Yeah, and, so, today I ran Tomb of Horrors for a different group than The Lost City. Prep time about an hour of rereading it (but there have been plenty of other immersions in it), runtime four hours with another session--maybe three hours--planned. Right now the party is in the mummy preparation room.

No one has died for good yet, although that may be because I was too soft with the use of neutralize poison. It's a fourth-level spell. Slow Poison is L2. Slow Poison says it can be used postmortem to bring a character back, so I ruled that Neutralize Poison can too. But maybe the idea was that you cast Slow Poison after death, and then you have to cast Neutralize Poison, but you need them both.

I guess I could ask Tim Kask at Gary Con.

But I'm playing with a set of players who are, in Nethack parlance, "thoroughly spoiled." My hypothesis is that better than 50% of the characters die anyway...but we haven't gotten to the really deadly parts of the module yet (and they somehow mysteriously knew better than to try some of the really deadly or drastically inconveniencing wrong turns available).

It's not as much fun as The Lost City was. Amy says, and I think she's right, that it's because there's no real resource squeeze yet. There are plenty of characters, plenty of opportunities to rest, plenty of ropes and grappling hooks and spikes and so forth. Maybe that will change as the module moves into the home stretch in two weeks.

So, this came out of a discussion on Google+.

Long story short, there's the Traditional D&D Endgame: you reach name level, you build a keep, you pacify the surrounding wilderness, and you retire to enjoy the fruits of your labors. This is in keeping with D&D as a metaphor for the Christianization of Europe, which may well be how Gygax saw it.

But....

First, I don't think that's the way the endgame goes down in actual play, and second, that's not the way the story ends in the myth that D&D actually is, which is, I think, a little different.

I hope we can mostly agree that D&D is an American myth. It's the American myth, in fact, which is the Western, and which kinda resembles the Christianization of Europe in some ways: it's about carving order and domesticity out of the howling wilderness, about taming the frontier. So far, so Gygax.

But after he's made the town safe again, the Man With No Name doesn't settle down there and plant a garden and get married and get old and die. Oh no. Instead, he leaves again; in fact, he's driven out, because there's no role for him in the society he has created.

This gets right at the heart of the core paradox of American self-identity: we have this myth of the rugged frontiersman individualist. And that's great, but it's no way to run a civil society, so the society comes with its own baked-in distrust of itself right in its founding myth.

Now, there's a high-falutin' phrasing for how the D&D endgame really goes down, which is just striking out for ever-more-distant horizons:

"The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die."

Tennyson's very pretty, But "Ulysses" isn't all that appropriate for a quintessentially American myth.

So, I think the best phrasing for the D&D endgame is, well, of course it's found right where it would have to be:

"But I reckon I got to light out for the territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can't stand it. I been there before."

Humanoid races basically per _Savage Species_.

Very little healing magic other than Liquid Courage. There will be intoxication tables, random vomit tables, and vomit miscibility tables.

I have not decided whether you have to roll what kind of drunk you are at character creation time or whether that will be decided at drinking time. The former seems more realistic, but realism is not a primary goal, and not knowing whether you're going to be a funny drunk (+2 CHA, -2 DEX, -2 INT), a maudlin drunk (-3 initiative, prone to fits of weeping, -2 INT, -2 DEX, +1 WIS, -1 CHA) or a fighty drunk (-4 INT, -4 WIS, -2 DEX, -4 CHA, +3 CON, +3 STR) might be fun.

Studded Leather protects as chainmail + shield. Why? Because it's metal, that's why.

Spellcasting will be enhanced if you can name a specific (metal) song that evokes what you want your spell to do. Even more enhanced if you have it on your iPod and we can play it while you cast it.

I went to GaryCon again this year, which again kicked ass. I played a lot of Empire of the Petal Throne run by Victor Raymond, and a bunch of other stuff too.

I also went with a friend of mine, Tracy Jo, who has never been much of a tabletop gamer, but who enjoyed herself and who had a very interesting observation.

