lizard men

I wasted my adolescence playing Dungeons and Dragons. Seriously. I played some Traveler, some Space Opera, some Gamma World, even some Paranoia, Toon, and Call of Cthulu, but mostly it was DnD, sucking my time, giving me a reason not to hang out near the 7-11 pay phone, smoking a cigarette, trying to look cool, joining a punk band, trying to get laid. Instead, I fought orcs, impaled paladins, befriended dragons, got disintegrated, built vast space empires. Looser. At the end of all of it, what I had to show for my time was a set of amazing writing skills and an even more perverse imagination, along with the knowledge that a mummy could not hope to beat a vampire in hand to hand combat, that hell is ruled by archdevils, followed by dukes of hell, that antipaladins can turn clerics, that wraiths get their power from the negative material plane, and that geodesic is good for mapping countryside, but nothing beats good old grid graph paper for mapping underground labyrinths.

Here are some highlights from the time I wasted.

1) I first got a copy of the original DnD rules on a family vacation to Minneapolis. It wasn't the boxed set, just the rule book. I filled in the rest. I remember calling my sister an Ogre, but getting the pronunciation wrong. Still, grandma's house was boring, and now I had an excuse to draw one dungeon after another. I still use their notation for doors, cliffs, windows, and trap doors.

2) The first time I fought a skeleton, it had something like six hit points. I had a mace. I was first level. I barely won. I don't think I got too much farther in the dungeon than that. It was in Walnut Creek, CA, and a friend's friend was Dungeon Mastering. He left with the module, whatever it was. I must have been in sixth grade at the time.

3) Keep on the fucking borderlands. Hell. I dunno how many times I burned this thing down and killed everybody in it. Sometimes I had the help of the hobgoblins in the caves of chaos, sometimes not. Sometimes, we killed everything in those caves too. This keep had a way of repeating itself in every fantasy world I constructed...it was they way fantasy empires project power, by replicating this same keep and dropping it all over the map.

4) Riding through a halfling village, on a warhorse, cutting the little fuckers down with a morningstar, or burning their houses down with spells like Flame Strike. I had a predilection for evil clerics, something I can directly attribute to Thulsa Doom's character from Conan the Barbarian. The ones that lived underground, we gassed with spells like Stinking Cloud. We led the women and children away as slaves, in chains, to build a ziggaraut to my mighty power.

5) As an evil, 29th level cleric, we fought the Indian Diety, Ushas, Goddess of Dawn, and defeated her on her own turf, thus destroying her. I still feel guilty about this. She was an awesome goddess. I now realize that we cheated (she should have used her divine command power to completely destroy us...I think we made ourselves deaf or some dumb shit). I don't know how I ended up using clerical spells against another god, but it made sense at the time, even in Elysium. Seems like evil magic should not work there. We had some sort of infernal army helping us. It was like 4:00 AM when we did this, and we were cracked out on Jolt and chocolate chip cookies. Funny, dawn came anyway, in the real world. In my goofy fantasy world, of course, eternal night....EEEVILLL. Everything everywhere must have perished. Dumb cleric, no followers. I was DM and playing with a friend simultaneously, this is something like playing chess against one's self...goofy. That explains it. Seriously, I never see a sunrise nowadays without apologizing to her, or thanking her for making us think we won. Tenth grade, probably.

7) I usually DM'd. I came up with so many fantasy worlds, I could never keep them straight. I remember one scenario where I was breeding armies of undead from caged ghouls and human hostages fed to the ghouls. I would then turn the undead. Another evil cleric. Animate dead was the basis of my power for a hell of a long time. Best third level spell ever, even better than fireball is for magic users, if used properly. One need never to fight opponents again, ZOMBIES do that for you now. Fuck having a thief around to check for traps, let ZOMBIES go first....and hundreds of zombies, led by some fuckwad on a warhorse, is a good time. Hell yeah.

