A Question About Routine

I bold peon asks:

“What’s your daily routine like?”

Daily routine? Really? Who cares? I guess you do. Fine.

First I wake up at dawn because of the harpies. Or…harpoes as I like to think they like to be called. Anyway, the male harpies. Yes, there are some. Only about five in one hundred. And aside from the crowing, the awful, awful crowing, they don’t ever make a sound. So like I said, I wake up at dawn, angry. I throw on a dark lord cloak and step out of my tent and grab the first goblins I can see. With gloves, of course. I wouldn’t touch them with a bare hand. Eww. So I take those goblins about five steps from the tent and throw them at the nearest harpies I can find. One day I went looking for harpoes to beat to death with the goblins, but I got bored just beat one to death with the other.

As it turns out, goblins are rather well suited to being used as weapons. They’re small and light, and they flail and are oddly proportioned, but there’s something about their bone structure or something that makes them surprisingly resilient to hitting things. Or maybe it’s just that one. I don’t know, but when you use one goblin to beat another to death you’d expect the first to be in worse shape than he was. And you certainly don’t expect him to walk away.

Where was I? Right. Daily routine. Goblins are just so distracting. Even when they aren’t in the room.

So, after I throw the goblins at some harpies, I go back to my tent and try to sleep until someone brings me breakfast. I eat what I want of it and set the rest on fire. Then I put on my proper armor because you can’t start the day without getting dressed. I tend to like finishing my conquests in the morning at about this time so that if I want to spend the res of the day doing nothing I can still feel like I accomplished something even if I did all the hard work the day before. For such a long campaign it really is important to make sure you can feel like it’s worth it and that you’re getting closer every day because it will take years. And sometimes it can take two or three tries.

After finishing my conquest for the day, I like to take a nap before consulting my advisors. I tend to kill one during the meeting on alternate Tuesdays to try and keep it fresh and keep them dedicated, but it’s getting predictable. It’s almost always the new guy. I only consult with the advisors when I don’t have a conquest to start or a particularly difficult city that takes more than one day. Some take weeks. Can you believe the nerve of those places?

I eat lunch in between my nap and the advisors or in place of the nap or sometimes there’s too much fighting for lunch. The latter isn’t a problem unless there’s too much fighting for early evening snack. If that’s the case I get very upset and things start to go poorly all around. Cannons and catapults get fired wherever, fires are set, the reserves are sent in, the undead are sent in…it’s a mess. But sometimes it distracts me from the fact that I haven’t had my snack.

I eat again at dusk, then free time and then bed. Some days I throw the schedule at the harpies with the goblins and do something different but it’s important to have structure on the road so I try not to stray from the routine very often.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, talking about my routine is cutting into my valuable free time.