Because 7-8-9

 In taking a look at my gaming shelf, I realize that I have a lot of superhero game systems at my disposal, and none of them the perfect choice for a superhero game.

I've gone on about Silver Age Sentinels recently, and it's one I will most definitely look into again, especially now that I know a new edition is coming out this year.

I got into a discussion with someone about Mutants & Masterminds, a game system I have very much enjoyed in the past. I have run several superhero campaigns, and my latest one was in Mutants & Masterminds 3rd Edition. The game did not go well - it fell flat and didn't really get me excited as a GM.

For the longest time, I blamed myself for it - that I was burned out, busy with other things, other distractions, etc. - but in having this conversation with a friend of mine, I really realized I was being obtuse about the whole thing.

I guess my realization is that M&M 3rd Edition is so bulky, that it gets in its own way. The system got in the way of the story I was trying to tell in the game, and I blamed myself for that. Now, I do certainly have my fair share of the blame, but I have to recognize what the M&M 3E system did to me - it made me a hostage of a rules system that allows abuse of those very rules.

This is why I don't review games or movies - I get blinded by the shiny bits and it may take years for me to see things as they are.

As I've said, I started with the FASERIP system in the Marvel Superhero Roleplaying Game from TSR back in the early 1990's, graduated up to Champions 4th Edition later, and then on to Silver Age Sentinels.

Well, from there, I, of course found Mutants & Masterminds, The first edition was okay, but didn't really make a cohesive superhero game until the second edition was released. In retrospect, the second edition was the best iteration.

The books looked good, the art looked good, and the writing was top notch. Third edition decided to try to be everything at once, and it got muddled in the process. I created many a character, villain, and story in the second edition of M&M. I like their Freedom City setting very much, and love the heroics that overshadow the game world in general. I folded much of it into my Superpowered setting.

When I became disillusioned with M&M 3E, I gave Savage Worlds Supers a shot. Now, Savage Worlds does some things very well - that being pulp adventure stories and modern action. It flows well once you get the hang of it, and it's a simple enough system. When you start adding in a superhero power structure, things can get a little crazy.

When Pinnacle released their second edition of the Super Powers Companion, the revisions they did were done well. I ran one game using these rules and it worked fine. It's hard to tell how it would have worked in the long-run, since I was running a game for some middle-schoolers at a birthday party, and things were a little chaotic to say the least.

I converted several characters over from M&M 3E to Savage Worlds and it worked just fine, like I said. It's not perfect, but it's good enough for me to want to try it again. Things got sidelined, however, when Pinnacle released the new edition of their Savage Worlds rules, the Adventure Edition, they announced they would be updating all that stuff as well ... eventually.

Now, I'm not complaining about Pinnacle, mind you. They put out great stuff. They've put out a new edition of Deadlands, Deadlands Lost Colony, are coming out with a Pathfinder conversion, and are busy making good stuff as quickly as they can while managing to make a good quality product. I'm content to wait until their companions are ready to come out.

So, let's see, that's seven different game systems I've ran that I can remember. I've played in a  few others - a homebrew system from someone about 15 years ago that wasn't bad, and I played in a one-shot of Tiny Supers, which, while fun with the people I was playing with, was a God-awful system and very much not to my liking. So much so that I opted not to play in the follow-up session.

I'm going to go ahead and look into the Sentinel Comics RPG, based on the Sentinels of the Multiverse game, as I've heard some good things about it, but I do so hesitantly. Like I said, I will get the new edition of SAS, oddly titled "Absolute Power" for some reason.

On a side note, there is a system that Modiphius uses called the 2d20 System. They've used it in their Mutant Chronicles, Star Trek, John Carter games, and other books, and I've played in it a few times. It's a good system, in my opinion, and I'd really like to see what they would do with a superhero iteration of those rules. It might be really awesome. I'd love to see it, but thus far, they've stuck with licensed settings like Fallout, Dune, Conan, and The Elder Scrolls. That's fine, too, they do excellent work, which is why I'd like to see them take on the superhero genre in some way.

Enough capes and cowls, it's Friday!

Rollin' Rollin' Rollin'

 I'm done clearing the way in my collection for new/old stuff to come in. I've been going through my game collection and culling out some things and shipping them off to Noble Knight (free plug) for trade credit and turning old games into ... well, old games again, but at least it's old games that I actually want.

I'm also reading again for pleasure, something that I haven't done in a long, long time.