8) I had this campaign with ultra powerful player characters. They were at about 24th level. I translated the book of Revalations into DnD format and ended the fucking world. It was awesome. Early on, they had to keep rolling on the random disease table (yes, there is one in the Dungeon Masters Guide, first edition) for the ailments they got from god, then trying to heal themselves. Somehow, the pagan gods they worshiped still had some modicum of power. There were armies of undead led by a badass antichrist....a big lion-headed beast that breathed sulfur. The PCs knocked those things down, no problem. More monsters though, and earthquakes....I think most of them got wasted before the end. A couple ended up in the lake of fire, tormented eternally. Good job.

9) My friend Rolf was a killer DM. Tomb of Horrors was the perfect module to fuck with me. I think we all died. I was a total pussy about it when my were-rat thief crawled into that fucking sphere of annihilation and disintegrated. I still think that cover is a shitty thing to do...you can clearly see them FIGHTING a lich. Instead, you get this crappy demilitch that is indestructible, and devours your souls forever...it was a total killer dungeon. At the time I was pissed, now KNOW why Gary Gygax wrote it, from the daughter of a woman that played with him all the time. HE DID write it to kill characters, he wrote it to kill her, specifically. This was the same woman who invented the rust monster, by the way. Figures, doesn't it? You DnD fans out there, your most memorable, miserable DnD experience resulted from a personal vendetta. Wouldn't have it any other way, now. Sometimes you are just fucked.


10) THANK YOU, ex wife, for the few times I got laid BECAUSE of DnD. Great times.

Dear Ruby

Dear Ruby,
It is your official due date, and I am waiting here for you. I can guarantee you that this planet has snow, the kind that requires a snow-suit, for making snow-angels. Soon, it will have rain, and sunflowers, and ice cream. It has fossils. It lacks Titanotheres, sorry, but it is well-stocked with arthropods. I promise to lay off on the loud death metal until I think you can handle it...you are more likely to hear Joanna Newsome and Tangerine dream early on. We have three freak cats for you to meet, and a little bassinet with a sheepskin. We have tiny socks for you.

see you soon.

this is horrible

this is, indeed, horrible. going back to a blog is like going back to an AA meeting after a month long drinking binge. arrrghhhh....feels better already. it was a failure caused by high expectations...i did not want to just blog ANYTHING....it had to be "good", whatever that is. meanwhile, we have watched the entire structure of finance collapse, a titan with clay feet falling over into the desert, crushing thousands of us under its bulk as it shatters, more to perish because the angered gods will cause economic drought and wilting. meanwhile, my daughter is locked and loaded, the miscreant kicking every time the mother eats a cheesburger. i will probably look back on this as a simple, happy time, but in fact i have a headache nearly always and find myself perpetually distracted, nonproductive in a very banal way. it is all about that collapsing colossus....i enjoy seeing it topple, but here i am, wanting to shore it up with a scaffolding of bamboo, because i am underneath it like everybody else. meanwhile, fish swim free out there in the north pacific, and color-changing squid. jupiter is unaffected. i have just realized that it is absolutely impossible to ever know the answer to the life after death riddle, because to die is to stop being capable of knowing anything, any person who dies is effectively insulated from the knowledge that the game is over. nor horrible, just a fact of existence.

The Tower

The thing rattles its cage it is a man it is a beast it is captive it is godlike. Black clouds gather, lightning, the vanguard of rain, crackles and illuminates through the cold cold window, its bars polished by centuries of clutching hands. In the city below, this tower can be seen from all points, a stone archolith, a black spire, stabbing the heavens, a spike held to the neck of pagan gods who crafted the earth out of venom so long ago. Gold coins fall into a wooden box. Far to heavy to carry, the treasure box sits along a row of such boxes in a deep vault, torch lit, location secret. One box for gold, one for silver, six for copper, nine for tin, bronze and the lesser metals. Even here, in the bowels of the black tower, gusts of wind from the north cause dust to rise in spiral eddies, torch flames bending and bending back again. More coins. A bony hand holds a particularly ancient one in its grip, admiring its age. It is from the time of heirophant Merovik, sixteen centuries ago, the face of the dead autocrat depicted in profile in its gold. In those times there was a second tower, and a third, one for each eye in the face of the true god. Coins drop. Cage rattles. The first downpour of rain starts suddenly.

