Life is Timeless, Days Are Long… When You’re Young

Another nostalgic pang just hit me. It’s June, and it’s just after 11 pm (in my time zone anyway). At this exact time ten years ago, on a Friday night during what would have been my school vacation, I was probably knee-deep in hobgoblin remains on the killing field, or trying to determine if the magical item I just picked up was cursed or not, or hopping from one plane of existence to another trying to outwit the demonic forces on my trail, or interrogating a demented inmate at Arkham on the whereabouts of the black book of nastiness…

Whatever I was doing, I’m sure it went on until the sun’s rays started poking out from behind the tall buildings. And I know a great deal of pizza and soda and all manner of junk food type things that aren’t good for you were involved too.

Ah, to be a kid again…

HeroQuest Hijinks: My Road to Ruin

Previously on my blog o’ doom, I spoke about the day I picked up the Dungeons & Dragons game for the first time, but I neglected to mention how exactly I ended up going down that path of dorkiness. It started a year before, in 1990…

To be perfectly honest, I remember very little from that year. The only memories I can recall instantly are things that annoy me: I had a crap teacher at school that year, Chris Waddle shattered the hopes and dreams of a nation by whiffing a penalty kick – badly, I might add (and gleefully made fun of this by doing that fucking Pizza Hut ad years later), and Hulk Hogan lost the WWF Championship to the Ultimate Warrior, which… not that I ever really liked Hogan, but seriously… even as a child I knew the Ultimate Warrior was a horrible, incomprehensible, roided up idiot (and if you don’t believe me, just look up some of his recent ‘political’ speeches on YouTube and prepare to be shocked beyond belief.).

Anyway, there’s at least one pleasant memory from ’90 which sticks out in my mind and helps ease the pain just a touch, and that is when I received this wonderful board game co-produced by Games Workshop and Milton Bradley for my birthday. Yes, that board game…

I can’t fathom where I first saw HeroQuest advertised, perhaps I just saw it on the shelf in a toy shop at some point, but I knew, just knew, from looking at the back of the box just once that I had to have it. Miniatures of orcs and skeletons and gargoyles on this intricate board decorated as a foul dungeon? Oh man, this would be SO cool. Seeing the drool form on my face, my parents agreed that it could be my birthday present that year. They even agreed to play it with me. I mean, they played all the other board games with me… why should this one be any different? Ahem.

Well, as you might have guessed, my parents’ agreement to play with me was hastily forgotten once they got a glimpse at the multiple rule books, the decks of cards, the dice, and the large volume of plastic miniatures representing both the heroes and the monsters that came inside the box. They simply thought it was too complicated, which I suppose in retrospect is fair – HeroQuest is complicated in board game terms. Yet at the time I was rather annoyed with my parents. I mean, I wasn’t ungrateful, they did buy the damn thing for me after all, but now I had this wonderful new game and yet there was no one else around to enjoy it with. I knew that the few friends I had back then were more into nerf guns and the sellout kiddie version of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Asking them to sit down at a table and roll some dice was almost as bad as asking one of the little bastards to read a book. It just wasn’t on the cards.

I still found ways to amuse myself by selecting a random adventure from the quest book that came with the game and setting up the dungeon as the text described. Thanks to my knowledge of the Fighting Fantasy books, I was able to brew up a system to use for HeroQuest solo gaming, although I’ll be damned if I can remember how I did it nowadays (my first house rule system, although I didn’t realize this at the time…). I know that might paint a pretty sad picture of my childhood, but you have to believe me, I WAS enjoying myself there.

Months later, after numerous bribes which involved me flagging down the ice cream truck and spending my loose change on Oreo cookie bars for him, I was able to draft in a neighborhood ‘friend’ (who shall remain nameless). I don’t believe he ever entirely understood what was going on in terms of the rules, but he was quite enamored by the miniatures, which was good enough for me. Off we went! I took up the role of the evil wizard Zargon (or Morcar, the one who controlled the monsters and acted as a sort of referee – my first GMing experience! Although again, I had no idea of knowing this at the time.) and my friend took up the roles of the Barbarian, Dwarf, Wizard, and Elf. A little time consuming to play all four characters, but we made do.

