Greg Stafford & the First Copy of D&D

(Young Greg painted for King of Dragon Pass by Stefano Gaudiano)

Before you read my story, read the story in Greg's words from the Chaosium blog, February of last year.

It's a great story and I was extremely amused to read it. But my amusement may not have been the same as your amusement, because I was comparing it to the story as Greg had told it to me, back when I worked at Chaosium!

Greg was a storyteller supreme. The best. I can see why he might have been more circumspect in the codex than he was with me. I'm not certain which version shades more towards truth. That doesn't really matter to the story . . .

When Greg told the tale, we weren't talking about Dungeons & Dragons. We were talking about White Bear & Red Moon, specifically about how Greg had tried to work out a publishing deal with various companies, shopping it around. I think it was after the first printing had sold out, he wondered if there was a way to publish the boardgame with a bigger company.

And he went to see Gary Gygax at TSR. As Greg told the story, Gygax was doing well at that time, he received Greg in a nice office. But it did not go well for Greg and WB&RM. Early in the conversation, Greg told Gygax that he thought he had owned one of the earliest copies of D&D . . . and here we diverge!

The way Greg told it, most of the copies of D&D had been stuck at the printer because the bill hadn't been paid yet. They weren't releasing the games to Gygax. And Greg's brother-in-law worked at the printer, or had business there, and saw the game, and thought it looked like something that Greg would like. One way or another he got a copy and sent it to Greg at a time when Gygax was being prevented from getting copies out to anyone else.

Maybe Gygax was amused later, but according to this telling, he wasn't happy with Greg at that moment. The attempt to publish WB&RM through the resurgent TSR went nowhere, and in this telling, Greg turned the story into a sort of fable about waiting until after the deal is done to tell funny stories that will only be funny to you.

(Greg the storyteller, again painted by Stefano Gaudiano for King of Dragon Pass)

2nd Book First: The Two Towers

the original tome, battered but intact

As a kid, I read what I could find. Thanks to the vagaries of bookstores and the limitations of libraries, there were at least four great fantasy series that I entered via the second floor, book number two, sometimes without even knowing I'd missed the actual entrance.

Yes, this is a story about olden days. 

The Lord of the Rings was my first missed doorway. My mother had the full unlicensed Ace trilogy. She wouldn't let me read it when I was in second grade, living in Heidelberg Germany, but that probably wouldn't have stopped me for long, except that our teen babysitter smoked cigarettes in our apartment and borrowed The Fellowship of the Ring. Cigarettes? Forgiven.  The Fellowship? Gone with a moving van when the girl's family got shipped off-base a couple months later.

Mom refused to buy a new copy of the book. I suspect that her arguments--the former babysitter's ongoing obligation to return the copy, and money--were screens for the fact that she just didn't want me reading Tolkien as a second or third grader. But it's also possible that we couldn't find a copy. We were in Germany, the Ace books were being outed as unapproved, and we certainly never shopped anywhere that had them for sale. About a year later Mom tried to get me to read The Hobbit, but that wasn't gonna happen, that book was for kids. Said me. 

So in fourth grade, still in Germany, I read The Two Towers. For me, the Lord of the Rings didn't start with Bilbo's 100th birthday party, hooded riders in the Shire, and hapless hobbits having to be rescued from trees and barrow wights. It started with three kickass warriors--an elf, a dwarf, and a ranger--chasing orcs across an endless plain. The orcs' hobbit victims felt less hapless, given that they (spoiler alert) eventually figured out how to cut themselves loose and run away. Riders of Rohan? Keeping score at Helm's Deep! Onward! There are people who dislike The Two Towers because it's a sequence of military encounters and landscapes, punctuated by ents. For me, growing up on Army bases, trying to figure out ways to play with my Airfix Roman and barbarian armies, a book of fantasy military encounters was exactly what I was looking for. I reread The Two Towers as soon as I finished the first pass, since the Frodo stuff at the start of Return of the King made me aware I didn't actually understand what was going on. 

We returned to the USA before I entered fifth grade. Our first week back, Mom went shopping at a big American bookstore and returned with a present: Ballantine's The Fellowship of the Ring. She cared that it was an authorized edition. The picture of the author on the back revealed that Tolkien smoked a pipe like my dad. We were home.

Kussen Verboten

 

Ruby Beach is one of the most beautiful beaches in Washington. This panorama shot is from 2017, catching a moment when Lisa, our dog Roo, and my cousin and her husband were the only people in the panorama.

