For the first time since the Wall fell, nuclear horror is weighing on my mind.

I have no idea how many read this or know who I am, but for the uninformed: I grew up during the latter days of the Cold War.

Part of my mental architecture from those years are these pop culture markers: 

A Canticle for Leibowitz, Gamma World, World War III (the NBC miniseries), The Day After, Threads, Hackett's Third World War, Alas Babylon, On The Beach, The Last Ship, 99 Luftballons, The Horseclans, Snowbrother, Down to a Sunless Sea (very underrated), Testament, The Pelbar Cycle, The Survivalist, Miracle Mile, This Is The Way The World Ends...

[References to the above can be found on this solid list here.]

And they have remained there, despite receding quite a bit in the wind of change. 

But now those old feelings are back. I'm not sure what the strategy is behind this sort of tough-guy posturing, especially with the repeated hints regarding the grim change in Putin's headspace. The latter of which seems to be borne out by his speeches and forced resettlement of Ukrainians. 

But sure, why not?  

In the meantime, I've carefully avoided any use of the N[uclear]-word around the children. The pandemic already left enough to deal with. 

And yet, I'm going to have to address it sooner or later. What a time to be alive.

Goodwill, and How to Lose It.

Gaming corporations are obviously profit-making entities. 

But it happens a lot that those who come to control such corporations come to the mistaken notion that they are simply profit-making entities.

What they forget is that gaming, in all its various forms, is a big part of modern life. It can inspire passionate devotion and dedication, connected as it is with imagination and camaraderie. And when a significant financial investment is added in, it intensifies.

That devotion creates a great deal of goodwill. 

Which can be thrown away in a stupid fit of border policing.

Games Workshop, maker of the soaring Warhammer series of tabletop games, is giving its goodwill the Old Yeller treatment. 

Short version: With few exceptions, fan creations are IP violations.

That includes my favorite, the If the Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device parody series. The creator is putting it on the shelf--he does not feel like a legal battle.

 

I'm the furthest thing from an intellectual property expert, so I cannot speak to how enforceable the new policy is. Parody protects some things, but to what extent I can't say. Certainly, companies have to defend their IPs or risk losing them. But it's also true that fan creations are free advertising, bringing people to the brand. In the endlessly-memed Warhammer universe, this is particularly the case. 

GW right now reminds me of the end of the Lorraine Williams era at TSR (1985-1997). Williams came on board when Gary Gygax was dumped. It is true that Gygax was an uneven business mind and had too much on his plate. Unfortunately, he was given the heave-ho entirely, and Williams was brought on to impose disciplined business practices. 

Amongst these practices in the early internet era was a dogged policy of policing fan sites for any trademarked material and ordering their removal. This only ended with the rescue of the company from the brink of bankruptcy by Wizards of the Coast. A more relaxed, unite-the-fans approach followed, and worked. 

Hopefully, GW will wake to how counterproductive the hyper-strict policy is. But it will probably take years and priceless goodwill run through the shredder first. 

And now for a neck-spraining segue.

Because there's only so much staring into the abyss I can stand, even in blog format, a question from out of nowhere:

Does anyone else play Stellaris?

If you do, I would like to pick your brain to help me better endure the empire-shredding crisis of 2500. Learning from mistakes is helpful, but learning from yours beforehand would be even better.

Don't worry: things can and will get dumber still.

Is chess racist?

Now, the rebuttal is that "hey, we were just going to discuss the issue of why white has to go first."

But...really?

This is what is left of your future, what's-left-of-Western-civilization: having even your hobbies and games questioned--and then Minitru'd--by the Woke Police.

The good news is that that future won't be a lengthy one.

The bad news is that it will seem like forever.

Thomas Mann once pointed out that "everything is politics."

Now we are seeing what happens when that dictum is imbued with a religious frenzy that would have made Torquemada say "hey, slow your roll there, champ."

It will only get worse.

You probably already knew this, but...

...social media is the Dumpster Fire of the Gods.

I am coming to the conclusion that the cacophony at Facebook and Twitter are bad for the heart and soul. At best, you'll get information overload. And we really aren't built, intellectually or spiritually, to sort and assimilate reams of information in digital format.

I bowed out a couple days before my somethingth birthday, and I have to say I don't miss it much. I like being in contact with friends and family. 

Being in contact with dozens of newly-minted pundits, epidemiologists and legal experts....not so much.

The last time I last touched base with this blog, long before this dumpster fire of a year, 
 

I had a good family life and career. And those have remained the same, natural potholes along the way notwithstanding. Hobbies have remained the same, with two exceptions.