First, to set the stage, I've been thinking a lot about a topic that I think I pissed Skip Williams off with. It's this: RPGs are on the cusp of transition from product to folk games. The OSR is dumping fuel on the fire, of course, but it's more generally a symptom of the internet. I know that Google+ is widely derided as a failed Facebook competitor, but as far as I can tell the RPG scene on it is not just thriving, but fecund.

But I think a lot of what is going on--and I have no idea whether RPGing has enough cultural mass to survive this transition--is precisely the transition from product to folk entertainment. We're seeing tons of interesting things that are basically people's hacks of D&D appearing--things The Forge would call "fantasy heartbreakers" but might better be viewed as little pieces of specific-culture folk art: "this is how we play D&D in my neck of the woods."

This is, of course, terrible news if you want to get paid for writing and publishing RPGs. But it's awesome news if you're me, or someone like me, who has a day job, thank you very much, but wants to share the neat stuff I came up with or figured out playing RPGs with other people who enjoy it as a hobby.

So, back to the original point: Tracy Jo points out that this is very much what the bluegrass world is like, and that GaryCon felt to her very much like a bluegrass festival. There was the same thing where the old-and-famous-guard jammed with the newbies, there was the same sense of shared joy in an activity that the rest of the world just didn't get, there was the same family-reunion friends-you-only-see-there thing going on. And both worlds are facing the same crisis: the first generation is passing away. The activity is no longer as popular as it once was, and there's no certainty that it's going to survive the loss of its founders...but there's hope, and there's a younger generation that's also passionate about it, although they may be remixing it in different ways.

I'd love to see RPGs become a non-product entertainment choice some people play when they have a few hours to spare, like a rubber or two of bridge. No one buys "Bridge by Hasbro"; a lot of houses have a deck or two of cards lying around, and some tribal knowledge of how to play various games with them. Why should RPGs be different? Maybe someone has a set of books. Maybe they just remember ability scores go from 3-18, an untrained fighter hits an unarmored opponent half the time, hit dice are generally d8s, and work up something from there.

Fundamentally, playing "let's pretend" is never going to die off, and what are RPGs besides "let's pretend" with some not-completely-subjective method of conflict resolution? This, by the way, is to my mind the thing that separates story gamers from old-school gamers. I think both would end up agreeing that narrative is paramount, but story gamers want the narrative to be the result of negotiated choices between the people playing the game (that is, I include the GM there, if there is one), and old-schoolers prefer to construct narratives using dice as divinatory aids: the results of a succession of choices and the one-damn-thing-after-another falls of the dice eventually yield a chain of events which, then, stepping back, you can see forms some sort of narrative structure.

So, hoist a glass to the shade of M.A.R. Barker, or Earl Scruggs, whichever you prefer, and go play something--a game, some tunes, whatever--with your friends.

I took the opportunity of Secret Santicore to teach myself some Javascript.

First I took my table and implemented it as a Web 1.0 CGI script in Perl; then I ported that to Javascript.

The Javascript version is at santicore.fsf.net and the CGI version is linked from there.

The request was "Spells for door traps, the more obscure the better," so what I did was take the list of spells in Unearthed Arcana and select all the ones I could think of plausible door traps for.

Then I created a choice function. Actually, I created three:

One is straight-up Gonzo: equal chance of any spell, any level, any class.

One is Location-Independent: I assigned a weight to the class choice (15% Cleric, 5% Druid, 70% Magic-User, 10% Illusionist), and then a weight to each spell level (the top-level spell got one slot, the second-from-the-top two, and so on, until you get to the bottom of the list). Then within a class/level the choice is equally-weighted.

The third is Depth-Based. Basically, I rolled a d20 for the Level Of Characters That Should Be Exploring Here, and picked the highest-level spell of the chosen class (same weighted function as in Location-Independent) that a character could cast. Then I applied 4DF to it (4d3-8), capped at top or bottom as needed, and then picked a random spell of that class/level. This sort of approximates 3E Challenge Ratings, really.

Then for each spell, you may need to know the level at which it is cast, so that's the minimum level required for the spell plus 1d6-1.

+



=

Well, it's happened. I can rightly be accused of corrupting the morals of the young, just like Socrates.

