By: Nixon "Jasper" Showalter
Hello friends, foes, and otherwise,
I have finally returned home from the Clontarf province and now given time to weigh my pouch of gold and reflect on the hijinks of the day, I can confidently say I did nothing but enjoy myself!
The day opened up with the Newbie Poker Tournament, the perfect place for beginners to test their luck and skills at the poker table. I had just taken Duke Lord Sir Tao’s (I learned all of Tao’s titles that day) class on the intro information to poker, so I felt as prepared as I could possibly be. Now for anyone who knows me, or may come to soon understand my mind as you read this, I was the first person out at the table after betting around 1000 chips on hands that I definitely should have folded. Call it the love of the game or whatever you would like, just don’t do it to my face.
With this, I was off to the races. No longer locked down to a table, I was ready to face the day and see how much money I could make. Now an important note, while many people around the Clontarf casino that day were prolific gamblers who all had very high levels of skill and prowess, I was not one of them. I have learned to let intuition guide me, and guide me it did. There were special chips which you could gamble with and turn in for raffle tickets and these became my primary source of gambling funds (definitely not because every time I gambled with money I lost it all). Clontarf’s Let It Ride has quickly become one of my favorite games they offer, it has such a fun blend of skill and luck which really makes it addicting to keep playing! I was able to make quite a few of these chips playing for some time before I decided to try my hand at the blackjack table.
The blackjack table was extremely popular all day, for the most part constantly at max capacity. For better or for worse, it was not my day for blackjack. The vibes were absolutely not guiding me that day and I did lose any money I bought in with so I decided to be a responsible gambler and go elsewhere.
And fortunately for me and my gold pouch, elsewhere found me instead. Sir Kara burst into the casino looking for adventurers to help them capture their fleeing creatures. After some time and a lot of jingling of chainmail and metal scraping of sheathing weapons, a party was ready to return the first creature, a baby golden dragon. This baby dragon was extremely skittish, though extremely playful looking to play tag while playing hide and seek. Now I will say, we were all convinced the poor thing was cheating. We would tag it and it would either masterfully dodge our tags or seemingly fade out of existence when it hid. The times we did connect, we learned that its thick scales made it so that the poor thing couldn't tell we were tagging it. It eventually took some soft sword pokes to let the dragon be able to play with us mostly fleshy creatures, but everyone had fun in the end!
After some time, and some good gambling later, Sir Kara told us there was another creature amiss. This time it was a fire salamander. With most of us being quite placated from the baby dragon encounter, we were nothing if not shocked to encounter a salamander hitting us with the force of a fireball. Since the fall of Anti-Light, I have felt that my magic has been getting weaker .I have not been able to bring myself back from the dead recently, so for the first time in a while I took this threat very seriously. With a lot of convincing, in the form of words and swords, we were able to tire the creature out enough that it was safe to be returned to Sir Kara.
Now with more time available to gamble, I was able to play some more hands of Let It Ride which was very enjoyable, but destiny had other plans for me: the Roulette Wheel opened up. While the people betting next to me seemed to have a great strategy, I came with a new approach: all in on black. Now you might be thinking, surely no that would never work and oh you have over 50% to lose it all. Now now dear reader, that is the mentality of someone who would lose that bet. It takes complete confidence in yourself and in your intuition, with both of these things you will always hit at the roulette wheel (I am not responsible if this turns out to not be true, you must’ve not been confident enough). With this I was able to mass over 150 raffle tickets and I will be forever indebted to the roulette wheel.
Once the gambler’s itch was scratched, it so happened that Sir Kara had one final creature that needed to be returned, and this one was… unlike the others. A much smaller party this time, as many were much more invested in the gambling, headed out thinking surely Sir Kara’s warnings were overly harsh. We encountered a cow unlike any I had ever experienced before. One that struck with poison, one that spit fire at us, one that could take strike after strike and not go down. It was… a slog. However! We all were able to make it out mostly-whole at the end. It was a war of attrition, and at times a war of running for my life while my friends got important strikes in, but we were able to tire out the cow until it was unconscious and bring it back to Sir Kara as well. I also learned that milking evil cows is frowned upon, but luckily I learned that before doing it.
Toward the end of the day, the remaining raffles were called and I made it home with some pretty cool items that will definitely level up my fashion game (I hope the Order of the Peacock is proud [of my fashion game - of course they're proud of themselves]). There were also a bunch of other fun games people were having a great time with I didn’t make my way to, like Rhiassa’s Dino Racing. I did play a round of Rhiassa’s Questo which was extremely fun and being able to pick out a quest like a personality test was definitely a unique way of gambling my winnings away.
Overall, I had an amazing time in Clontarf getting to play incredibly fun games, spend time with great people, eat delicious food, and overall enjoy myself. If you have the chance to go to Clontarf Casino in the future, I’d definitely recommend it.
Until the sun touches the sea,
Jasper Sherwood