I read to my kids, of course. Right now we're in book three of the Percy Jackson series, and I'm enjoying it as much as they are - even though they fall asleep about five to ten minutes into reading each night. I've read The Hobbit, The Colour of Magic, and the first two Percy Jackson books to them. They really dig it, and I really love reading to them.

I haven't read for pleasure really since before college - higher education killed my love of reading. Up through High School, I read a lot - mostly fantasy and sci-fi. When I was in Junior High, or Middle School for some of you folks out there, I remember reading the Dragonlance Chronicles trilogy.

It was a big white book, the "Collector's Edition" that compiled all three books into one. It was a massive book and clocked in at 1,030 pages. When I set out to read it, it made me nervous, but I made my way through it. I remember when I finished it, I felt a real sense of accomplishment.

I would also put my bookmark in the book, then look at it from the top, sort of measuring how much I'd read. At first, I measured in millimeters, then it was centimeters, and finally, inches. The thicker the bunch of paper on the left-side of the bookmark got, the more proud I got. I read that thing for weeks.

Then high school and college came around and I was subjected to books I didn't care about. I also really got into film. Film is a passive medium, you sit and watch and absorb what you're seeing. It's a story shown to you using a different set of senses than a book does, so it's not necessarily less work, but different work.

When I had to put down books that I were interested in and had to read textbooks instead, or really read anything that wasn't the least bit interesting to me, I stopped caring. In fact, with the exception of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in my Western Civilization class, none of the books I read in college were interesting to me. None. They put me to sleep. Literally.

I transitioned to listening to audio books, since I had to commute to work, school, and home. Reading became a passive thing for me. Now, I've listened to countless audiobooks, and there are some stellar ones out there. The Dresden Files series, the Song of Ice and Fire books, Ready Player One, and the Expanse novels all come readily to mind.

So, I thought I'd start reading again, and while I had meant to start this last night, things came up, tonight, I plan on not turning on the television ... and reading.

Now, I'm reading The Ultimate RPG Gameplay Guide by James D'Amato right now, and it's a good read. I know it's not a groundbreaking epic of a story or anything, but it's something I want to read.

I've been slowly getting novels from the past that I haven't read in well over fifteen years, and it has surprised me what books came to mind for me when I said to myself, "What books would you read over again?"

Well, of course, Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson is one of those books that comes right to mind for me, but I've read it probably half-a-dozen times and it's one of those novels that I've managed to constantly have a copy of on my shelf, so that one's not a priority. I'm thinking of books that I've read that were fun, perhaps easy-reads, that made me smile when I thought of them.

Slowly, these books are arriving. None of them were expensive to get - and I could have just purchased the e-book versions of them, but I wanted to hold them in my hands and read them, physically turning the pages  on them like I did years ago. I have nothing against e-books - the books I read my kids are on my Kindle app - I just want that experience again of measuring where I am in a book.

The Forgotten Realms Phlan Trilogy was one I read a long time ago, I think in Junior High as well. I got Pool of Radiance because of the gold-box SSI video game we had on our Commodore and, eventually, on our my brother's Packard Bell 486DX2 computer. I never did beat the game, but I found the novel one day while browsing at (probably) Borders, and picked it up.

Little did I know, it was part of a trilogy. There really wasn't any indication that it was part of a trilogy if memory serves, but I later stumbled on Pool of Darkness and Pools of Twilight. I don't recall if I read either of those, but I have them now, so I will read them at some juncture.

I never read a lot of D&D books, to be honest. I read the Dragonlance Chronicles and the Pool of Radiance book and that's about it. I bought several others, but never picked them up to read. I remember owning a copy of Spellfire by Ed Greenwood and some other generic D&D novels from back in the 90's, but never being too into them. I didn't read the Lord of the Rings until my girlfriend at the time made me in the early 2000's. I was always more into science fiction, I suppose.

Superhero Bus Stop

I've said before that I've played a number of superhero games - from Marvel FASERIP, Champions 4th Edition, Silver Age Sentinels, Mutants & Masterminds, Savage Worlds, and a few random others - all of them (well, most of them) good games.

I received a copy of Silver Age Sentinels today. It's a game I originally bought 19 years ago when it came out from a company called Guardians of Order, a Canadian gaming company that made their bacon back in the day with Big Eyes Small Mouth, a generic anime role-playing game using their Tri-Stat system. 

Now, as I recall, the original Tri-Stat System was d6-based, but they upped it to d10's for SAS (Silver Age Sentinels). It was originally published in 2002 during the d20 boom. There was a d20 version, too, but I wasn't interested in a d20 supers game with class-based superheroes. It felt too restrictive to me and superheroes needed to have some serious customization options available, especially for me and my players.