We saw amusing evidence of Ruby Beach’s international appeal on this trip. We just missed the people who scratched this message into the sand, so we can’t be 100% sure they were German.

But we were positive of the language spoken by the next three people to arrive. Three French folks showed up as we were admiring the no-kissing sign and immediately started scratching a response in the sand to the south.

I’m still bummed we didn’t stick around to read the French response, but we were running late and maybe a little cold and we kept walking.

Appropriate French responses accepted here!

13 Years of Color!

It's time to pull on this blog's starter cord. For the fun of it and because a couple people were asking, I'm restarting by rerunning the first blog post I made on LiveJournal, back in 2008. Yes, my thirteenth anniversary of color is tomorrow. I'm grateful every day.

Untitled, by Eric Eschenbach

    Until 2006 I was colorblind. Show me a sunset and I saw shades of green. Hand me a pink shirt and I was sure it was grey. Before my first date with Lisa, my future wife, I gave her my address and described my house as the gray house on the corner. The only gray house on a corner anywhere in the neighborhood belonged to the local drug dealers, which she realized when they opened the door and called inside to see if there was a ‘Rob’ sprawled somewhere in the haze. Lisa said “Uh, sorry, I’ve got the wrong house,” backed up and found me in the blue house on the corner.

    On February 8, 2006, I sat at home typing Dreamblade notes on my laptop computer while Lisa went to hear a National Geographic lecture with her mom. As usual, I had Windows Media Player humming along playing music. I liked having the Alchemy visualizer twirling colors around at the side of the screen while I worked. Suddenly the screen flashed orangecrimsonpinkpurplescarletblueviolet. I’d always thought of the program as a mix of flashing yellows and blues and some greens. Had the visualizer changed? No, it was the same program I always used. But these were actual colors! I sat and watched the full spectrum twisting for almost an hour.

    I knew that I had a conclusive color vision test hanging on the wall across the living room from me. The day before I’d had my nose pressed to a landscape painting by Lisa’s brother, trying to see the pink in the sky that she said was her favorite part. I hadn’t been able to see anything except some dark streaks. I pointed to them and said, “Is this the pink?” but Lisa just shook her head, saying that I might as well not try.

    When I dared to set the computer aside and approach the landscape, I was ecstatic to find that the sky wasn’t just a blue and gray wash. There was the pink. And those dark streaks I’d noticed the day before? They were beautiful orange.

    Lisa came home and found me sitting in a pile of all our art and photo books, spread out on the floor, looking at colors and details I’d never seen. I was bawling. I was overwhelmed by the reality that this was how everyone else saw the world all the time. Lisa had to talk me into going to sleep, I was worried that I was going to wake up and it would all be gone.

    Two [[13!]] years later, I still have color vision. I don’t have a medically verified explanation for how I regained colors, but with a prompt from a neurologist friend of Lee Moyer’s, I have put together a good guess. No one ever accused me of being colorblind until I was in fourth grade. I don’t remember having any trouble recognizing colors when I was younger and I didn’t have any trouble recognizing them when my color vision came back. But when I was in third grade I ran into a metal pole at a full downhill sprint. It was a serious head injury and it left me with symptoms that bothered me into my thirties. Those symptoms have all gradually gotten better or gone away. My guess is that I also lost the world’s colors to that metal pole.

    After decades, something has reconnected. My mind has agreed to show me colors again.

    I’m happy.

The Subject Will be Revealed

Back in the 90s, when Lisa and I moved to the Bay Area so I could work at Chaosium, I got some fun postcards from a non-gamer friend in the Pacific Northwest who had gotten involved in a roleplaying experience he knew I would want to hear about. Every week for about a year, the players were creating poetry and art from the perspective of their characters. They did more worldbuilding than playing, when they played it sounded like a mix of roleplaying and live-action roleplaying. The game was full of secrets and spies and conspiracies. I asked for more info.

They were on an island. There were some really screwed up people running the island. Martial arts. Aliens, probably. Definitely magic.

Wait, wait, I said: are you playing Over the Edge? My friend wasn’t sure.

Is the island called Al Amarja? Yes!

I loved that this Over the Edge GM had made the game’s publishing history invisible to the players. They were having an experience, on an island named Al Amarja, and it was so over-the-edge that the game book stayed hidden.

