Category Archives: Nerdgasm

I’m a science fiction, fantasy, and horror nerd; I like books, movies, games, and conventions. These are entries where I talk about my nerdy interests.

Gaming and Writing

Polyhedral Dice
Many-sided dice for funsies

Another topic suggested by Brian C. E. Buhl! Hello again, Brian!


First of all, a big welcome to the readers who came here from the Just Keep Writing podcast newsletter! And a huge thanks to the hosts of Just Keep Writing for linking to my blog! This podcast, in case you aren’t aware, is a great one for writers, with a diverse set of hosts and a wide array of topics. A few months ago, they did a read-along of Charlie Jane Anders’s wonderful Never Say You Can’t Survive; currently, they are reading along in Matt Bell’s Refuse to be Done.

You may have noticed that I don’t necessarily blog about writing every single day. Yesterday’s post on my favorite sandwich wasn’t about writing. I’ll do better at finding ways to bring writing into the day’s topic.

In today’s post, I use a lot of terms familiar to old-timey gamers, like Player Character and Non-Player Character, that may not be familiar to non-gamers. If you find yourself faced with one of these terms and want to know what it means, just ask me here or on Facebook, and I’ll do my best to enlighten you.


Gaming, when I was in high school and college all those years ago, meant primarily table-top role-playing games, such as Twilight: 2000Call of CthulhuBoot Hill, and, of course, the giant in the playground, Dungeons and Dragons. If you were a gamer, you probably played one of these, or maybe you played a Steve Jackson card game like Car Wars. These days, if you’re a gamer, you probably play video games, either on your PC or on your console of choice.

I use the first definition. I’m an old-time gamer. I started playing Dungeons and Dragons in my junior year of high school, occasionally DMing a game, occasionally playing, but none of us really knew what we were doing. I really got into it in 1986 in my first year of college, with a couple of friends who were also heavy duty gamers. I started my first campaign in 1987, and ran it for many years; I’ve run several campaigns in Dungeons and Dragons, and later Pathfinder, since. Most of them were in the same campaign setting which I detailed in meticulous notes that I still have a thick black binder. My current game is set in the 18th century Caribbean and features pirates.

So, that’s the perspective I think of when I think of gaming and writing.

I know that lots of writers credit role-playing games (RPGs, or TTRPGs — Table Top Role-Playing Games) with learning the craft of writing. Playing a character in someone’s campaign can give you deep insight into that character and how characters in general are created and how they work, while running a campaign can give you the same insight (since you’re probably playing a bunch of NPCs —Non-Player Characters), as well as a deep dive into worldbuilding and story generation, especially if you run a homebrew campaign instead of a pre-made module.

For me, though, things were a little different.

My DMing style is what like to call “Reactionary Improvisational”, which means that I pretty much make up the storyline and the ongoing world in reaction to what the players do during the game and the questions they ask. I may create a puzzle without a solution, for example, and simply trust when I’m running the game that there would be fix or six smart players who would come up with a solution that I think works. Or, as my friend Dezzy once put it, I might have an orc in a battle with a halberd, and when questioned about it I would not only give a detailed and interesting answer, but I would by the next session have a detailed culture built for the orcs that includes their using their halberds as weapons of honor in certain types of battle.

It’s all improvisational, in other words. I mean, I learned much about worldbuilding, and happily created worlds and scenarios for games of all sorts. Did I learn about plotting and character? That’s a difficult question for me to answer, since everything I’ve ever done was pretty much improvisational. My games were led, plotwise, primarily by player actions, instead of having the plot guide the characters (but never forcing them onto a particular path, which is anathema to DMs). Thus, in my stories and novels, I tended, for a long time, to have passive characters who reacted to events around them rather than initiate them. I’ve definitely gotten better at this since it’s been pointed out to me by members of various writers’ groups and other readers and editors, but it’s something I still struggle with.