They Are Called Arachnoids

The surface of Venus, dark under an impossibly thick cloudscape, nightmarishly hot, and dry as a bone under sulfur clouds and atmospheric pressure so intense the air ripples with every shudder of the air mass upon air mass nowhere for the heat to go. The crust seems solid but it is not, so hot it does not break into continental plates like our Earthly foothold instead the plumes make their way to the surface as vast and horrible bubbles, calderas of molten lava they rise to the surface melting the landscape and cracking it like pudding on a pot, bubble bursting and filling with lava, from space the affair recalls two dimensional spiders in some horrible web.
They tell me that meteors, falling to earth, one it was in Indonesia I think that killed a dog..five billion years in space before that dog existed and it nails the canine on the head with perfect accuracy it could happen to each and every one of us and we should live our lives knowing it. Those meteors have diamonds in them, tiny, and older than the solar system, made as the shockwave of an ancient supernova passed through its upper atmosphere millions of miles distant, debris of which precipitates the collapse of yet another starfield another sun another two dozen one, our own, adrift in the galaxy we shall never know which stars share a common origin with us.
Once again, I contemplate every lifeless globe out there unsung and beautiful never-to-be-observed and long for some dimension x, solids of which have already been described floating along the plane of imaginary numbers.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

Lonely out in space, this vast starfield a shroud, woven of nebulae, wracked with cosmic rays, nurturing a million rocky orbs. A vast sea, dark as pitch except the occasional flash of lightning, warm clouds above, deck after deck of them, flecked with volcanic ash. Elsewhere, an icy orb, crystal lattice after crystal lattice left over from ancient volcanism, domes collapse and broken shards litter the landscape like a brawl between titans in some colossal glassware shop. Still farther and there are nothing but radiation clouds, lethal to some, nourishing to others, a neutron star at the center of them, degenerate matter so tightly compressed that time on the surface crawls and creeps a million ticks of the clock elsewhere to one subtle click of the second hand, were it even possible, on a surface that crushes matter into a single, vast and complicated, matrix of woven strings.
I long to be back home, clouds purring over an urbanized landscape, the sussurus of cricket calls at night, hot chocolate and donuts in the morning, meetings and late trains. Life and death, not annihilation and cataclysm.

Jupiter

We just watched mighty Jupiter, globe vast and dusky spinning fleet every ten hours a revolution, it crawled up the edge of a mighty scaffolding, like some Ptolemeic fluke the firmament was committed to measurement and mighty Jupiter raced like a pony. Or was it us that was moving, as you kept saying just as Jove spins earth spins likewise, but slower, and so much less to spin you could cram hundreds of our world in its cloud deck like bowling balls bouncing around the tilt a whirl at an amusement park all these rocky orbs in coplanar orbits not inevitable just luck because our star condensed the right way to produce a pleasant series of ellipse.

Jupiter, you could have eaten us, long ago, when the solar system was a few hundred million years old and accretional friction from all those tiny chunks of rock and planet you swallowed added up to braking and tighter orbits and thank god you ran out of things to eat on the way. It stopped you. And here we both are. Thank you Jupiter for all the deadly asteroids you have swallowed up over the years, bolides that could have smashed into the earth. I am sorry i never made it to the planetarium when you were eating Shoemacher Levy, it was a show, but I was going through an ugly breakup at the time. Still, getting out of the house would have done me good and there is nothing like astronomy to make a person wonder about things. Like bikinis. I am brutish and savage, a product of mammalian evolution and scratch me, yes, do it, you will feel the ape beneath the flesh, evolved from nucleic acid and opportunistic ontogeny, selfish dna and unselfish, slaughter and nurture, till neuron meet neuron and there we are, both on the balcony watching the sunset marveling at the tons of steel, iron forged in the heart of a red giant and carbon most likely cycled through a million cycads and jawless fish on the way to its status as a railing, protecting the both of us from some final oblivion. It is a shame that we only get to know so much.