I told my friend that I knew the guy who’d written the game, and that I’d introduce them someday. Years later, I did.

Vault forward another few years and Jonathan has revised Over the Edge. We playtested for a few months in my gaming garage, playing multiple mini-campaigns as Jonathan streamlined the system and shaped new storytelling tricks for the off the edge/grid campaigns of the 2020s.

The Kickstarter runs for the next three weeks. Visit soon. 

Top Level Security

The Frame: I heard the story I’m about to relate as it was happening, from people inside the building speaking off-the-record to an outsider. I wasn’t in a position to find out more at the time, and I liked the Story-Of-It-All so much that I haven’t tried to follow up and find out what, if anything, people eventually learned about how this happened! Maybe by posting this I’ll discover the Truth, but I admit I’m pretty happy with the mystery . . . .

The Story: A couple years ago, the Redmond Microsoft campus had an unprecedented security problem. I say unprecedented, but technically that may not be true if you watched Seinfeld.

As part of the deal that brought Skype to these shores, Skype employees were provided with breakfast on the Microsoft campus. It was part of the contract. Many people took advantage of the perk.

And then the Skype-breakfast muffin tops started disappearing. Not every day, but often, the tops of the muffins were gone. Eaten? Disappeared, in any case. No one came forward to take the credit. The muffin-topping continued. Take that, Skype!

So people started taking steps, including setting up cameras. That didn’t work. Which started seeming weird. I’m not sure how seriously anyone was worried about it, but there were impromptu patrols by semi-concerned employees.

The last I heard, a patrol thought they had found a woman acting suspiciously in one of the kitchens, but when she realized they were fairly crap vigilantes, she just walked away and no one figured out who she was. 

We Shadows have Offended

The massive opening of The Yellow King Kickstarter project has caused me to reconsider an event that took place on June 21^st, just prior to the launch of Robin D. Laws' new GUMSHOE game.

I was talking with the London half of the Pelgrane Press publishing team on Skype. Behind Simon, a woman in a summer skirt dithered in the doorway, obviously wanting to talk with him but not wanting to interrupt as he talked into his headset. She came back a couple minutes later and knocked to get his attention.

Simon got up and talked with her a bit at the door, too far from the microphone for me to hear. He closed the door and said, “They’re doing a performance of Midsummer Night’s Dream in the hallway and they’re worried that with the door open, people will think I’m part of the play.”

I said, “That’s the most perfectly English thing I can imagine."

A couple days later, with The Yellow King surfacing, I’m not sure what I saw. People putting on A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the hallway? This is normal now?

Roman Aqueducts, Hell's Bells

Last month Lisa and I and the rest of her family took an amazing vacation through Barcelona and southern France. It was the first non-working vacation I've taken in a dozen years and there were so many splendid moments that attending an actual Barcelona game (vs. Almeria, league minnows) fell out of the top seven joys of the trip. I'll write some of those moments up eventually.

For now, a moment that came a few days after the Pont du Gard photo above was taken.

We were staying at a hotel inside the old walled city of Carcassonne. For ironic effect, Lisa had brought our copy of Carcassonne along in the luggage, but there were better things to do than play boardgames in the hotel, so the box ended up serving as a postcard'n'art storage unit!

Past midnight, Lisa and I decided to go for a walk all around the old city's inner walls, sometimes climbing up on the outer parapets where the floodlights showed the route. The walk alternated between long periods of silence and isolation dotted with bizarre moments of frenetic activity. Once a celebrating rugby team roared past on their own top-speed circuit of the walls. Later a small forest of birds chirped at full volume, fooled as intense spotlights aimed at the inner wall simulated morning.

Before the rugby team and the birds, in the quiet section when it seemed we were alone, we rounded a corner tower and stepped onto the longest straightaway. There was no one else in sight, only bats flitting overhead, weaving out of the towers under the moon. And then power chords started up in the distance. Da Da Da da-da-da Duh Duh DUH. Repeat. I knew the tune. Couldn't place it for another few steps. We were still hundreds of yards from the source but omg it was Hell's Bells, AC-DC.

Another few dozen steps and it was clear it was a live band. Deep bass thumping down from up high on the walls. Two-thirds of the way down the long straightaway we passed beneath the band's hole in the fortifications. Thirty-five yards up the thick inner wall of Carcassonne, blue and green light swirled out of an arrow-slit, accompanied by the best attempts of a French rock'n'roll band to scream Aussie lyrics.