I do remember the d20 system had a better cover. The Tri-Stat version was once described to me as a bunch of superheroes looking like they were waiting for the bus, while other superhero games had more dynamic artwork both inside and out. For what it was, this was a huge step in the right direction with art direction that would ultimately be perfected in Mutants & Masterminds a short time later.

It was a good system and it worked well, but when Mutants & Masterminds came out, this went by the wayside. In some ways, I regret giving up on it. They did some supplements for it, but nothing ground-breaking. M&M came out in the same year and kind of stole it's thunder. I seem to recall SAS was out at Gen Con that year, but M&M just missed it or had a very limited run therein, so SAS was the choice for those of us with ready money at the con that year.

SAS had a pretty robust superpower system, with pseudo-guidelines in there for converting from, say, Champions or something else. Wile BESM (Big Eyes Small Mouth) never really interested me (I'm not much of an anime guy), this was very much on my list of must-haves at Gen Con that year.

I got the book and got right to work making characters and creating a universe I'd call "Superpowered."

I remember driving to my then-girlfriend's workplace, a Dunkin' Donuts and getting struck by a weird burst of inspiration when I thought of a city name that just opened the floodgates of my imagination in such a way that I'm hard-pressed to think of another time where writing just flowed out of me so freely.

I was thinking about a superhero campaign, and a universe to run it in. SAS had a setting in it, but I was at a point in my 22-year-old life where I wanted to create my own thing, my own universe. So I'm driving to Dunkin' Donuts and I'm thinking about a superhero universe and the names of cities. While Marvel is a universe where cities are real, grounded places like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, etc., DC is a place where you have imaginary places like Metropolis, Gotham City, National City, and others, and that was never as appealing to me.

It got me thinking, though. What if, due to superhero popularity, a city like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, etc. changed its name as part of this sudden wave of superhero popularity. There were some places that already had cool, superhero-sounding names associated with them, like Century City in Los Angeles. I remember thinking about this and then mulling over that word, Century and how it sounded just like Sentry, more or less, and a place named Sentry City sounded pretty superheroic.

I then got to thinking about how to adapt our universe to a superhero universe, and I borrowed a page from the Deadlands playbook and decided that there could be a defining event that creates superheroes globally - something cosmic that changes the face of the world.

What came next was like someone threw gasoline on a fire. I got to Dunkin' and grabbed a yellow legal pad and a pen that were both in my backpack, and started writing. I wrote furiously, trying to keep up with the flow of creativity that was spewing forth from my unbridled right-hemisphere. I went inside Dunkin' Donuts and sat at the counter (it was an old-style Dunkin Donuts that had seats at a counter and all that) and just wrote and wrote and wrote.

It was a steady stream-of-consciousness of creation.

I wrote down names of cities, which lead to names of superheroes, which lead to names of superhero teams, which lead to supervillains, and so forth. I developed a classification system of "Superpowered," what these new beings would be called. I liked the play on words - "Superpowered" could be used in a variety of ways. I pictured, "This game is Superpowered," reading across three columns of a comic book. It was literal and descriptive at the same time. I loved it, so I ran with it.

I treated it like a book of my very own, something I hadn't done in years. I just clicked that night and exhausted myself with hours of writing down this setting and its inhabitants, the rules of the world, and everything just fit. It was glorious.

I attribute much of that to SAS, and I've chased that dragon ever since.

I realize that in all fairness, what I did was highly subjective and important to me and me alone, and when I try to explain the intricacies of writing all this stuff down, a lot is lost in translation, but believe me, it was like a possession. I had to write all this stuff down. I pulled up scientific information on the internet to make things fit into a remotely meaningful universe - a universe where I could BS just enough to make these extraordinary things that are impossible seem possible given the right justification.

I was was, and still am, very proud of what I created that night, and it's served as the basis of my superhero games ever since. I love the universe I created - meshing it with the M&M universe and folding in other concepts and settings as time went on.

SAS lent itself well to it, and I ran three campaigns in it over the next few years When second-edition M&M came out, I left SAS behind for greener pastures. As time has gone on, I realize a bit that I had gone backwards in my superhero game system journey without realizing it.

I had left FASERIP for the complexity and customization available in Champions. When that started to prove itself taxing, I moved on to SAS, which was not nearly as crunchy and felt more fluid than Champions had been. I moved on from SAS to Mutants & Masterminds second edition (the first edition didn't really click with me much, though I did like it) and followed along with that, thinking that this was the end-all-be-all of superhero tabletop games. It scratched the customization itch and we weren't rolling cups of dice to make things work.