This is not to say that I regret in any way all that time I spent playing TTRPGs. I have friends I’ve known since high school that I wouldn’t have made without gaming, and I know that most people who played my games had a grand time (you can’t please everyone of course, and some people didn’t like them, which was always fine with me). And, of course, I have plenty of dear friends of over twenty years that I bonded with over our love of Dungeons and Dragons1, and I regret none of that. It’s also been pointed out to me that some of the puzzles I created for my sessions were deeply philosophical or moral ones, and the players really enjoyed solving them and learning from them.

So. Worldbuilding, yes. I learned a lot about that from my years playing TTRPGs. Characters with agency and plotting? Probably not so much.


Today I finished reading Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death, and Art, by Rebecca Wragg Sykes. I’ve always had a fondness for our Neanderthal cousins, whose DNA many of us share, and what the world was like for them. At many points it a dry read, and somewhat slow, but I recommend it highly if you’re at all interested in that sort of thing.

Con Report: BayCon 2023!

BayCon 2023
BayCon 2023!

 

So, last weekend I went to BayCon in Santa Clara. It was the first time I’ve been to a con by myself since TimeCon ’87; since then I’ve been with friends or with Jennifer. I was expecting to feel kind of lonely and sad without Jennifer at the con with me, but I didn’t. I made new friends, I met old friends, and I met other writers (including old friends who are writers), and in general I had a blast.

Cover of The Repossessed Ghost
The Repossessed Ghost by Brian C. E. Buhl

My good friend Brian C. E. Buhl launched his debut novel, The Repossessed Ghost, and I snagged a limited edition signed copy. I also met some other writers, but I already had copies of their books, and since I hadn’t brought their books with me, I didn’t get any signed. Ah well.

There was also gaming at the con, but I didn’t avail myself of any games since I had simply too many panels to attend or people to meet and have meals with. One of the people I met with on Saturday morning was a new agent. Mind you, I don’t have any projects ready to pitch to an agent (the novel And the Devil Will Drag You Under isn’t close enough to ready), but it was a good conversation nonetheless. They invited me to lunch, which I’m told is a good sign, but I needed to get coffee and head to Brian’s reading.

I went to panels on AI in writing and the arts, on panels about general topics in writing, and a panel that had five writers doing a dramatic reading of (of all things!) Modelland by Tyra Banks. I am not 100% convinced that this book really was written by model Tyra Banks; it might have been ghost-written, I suppose, or someone wrote this and slapped her name on it. Either way, it was really, really bad, and perfectly deserving of five writers doing a dramatic reading in exaggerated tones and voices.

I checked out the dealer room, where I bought a t-shirt, a pair of robot earrings for Jennifer, and way too many books. A pair of books that caught my eye were From Girl to Goddess: The Heroine’s Journey through Myth and Legend, by Valerie Estelle Frankel, which outlines a very different version of the Heroine’s Journey than Gail Carriger does in her book on the topic; and The Villain’s Journey: Descent and Return in Science Fiction and Fantasy, also by Valerie Estelle Frankel.  I also picked up a copy of Classic Monsters Unleashed, which looks right up my alley.

Each night I headed back to my hotel room after dinner and flumpfed onto my bed. I fully intended each evening to get back up after an hour or so, but it just didn’t happen, so I missed most of the evening events and parties, which makes me kind of sad. Maybe next year I will budget my energy better.

Dragon*Con is in a couple of months. I have friends who are going, but I am not, even though some of my favorite writers will be there. I haven’t been there since 2006, when attendance was something like 30,000; I understand it’s much larger now, and I’m likely to get overwhelmed. Also, I entertain this fantasy that the next time I go to Dragon*Con, it will be as a guest. It’ll happen.


As I mentioned, the last con I went to on my own was TimeCon ’87. I went to TimeCon ’86 (on my own) prior to that. I also attended TimeCon ’88 with a lot of friends. I’ve been to several cons with friends or with Jennifer since then. I’ve only been to one con that I didn’t have a lot of fun at and that con shall remain nameless for now.

For a bonus bit of blog, here are the program covers for two of the TimeCon events that I attended in 1986 and 1987. Anyone remember these?

Cover of the TimeCon 1986 Program Booklet
Cover of the TimeCon 1987 Program Booklet

Of Dice and Me

Polyhedral Dice
Many-sided dice for funsies

I’ve been playing Dungeons and Dragons since before it was cool.