Despite his initial confusion with the rules, my friend ended up having a very good time, and the game soon became a fixture, especially over our school vacation in ’91. My pal was able to amass a small fortune in treasure during that time, and we almost made it to the end of the quest book before a rather unfortunate series of traps and encounters wiped his entire party out. The kid was pretty crestfallen and frustrated, and seemed to interpret this as the ‘end’ of the game (he had lost characters before, but never the whole party, so the lost ones were easily replaced). In other words, he threw a fit and decided he didn’t want to play anymore. This taught me a valuable lesson which stuck with me when I moved on to role-playing games soon after – never play with pansies who can’t handle a character dying. It’s just a friggin’ game! The next kid I bribed into playing a game with me (that would be the D&D game) took character death a little better (which happened quite a lot, since I soon became a slave to the dice… but that’s another story).

I still get the nostalgic feeling to play HeroQuest every now and then, but sadly, I no longer own a copy. I’m not exactly sure what became of my old box, but I have a hunch that I sold it for about ten bucks in a garage sale some years later after it sat gathering dust in my closet. I even threw in the expansion sets I had acquired but never played with the main game, so some fella scored a bargain that day. Yeah, I know… stupid move. I probably only bought bubblegum or something with that ten dollars, anyway. For a copy of HeroQuest in good condition with all the pieces nowadays… hell, I’d probably give a kidney.

Fortunately, there’s a tremendous computer version of the game available for free, with dozens of additional quest packs to download and play through, so my nostalgic thirst can still be somewhat quenched, and the best part is, I no longer have to bribe anyone to play the damn thing with me. Huzzah!

Rogues’ Gallery: ‘Captain’ Mason Gray

It’s the return of my almost forgotten Rogues’ Gallery segment, where I blather on about some of my favorite characters from the RPG’s I’ve been lucky enough to play over the years.

Name: Mason Gray (nickname: Captain)
Game: Shadowrun (2nd Edition)
Current Status: Deceased

Mason was a character I played circa 1997/98 very loosely based on Beast from the X-Men comics. The concept of a monstrous yet ‘human’ character has stuck with me over the years (I think I must have seen Beauty and the Beast at an impressionable age). Indeed, when I stop to really consider things, Mason has actually lived on to some degree in the form of a few NPC’s I’ve introduced in various games I’ve ran since this time. He was a brilliant mind — a scientist, mathematician, and scholar who through the unfortunate randomness of the ‘Goblinization’, ended up as a metahuman Ork. Because Orks were generally considered to be of inferior intelligence in the Shadowrun world, he was forced to do most of his research and experiments in poor, underground metahuman warrens.

Mr. Gray was also sadly allergic to cybernetic implants (if you’re completely unfamiliar to the game, many characters in Shadowrun will often deck themselves out in cyberware to improve various skills, especially combat abilities), thus Mason seemed destined to become a magician (a magician who still knew how to use a firearm, mind). The other players in the group (four of us in total) were skeptical of his usefulness at the outset of the campaign, but quickly warmed to Mason as his use of hermetic magic bailed them out on many occasions, most notably a rocky encounter with some TRC Troopers during the midst of the Celtic Double-Cross adventure.

I enjoyed playing Mason because I very rarely play mage characters, and also because it gave me the opportunity to go against the ‘YARRRGGHHH!!!’ dim witted barbarian stereotype that Orks (or Orc, if you like) have. I have a soft spot for the race, if you can’t tell by my Xbox Live gamertag. Funny though, I cannot for the life of me recall how exactly this character ended up with ‘Captain’ as his nickname. I just know everyone in the group always called him ‘Captain’ or ‘Cap’. The mists of time can sometimes distort the memories of our past gaming sessions in bizarre ways, no?

The group of runners Mason belonged to eventually made the mistake of getting on the wrong side of the Yakuza. We had been tasked with assassinating a high ranking cabinet member of the current UCAS government who was, unbeknowst to our runners, one of the top puppets for the Yakuza (who knew those guys could aquire that much clout?). Although we managed to buy ourselves a bit of Mafia protection whilst trying to disappear, it was not enough for Mason and one of the other characters in the group (Bob, the surfing obsessed Dwarf shaman), who were both killed from the magnificent blast of a car bomb. What a shame.

