jordangreywolf

The Happy New Year wasn't entirely happy. "Ragnir," or, rather, the player of the friendly Dark Iron Dwarf player of the "Ironforge Guard" who hosted the Friday night "Ironforge Market" passed away on December 31st due to complications related to a breakthrough case of COVID. I ignorantly was still sending him messages after he'd passed on, just assuming he was, y'know, elsewhere because of holiday stuff. I only got the news this week. (Last night - Friday the 7th - was going to be the next market. For obvious reasons, it didn't happen.)

But, "Winter's Veil" was nice while it lasted -- that being the Warcraft stand-in for Christmas. Here's the last doodle I drew of "Ragnir":

Caroling at the Ironforge Market
On the left is Ragnir's character, and next to him "Anna," who let me know the bad news this week. The little robot up front is "Blinky," Ragnir's pet tag-along (and "comic relief" outlet for silliness, while Ragnir the dwarf himself was supposed to be serious). Over on the right are Redoria and "Rori" (short for Aurora) -- "Redoria" being an elf player who sometimes shows up with "Rori" in tow, also doing a bit of the "my character is serious, but my sidekick is silly" routine as an adoptive-adventurer-mother-and-child pair.

This particular doodle was done when "Anna" had called off the market the week before Christmas, since she hadn't personally gotten enough commitments from "vendors" to run things. Alas, this sort of vote was held during the workday, and I don't sign in on Discord on my WORK COMPUTER to check on such things. So I ended up showing up and ... hey, where's everybody? Well, Ragnir was a good sport and put out the word that we were going to have an impromptu whoever-shows-up gathering for anyone so inclined, and this was who showed up. We did some "carols" -- I came up with silly alternate lyrics for some more conventional Christmas carols. Features included:

"I Wanna Purple Crocolisk for Winter's Veil"

"Goredolph the Vorpal Reindeer"

"Chippy the Snow Sprite"

"Deck Mead Hall"

"Mithril Bells"

"You're a Mean One, Mister Greench"

"The Twelve Days of Winter's Veil"

"Ragnir" was the stern and serious type, as per usual, somewhat reluctantly going along with this farce, while Blinky the exuberant little Alarm-O-Bot was more than happy for any excuse to make a ruckus. The backdrop is a depiction of the area in front of the Ironforge Bank, where the market is (was) usually held, with the Feast of Winter's Veil decorations in place.

This didn't go on for terribly long (at least relatively speaking), but it was much fun, and was a nice break from some glum stuff I was dealing with IRL that week. Ever since "Brewfest," a lot of the folks in Gwendel's RP group have been drifting off, but Gwendel hasn't officially declared being done with Warcraft yet, so I feel like we're in a strange sort of limbo. I really appreciated the friendliness of the Ironforge Market crew -- particularly Ragnir -- and although I can't claim I knew him terribly well (I didn't even know his real-world name), I was saddened to hear of his passing.

Additional (1/9/2022): Saturday night, we had a "wake" for one of "Ragnir's" other characters, one associated with the "Golden Keg" tavern (an in-game pub in Stormwind in the Dwarven quarter, which a few PCs have decided to use as a base of operations for their light roleplay, as if they're the co-proprietors). There was quite the turnout - maybe 30-40 people (although I think a few might have just been curiosity-seekers who noticed something was going on). Mostly it was done in-character. I took a few screenshots, notes of who was in attendance, thinking that I might write up a tribute article for the "Stormwind Daily," but it looked like there were some other (senior Stormwind Daily players) around and, yes, it turned out one of them had plans to write something up. So I put all my notes in a Google doc to make available for reference.

This was someone I only knew a little bit and for a very brief period of time, but clearly he was a very generous person (he put in funds for servers/sites for various RP projects) in addition to being very encouraging and creative. It also started raining in-game right in the middle of things (whereupon a dozen or so parasols started popping up), and several people jynxed each other by commenting that he loved the rain so he'd love this.