See, as our old RPG group withered due to player attrition and apathy, Amy and I happened to attend "Queenfest"--a party devoted to appreciating the music of the band Queen--thrown by one of our old college gaming buddies. This year it was at the house of a friend of his, and that friend lives in St. Louis. With his wife and their daughter, who has just turned 12.

So I'm now running a D&D (well, Swords and Wizardry) game with them and Amy...and (and here's the moral-corrupting part) Amy and I just gave Alex, for her birthday, copies of the first edition PH, MM, and DMG. "Here, kid. Here's something incredibly addictive. Never did *me* any harm!"

So that game:

It's set in Zak Smith's Vornheim. But the nice thing about Vornheim is, it's a city toolkit more than it is a city. So my Vornheim is way different than the D&D With Pornstars Vornheim.

It shares some features: the verticality, the important buildings built like grasping hands, the Cathedral and the Palace, with the square with the Well and the Wyvern in between them. It's on the River of Unfathomable Despair (Vornheim clearly needs some real estate agents for the nomenclature).

But beyond that....

So, let's see.

Street addresses are where you are on the street, counting up from where the street first leaves a bigger street more toward the river, and the number after the address increases from ground level. Posh is higher up. So, "6 Ironstar Way 1524", where Lady Stiella Görbler lives, is very posh indeed. Her tailor, Unvelt Ohn, is at 443 Toad Street 26: the garment district, but a pretty good spot.

Across the river is Goblintown. The human was sent to find out why many elves are disappearing to Vornheim, never to be heard from again. One of the elves came because the opportunities for scholarship were that much greater; one came because he can't marry his betrothed until he's a Person Of Importance in the Church Of Vorn; and the last one came because she was kicked out of her tribe for practicing black magic.

Which is another thing: I've gone the Lankhmar route, where clerical magic is white, and sorcerous magic is black, and all black magic basically involves making pacts with various demonic entities. Low-level spells are really no big deal. But once you start being able to cast heavy-duty spells, there's going to be a lot on the line.

We already have three competing religions: the Church Of Vorn, about which the acolyte's a little disillusioned now that he's come to the Big City and sees how wealth-driven and corrupt it is (my Church of Vorn? Catholicism with a cosmetic makeover; no celibacy and no male-only priesthood, though), the Titivillians, about which my players know nothing other than she's the demon-goddess of fleshly pleasures and scribal errors, and Our Lady Of The Thorns, responsible for the Thornbabies (Zak calls them Thornchildren, but I thought Babies was creepier), worshipped by one of the three elves in the party, and kinda-sorta based on The Lady Of Pain from Planescape, in that even her worshippers would really, really rather never meet her. She's a beautiful and very severe goddess. Druids--who, if we meet any in this game, are going to be my Scary-Ass Dead-Eyed Killer Druids--dig her.

We know that Görbler is a major benefactress of the greenhouse which serves as the cathedral of Our Lady Of The Thorns, down by the river (I'm playing it like the Gardens in Wolfe's _Shadow of the Torturer_, if that helps you place it). When my group was in there paying their respects, she came in, left an offering on the altar, and began taking cuttings from the poison garden. She took a shine to the innocent young cleric of Vorn (name: Palalladin, played by Amy, my wife) and has invited him and his elvish retinue to her dinner party (which is the subject of the next session).

The group also--since Palalladin decided to make a little coin shriving people in a bar--has found out about Zorlac's library, since they talked to someone who took a lot of money for stealing his master's copy of _The Clutching Cow_ and delivering it to Maarten Tull.

And in my Vornheim, the group has:
a) gone to Ohn's tailor shop, and gotten a quote of 450 gp for suitable clothing for the party. Which might as well be a million
b) gone to the secondhand shops and found three lemon-yellow satin Snuggies for the retinue, and a red zoot suit for Palalladin, and a half-elf tailor who will alter them for the party. They're just renting the suit, and Palalladin's longbow is the collateral for it.
c) paid a visit to Zorlac, who understood immediately what services the group was offering, in terms of book acquisition from the recalcitrant, and has opined that he sure could use a copy of "Anatomy of the Goblinoid Races", which was written by a Goblin scholar at the University within Gaxen Kane. Since the poor benighted goblins don't have the printing press, no more than a dozen copies are known to exist, and all else being equal, he'd like one of the five manskin-bound presentation copies, thank you.
d) Found that Görbler has been a widow for about ten years, and is known for i) taking a succession of younger, handsome lovers, who never last long, and ii) throws extravagant, themed dinner parties. One was entirely in utter darkness, for instance (Eshrigel was invited, although the players don't know this, and enjoyed a party where she could go maskless), and another one had all the guests given water breathing spells and was a fourteen-course dinner served and eaten underwater.