Some Classic Dragon Mirth

I always loved the Dragon Mirth section in the old Dragon Magazine. If you never saw one before, it was basically a page or two of mostly single-panel art, completely goofy in style, always poking fun at either the fantasy genre or role-playing gamers. It was more often than not relegated to the last couple pages of the mag, but I usually flipped straight to the section whenever I received a new issue. Here’s a piece from issue #194 (that’s June, 1993 if you’re interested) that always cracked me up.

It’s not just the shifty eyes and the smirk on the dragon that does it for me, it’s the way he’s innocently holding his little hands together like an angelic schoolboy. Bwahaha!

About the artist… I reckon this may very well be the same gentleman. At least the signature on his recent pieces looks quite similar.

Rogues’ Gallery: Tommy “Love Handles” McQueen

My personal Rogues’ Gallery, where I blather on about some of my favorite characters from the many RPG’s I’ve been able to play.

Name: Tommy “Love Handles” McQueen
Game: Werewolf: The Apocalypse (2nd Edition)
Current Status: Unknown

Love Handles was great fun to play during an unfortunately short-lived Werewolf campaign I participated in at the FLGS I used to hang around as a young man. I want to say this was about mid-to-late ’96 or so, but my memory of this period of time is shot all to hell, so I could be off by a year or so. Anyway, I definitely recall getting into Vampire: The Masquerade in 1995 with its 2nd edition book, and was slowly en route to discovering the other World of Darkness titles. I knew a great number of old-school inclined folk, guys I played AD&D with there, who hated, absolutely HATED anything that came out of White Wolf at the time. Possibly because WW really seemed to be going against the grain and trying many things that could be considered ‘out there’ to the traditionalists. Or maybe it was just all the LARP’ers these games attracted. Probably the LARP’ers.

I fell in with a small group of three other young dudes who were determined to play these games with their rules as written, instead of the ‘rules lite’ approach that some of the WoD books almost recommended. It’s not that I don’t like LARP’ers, but… okay, that’s not true. I don’t like LARP’ers. There, I said it. Happy now?

At any rate, I had a sweet character concept all thought up and was eager to get going with our game. Only problem was, my concept was for a different game. Up until about five minutes before we sat down to create characters, I really thought we were going to be playing Vampire. It was the game we had been discussing, after all. “I decided we should play Werewolf instead,” the GM remarked. Well, I was brought up with traditional RPG values. If the GM says we’re playing Game-X, we’re playing Game-X goddammit. However, I have to admit, I didn’t ‘get’ everything about Werewolf at the time. I have a much better understanding of the concept behind the game nowadays, but I’m almost 100% certain the character I created for the game was a reflection of my lack of Werewolf lore.

The other two players in the group had gone the more typical route and created chiseled, buff and handsome characters who probably knew 900 ways to kill a man with their bare hands. I do believe they both belonged to the Get of Fenris tribe (if you’ve never played this game, they’re a tribe loosely based on Scandinavian and Germanic warriors). Being a contrary little bastard, I went the other way and came up with a character who belonged to the Glass Walkers (the city dwellers of this game), Tommy McQueen (not the guy who used to play for West Ham) – a fat, lazy businessman with all the charm of a snake oil salesman. I even channeled a little bit of George Carlin and had my character ride a motorcycle on the weekends and hang out at biker joints he didn’t really belong in (where he picked up the “Love Handles” nickname). Carlin described these annoying weekend bikers as the type of idiots who had their bikes trucked into the rally at Sturgis and then rode them in for the last half mile or so… that was Tommy McQueen, a complete phony.

However, McQueen had a sizeable bank balance, and even if he was a slime ball, he could fast talk… so he became the mouthpiece for the group. In a fight though… he got the hell out of Dodge. Even in wolf form, he was still a blobby, grotesquely overweight sloth, so he offered few if any useful skills in combat, other than providing distractions. He never really conformed to the typical Garou traits, was probably too self-centered to completely understand why he was meant to defend Gaia, and certainly was not a spiritual being like the other characters (he had pretty much no chance of learning any Gifts from the spirits). Perhaps if the campaign had continued, it would’ve been interesting to see if Love Handles discovered what his true calling was, or if he ever got more in touch with his spiritual side. As the campaign ended and the three Garou parted company, Love Handles rode his ridiculously expensive bike into the sunset. His current status is unknown, but without his warrior buddies protecting him any longer, he probably wouldn’t make it that long on his own without hiring some more beefstakes as bodyguards. The original character sheet is sadly some 2,000 miles away from me, stuffed in a manilla folder with a whole stack of other RPG related paraphanalia, so I doubt I’ll be digging this guy out for another ride in the sun anytime soon…

I Miss Shadis

Warning: The following post is nothing more than a nostalgic whine. Proceed with caution.