No, seriously. Back in the 80s, I was a member of my high school’s unofficial D&D club — just me and a few friends rolling dice, checking the results against numbers on character sheets, trying to figure out what we were doing, all in the back room of the library. Given that this was a Catholic high school, it’s kind of surprising that we were allowed to do this. This was the mid-80s, as I mentioned, at the height of the Satanic Panic, when any sign of deviation from cultural norms was seen as part of a vast Satanic conspiracy to… something. D&D, as a thing that was done with nerds and which involved people telling each other stories that involved magic, was targeted in that moral panic, and plenty of kids around the country saw their dice and books go up in flames.1

I didn’t get seriously into D&D, though, until I hit college. There, I met a guy whom I shall refer to only as M—, who had been playing serious D&D for years. I decided I wanted to be Dungeon Master, and M— taught me how to create compelling stories and create immersive worlds. I enjoyed playing in his games, and he enjoyed playing in mine, even if we did have differences of opinions in how kobolds should be portrayed. We fantasized about being professional Dungeon Masters, but at the time, there was no such thing. You couldn’t make a living at such a hobby, unless you were named Dave Arneson or Gary Gygax or Steve Jackson.

During college, I spent a lot of time playing Dungeons and Dragons. M— and I would dedicate hours to plotting out the games we ran, and we would run campaigns for our friends that lasted months, some even years. Why, when I learned I could take a quarter off from school without a gap in financial aid, I did so, and spent a majority of that time playing D&D games and running them.

Man, I had a blast those days.

Cover of AD&D Second Edition Dungeon Master Guide
You know I went right out and bought this

When the Second Edition of D&D came out, I was thrilled. I bought all the books (including the Dungeon Master Guide, aka, the DMG). I played more games. I ran more games. I had a core group of friends that I played with regularly. Even with M- left Davis, I stuck with that core group.

Over the years, friends came and went, my core group of players and DMs changed, but the games went on. I had girlfriends who were heavily into the game as well, and that certainly fed my passion, and girlfriends who weren’t very much into it.

D&D Second Edition Council of Wyrms Box Sex
Council of Wyrms. I so wanted to play this, but never got around to it.

That’s not to say I was averse to other role-playing games. For awhile, I ran a game of Vampire: The Masquerade and the interlinked games published by White Wolf Press (I honestly don’t know if they’re still around, and at the moment I’m too lazy to look them up). For three years, possibly more, I ran a Vampire Live Action Role Playing game (LARP), which consumed all my emotional, social, and creative energy.

When the 3rd edition of Dungeons and Dragons came out, I switched to that from second edition, then from 3rd to 3.5. But I never could get into 4th edition; to me, that edition minimized the role-playing aspect of the game, which was what had always thrilled me about it, and focused on the battle aspects. I’ve since heard that 4th edition really was good, but by then I had moved on to Pathfinder, a new RPG system that was, at first, essentially D&D version 3.75. Now, the 2nd edition of Pathfinder is out.

It’s been years since I’ve run a role-playing game2. The pandemic has put a pause on that aspect of my creative life.

Roll20 logo
Roll20. The future of gaming?

But now… Now I feel the old urge kicking in. A few months ago I started plotting out a new Pathfinder game, with (of course!) pirates. And since we’re still in a pandemic3 my six players and I are meeting virtually, through a Virtual Table Top (VTT) called Roll20. I’ve heard good things about this site, and while I’ve never GMed using it, I’ve played in a game that uses Fantasy Grounds, another VTT. So this will be an interesting experience, to say the least.

In all the years that I’ve run D&D campaigns, I’ve never once used a pre-created campaign setting; they’ve all been homebrew games with settings and mythologies and stories that I’ve created myself. I’m kind of proud of that. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with running a pre-created campaign, it’s just not my style.

Anyway. That’s a brief history of me and gaming. I’ve had so many creative joys, made so many great friendships through D&D and other role-playing games that it’s hard to imagine life without them. There was a time when I considered those days and months and years wasted, times when I thought I could have been writing instead, but fortunately saner heads prevailed and convinced me that none of that time was wasted.