So play has currently broken off the afternoon before Görbler's party. After that (whatever may happen), the group is planning to try to attach themselves to a diplomatic mission to Gaxen Kane to get access to a book they can steal.

See, the goblins in *my* Vornheim...well, they don't walk on the ceiling. But there's a good reason that the way they talk sounds very backwards to humans. In short, the entire metaphorical structure of their society is based on the idea that down is good and up is bad (and if pressed, I intend to say that their language is like Latin or German where the verb goes at the end, as opposed to Common, which is pretty much English). Almost all of Gaxen Kane is belowground; the aboveground watchtowers are what you get sentenced to when you've really pooched your military career. The goblins in Vornheim? Really troubled sorts. Calling someone a "low-down dirty rat" is a high compliment in Goblin. The earth is the nurturing womb of the Goblin races (this may, or may not, be a metaphor), so dirty is holy. Rats burrow and dig and are sacred animals. Low-down speaks for itself. And the goblins consider all stone and metals rightfully theirs. The surface dwellers have those nasty-ass trees--why do they have to steal stone and metal from the Goblinish folk to build their buildings and make their tools? (If you're detecting some Baum Nomes here, yeah, you're totally right).

Vornheim and Gaxen Kane are at peace, though kind of hostile. Each has an embassy in the other. Vornish diplomats hate it there--in fact, most of the recent ones have been clergy of Titivilla, being punished for their heretical faith. But Vornheim buys mushroom wine, dried fungus, and spider silk from the Goblin Lands, and the Goblins import wooden furniture, textiles, and some grain from the human world. Walking--well, stooping at best, and crawling much of the time--in Gaxen Kane, for your typical adventuring party, is about as hazardous as, in our world, for your basic suburbanite to saunter carefree around North St. Louis or Detroit. It's not instant death, but the odds are good that, pretty soon, something unpleasant is likely to happen to you. To be fair, that's pretty much also exactly what happens if you're a goblin in Vornheim, and you wander out of your ghetto alone.

So far, we're having fun...but we've played two entire sessions with zero combats, which has been kind of weird for me.

[EDIT] Oh dear, he said, in some consternation. Prompted by a niggling little voice at the back of my head, I got down _GURPS: Goblins_--a volume for which I have playtest credit--from the shelf.

It appears that we are not actually playing D&D (or even S&W). Rather, we are playing _GURPS: Goblins_ with a variant ruleset.

Went and saw the Tom of FInland show at phd gallery in St. Louis this weekend ( http://www.phdstl.com/tom_of_finland.html -- go if you're in town and you don't mind Tom of Finland; there's some good stuff there).

I finally realized what I like about Tom of Finland and why it dovetails with what I was doing with Stiffy Makane. Namely, there's Tom on his art:

"In those days, a gay man was made to feel nothing but shame about his feelings and his sexuality. I wanted my drawings to counteract that, to show gay men being happy and positive about who they were. Oh, I didn't sit down to think this all out carefully. But I knew, right from the start, that my men were going to be proud and happy men!"

The thing I really like about Tom of Finland pieces is--and hang on for a second here--their innocence.

Yeah, I've thought about that noun and it is actually the one I mean.

These are sexual beings, happily engaged in indulging their lust, in a fantasy world in which there are no emotional or physical consequences for doing so. And that's pretty much the Stiffyverse as well (Carthage notwithstanding, in _Mentula Macanus: Apocolocyntosis_), it's just that Stiffy is into girls too. (And fruits and vegetables). Now you certainly can make the case that this is a peculiarly male fantasy. I think you're wrong, but it's a case you can make.