Well, what can I say? I really miss Shadis magazine.

In case you missed it, Shadis: the Science Fiction and Fantasy magazine was this tiny little fanzine started in the early 90′s by one Jolly Blackburn, which eventually transformed into a small circulation magazine. It won the Origins Award three times, and perhaps most famously, it was the magazine in which Jolly, needing to fill in a couple of empty pages at the back of one issue, debuted his Knights of the Dinner Table comic strip as nothing more than a silly joke. KODT is still going strong to this day, and as far as I’m concerned remains the only humorous RPG-related comic worth a damn (sorry Dork Tower fans).

But this is not really about the Knights, although every time I do see a strip today it does bring back memories of seeing them in the back of the early issues of Shadis. I really just miss the magazine in general. It’s been gone for ten years now, so you’d think I’d have come to terms with its death, but alas, I think I’m still in a state of denial. Each issue was packed with useful subject matter for your games, thought provoking articles by a number of now more famous writers still involved with the hobby, and some really cool short stories of varied genres.

Of course, it didn’t have the production values of the more sleek rival Dragon, but the ‘homegrown’ look of Shadis only added to the charm. I always got the sense that Shadis readers didn’t gravitate towards it for the pretty pictures, anyway. I personally liked it because it gave off the perception that it wasn’t a loyalist to any one game company; it reviewed and covered the new products on the market equally and fairly. That, and it seemed to feature content for damn near every game under the sun. While I still read Dragon at the time and loved the D&D content, without Shadis I probably would have never been introduced to a heap of games — Shadowrun, Call of Cthulu, Vampire: The Masquerade, Castle Falkenstein, Toon, Cyberpunk 2020, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, Middle-Earth Role Playing… the list goes on. The ‘little zine that could’ really broadened my horizons as far as the role-playing hobby is concerned.

I vividly recall an article from issue # 20.5 (a special wedged between 20 and 21) about a generic setting, the ghostly town of San Diablo, intended for use in a western RPG of your choice (too bad Aces & Eights was about eleven years away!). This is perhaps the only western RPG feature I’ve read that really, truly nailed the genre without tacking on silly science-fiction or horror elements for no good reason. Hell, I can’t even remember any other gaming magazine even attempting to go near the Old West.

This was also back before the rise of the internet, when play-by-mail games were all the rage for gamers who couldn’t get a proper fix in their location, so there was usually half a dozen ads in each issue promoting the latest play-by-mail game to hit the market. In fact, a forum page eventually developed (‘Market Platz‘), where folks could advertise whatever they wanted, those searching for a group, buy/sell/trade requests, convention promotion, or quaint little ads for a fledgling FLGS or two. Some issues came with free bonus content, like CD-ROM’s or small packs of Magic: The Gathering cards. Great incentives to buy the magazine (I realize that if you live in the UK, where a free CD is glued to the front of every other magazine on the rack, this is not such a big deal, but to those living in the States, outside of the computer mags, we are sadly deprived of these free gifts).

Ultimately, reading Shadis felt like a good substitute for yakking it up with folks at your FLGS (especially if you didn’t have one in town). There was a swathe of house rule articles that popped up in the ‘zine over the years, but it wasn’t just that. It was something organic, like you had a finger on the pulse of the hobby. It was a undefinable feeling, but you know what it reminds me of? The RPG blogosphere of today. Take a look around: you’ve got authors from the old and new schools (and some in-between) ranting and raving about many different games in many different genres, house rules left and right, campaign and convention reports, books, comics, films, nostalgia, humor, art… it’s turned into a great little community.

You can still buy select issues from certain RPG sites and the old ebay, but some of the prices, especially for the early issues, can be a little steep. Thankfully, RPGNow.com has some of the early issues for sale as PDF’s for very reasonable prices.