A couple hundred more steps and we'd rounded the final tower of the straightaway and were back in the muted world of midnight between the walls.

customer identification

A couple days before Dragonmeet in December, I enjoyed a ramble around the British Museum. I didn't have much time but I still found myself in the wonderful little museum bookstore that's off to the side of the exhibits, down a corridor long enough to give the impression that there must be interesting things happening on either side of the walls.

The only other people in the shop were two attractive young women wearing blazers that were associated with the museum somehow and a sharply dressed twenty-something guy working behind the counter. He had an Italian accent and as I rummaged through Osprey books and read the first few pages of a Norse history called The Hammer and the Cross, he told the two women the story of the coolest thing that had happened to him in the store recently.

A distinguished older man with a beard had spent a good deal of time looking through the books. He'd brought his purchases forward, then paid with a credit card that read UMBERTO ECO.

The bookstore clerk found himself blurting "Are you Umberto Eco?"

"Only metaphorically," he said, leaving no doubt.

The Face in the Frost, the gang from the tube

I finally read John Bellairs' The Face in the Frost last week after owning and ignoring the book for decades. Why did it take me so long? Maybe glancing at the book's cartoons as a youth turned me off for no good reason other than being tired of reading about friars and monks. Not much of a reason, but that could have been it, and when you have a book forever it's easy to forget that you could get around to reading it instead of finding something new.

John Rateliff reminded me of the book's existence a couple years ago when we were talking about the history of fantasy for the permanent Fantasy exhibit at the EMP. Then a couple weeks ago, reading John's review of an Ursula Le Guin talk he attended in Seattle, I was reminded of The Face in the Frost again, a connection that made sense when I pulled the book out of a downstairs shelf and found Le Guin's admiring quote on the cover.

The Face in the Frost reads quickly and still feels substantial. The story has held up remarkably well for a fantasy written in the 60s. It's quirky, it's charming, it's dead-scary serious. I liked it a lot.

As I was reading the book last weekend, pressed to the glass of a door on Seattle's light rail train, there was a moment when reality and The Face in the Frost darted past each other. In the book there's a confrontation with a shouting wizard during a crossover between worlds of fantasy and the world we know as real. On the Seattle light rail a heavyset Filipino man burst out of his seat and shouted down an older African American man who had been talking quietly to someone else in a seat a couple rows back. "Hey! F*** you man! I'm a member of the Sons of Anarchy! I'm sick of people disrespecting us!"

"Alright, man, alright," said the older guy, slipping out of his seat and out the train's door, which had luckily just opened at a stop in a south Seattle tunnel.

I took a few seconds to watch as the ranting gang-man stalked back to his seat. I turned back to the war of magic in my book. Then I tried to connect the dots in the real world scene I'd just half-witnessed. I thought the Sons of Anarchy was a TV show about a fictitious biker gang? Who, if anything, really piss off the Hell's Angels? So this would have made a lot more sense if he had been yelling that he was a Hell's Angel. Which he didn't. Which means this guy a few seats down identifies himself as a member of a television biker gang? Oh. He's really crazy.

Or have the Sons of Anarchy crawled out of the tube and turned into a real gang in Seattle? Which is also crazy, but it's socio-cultural crazy involving the blurred line between tv-shows and and tv-reality-shows instead of just personal batshit crazy. No answers, unless I wanted to move up a few rows and ask the Son of Anarchy about his gang affiliation. So I went back to my fantasy book about blurring lines across malleable realities.

Today's Fortunes

The quotes and dialogue that follow are from the last couple weeks, alternating between quotes from 13th Age game sessions and our section of the real world, far from the game table.

The photo above is apparently also from the real world, since it's what I found on the path from my house to my garage-studio this morning, dropped more or less where birds discard the pits after they've feasted on our plum trees.

Special Teams
It's time for CSI: Cleric Sorcerer Investigations.
      How long have you been waiting to say that?
A little while. Not long.
      Except with your autistic bard it's more like the Special Buses Unit.
The big bus . . . is just too much freedom for me.

Movement Fumble
I stepped on a dying elephant seal. And lived.

Alignment
I don't really know what position is correct.
      Snake on top.
What?
      Sssssssssssixty-nine.