So. How are you?

Living in a Post-Monstrous Age

I had a blast at FogCon, as I usually do. The panels I attended were all fascinating, the people were great, &c. I was a little miffed that the bio I wrote for myself on the website didn’t manage to make it into the printed program, but I’ve learned to live with small disappointments like that. I also enjoyed hanging out with other writers and talking craft and projects with them. That’s always worthwhile.

The panel I was on, “Cuddly Horrors from Outer Space”, went in a direction that I wasn’t expecting, and as a result I felt a bit out of my depth at times. I was far more prepared to discuss cosmic horrors and Lovecraftian critters and how making them cute is, in a sense, defying the nihilistic culture we live in, so when we veered into social commentary about Dracula and similar creatures of imagination, I was a bit surprised. And although I felt I didn’t have much to contribute to that particular part of the conversation, I enjoyed it.

The more I think about it, the more I think we live in a culture with more “defanged” monsters than actual scary ones: monsters which are cute and cuddly, rather than horrific and scary. It’s far easier to buy a plush Cthulhu than a monstrous statue of him, for example; and cartoon images of vampires and werewolves abound, to the point where they show up on Sesame Street as the Count and Stephanie Myers writes about glittering vampires playing baseball in the sun.

The “Disneyfication” of horrifying cultural tropes came up as well. Many of the folk and fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm were cautionary tales for children (and some were meant for adults), and some were just plain scary for the sake of being scary, but Disney transformed the original Snow White into Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. As a result, the original horrific element of that story is lost in a whirlwind of singing birdies. Of course, as time has gone on we’ve seen reimaginings of, say, the “Princess” trope, where the definition of a Disney princess has gone from the meek and helpless Snow White to the nearly (but not quite) feminist characters found in Frozen. I think more work needs to be done with these tropes, but I am heartened by what we’ve seen so far (yes, there are feminist retellings of these fairy tales but on the whole they’re meant for adults and not for children).

We also talked about humanizing monsters, making them sympathetic, and about exploring the human side of them. We see this in works such as Frankenstein, where in the novel the creature is meant to be sympathized with and Frankenstein himself is the weak and pathetic character who runs screaming from what he’s created and refusing to take responsibility for it. Seeing our own reflections in these monsters helps us, I think, reflect on our own humanity.

Of course, we also have shows such as Hannibal and Dexter, which invite the audience to see serial killers as sympathetic creatures in spite of their terrible crimes. This brought the conversation, in a roundabout way, to a discussion of our current political climate, in which we “normalize” monstrous people such as Nazis and fascists and find coverage of them in The New York Times, while the forces of good, such as the antifa movement and Black Lives Matter are rendered monstrous.

We talked also a wee bit about “humanizing” zombies, though I am pretty sure we agreed that the point of a zombie is that it is a creature that has lost all dredges of humanity entirely; and thus the moment you start to humanize them, make them sympathetic, then by definition they cease to be zombies. I can’t think of any exceptions to this off the top of my head. Even novels like Scott G. Browne’s Breathers, which is told from the point of view of the zombie, doesn’t really have any zombies in it.

I don’t know for sure. Am I moving the goalposts here, redefining what it means to be a zombie as I discuss the concept? There are plenty of iterations of the vampire motif, so why not so with zombies?

On the whole, then, I think we live in a post-monstrous age, where the supernatural creatures are no longer scary and the monstrous within isn’t examined anymore. While zombies might represent the faceless evils of racism and consumer culture, it’s still pretty easy to find plush zombies in the stores and online through ThinkGeek. Even Sadako and Samara, the yurei that feature so terrifyingly in The Grudge and The Ring so supernaturally, were recently pitted against each other in a more comedic film (in much the same vein as Freddy Vs. Jason).

Are there monstrous beings anymore? Can we be frightened by vampires and werewolves and Cthulhu anymore? Is it even possible? Or can we still find horror within, reflected by media overgeneralizations of cultural forces?

I’m going to have to think about this some more.

