I think I've been sleeping too much. I know, if you sleep, then it's probably not too much, but it's considerably more than pre-covid. Doom scrolling and other behaviors seem to have an impact on my hours of shut eye. I noticed the difference this week when I got up at my old commute time for several days and had several hours of pre-work time to myself to...well, work, and read, and watch some television, and walk...I definitely felt more productive.
This morning I overslept - imo - but I got to enjoy a weird dream on the tail end of those hours. In some run down factory that had been semi-gentrified, I was hosting a D and D game. But I'd lost all my notes from previous games and had fifteen players participating I couldn't remember a thing about. So I looked out the window, took note of all the broken brick and trash in the neighborhood where they/we were trying to repurpose an old factory, and decided I'd have to do a hack and slash that was challenging regardless of the number of players and/or their level. The result...a brick and garbage gollum the size of a factory that had fists, hands, mouth, but could also form tree sized pseudo appendages that would slam into a player, enveloping them, suffusing their lungs and stomach - unless they made their save - and possessing them as a gollum zombie under the gollum's control that would start to ooze and collect trash, ala the Japanese movie Tetsuo, the Iron Man. I remember thinking in my dream that it was clever to have a gollum, traditionally under control, be the one controlling. It's less clever when I'm awake because gollums don't work that way, so it was likely more of an elemental, or the zombie players were under the control of the gollum's owner.
I suspect all that is related to helping E with D and D lately, as well as playing it myself with my old crew. When E and I were talking I pointed out I have a few standard scenarios I pull out when I need to buy some time for future ideation, or want the party to enjoy a bit more hack and slash than usual. Crippled beholder with fewer stalks, weird spells, and a tribe off worshippers, like bullywugs or kobalds, plus associated pets [maybe the beholder has a tame spell it uses on behalf of it's worshippers, so anything is fair game]. I also like rando nemesis. Maybe you trespass, maybe you find a small abandoned temple and loot it, maybe you ruin something that seems innocuous like a nest or a colony of bugs, and the local wood demon/deity decides to make an example out of you and keeps upping the challenge until something "works".