Monochrome Dungeons

I remember a couple of friends owning this particular game, or at the least having a copy of part one of the adventure as shareware. Myself, I had the thing on a pair of floppy disks I purchased for a few bucks at a used book shop.

I speak of the rogue-like adventure known as Castle of the Winds.

Of course, children of today will scoff at the simplistic graphics, the limited use of colors, the fact that you are nothing but a torso running around attacking other static images of monsters… they’ll never understand! You don’t need a $400 graphics card or a $600 console to have a great adventure game. Castle of the Winds is but one of the many examples of this.

The game is simple, and somewhat linear… but the beauty of it was exploring everywhere for the first time, collecting new magic items, looting copper pieces, and exploring the dangerous (and monochrome in color) dungeons. Character creation is easy — no classes or anything to worry about, just pump your available points into whichever of the four stats you like, select a spell to start with, and you’re on your way. I started a quick game earlier, creating a musclehead by the name of Buzz…

Buzz begins the adventure by outfitting himself as best he can with his limited resources at the local shop, and is then on his way to delve into dungeons deep and avenge the death of his godparents. See, there’s a story to this game, and it’s actually pretty decent if you pay attention to it. This was before the ‘orphan with the destroyed farm home’ storyline got worn out by a million other games.

I’ll be honest, most of the rogue-like games passed me by. I’ve discovered a number of them many years after the fact, now that most of them are freeware, but CotW was the exception. I don’t know how many hours I wasted on this damn game, charmed by it’s simplistic beauty. I seem to remember actually conquering it too, at about 3:30 AM one night many years ago, and was disappointed that there were only two parts to the adventure. Nowadays there are all kinds of fan remakes and add-ons and such if you do a search for them, but none can match the brilliance of the original.

Oh look, I got my ass kicked in about five minutes! Did I mention this game actually had some challenge to it? Poor old Buzz, we hardly knew ye…

Visit the designer, Rick Saada, at his homepage for a free download of the game (he also has a cool journal of his D&D sessions there).

October 31, 1991

I still vividly remember my first foray into the world of Dungeons & Dragons. Autumn, 1991, with this bad boy right here:

It had the basic rules in it, but it also featured a pretty swell map and some cut-outs so that complete rookies could run the first adventure, “Escape From Zanzer’s Dungeon”, as a sort of board game, along the lines of Hero Quest or DragonStrike. (It also had a bitchin’ DM screen that I would reuse for a number of years afterwards).

Maybe this was a sign of things to come, but I instantly started thinking about creating my own adventures instead of running the dungeon out of the box. However, the only friend I could rope into playing with me just couldn’t grasp playing without the safety net of a board and character markers. Not to rag on this nameless childhood pal, but perhaps it was asking too much to get an eight year old kid freshly weened off of a Sega controller to actually use their imagination. Regardless, we ended up using the map for our first few adventures.

The first adventure is not where my waves of silky nostalgia really come from when I see an image of the big, black box though. No, what I remember as the most exhilarating experience I’ve ever had with a roleplaying game was the first thing I ever did with one: I read the rulebook.

I would later figure out that the rules included in this box set were more or less a pastiche version of Moldvay Basic, but I had no idea what the difference was between any of the editions at the time. I didn’t care. I was pure. Innocent. A gentle snowflake. Speaking of snow, it was snowing as I read the rulebook for the very first time, perhaps adding to the romance of my memory.

It was Halloween, and I had spent birthday money generously donated by relatives on this game (If only they knew the kind of trash I had spent their money on). There also happened to be quite the snowstorm brewing outside, and while all the stupid kids out there slipped around on the ice and slush for a few extra Three Musketeers bars and peanut butter cups, I was warming myself by the fireplace, drinking hot coffee* and reading the rules to Dungeons & Dragons for the first time.

No wonder it took me so long to get a girlfriend.

I don’t know any erudite way to say what I was feeling as I stepped into the D&D world, so I will simply say — I was fucking amazed. Dwarves and clerics and magic-users and… holy shit, look at all the weapons and armor! And the spells you can choose from! Look at all these monsters you can fight! They even give you advice on crafting your own dungeons! Awesome!