First, the pandemic has put the kibosh on theatre. Particularly heartbreaking for my children, who miss seeing their friends in person. But also a disappointment for me, as my evolution as a community theatre performer saw me play Polonius in "Hamlet" (for realz, as the yutes say) last fall and get a nice role as a Russian mobster in "Matilda The Musical" (based on Roald Dahl's classic book) this spring. The latter is on indefinite hold. Maybe this year? Large indoor gatherings are not happy places for this scourge, as we have learned.

Secondly, I have taken to a cheap new hobby involving the collection, assembly and painting of Tiny Plastic Spacemen. It's part of a game called "Warhammer 40,000", and it is easily thought of as a toy soldier warfare game for nerds set in a dystopian future. Some nerds are more equal than others, but I'm no Superman.  And when I say it's a "cheap new hobby," I'm lying out my arse, as the English creators and suppliers of the game might say.

Holy smokes, it's not. But it has been a fun outlet for myself and my youngest three--yes, even 10 year old Elizabeth is proud of her Ultramarines Primaris Reivers. If you aren't interested in the outlay for the game, the company has a publishing arm called "Black Library" where you can immerse yourself in the "lore" of the game. Some authors are better than others, but I am happy to give you tips if you are interested.

And there are worse ways to spend a pandemic/riot summer and increasingly-discordant and feverish election year.

Hope you and yours have been and remain well and safe during these historic times.

News of the creepy.

First, the light-hearted, and sure to be a hit in the Fellrath household: Where The Deep Ones Are, a parody of the classic children's story set in Lovecraft's Innsmouth.

Second, and just straight up eerie, an article on the Wendigo phenomenon in light of the unspeakable murder in Alberta.

On a related note, Jamie and I and a couple other certified neeerrrrrrds used to play Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu RPG, set in the world created by H.P. Acquisition of "mythos knowledge" was an integral part of the game. Essentially, what happened was if your character found some grim tome/artifact/Civil War chess set (no, really) and decided to read/examine/utilize/cast a haphazard glance at it, you would acquire knowledge of the Lovecraftian world and use it to become more powerful and to fend off the grim slavering insane extradimensional beings whom you'd be better off not knowing about. However, with each point of knowledge there was a concomitant loss of sanity, which in my opinion was the most valuable character trait you possessed. Failure to make a "sanity roll" meant your character could flat out lose it in crucial situations and could become Alpo. My character, a 20s PI armed like Mad Max in Thunderdome, steadfastly refused to read/handle/glance at any of the "weird crap."

"No, you can curl up with Abdul Alhazred's long lost Moaning and Bleeding Codex of Ghastly Ends, Professor Twitchy. I'll be over here cleaning the sawed-off. Oh, and by 'over here,' I mean Maryland."

Worked out pretty well for me, not so good for the autodidacts.

Chess Boxing.

A new Russian sport.

Any commentary I offer would be superfluous.

Acid Nostalgia Tripping.

Behold, the 1981 and 1982 Atari 2600 game catalogs.

Adventure was the bomb, and Circus Atari made my mom laugh her butt off when the acrobat missed and went splat. With agonized limbs still waving in the air. So, yes, my issues are genetic.

I think we are in agreement that Atari's sports games chewed the big green weasel?

It's unanimous.

The contemporary Odyssey system had a better football game (during which I used to beat commenter Bryan like a redheaded step-mule), and Intellivision was better everything. Colecovision was even better, but arrived on-scene shortly after the bubble burst.

Of course, Activision had the best 2600 games (River Raid, Pitfall), which was always an annoying head scratcher--Atari could do better, but didn't want to.

Enjoy--it will jolt parts of the brain you'd long since abandoned.

So...

...the stairs have been replaced. Upgraded is more like it. Look really good, too, if I say so myself.

My mom and dad are back from Arizona and marvelled at their grandkids in a visit on Friday. Dad strongly approves of the minivan, having cobbled together an excuse to borrow the keys and take it for a spin.

The correct answer to the module question is "Q1, Queen of the Demonweb Pits."

So, anything happen while I was gone?

And you call yourselves geeks.

I'm taking away your nerd cards and slide rules.

Which module is missing from the poll right next door?

It's as obvious as the tape on your glasses, yet none of you caught it.

I'm so ashamed.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Slate offers up a really bad article about the morality of D&D, denigrating it as a hack-n-slasher, a tabletop first person shooter of the worst order.