So, that, in turn, probably helps to clarify why in _The Undiscovered Country_, the character portrait at the start is a fat, late-period, sweating Ron Jeremy (well, late-period for 2001--he's, ahem, even more so now), but after the player character undergoes Tantric Jedi Training with Space Moose he becomes--what else--a Tom Of Finland leatherman. Also you'll note that the highest rank you can achieve in *that* game is "Tom Of Finland", although it's also revealed that you have become Space Moose's Bald Dwarf.

So Stiffy--the ithyphallic Hermes--is simply another avatar of Kake. Not sure quite what to make of that yet.

Notes on Mentula Macanus: Apocolocyntosis

Warning: this will be spoilery. If you haven't seen the original game, go over to stiffymakane.com.

ADDRESSING THE CRITICS

I'd like to begin by responding to the two fantastic reviews Mentula Macanus: Apocolocyntosis got, and some of the less fantastic.

First, I want to announce to the world at large that the Grahams in the Unreal City were in no way intended to be an attack on Graham Nelson. Yes, the identical bankers (stolen from Martin Rowson's The Wasteland) are indeed all named Graham Nelson. Why? Why, to set up the Nelson's Column dick joke, of course.

Second: Emily nailed the Gate Of Ivory reference. Am I saying that Classical IF is a lie? Vergil had Aeneas come out of the Gate of Ivory. Myths aren't factually true, but that doesn't mean they're not good, nor that they're not necessary.

Third: Sam Kabo Ashwell got stuck on attempting re-use of the whale. How? Clearly that's a bug, but it is one that I don't see how to reproduce. Likewise with getting stuck three-quarters of the way through. How? Was it insufficient cueing of the moonmilk? Several of my testers struggled with that, and although I tried to make it more obvious, I don't know whether I succeeded.

Fourth: Again with the Ashwell: it's not that Julia. It's Julia from the Cranky Roman Family of Hans Orberg's Lingua Latina. Take a look at the link for a gentle introduction. Also, every other character in the game knows their slave Syra. Ask about her.

Fifth: I chose the Pompeii mosaic as the cover art before Graham revamped the Inform icon. My first cover image was, as Emily may have guessed, an ithyphallic Hermes; I toned it down for public release.

Sixth: to respond to Poster's blog post of May 15, I'd really like to know where the "homosexual monolith" is. As far as I'm aware, none of the other Spring Thing entries concern pole-smoking, donut-punching, or fudge-packing in any way. Did I miss something? Maybe The Cavity of Time is upsetting him. Anyway, I will console myself with the fantasy that my $123 is coming directly from Poster's $150.

Seventh: Speaking of, I'm totally thrilled that Sam Ashwell wrote The Cavity of Time. Also thrilled that he created those delightful Stiffy images. Thank you!

Eighth: I am a little peeved that my game got as many 1s as 10s, but I have no beef with Jimmy Maher's review. To clarify that a little: in my judging, a "1" is the worst possible game--a buggy, unplayable, subliterate piece of shit with no redeeming features. Mentula Macanus: Apocolocyntosis was a solidly implemented, grammatically-written, correctly-spelled piece of shit with no redeeming features, and as such, I think it deserved at least a 2. If memory serves, I gave "Cattus Atrox" a 3/10 for basically the reasons Jimmy gave MMA a 3: competently crafted, but absolutely unappealing to me.

Ninth: I will, however, confess embarassment that, as pointed out on IFMud, attempting to molest the library slaves gives you a "keep your mind on the game." That's a bug, all right.

Tenth: I really, really want Victor Gijsbers and Pissy Little Sausages to review the game. I'd like to know what they thought in some detail. I would also like Graham to play it, but, well, I already got one of the two people I thought would get most of the jokes but wouldn't play it to give it a whirl, and she liked it astonishingly well. So I'll try not to be greedy. But anyone who was thinking of writing a review--good or bad, short or long--I'd like to know what worked for you and what didn't, with as much specificity as you can spare.

GAME DESIGN

My primary goal in writing Mentula Macanus: Apocolocyntosis, of course, was self-gratification. In that aim I clearly succeeded. I did, however, have some other goals in mind.