 

Ia! Ftaghn! Cosmic Nihilism and the Cuteification of Cthulhu

Cthulhu

Time was, Cthulhu, the monstrous entity pictured to the left, was the most frightening thing imaginable. Not only was he a giant creature at least a mile in height, who lay dead yet somehow still dreaming in his sunken city of R’yleh, somewhere in the Atlantic… Not only could his dreams affect people in the waking world and control cults and sects throughout millennia… Not only could he rise up at any time and scour the Earth and lay it to waste… No, he’s just a harbinger of even worse things to come! He’s a priest of the old gods, entities that make Cthulhu himself look like a child’s plaything.

Yes, Cthulhu was, at one time, the most frightening thing imaginable for certain groups of people.

On Sunday at WesterCon I attended a panel entitled “Cosmic Horror in the Mainstream Media”. It was an interesting panel which, as is pretty much always the case when the term “cosmic horror” comes up, focused primarily H. P. Lovecraft and his influence not just on the horror genre but on culture at large. There was some debate about what the term “cosmic horror” means, and the panel agreed that it had to do with giant monsters, sanity-blasting, ancient magics, hidden knowledge, and so on.

I disagree.

To me, “cosmic horror” means a genre of horror entertainment which emphasizes the fact that nothing benevolent exists out there. It’s about nihilism, about the nothingness in the universe that doesn’t care a single whit about human beings. Sure, Cthulhu might incite a few cultists with his dead/not-dead dream state, but, really, Cthulhu probably doesn’t give a damn about human beings at all, aside from how tasty we might be.

There’s more to it than that, of course. Cosmic horror, to me, also implies “deepness”: Lovecraft’s horrors (and Lovecraft is still, for all his flaws, the undisputed master of cosmic horror) exist in deep space, in deep time, and in deep consciousness. It’s the intentional seeking out of these entities and cosmic nothingness and universal indifference that drives the poor Lovecraftian characters mad. What happens when you see Hastur and Azathoth palling around with each other at the chaotic miasma which is at the center of the cosmos? You lose all your sanity, that’s what.

But I think this sort of horror goes beyond just the Lovecraftian. While one might be hard-pressed to find examples in popular, mainstream culture, it’s definitely out there. I offered up AMC’s The Walking Dead as an example of this sort of nihilistic horror; and while even I have to admit this is a bit of a stretch, the cosmic nothingness, the idea that nothing benevolent exists, is still part of that show’s milieu.

This cosmic nihilism, I think, has always been with us. Some of the Greek philosophers expounded on it, but I think the ball really got rolling with Nietzsche in the 19th century. It began to pick up speed during the First World War, picked up some more momentum with the Second, and, during the Cold War, it ran rampant all over everything. I grew up in the 80s, and I remember the existential horror of knowing that Reagan or Khruschev could at any moment decide that they’d had enough and would press that red button.

So what do you do when you’re faced with this kind of horror? You can embrace it and write more Lovecraftian-style horror, or even apply some of that nihilism to your own horror or science fiction (Alien is cosmic horror whether you like it or not). You can also ignore it.

But you can also “cuteify” it. Indeed, a whole industry has grown up around making plush Cthulhu toys, silly songs about the Mythos, and so on. This is aplushcthulhu way of coping with Cthulhu and the empty, uncaring cosmos that he represents.

I personally have nothing against a cute Cthulhu. Heck, we have a plush Cthluhu that we put atop our Christmas tree every year. Plush Cthulhu is fun, goofy, and a neat way of coming to terms with the nihilism existential horror that is our daily existence.

I do know, though, that the cuteification of Cthulhu causes some problems for some people. That’s fine and understandable. They don’t like their cosmic, nihilistic, existential horror messed with.

So, the takeaway here is that cuteifying a horror is one way of coping with it. In my own fiction, I often take a comedic approach to Hastur, Cthulhu, Azathoth, and others. Does this mean that I’m also participating in the cuteification of Cthulhu?

I’ll leave the answer to that as an exercise for the reader.