How bad is it? At a minimum, anybody criticizing the game system's morality should at least make a nod to the alignment system. You know, that critical part of the rules system that requires the roleplayer to adhere to a certain ("Dude, at least it's an") ethos and morality?

Not even discussing that limitation makes a complete hash of his argument. His "narrative arithmetic" presumes everyone is playing to an evil alignment. That's not the way me and my nerd posse rolled, man.

That's not to say that the alignment rules weren't sometimes twisted into balloon animals, nor that some players harkened to evil characters. But don't pretend the rules weren't there. Good-aligned characters wouldn't--couldn't--engage in sociopathic violence without severe, even campaign-ending, consequences.

Moreover, the books and adventures explicitly gave or at least recommended experience bonuses for non-violent play, and punished hack-n-slashery. The hypothetical orc slaughtering in the one room might wake up something really nasty down the corridor, for example.

Now the one point the writer does have is that Gygax's system came prepackaged with real flaws--the rules were full of parenthetical digressions, random excursions and long-winded (if usually interesting) explanations that could slow actually learning the game to a crawl. And the rules themselves often ran the gamut from Baroque to Rococo--alignment languages? WTH?

Don't get me started on the First Edition weapon speed rules or segments, rounds and turns. Gaming Logorrhea, thy Father was E. Gary Gygax. There were, and are, simpler game systems. GURPS is all right, but the original Traveler was even better. But it was and remains a very sturdy game platform that has stood the test of time for a reason--because it works.

But to portray it as Grand Theft Auto with dice is one of the dumbest accusations you can level at Gygax.

This means absolutely nothing to most of you.

But I got this for $5.00. Complete and almost pristine:

Yet another in the pile of games to thrash the children in. And, of course, eventually be thrashed. But I'm slowly advancing them up the line. They like Dungeon, where they get to smite monsters for treasure (The Boy™ actually beat all of us in the last game we played, and Maddie came close to winning), but Imperium is a little abstract. Plus, I have to teach the lad that a paper football is not a shuriken.

My little girls.

1. Yesterday, Madeleine announced that she wanted to play "Daddy's game with the lion, Carter and the girl."

Oh. That game.




Actually, it's not that bad a game for older kids--a pure swashbuckler, like the books. But I've convinced her to take the natural intermediate step first.

2. Rachel has taken to the dog food dish with the usual vigor of mobile infants. How can you tell when Rachel has at least two nuggets of Alpo in her mouth? When she doesn't freak out when you remove the first one.

Saturday, I see her sitting sitting serenely Buddhaesque in the kitchen. It would be serenely Buddhaesque if the Buddha had had a thing for Copenhagen, I suppose.

"Rachel--do you have dog food in your mouth?" For an instant she stays there, adjusts the nuggets in her mouth and half smirks back at me. Then she immediately heads down the hall toward her bedroom as fast has her chubby little limbs will take her. The theme to The Great Escape leapt into my head as she chugged down the hall.

"You'll never catch m--argh!

Stupid baby gate...."

I can't imagine my life without either one of them.

Dungeons and Dragons turns 30.

This site has a fascinating series of articles and interviews covering the development of the game and the birth of the role-playing game phenomenon. An interesting sidelight is the amusing infighting and revenge-taking seen in the naming of certain characters and regions in the game worlds created by Gary and Ernie Gygax, et. al. Some of the legends referred to in the game are based on their real life names. For example, one of the warriors was named Yrag, there were wizards named Xagyg and Serten, etc. Well, as is often the case, there were various fallings-out along the way. For instance, Gary Gygax named the orc realm in the Greyhawk setting the Pomarj, which involved the first letters of his first wife Mary Jo's name. But perhaps the most direct was Dave Arneson's name for the mysterious villain who haunted the Blackmoor setting: The Egg of Coot. The Egg was portrayed as a mysterious, powerful and largely unknowable "evil superbeing." Arneson, D&D's largely forgotten co-creator, had a major falling out with E. Gary Gygax, which led to the former quitting the company and filing suit, resulting in a settlement in 1981.

Interestingly enough, the two managed two patch things over sufficiently that Gygax began to publish a more developed version of the setting--complete with the Egg--before being fired in 1985.

Another interesting sidelight: Gary Gygax claims that Tolkien's works had little influence on the development of the game. That's probably right--especially in terms of "magic appeal". Gygax more or less lifted the game's magic system from Jack Vance's works, right down to the references to "ioun stones." But it seems pretty clear that Tolkien's popularity at the time helped to make it a phenomenon--that, and he borrowed "halflings" and "rangers" wholesale from the books. I discovered D&D right after blasting my way through LOTR, and so did my earliest gaming friends.