It was like a high no drug I’ve ever taken has been able to replicate (except for maybe that time I had to take a bunch of Tylenol 4 after a tooth extraction… back off, it was prescribed). I was positively giddy with excitement and wonder. Oh, the things you could do with this game! For a… shall we say, unique, child who was already in love with The Colour of Magic and The Hobbit, and could use his imagination, this was the jackpot. I think I stayed up until the wee hours of the morning, reading and rereading, making phantom dice rolls with my fresh d20, and plotting just what deadly monsters and traps I would use in my epic adventures. To make things sweeter for me, the next day, a Friday, was a snow day home from school, so I had an extra long weekend to bask in the glory of my new favorite game. Of course, I still carried the damn book with me to school the following Monday and read it in between classes. Oh man, the world was never going to be the same to me again.

I often like to joke and say “I hated me as a kid”, but this is one instance where, even if it would create some sort of weird temporal anomaly, I would go back in time and give my eight year old self a high five. You did good, kid.

*yes, I was drinking coffee. I started on the stuff at age six… that’s normal, isn’t it? Eh? Eh?!

Father’s Day

He didn’t pretend to understand it all for a minute, but my Dad bought all kinds of silly books and computer games related to this hobby for me when I was a youngster. He must have thought… well, I don’t know what the hell he thought, but it probably wasn’t good. Still, he loved me, so when birthdays and Christmas rolled around, I was always loaded down with loot. A dorky kid couldn’t ask for anything more. Happy Father’s Day.

Dwarf in a Tank

Another sleepless night. I used to suffer from them quite often, what with that whole ‘insomnia’ thing being a thorn in my side for many years. In recent times however, I haven’t had much trouble sleeping, so I’m going to attribute this particular restless night to the other affliction I’ve dealt with for years: allergies. Ugh. Was I that ignorant to not realize Phoenix has a ridiculously high amount of pollen floating around? Apparently so.

Don’t worry, this isn’t going to turn into Matt’s Medical Journal. I’m just setting the scene.

Anyhow, what very little sleep I did get was filled with hallucinatory dreams about pink cats (again!) trying to drown me in quicksand until retired professional wrestler (and 16 time World Champion! Woooo!) Ric Flair showed up to save me. I woke up from that, accepted that it was simply another in a long, production-line length series of dreams that a sane person would consider ‘weird’, and promptly fell back into another fitful slumber. However, I was soon to experience another dream that would become not only the catalyst for this post, but would ultimately inspire me to change the name of this site to something a bit more fanciful (which I was hoping to do from day one).

The dream featured a harsh, barren landscape. A dry riverbed in some godforsaken desert wasteland, perhaps? Or maybe the surface of an uninhabitable alien planet? It really matters not where it was… all you need to know is that life is null and void in this place. There is no civilization around for miles.

Much to my surprise, a little reptilian looking creature scuttles across the landscape. I look closer (I think I’m just floating around without actually being there in this particular dream) and discover that the reptile looks an awful lot like the basilisk from the AD&D 2nd edition Monstrous Manual. Kinda weird huh? So the basilisk runs along, almost as if it was running from something…

Moments later, a roar of screeching steel breaks the silence of this deathly landscape, and along rumbles a tank. That’s right, a fucking TANK. The tank stops for a moment, a dwarf pops his head out from the top hatch, looks around, spots the basilisk off in the distance, and continues the chase. Both the dwarf-driven tank and the reptile soon disappear from view.

I had just had a dream about my ultimate D&D related inside joke.

Everyone has these silly stories and their own inside jokes about playing the game, but I don’t even know if I can correctly describe how this ludicrous scenario originally happened without the use of regression therapy and some seriously hardcore drugs. The game in question was simply two players, my friend Chaz and myself. We would often take turns playing as DM, and on this day it was my turn. His dwarf, the awesomely named Flash Pendragon, was the one who ended up in the tank… a magical tank. He would soon become involved in a high speed pursuit with this damned basilisk that just wouldn’t die. The dwarf became obsessed with trying to kill and flatten this thing once and for all, and thus a lifelong Wil E. Coyote/Roadrunner-esque chase began.