[A-Z] D is for D&D

DnDPH Yesterday’s post about kobolds made me think about my old Dungeons and Dragons days. I used to play a lot of D&D. I mean a lot. I played a little in junior high and high school, but I really became addicted in college. My friends and I would play for hours on end, several days a week. When I lived with my friend Matt, he and I spent hours and hours discussing the philosophy of gaming, its mechanics, its dynamics, and so on. I even took a quarter off from college in my sophomore year to play even more D&D (well, that and to refresh my brain that had become stale on too much… well, whatever it was I was studying at the time). In short, I really loved the game.

While immersed in D&D, I discovered that I really enjoyed being the Dungeon Master (DM), the guy who created the settings that the players would explore and interact with, and who would create the storylines and plots that drove each game session. During college — and for many years after college — D&D and other role-playing games — was where most of my creative energies were focused. I didn’t do a lot of writing in those days. I created wizards and dragons and empires and desperate moral dilemmas for my players to muddle through. There was a time when I considered those years “lost” in terms of my creativity, since so much time I spent playing and DMing I could have spent writing. However, it was recently pointed out to me that those creative energies were not wasted after all; I provided thoughtful and challenging entertainment for dozens of players over the years. When I moved on to running Live Action Role Playing games, the scope of the sessions expanded from five or six to several dozen at a time. Creating storylines and plots that so many people could get involved in and enjoy was challenging and plenty of fun, but exhausting.

These days, I don’t run nearly as many games as I used to. Back in the day, it wasn’t unusual for me to run two separate campaigns at the same time, one session per campaign per week (yes, that’s two or more gaming sessions of six to seven hours each per week). Nowadays, because all of us players have lives and jobs and families that demand attention, the gaming sessions are much more sparse, with weeks or even months between individual sessions.

I used to bemoan those years when my creativity could have gone into my writing. These days, though, I’m pretty grateful for those years. I made a lot of great friends. I learned a lot about storytelling. And so even though I’ve moved on from Dungeons and Dragons (I play Pathfinder now), I’ll always be grateful to that game and all its myriad editions, and to the time I spent with it, and to the people I shared it with.

Edited to add: I don’t know how I could have failed to mention this, but I actually met my wife during a Dungeons and Dragons game. So that’s pretty cool too.

Con Report: FogCon 2015

This past weekend, Jennifer and I went to FogCon, a small science fiction and fantasy convention based in Walnut Creek. It was fun — a LOT of fun — but now I am suffering the post-convention blues. Big time. Sigh. Maybe a quick blog post about the con will help me recover.

For one thing, the is probably the first convention in a long time where I haven’t participated in the writers’ workshop. For one thing, I just didn’t get to the application process on time; and, for another thing, I feel pretty sure that I’ve gotten as much out of these workshops as I am going to get.

The highlight of Friday (day one), was a reading which featured my friend Andrea Stewart, who read from her upcoming novel Loose Changeling (which will be available on April 1 from Amazon — check out the Changeling Wars website). Andrea is a fantastic writer. You should definitely check her out and buy her stories and books.

Saturday morning I attended a panel called “The Road”, which was essentially about road stories in science fiction and fantasy, and variations of the theme. It was interesting, and I came away with plenty of ideas for various stories. During the panel, I noted one fellow who had hearing aids that were wired to purple discs that were attached to the sides of his head. I was fascinated by these, but I didn’t have the chance at that panel to ask him about them.

I did meet up with him in the lobby later that day, though. We were headed in opposite directions, but I (probably quite rudely) stopped him and said, “I’m interested in those purple discs attached to the sides of your head. What are they?”

“Oh, they’re cochlear implants,” he said, which I found interesting because I always thought that cochlear implants were internal, not external. We chatted about this for a few minutes, then he looked down at my name badge.

“Wait,” he said. “Richard Crawford?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Richard SCOTT Crawford?”

I looked at him askance. How did this guy know me, and how did he know my middle name? Maybe he was a fan of my writing, though I didn’t think I had any fans outside my circle of friends.

