Failed quest trigger

I can still hear the crows cawing outside. They’ve been out there all afternoon. I first noticed them around 3:00 pm. There was a whole murder of them (nailed it!) and I could hear them circling around outside my computer room window, which is on my second floor. I got video of them and they were literally circling around above my patio. When I went out to see them, I tried talking to them, and they landed in trees just past my patio but did not stop cawing.

I went downstairs to see if dad was out on the patio; that’s where he goes to smoke. He wasn’t; he was on the couch watching TV. I asked him if he’d heard the crows and he hadn’t. I tried to get some more video but it was just sound; they weren’t in sight, just sitting on tree limbs.

I am the kind of person who respects crow’s intelligence and curiosity. I even talk to crows when I’m out and about. I treat them like friends, say hi, ask them how they’re doing. I rarely get an answer, though, and I never have any treats to give them, so I never expected to build up a relationship with the local crows.

So weird. OK, maybe it’s not weird. I edited my video clips together and posted them on Instagram and TikTok. My joke was that the Raven Queen had a mission for me.

You don’t know who the Raven Queen is? That’s a D&D reference; she’s one of the canonical D&D gods and her domain is death and memory. And I’ve used her as a motivator in my current campaign, even before I knew that Matt Mercer had used her for Vax’ildan’s (Liam O’Brien) character arc in Campaign One of his enormously popular Let’s Plays. The Raven Queen rules from her domain, which is in the Shadowfell, a dark mirror of the primary world, what us grognards called the Prime Material Plane. But, I digress.

Clearly these crows, corvid messengers of Our Lady of Death, had a message for me. But what could it be? I talked to them, told them it was safe to speak, that I was ready to listen, but they just continued squawking, agitated, non-stop. They were still doing it hours later. By now, the sun has gone down, and they’ve mostly stopped but every once in a while I can still hear one or more of them calling.

Sure, it could just be that they are alerting me and everyone around that there’s a hawk nearby. There’s a game I play that I’ve written about before called The Long Dark, and in that game, hearing crows can give useful information about the environment. Crows (in that game, I’m not sure if they do this in real life) will circle above a dead animal, making the carcass which provides meat, hides and guts easier to locate. And crows in the game have a special more agitated call that will alert the player of the presence of a bear. Gotta know where the bear is because it’s very dangerous if you’re not prepared.

That would be a mundane explanation, sure, but isn’t it pretty to think more interesting things, as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone? I’m just sad that no matter what I tried I wasn’t able to trigger the quest. Nothing has shown up in my journal. Boooooo. Hopefully it’s not a timed quest. I’ll try again tomorrow.