1-point background
Yes, it's true. I worked as a phone sex operator for four weeks and didn't realize I was a phone sex operator. They always said just be welcoming and friendly to the people who would call in and it was called welcome wagon so I just talked with people. They called back!

Charity
Oh this is sad. Zombie dad just wanted the chance to take little Crispin fishing.
      Don't worry. It's the Make a Lich foundation for dead children.
'It's Never Too Late.'

Truth
What good is a throne if you don't take it by force?

Royal Family
Wait a minute. How does this work? Do we ALL get to be king?
      Yes. One at a time. For a very short time.
I volunteer to be the last in the succession. Just saying I'm OK with that.

Cat Stuck in Tree for One Night, but Not Two Nights (from a friend's email)
I got out my climbing harness, a helmet, and a back pack.  Up I went.....up and up until I was about 8 feet from the cat.  The tree was swaying and getting thinner and thinner.  It was starting to get dark.  I strapped myself to the tree and my presence gave the cat the encouragement to lower himself to me.  Now i am about 40 or 50 feet off the ground with a wet, scared cat clawed to the tree and it needs to get into the back pack, which is still on my back (This just maybe be the same backpack that saved us from the killer grouse!).   I am not sure how it all happened, but within about 10 minutes I was at the bottom of the tree with the cat in the bag.

Norman Dee-Dee-Dum

This is a picture of Lisa’s bike still showing her race tag from the triathalon she was in last summer. You’ll note the wonderful number. She normally wouldn't keep a race number around but she kept this one because really, how could she get rid of 1066?

A few weeks ago we were talking with a friend who had no idea why the number 1066 would matter. We started explaining the Norman Invasion.

“Oh man,” he said, “enough, I learned everything I wanted to know about Normandy from Saving Private Ryan.”

Manos: the Hands of the Internet

Bruce Baugh introduced me to the Internet. We were both living in Portland in the late 80s and very early 90s. I remember Bruce showing me that his computer was dialing up a system that let it link to other computers all around the world. I’d sort of vaguely known that something like this was possible but had left it to others. Bruce was one of those others. For reasons that might have had something to do with what was working at the moment, Bruce demonstrated his computer’s worldwide connectivity by finding out what the weather was like in South Africa. At that second. Well, actually it took a minute or two and Bruce commented on the computers his query was routing through. I was impressed. I didn't know what to make of it, not really, but I was impressed. And within a few months I had an AoL account and was participating in the gaming forums, which in combination with contacts made through pre-internet Alarums & Excursions surely led me to work professionally in gaming.

I didn't have a television back then (or since . . .). So Bruce was also the man to introduce my girlfriend Lisa and me to Mystery Science Theater 3000. The first episode Lisa watched with us was the epically brain-damaging episode bludgeoning through the movie Manos: the Hands of Fate. If you aren't familiar with this film I’m not going to be the one guilty of linking to it.

When people joke about the early days of the Internet—it’s a series of tubes—I flick past the subject’s personal association with a murderous dwarf, a high priest’s orange robes that flare out into giant hands, and slap-wrestling semi-nude female cultists.

About half-right, in other words. 

Bruce. Thanks for everything. 

Three Strikes Lightning

Cleaning my desk I uncovered an envelope with two stories scrawled on its back, stories I heard in two of the rare moments I wasn't carrying a notebook.

The top of the envelope is a list of curious but ultimately non-remarkable attributes pertaining to a friend's cousins. They add up to a compelling clan in a Hillfolk game set on the 7 hills of Seattle.

But the bottom of the envelope is where things get interesting. We were hiking a ridge trail near Hurricane Ridge with ominous clouds in the distance. The conversation turned to lightning strikes and the woman passing us on the trail entered the conversation.

     "My grandfather got hit by lightning three times."
     "What? Three times?" I said. "Um, clearly he survived at least..."
     
Yes, he had survived all three lightning strikes. I believe she told me that he was still alive but not up to hiking any more, so they'd come up the Ridge without him.

Of course I wanted the details so the full story came out in about ninety seconds while she waited for the rest of her family to catch up.

Strike #1 was when her grandfather was in school. He was sitting at a desk just looking out the window and lightning came through the window and blasted him out of his chair. Didn't hurt him much though.

Strike #2 was worse. He was in the Air Force during WWII and he and two friends wanted to get back to the barracks quickly from the mess hall. Reconstructing my notes, the situation was complicated by the fact that the grandfather had suffered some sort of leg injury, he was on crutches. His two friends decided to rig up some carrying arrangement and then instead of going the long way around they cut through a drainage culvert. And that's where the lightning hit them and both his friends who were carrying him died.

