Shade has been in my thoughts a lot recently.
Just over a month ago, one of my very good friends returned home on a Sunday night to discover that he had been robbed. Unfortunately for him, the robbers were still inside the house. When my friend entered the room they were hiding in, they attacked him, stabbing him several times with a knife and bludgeoning him over the head with a heavy object. His neighbors heard his screams for help and immediately called the police, but by the time they arrived, he was already dead and the robbers had fled.
The weekend before he died, our gaming group had gotten together at my house. Unusually, everyone decided to stayed over for that whole weekend, so there were plenty of board games played and lots of socializing took place, as well as an eight hour D&D session. I am very grateful that the last time I saw my friend was for such a fun-filled weekend.
Losing someone that you game with regularly is slightly different to losing a friend that you don't game with. You don't have to say goodbye to just one person, but also to the characters he played. At the end of last year, we finished the heroic tier of our extended 4e campaign, in which the heroes led a large scale assault on the lair of a powerful lich-lord whom they eventually overcame in a climatic battle. One consequence of this is that a statue of the heroes who led the charge is being built in their hometown. It is strangely comforting to know that although my friend will never have another chance to play his character, that character will forever be immortalized in stone in our gaming group's shared collective imagination.
Shade, it has been almost a year now since you left us. But you are not forgotten. I often think of your contributions to D&D monster lore when I am looking up monsters in my index, and I still get a lump in my throat each time I stumble upon one of your posts to the ENWorld forums.
But wherever you might be now, if you happen to come across a fellow traveller who plays a goliath with a huge sword and a tendency to stumble into awkward situations, or a shadar-kai bard who sees only in black-and-white because he traded his color-vision with a hag for a favor, I hope you'll be kind enough to invite him to join you at your gaming table. It pleases me greatly to think that he might have a kind and wise fellow gamer with whom to continue his adventures.
