some kind of nuclear waste, giving it back, and got an unlimited buffet of trash. Racoon heaven!)

None of this is surprising to me, by the way. I have always been fascinated by fantasy stories and mythology. I’m a bit of a dreamer. In fact, in elementary school, I got in trouble for staring at my much more interesting pencil than actually doing math and don’t think I stopped even after they gave me plain boring yellow pencils. After cutting my fantasy teeth on Anderson’s Fairy Tales, Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, and C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia, the thought of magical places where talking animals roam and life is idyllic and charming seems like utopia.

It’s hard to get friends together regularly though and not everyone wants to be a cute talking animal doing Hobbity things. Or racoon things, or badger things.. You get the idea. So when I found a solo RPG journaling adventured titled Fox Curio’s Floating Bookshop: A Year Upon The River, it was in my online cart before I finished reading the blurb about it. I’ve never tried a solo game before so I wasn’t sure how it would work, but it seems relatively easy. The game is written by Ella Lim and is available here through The Lost Ways Club if you want to follow along with your own floating bookshop. There are also a few more that look fun as well. Here is the website: https://www.lostwaysclub.com/shop

The idea behind a solo journaling RPG is that you use dice and cards to help give you a prompt for what happens during the day/night/time of the game. In multiplayer tabletop games you would have a game master who gives the players those prompts instead, but sometimes you maybe just want to take a little journey on your own!

So for the next few weeks, I’m going to try to post a weekly excerpt of my journey along the river, possibly asking for prompts from you as I go along. My world setting will be something like Narnia, Wind in the Willows, or Redwall. Lots of fun pastural scenes with different animals, wacky interactions with customers, cozy days reading in the rain on my houseboat bookshop. I will at some point, adopt a pet, but who knows what it will be? Maybe a butterfly or a tiny lizard? The possibilities are endless!

Don’t worry, if the storytelling isn’t your thing, I’m still going to try to get some updates about the garden and Piggy’s tomato stealing ways, life in general, and other fun things happening in my life. I have still been sewing and doing some cooking, although lately not so much with the cooking. The Husband and I got Covid after 4 years of narrowly avoiding it. Luckily it’s mild, but it’s made cooking extremely tiring and I was already been in a slump anyway.

For now though, I’ve left some music to inspire you to join me on my river journey.

Adventure is calling! Will you answer?

Wordless Wednesdays

(Almost) Wordless Wednesday- Piggy’s Adventures

Vacation Piggy!

“No Pupparatzi!”

She doesn’t even work out!

“Excuse me, I don’t think there’s enough tomatoes… for the both of us at least.” Tiny teefies!

Sunbathing and Supervising

Fought her bed and lost.

Simple Sundays

Simple Sunday- Friendship

“She is a friend of mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It’s good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.”-Toni Morrison

“The balm of life, a kind and faithful friend.” -Mercy Otis Warren

“If we would build on a sure foundation in friendship, we must love friends for their sake rather than for our own.” – Charlotte Bronte

“Women’s friendships are like a renewable source of power.” – Jane Fonda

“Women helped each other in ways small and large every day, without thinking, and that was what kept them going even when the world came up with new and exciting ways to crush them.”― Alyssa Cole, Let Us Dream

“Friendships between women, as any woman will tell you, is a built of a thousand small kindnesses… swapped back and forth and over again.” Michelle Obama

Simple Sundays

Simple Sunday- Independence

“If people are making fun of you then you’re probably doing something right.”-Amy Lee

“It’s not worth doing something unless you were doing something that someone, somewhere, would much rather you weren’t doing.”-Terry Pratchett

“When I look at the world I’m pessimistic, but when I look at people I am optimistic.”-Carl Rogers

“I firmly believe in standing by what you are. I was never taught to dim my light to pacify other people.”- Iliza Shlesinger

“My mother told me to be a lady. And for her, that meant be your own person, be independent.”-Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Simple Sundays

Simple Sunday- Respect

“We have tolerance, respect, and equality in our written laws but not in the hearts of some of our people.”-Ruby Bridges

“Everyone should be respected as an individual, but no one idolized.”-Albert Einstein

“What is home? My favorite definition is “a safe place,” a place where one is free from attack, a place where one experiences secure relationships and affirmation. It’s a place where people share and understand each other. Its relationships are nurturing. The people in it do not need to be perfect; instead, they need to be honest, loving, supportive, recognizing a common humanity that makes all of us vulnerable.”
― Gladys Hunt, Honey for a Child’s Heart: The Imaginative Use of Books in Family Life

“Love can often be misguided and do as much harm as good, but respect can do only good. It assumes that the other person’s stature is as large as one’s own, his rights as reasonable, his needs as important.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt, You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life

“Fight only in direst need
Not for lust or petty greed
Honor those that do give birth
Respect them well for their full worth” ― Anne McCaffrey, Dragon Harper

“Respect is a close relative of tolerance, and both go a long way to prevent and alleviate the negative interactions between and among people. Respect was a member of each Lakota household during the free-roaming buffalo-hunting days on the northern plains.”― Joseph M. Marshall III, The Lakota Way: Stories and Lessons for Living