Strike #3 came when his B-17 was hit. I didn't write down whether he was a pilot or a bombardier or a navigator or a gunner, but I did write down that the hit when he was in the B-17 left him blind for 6 months. But he recovered and ended up flying 25 missions for the USAF and 27 more for the RAF maybe not in that order.

     "Wow. OK. Thank you so much for that story."

     There was no sign of thunder in the clouds but if I was him I'd avoid hiking Hurricane Ridge even if my knees could handle it.

2 Serendipities

1
Last week my aunt and cousin visited from Wisconsin.
They drove through Oregon and visited my mother's grave in Springfield.
They ran and laughed and dodged through the cemetery, scattering in four directions every thirty seconds
because all the sprinklers were on and they were big powerful sprinklers, not the kind you want to get blasted by the whole hit.
Eventually the older generation accepted its fate and stood stoic in the spray, but the younger generation kept dodging.
A wonderful visit to my mom's grave.
I can't decide, now, if Mom would have kept dodging the water or taken the hit, if she'd been there.
When she had her mobility she liked a challenge.
But she was always the first person to say "It's only water," and accept the rain or a splashing.

2
Our friend Steve has organized or run the Cereal Thrillers breakfast cereal bar at Burning Man for years.
We helped the first year since it had somehow turned out to be my idea, but haven't been back.
This was the best year ever for Cereal Thrillers.
There are dozens of stories from this year I don't know yet, but the one I heard came from Dreamblade minis.
Every other year I've supplied a case or two of Dreamblade minis (and early on, some D&D minis as well) to be inserted in the cereal boxes as prizes. Shake a cereal box, get a freaky miniature from humanity's dreamscape, the cereal barista gets to tell a little story about the newly discovered creature.
When I started running out of minis, my olde Dreamblade co-creator Jonathan helped with a case or three.
But this year I was out. No more Dreamblade minis to give away as prizes.
Then Steve found a full case of Dreamblade sitting on the bar at Burning Man and thought it was something Jonathan had brought.
No. It was a gift from a man sitting and eating his cereal.
He had loved getting the Dreamblade minis in his cereal two other years, so this year he decided to bring a case of his own to contribute to the cereal bar.
So the tradition continues.

At the Sign of the Happy Harpy

We had an amazing family vacation for two weeks just as I was turning over the 2^nd playtest draft of 13^th Age. We spent two weeks in Turkey, starting with four days in the carved rock of Cappadocia, where I typed the new echo spell notes for the wizard listening to the night call of the muezzin bouncing off a fortress rock named the Castle of Uchisar. Then we drove south and west along the coast, hiking in ruins and swimming in the Mediterranean before catching aflight to Istanbul for a final four days of museums and bazaars.

In Kalkan, we stayed in a sweet hotel that we thought was named the Harpy Hotel. But half its logos and signs said the Happy Hotel. Which was it? Well it started as the Harpy Hotel. As witnessed by the Harpy Stele at the nearby ruins of Xanthos, the local harpies were conceived as benevolent spirits, winged women who took the souls of dead children to heaven. Huh. Dead children, well, I guess that’s the human condition. Heaven is good, at least.

But every week a hotel guest mentioned that as far as they knew, harpies were monsters. Eventually the hotel acknowledged its PR error. The owner’s name includes a Turkish word for happy, so the new name is a double-entendre that most guests won’t realize.  

As we were checking out I decided to take one last look at email since it seemed likely we wouldn’t have access that night. I had a surprise present, the first 13^th Age monster tile I’d seen from the Diabolist, sent over by Lee Moyer who’d finished the tile from Aaron McConnell’s rough pencils. And yeah, the moment we were checking out from the Happy/Harpy Hotel, Lee sent over the harpy.

I had my laptop in hand as we checked out and showed the art to the concierge, saying “You know all those people who turned the harpy into a monster and made you change the name of your hotel? I make games. I’m part of your problem.”

