Life happens. Spring came and with it came the thaw. Like the ice
breaking on the river, small events happened one after another, and before I
knew it, I was swept into real life off my internet chair. I buried my father
last October and was behind on rent for some months. God bless my landlord for
his patience and kindness. Winter was a gray haze of overtime and my car’s
engine burned out on Valentine’s Day 2016. Life is a free-fall in which things
will get ripped apart like space shuttle Colombia disintegrating on re-entry
into the earth’s atmosphere. I used to have a great roadster. It lived long past
the designed obsolescence, planned for it by the GM, until it literally started
falling apart at the seams and I couldn’t find the spare parts to maintain it.
I got a new awesome vehicle. I can’t quite classify it. Teal Ruby
was my Roadster. This one is my Little Two Scoop. Only one air intake, actually,
to feed the turbo. Not quite little, but compact as SUV’s go, a 2006 Subaru
Forester XT, police uniform dark blue in color. Its turbo engine and the glass
roof that it has for a Sun Roof (or Moon Roof or whatever) were selling points
for me. I rode the Greyhound bus up north for a few hours to upstate New York to
pick up my new car. Paid for it outright from my savings, no car payments to
speak of. That was November 2014. The car had miles on it and its 4 cylinder
turbocharged engine eats gas like my old Roadster that had the biggest V-6
engine the GM manufactured at the time when the car rolled off the assembly
line in 1996. Two Scoop has more horsepower than the GM Roadster, and it is all
torque and speed. All wheel drive and better ground clearance. I guess this be
my scout car. And so, this thing needed an engine job.
The engine started overheating and my very experienced mechanic
could not diagnose it in time – head gasket was failing and leaking compression
gas into the engine water jacket, causing sporadic overheating. Ultimately, the
engine block warped and seized thanks to overheating on one extraordinarily
cold day in February. I took it to technicians at the Ramsey Subaru dealership
in New Jersey for their expertise and for a loaner car that they can provide. I
was ripped off by the tow truck company servicing the supposed AAA free tow,
shame on the AAA incompetent road service operators who would not back me up
and made me pay the driver $100 for the $64 dollars in tolls that it took to
get me to the Subaru dealership. But, the car was fixed over a period of six
weeks, and I was not without wheels. The costs threw me in the poor house, but
I was able to get in debt to pay for the engine job.
When I bought the car, I foresaw the major systems on it failing
and invested in a service contract, for all a service contract is worth on a
used vehicle with over 100,000 miles. The company came through, and made a
partial payment. It was a good return on my investment and made the repair
affordable for me. I would not have been able to raise the full amount to cover
the cost of repairs otherwise.
If I am to play a D&D character, I would not want to be a
Dwarf, a human Ranger or a Druid. Real life being what it is, I would most
likely wind up a Half-Orc (or a Bugbear) with brains. In Midlands, Orcs are
pig-faced, and Bugbears have Ursine relatives. My more innocent and better half
is basically a Malloy from Brikleberry, so that theme is prevalent in Brooser’s
World, but anyway, even though I am not keen on Dwarves, I have a Dwarven
outlook on life – There is no luck in my universe. Everything will go wrong and
the point of all planning is to minimize loss and amortize damage. Every
operation is an exercise in controlled attrition. Win or loss is determined by
whether or not the damage and losses exceed the damage that was anticipated and
planned for.
Spring crept up unseen and things started improving gradually.
During the weekend of beer, movies, and board games I was asked by a friend to
start running a D&D game again, and then my other set of friends wanted the
same over a game of Scrabble. It was going to be a generic game, just some
modules, but then I felt the call of Midlands and started work on the campaign
again.
Another thing that happened, was that they opened a new LA
Fitness gym practically across the highway from where I live. Keep in mind,
that this is a stretch of the roads, where people drive like ass-holes,
literally. You try to cross this stretch of highway across the urban no-man’s
land, vacant lots and flood plains overgrown with sparse vegetation. You look
at the driver behind the wheel, and it speeds up as if to run you over or
discourage crossing before it goes past you. Other than that, a pleasant 16-minute
walk or a two-minute drive (literally), if no traffic. This too, has crept
unseen and accidentally. See, I don’t trust my checking account to gyms and gym’s
contracts, but I participate in a program with my health insurance, that lets
me go to any gym in their network. They dragged their feet for about six
months, or, correction, nobody was running with the ball. One fine spring day I
called up the offices to see why they could register the gym that I wanted to
be in the network. Stayed on the phoned for three hours or so, made additional
phone calls, but in the end of that afternoon, I got the gym and I started
going the next day.
The consequences of that day on the phone were more profound than
I thought. I am essentially doing triathlon training, I am a six day cycle and
it takes me 2 – 2 ½ hours to get through the routine. Now I am juggling
overtime and gym, and somehow D&D got sucked into the routine as well.
Before you know it, I ran two game sessions with my local friends, and I got a
session with the other group over the Memorial Day weekend. I am running Castle
Caldwell with the local group and will run B8, journey to the rock over the
upcoming weekend. Both are written into my midlands settings and NPC’s modified
for local flavor.
Somehow, in between all this, I got a few interesting D&D
projects going. First, I decided to write a Midlands Gazetteer and outline the
flow of the campaign. I read the Grand Duchy of Karameikos Gazetteer to become
familiar with a Gazetteer structure, and will review it later. I also read the
mega-module B1-9 series, because they have an “adventure flowchart”, a
rudimentary structure to be sure, but a good starting point. The second project
essentially involves consolidating all of D&D text from the first White Box
Booklets, through Moldway and Mentzger colored boxed sets, and core AD&D
Books that were written by Gygax. It is a journey of discovery. I am working on
two projects. The first one is the Compiled Monster List. I got a spreadsheet
going, that lists every monster listed in the OD&D and B,E,C,M sets as well
as Monster Manual, MM2 and Fiend Folio, all first edition. I keep track of
where each monster appeared first and will see which if any ideas were lost by
the wayside. Eventually, I will populate the Spreadsheet with the pertinent
information such as the creature type, level, and areas it inhabits. Then I
will drop it into an Access Database, and will be able to do searches to select
my special monsters – I need the plains dwelling humanoid levels 2-3, and see
what comes up. Every creature that has ever been invented for the AD&D game
will come up.
The second project I am working on is the Dungeon Design
Document. I love the Dungeon Master’s dungeon adventure writing section,
Moldway Basic rulebook Section 8. I also have Gygax’s DMG appendices on the
same topic, similar, but not the same. Moldway better organized it, but it lost
the level of the descriptive detail. Normally, I scan the dungeon module,
convert it into a word file, and edit it to write the generic adventure into
Midlands. In case of dungeon design, it is a labor of love, and I type the
relevant sections of text into the document by hand. I am scouring the Holmes
Basic set, all the other sets and the Core Books for relevant tidbits of information,
to see how it changed and what not as it migrated from one version of the game
into another.
Some people study the Bible or other religious scriptures. Some
people read up on String Theories and subatomic particles. My text, my passion,
is Dungeons and Dragons.