By the way, I have a confession to make:

Bryan, I deliberately snuffed your character in The Keep on the Borderlands so I wouldn't have to DM anymore. I didn't cheat, but I certainly made the climactic battle as violent as possible. Nothing personal--if Tim or Gary Ellsworth had been in the way, I'd have been just as happy. I just hated DMing at the time.

Please note that this had nothing to do with my metronomic victories in Panzer Leader and Blades of Steel. Those were just skill.

[Update 8/26: Upon looking through the Arneson interview, I changed some of the detail in paragraphs one and two. Apparently he and Gygax patched it over after the settlement.]

Harry Potter, D&D and me.

I haven't read the books. I'm curious, but Heather looks at me with a cocked eyebrow every time I mention a serious book purchase. As she has accurately noted, Stately Price Manor 'tis a tiny and shrinking place, an abode for two adults and two adorable short demanding people who are growing by leaps and bounds. SPM is currently best suited to purchases of paperbacks or the occasional "I can't live without it!" purchase, which is currently pending. It's a reference work related to our parish's fledgling bible study, but that's neither here nor there.

The point is, there's plenty of chatter about the books (check here, here, here and here for a taste of the debate).

All I can say is that some of the criticism sounds pretty familiar to the stuff I heard about Dungeons and Dragons back in the 1980s. "It's a doorway to the occult/Satanism/black magic/paganism!"

How do I know? I used to play D&D. A lot. It was a prime outlet for socially-inept-but-otherwise-brainy boy nerds. It was that, and listening to lots and lots of Rush.

Modern day warrior/
Mean mean stride/
Today's Tom Sawyer/
Mean mean pride...

[Anyone who can explain to me what that song was about gets $5. Or my gratitude.
Make it gratitude. It's easier to email.]

But I digress again.

For those of you unfamiliar with it, D&D is a (Dr. Evil voice) "role-playing game" that is awash in magic. In fact, the "role-playing game" is premised upon it: spells, swords, staves, potions, artifacts, armor, scrolls--the works. The goal of the characters in this "role-playing game" is to get experience, become more powerful and acquire increasingly potent magical abilities, weapons and equipment. Of course, to do that, you had to battle your way through or around increasingly deadly foes who were similarly equipped. But the goal was worth it, especially when you could brag.

"Dude, I got a +5 Vorpal sword, two-handed! Add that to my Plate Mail +3, Shield +4 and my Girdle [no, really] of Frost Giant Strength, and I'm ready to go smite something! I'm one bad Fighter Lord!" boldly declared the Shaft-Quoting Pasty Guy Still Scared By Girls In Real Life.

Your equally-albinoid companions indicated their approval, ticked off their own fictional bona fides, and off you went to pretend that you were intrepid glory-hunting adventurers exploring the Tomb of Horrors for the next 3-5 hours.

Actually, my first character was a "magic-user" (read: wizard). The character became pretty powerful, tossing fireballs, lightning bolts, even disintegration spells. Next to that, Harry's broomstick seems a little, well, fey.

I still have most of my books. eBay has ensured that the out of print stuff continues to appreciate like mad.

Anyway, people were making the same accusations about Dungeons and Dragons that they do now about HP. There was a veritable hysteria that arose, frequently driven by evangelicals: claims of suicides, devil worship, and even a bad Tom Hanks TV movie about a college kid (played by Hanks) who went nuts because he became obsessed with a thinly-fictionalized version of the game. I even remember one claim that a mother who burned her son's books claimed to hear them scream. [Of that, I have no doubt. It was very likely the identical scream a mother hears when she tosses her son's baseball card collection out.]

That there were weirdos who were associated with the game is undisputed. That they were regarded as weirdos and mocked accordingly by the Pasty Regulars is also undisputed. Obsessive types gravitate to these things like moths to halogen lights. They even become obsessed by sports. Rotisserie leagues, anyone?

Of my regular gaming buddies, to my knowledge, none have become high priests of Wicca or otherwise thralls of the occult. One's a city manager, another has an astronomy doctorate, one's a medical doctor in family practice, and the others are college-educated regular Joes with non-cat sacrificing jobs. Many of them are now married.

Yes, to girls. No lie!

However, there is one exception to this litany of normalness: me. After years of D&D playing, I became a Catholic. So, I guess those evangelicals warning about paganism were right after all. Heaven only knows what will happen to all those Harry fans.