But then he showed me his name badge, and I was delighted to see it was Aahz, a friend of mine from college (though I originally knew him as [REDACTED]). We hadn’t seen each other for almost thirty years, and meeting him at the con seemed pretty random. He introduced me to his primary partner, and we had a fun conversation, though we didn’t really get a chance to catch up with each other until Sunday at lunch. Turns out he’s learning how to be a square dance caller, something which I found really interesting; there’s a host of things to know about square dancing, as it turns out; in addition to the basic moves of square dancing I learned in 8th grade at Lawrence Academy, there are something like 100+ moves that each dancer must memorize and execute on the spot the moment it is called out. And the caller has to pay attention to the music, its beats and its melodies and nuances, and call out the most appropriate move. I hadn’t thought there was so much complexity to it.

Sunday afternoon (Jennifer wasn’t able to make it to the con on that day), I went and attended another reading, this time featuring Sunil Patel and Effie Seiberg. Both of them are very talented writers, and I really want to spend money and buy things that they’ve written.

All in all, a great con. I’m looking forward to going back next year.

Oh, and there were guests! Catherynne Valente and Kim Stanley Robinson. And the ghost of Joanna Russ. All of them worthy guests, although I wish I’d gotten a chance to meet up with Ms. Valente to have her sign my copy of The Girl who Circumnavigated Fairyland. It’s a great book. I recommend it.

Gaming! Huzzah!

Over the past weekend, I ran two Pathfinder games (Pathfinder, in case you’re not familiar with it, is basically version 3.75 of Dungeons and Dragons). I had such a blast that I’ve decided I want to do it again, but on a larger scale. So, I’m starting a new campaign, beginning with a single adventure on Sunday, July 21, at 2:00 p.m., at our house. Characters would begin at 6th level, and the style would be very heavy role-playing with not much in the way of combat or treasure-hunting. Newcomers are more than welcome. The time is flexible, but the date really isn’t.

Anyone interested? Let me know in the comments, or email me.

 

2013: A resolution or two

Merry second day of Christmas! As you know, Christmas is a twelve-day holiday, starting on December 25 and running through Epiphany, also known as Twelfth Night, which is on January 6.

Now for a couple of notes about Doctor Who:

  • First, I mostly enjoyed this year’s Christmas special, “The Snowmen”, though I was a bit disappointed with the resolution of the main storyline. On the other hand, I’m very impressed and intrigued by the new companion, Clara. I think she’ll make a fine addition to the show.
  • Second, I really want someone in the UK to send me a letter in March, primarily because the Royal Mail is beginning to issue these. Sure we in the US got classic movie monster stamps and Marvel superhero stamps, but Doctor Who!

Yes, I’m a fan. Yes, I’m aware that Doctor Who is a children’s show. Don’t judge me.


I don’t normally make New Years’ resolution. Why set myself up for failure? Last year I tried with a mere couple of resolutions, and while I did well with the second one, I didn’t do so well on the first. But I think I’m going to try again, just in case I’m able to refocus properly this coming year. After all, I’m turning 45 on my birthday (which just happens to be New Years Eve, so you have less than a week to buy me presents), which, being a nice multiple of five, seems like the perfect time to refocus.

So here are my two resolutions for 2013:

  1. Take better care of myself. Meaning, of course, eating better, exercising, all that stuff. I figure this means taking care of myself emotionally and spiritually as well as physically.
  2. Go easy on myself. That is to say, be forgiving of myself when I screw up. And screw up I will. I’m human, after all. Plus, I tend to have high expectations for myself, and when I don’t meet those expectations, the kobolds start knocking on my door. This resolution means not paying attention to them when they come calling.

I figure I’ll also take the opportunity this year to set some new goals and challenges for myself. I’ve already set a couple of writing goals: to complete the second and perhaps third drafts of Code Monkey!, and to finish up and publish The Winds of Patwin County, a novel in the form of several interwoven short stories, by November. I have other plans in mind. We’ll see if I get to them.

So those are my resolutions and goals for this year. I put them out there in public for the sake of accountability. If some of you will take note of them and help me remember them, I’d be mighty grateful.


One last bit of Doctor Who: Here’s the trailer for the upcoming second half of Series 7:

My first thought when I saw the Cybermen in this trailer was, “Oh Lord, not the Cybermen again.” Then I remembered that this coming year’s Cybermen episode is written by Neil Gaiman. So it will be really interesting to see what he does with them.

 

 

‘Tis the season for Holidailies