I tried hard to make the game fair. That is: there is supposed to be no way to make the game unwinnable that doesn't kill you off in fairly short order. If I failed at this, I want to know, so that I can fix it.

I wanted to make it newbie-friendly. At least, that was my initial goal. That is: there are no diagonal directions required, all conversation is ASK X ABOUT Y, and if there are any guess-the-verb puzzles (besides the really, really obviously cued ones), I want to know about it. The mazes aren't. The darkness puzzles are really not very difficult. Inventory management is intended to be a non-issue except in one particular section.

Now, that said, in the time between the game's inception and its completion, the state of the art advanced a lot. I don't have the user-friendly features of Aotearoa, for instance. I thought about adding some of these things late in the game's cycle, but I had already made up my mind to do a consciously old-school game. So: no status-line directions, no in-game map, no interesting-object syntax highlighting.

I wanted to make it less linear than my other games, and was only partially successful. The midgame is fairly open, but the intro and late games are on rails. I also overused the nothing-to-do-but-wait mechanic: the animal rides could definitely stand to be shortened, as could the player's capture that ends the midgame. I do kind of like the rowing mechanic (suggested, I think, by Andrew Plotkin). The endgame probably drags on too long, but, really, what else could I have done there?

INFLUENCES

Until I read Emily's review, I didn't realize that I had written a reaction to Curses. Of course, I had, but the funny thing is, I haven't replayed Curses in the last decade or so. The closest I came was dumping the text for something about Alexandria while I was writing that section. But...damn, it's undeniable that I was carrying around a whole lot of Curses in the back of my head.

The things I was aware of primarily thinking of were, in more-or-less-order:

• The Waste Land, by T.S. Eliot, and a few of Eliot's other works. (Eliot is, of course, an enormous influence on Curses as well) And of course The Waste Land itself is the kind of virtuoso random-influences mash-up I wanted this to be (albeit, with more dick jokes in mine).
• The Waste Land, by Martin Rowson. If you haven't seen this, it's brilliant. It's The Waste Land mashed up with The Big Sleep, more or less: Eliot viewed through the lens of noir detective fiction, done up as a graphic novel.
• The Satyricon, Petronius. As Emily points out, the story's structure is straight-up Roman novel WTFery. I'm fine with it landing in the genre of Menippean Satire.
• The Aeneid. Well, obviously. Also notice that I start the thing like an epic, in medias res, and tell the first half as a flashback. Not accidental.
• The traditions of classical IF. What do you think the Gate of Ivory is about? But of course I was dicking, as it were, around with the genre conventions with the light source and the "mazes" (although the Ostian sewers are kind of a maze, they're a very simple one, and they actually match up very well with the town overhead).
• Dungeons and Dragons, Gygax et al. The thing is rife with D&D riffs, in both obvious and non-obvious ways, and in part that's tied back to the classical-IF thing. Text adventures were, after all, among other things, a way to play something a lot like D&D without having to assemble a group of people and a big block of time.

I also had very clear visual images for most of the characters. I don't know why Persephone is played by Dolly Parton in a white satin dress, but she most certainly is. Rachel is absolutely Jennifer Aniston in her Rachel role. Most of these characters--the ones who are public figures, anyway--are listed in the credits.

Graham is correct in his surmise on Emily's review: "I dare say much of Mr Thornton's household and acquaintance can be found in Mentula Macanus, if we but knew it." Cerberus, to take the most obvious example, is the three dogs I had throughout most of the game's writing:Vinnie, Golem, and Ursa. You can see them as Cerberus here (Ursa is on the left, Golem in the middle, Vinnie on the right, as you face them).

All this, of course, is circling around the heart of the story: intertextuality. It's not just Eliot. There's some of Gene Wolfe, and a little bit of Borges, and some Stealth Nabokov. There are nods and winks to all sorts of classical and post-classical IF. And sometimes there's just a Symbolist rendering of whatever random shit came into my head, like Stetson's Stone Snail "Speedy", or deciding to add the chick from the cover of Eldritch Wizardry only make her a priestess rather than the sacrifice (haven't found her yet? You know what XYZZY does? Have you tried disrobing in the very first scene?).