For those of you reading this entry for information on 13^th Age instead of keeping up with my synchronicity highway vacations, here’s the scoop on our monster tiles. Preparing the art order, I mulled over the fact that our monster selection for the 13^th Age book deliberately sticks close to d20 norms. Therefore most of our monsters have been extremely well-illustrated multiple times. And recently. What were we going to add? Did our audience really need another monster-format illustration of a gnoll? An otyugh, even? There had to be a more interesting approach. So I turned to the strengths of our setting: what if the monsters could be represented by control glyphs created by the Archmage? That way the monster illustrations would be different and say something useful about the world. Maybe I’d put together a card game using the glyphs. Maybe the game would correspond to a game played by wizards. 

I talked the idea over with Lee Moyer. Mr. Value-Added, I call him. Once Lee began experimenting with the glyphs, he suggested that we rank the monsters with icons they might be associated with instead of giving the Archmage all the credit. Of course! Each monster or monster type appears on a form of tile, stone, gem or plaque associated with one of the icons. The Diabolist’s tiles are all shaped like the harpy tile, a shape you'll recognize from the icon's illustration. On the Diabolist’s other tiles, instead of a harpy you’ll get a hezrou or dretch or balor. But the Elf Queen’s tiles look nothing like the Diabolist’s tiles, ditto for the High Druid and each of the other icons associated with a few of the monsters.

Lee nailed this project. We’ll share more monster tiles soon!

Three Evil Overlords

Yesterday morning I decided to take advantage of the buy-15-and-you-finally-get-1-free card I had from Starbucks. I rolled on down the hill to the drive-through, made the order, pulled up to the window and reached for the postcard where I'd thrown it in the passenger seat. "That's odd," I thought. "There's a 13th Age postcard in here. I thought I only had one of those.  Great! It must have fallen out of Jonathan's stuff and Lisa found it when she cleaned the car." The card was something we put together for Jonathan when he was on panels at Norwescon. The wonderful art by Aaron McConnell and Lee Moyer shows two of our evil icons, the Diabolist and the Lich King.
   Beat. Beat. Beat.
   "So where's my Starbucks card?"
   Beat.
   "Oh."
   Yeah, I was a few sips of caffeine shy of firing on all neurons and I'd grabbed the wrong treasured postcard from the special spot behind the Fokker DR-1 triplane model on my desk.
   So as I floundered for my wallet to pay for coffee with a Starbucks Gold card instead of a postcard, I told the barista I'd grabbed the wrong card.
   "Well that looks really cool! What is it?"
   Turned out I could  *almost* have traded the 13th Age postcard for coffee. The barista and a friend working beside him play a lot of tabletop games, mostly Pathfinder and Warhammer. Next time I'll find out which Warhammer armies they favor.

"If I could stick a pen in my heart...

…and spill it all over the Sage...”

You are watching the Fellowship of the Ring movie. The Fellowship has arrived at Rivendell. It is time for the Council of Elrond. Elrond begins to relate the history of the Ring.

While Elrond speaks, Mick Jagger climbs onto the council table. Mick is dressed something like an evil elven kabuki dancer. Mick Jagger is Sauron.  

As Elrond speaks, Jagger mimes the rise of Sauron, the forging of the rings, and the gyrations of Elendil. Those about the table pay Jagger no mind. He is kabuki, invisible except to us.

This moment of alternate cinematic history could have come to pass if Tolkien hadn’t been alive to read John Boorman’s script for the Fellowship of the Ring. Tolkien slashed the script up with red pen. Slain before reaching maturity, the script fell and came to lodge in the Tolkien collection at Marquette University.

Which is where Seattle’s Tolkien scholar, John D. Rateliff, read the script and lived to tell the story. I wouldn’t know about the Boorman script if John hadn’t told me over a Tolkien-anecdote-stuffed-lunch. Boorman’s Excalibur was one of my favorite movies as a teenager. I think some of the images that he wanted to use in Middle-Earth found a home in the story of Arthur.

But kabuki Sauron? And the entire Fellowship prancing and strutting their stuff to try and seduce Galadriel only for her to choose Frodo as bedmate? Too close to Bored of the Rings for comfort. This is epic 70’s pipeweed material.

John’s blog over at http://sacnoths.blogspot.com/  talks Tolkien in depth and breadth. I poked around on the web after hearing John’s story and found it interesting that fans on some Tolkien discussion sites mentioned just how terrible they would have felt if something like the Boorman movie had been filmed first. But now that Jackson made the films that people pretty much agree got LotR right, some people said that they would be curious to see a less faithful adaptation, an artistic treatment that brought something new and unexpected to the story.