It was such a ridiculous scenario, but being good MST3k fans, we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to do some callback jokes. So the next game we played, which didn’t even involve Flash the dwarf, and was set on a completely different world, the basilisk would show up with the tank in high pursuit. I would pull this shit out of nowhere and move on before any real sense could be made of it…

“The road to Neverwinter is particularly treacherous at this time of year, due to the heavy amount of rainfall in the area turning the path into a quagmire of slippery mud. Just then, a basilisk runs out in front of you. Before you can even react, the reptile runs away. Suddenly, and from out of nowhere, a tank pops into existence and roars past in pursuit of the creature, flattening trees along the way.

Yes, as I was saying, the road is difficult to travel on at the moment.“

It got even better when Chaz started doing it when *he* was DMing. One of my characters would be roaming through the wilderness, traveling through the plains, or simply gazing out at the landscape from high atop a tower when they would spot this little brown reptile fleeing in terror from a tank. A friggin’ TANK! As if D&D characters, in their medieval fantasy setting, knew what the hell a tank was supposed to be! Aw man, I loved our stupid jokes. There was another one about the color gray, but… that one is more ‘painful ha ha’ than ‘funny ha ha’.

Anyway, I decided to name my blog after this crazy inside gag. I’ve played many games with many groups, both online and in the real world, but I have to say that some of the best times I ever had were playing with Chaz back in those days that seem like ancient history to me now. Whether it was in my parents basement (where the pool table saw more use as a games table with rolling dice than it did as an actual surface to play billiards) or in Chaz’s stifling little attic bedroom (where he usually had no less than 27 industrial strength fans going at the same time during the summer months), the fun was never-ending. We played 2nd edition AD&D until between the two of us we had slaughtered damn near every monster in the book. We toyed around with other games every now and then (I remember Call of Cthulu, Werewolf: The Apocalypse, and a few others). We drank enough Mountain Dew that we could probably piss it for the rest of our lives. And the junk food… mighty Odin, don’t get me started. I’m really glad our local Pizza Huts stopped doing that ‘Brooklyn-styled’ pizza after a while, or I would’ve died from a heart attack at age 15.

I could compose novella length blogs about our exploits, both RPG related and the experiences that went beyond the DM screen. Perhaps I will someday… I’m sure I could get a good 5,000 words or so out of how we somehow found the resolve and fortitude to play through the entirety of Final Fantasy VII on the PlayStation without falling fast asleep every time that stupid Knights of the Round materia came into play, or puking our guts out at the sight of the emo male queens with 13 foot long swords prancing about with fake lolita ninjas and Mr. T wannabes. Honestly, that game was the fucking pits… and as if we hadn’t experienced enough pain with that one, we decided to play through Xenogears after that! A ha … a ha ha ha… Gods, I hated me as a teenager.

Getting slightly back on track here, I honestly feel as if I’ve been a shitty friend to Chaz from time to time. Back in the old days, he had to put up with a lot of crap from me. Truth is, I had a pretty rough go of it as a child and later as a teenager (and I’m not here to tell a sob story or gain any sympathy, I’m just trying to give some insight). I couldn’t make any new friends, and I had serious difficulty getting along with my parents. I’ve since discovered some of the reasons why I had these problems, but as I said, this isn’t turning into a medical journal, so I’ll spare the reader any details. Point is, my social problems led me to shunning the company of the few close friends I did have from time to time, which is something I certainly regret now. I feel as if I could have had 100 more dungeon crawls with my friend if only I hadn’t been such an antisocial stick-in-the-mud.

Well, unfortunately, I believe I still am an antisocial stick-in-the-mud. The only difference now is, I think I’ve come to understand the importance of friendships. I’ve also realized just how important these ‘stupid, evil, and Satanic’ games were to me in developing those friendships. I’m not going to waffle on about this like I’m Dr. Phil or anything*, but to my pal Chaz I wish to say this: Cheers, man. Thank you for your friendship. I truly, genuinely would not have made it through my teenage years without it. I dedicate this very silly blog to you and to all the gamers out there who have discovered friendship across a table with a set of dice in one hand and a character sheet in the other. All of you really make this world a better place.

…and now let’s talk about slaying dragons, beer, NASCAR, and other ‘manly’ stuff so I’m not accused of being some goofy, elf-loving wimp. Huzzah!

* my second Dr. Phil reference in such a short space of time… you would think I watch this guy’s show or something…