RELEASE ALONG WITH THE SOURCE CODE

I release the source to all my games. This one's no different. The code isn't pretty. In most cases that's my own fault, but then there are some things, like Pythonic indentation, that came along after the game was very largely developed. There are a lot of objects that should have inherited from kinds but didn't. It's not pretty, but it gets the job done.

Also, the map. It was important to me that the map the game produced be usable without any further editing. It is, although this required some scrambling quite late in the game when Graham rewrote the mapper in 5Z71 (at least, I think that was the release).

Quixe is just plain cool. Thanks, Zarf.

FAVORITE EASTER EGGS

There are two pieces of implementation I'm especially proud of. One is the ledger in the Hotel Metropole, and the other is the gaming table. At the gaming table, have you tried rolling 1d20 until you get a 1, as Stiffy? And have you tried taking your own figurine? The ledger I leave to you, gentle reader. Or you could, you know, read the source and see what I like.

THANKS

Again, thanks to all my testers for bearing with me for so long. And thanks to Amy for putting up with this thing for so very long.

IN MEMORIAM

Gin Rosenkranz was one of my early testers and a good friend of mine, who died of cancer while the game was being developed. Vinnie, as mentioned, appears as the left head of Cerberus. I miss them both.

Adam

So, another wonderful year.

I ran Bring Me The Head Of Frank Sinatra and had a good time doing so.

I also played in:

John Hershberger's run of Joe Bloch's Castle of the Mad Archmage. I stepped on the teleport trap first thing, and the party idiotically followed me. So our dungeon crawl very quickly turned into a "get back to where we were". We did succeed in that goal, and we slew a (shadow) dragon and got rich off a couple trolls, so that was fun and successful. This was the first of many games where my obsession with scent was noticed; I acquired the name "Toucan Sam" for demanding to know what the airflow and scents from each passage were.

Jeff Talanian's Hyperborea. Weird Fantasy, Martian Apes, Lovecraftian Things. Fun game; felt sort of like S3, actually, in its fantasy-dudes-exploring-weird-sciencey-thingy vibe. I had a great time in Jeff's game last year, and I had a great time this year.

Bryan Skowera's Court of the Crimson King. Designed around the King Crimson song of the same name. Very, well, metal. Quite possibly my favorite game of the convention--I was playing a monk and thus WAY outside of my comfort zone, and I was very sorry to have to turn my character over to another player and leave to go play....

Tim Kask's GaryCon special this year, "The Sinister Secret of Sweetmeade Abbey". Fun exploratory game, although 12 players made it a little unwieldy even for OD&D. It was in a noisy location next to the door which kept opening to admit smokers and the arctic blast, so it was really hard for one end of the table to hear the other. We all got stung to death by bees. So it goes.

Then I ended up jumping in to the tag-end of some other game that had been going on. This was a late-Saturday-night everyone-is-drunk-and-exhausted dungeon crawl through a semi-collapsed mine trying to solve some mystery about some groups of competing miners or something. It got way silly. I remember we ended up cutting out the lungs and trachea of a grimlock to use as an air bladder to get through a flooded passage. It made perfect sense at the time.

Next morning: Joe Goodman running Dungeon Crawl Classics. Man, that was a blast. I'm a little proud in that my character voiced his suspicions that we were being set up, and Joe improvised the adventure on the fly to make that come true. Bravo, sir, bravo.

Sunday afternoon: I jumped in for a little while while my wife was finishing up her game in an Empire of the Petal Throne game run by Victor Raymond. I took over a guard NPC. We were delivering a message to a really scary sadistic archmage. The DM had played in Professor Barker's game for 20 years, so I was able to play a proper Apostolic Succession game of Tekumel, which was great. I don't think I or anyone I know can run it, because I just don't grasp the metaphysics or enormously-complicated society of Tekumel, and if I tried it would be just another Weird Fantasy take on D&D. So that was extremely cool.

I did get that copy of Lost Tamoachan signed by Harold Johnson, Jeff Leason, Jim Ward (a second time!), and, yes, Jean Wells! On the Nereid illustration! Scans later when I get around to 'em.

And, for you EC fans out there....