I remember thinking that the M&M system was simple and elegant. Now, looking back, especially after the third edition came out, I realize that, while M&M was a great game, and still is, as I've gotten older, it's become too complex ... too abusable.

Don't get me wrong. M&M is a good game, and I'll sing its praises. To this day, it has some of the best source material and splat books for the superhero genre in general that you'll ever find (check out their Golden Age and Mecha & Manga books, those two in particular are some of the best books on the superhero genre you'll ever find).

I'm at a point where I want a system to support the story, not the other way around, and M&M can be manipulated into unbalance and awkwardness when in front of a GM that doesn't have the energy or will to fight against such things. It's not the fault of the system, it's the fault of me, the GM, for letting the system overpower me.

I look back and feel that, just maybe, SAS didn't do that to me. It did what it did, and didn't get in its own way. Now that I have a copy again, maybe I'll read it through once more, and see what comes out as a result of reacquainting myself with this old friend.

Guardians of Order died in 2006, it's properties going to ArtHaus Games, a subsidiary of White Wolf, and they never did anything else with the line, instead focusing only on Big Eyes Small Mouth. BESM Kickstarted a new edition last year from Dyskami Publishing and Japanime Games, but there's no sign of anything SAS-related.

What with the popularity of superheroes, it's a wonder why SAS never made a comeback, but maybe, just maybe, Dyskami Publishing has something up their sleeves, but it seems they're currently focused on bringing anime back to the gaming table, whether in a new BESM Edition, or using the D&D 5E system.

One can hope. After all, superheroes encourage hope, right?

P.S. GOO also did a d20 and Tri-Stat version of the anime, Slayers. If they were to bring that back in RPG and/or board game form, I'd be on that like ugly on an ape. Just sayin'.

Dad

 As you can see, I took a break this last weekend. Weekends in general are busy, and some moreso than others.

I'm married and have two small children - so that takes up a lot of my time and energy, obviously.

My wife talked to me about something the other day. Sometimes she goes out and had her nails done or something else the helps her relax and defrag. We all need things like this, obviously, and I support her whole-heartedly taking time for self-care.

She told me she gets a question almost every time she goes out and has a conversation with a stranger: "Who're the kids with?" Then she responds, "My husband." Then they almost every time say, "Uh oh ..." like leaving them with me, their father, is tantamount to letting them play some kind of Russian roulette with an exploding fart gun.

It irritates her when people make it seem like because I'm her kids' dad that I'm somehow incapable or unwilling to be a parent to our kids. She knows that when I'm watching the kids, she and I are a unified front of parenting, and that just because I'm the dad doesn't mean that when she returns from her well-earned time of self-care that I'll be a nervous wreck, somehow subdued like Gulliver vs. the Lilliputians.

It irritates me, too, to be honest.

I don't pay attention to any looks or comments from others about my public parenting. To be crass, I don't give a shit if they approve or disapprove of my parenting style or decisions - I know I love my kids and I'm doing the best I can. Do I get annoyed with my kids? Sure. Do I lose my temper with my kids? Of course. Do I melt into a puddle when my kids do something sweet for me or my wife? Almost certainly. Am I strict with them sometimes? Oh, yes, definitely.

All the same things there can be said about my wife, too. Neither of us purport that we're perfect - we just do our best, and I think our kids are amazing, awesome, and absolutely the best in the world.

I admit, I'm biased.

My kids are learning to read, and it's a slow process what with the pandemic and all. I look forward very much getting them back into public school this coming fall. I can only hope that we did justice to a curriculum for their kindergarten/first grade years and that they are ready for the next step. I'm terrified that we've missed something, or we've not done enough. I really have no idea how to measure their readiness.

I know adjusting to being back in a school setting is going to be difficult for them - especially my son who lost out on his whole kindergarten experience. I mean, c'mon, kindergarten was the best, right? Naps, playing, art, fun times in general - at least that's what I remember from my kindergarten times 35 years ago. I suppose things have changed since then - what with Pre-K and all that, now.

Make Words Go Now

 Lots of interesting things happen in this world, and sometimes they happen to me.

I'm in a spot where I'm happy at home and happy at work, and we're smack dab in the middle of a global pandemic. I've done many creative things in my life, some with more gusto and dedication than others.

I'm trying to make a habit out of this with no overall goal in mind other than to do just this - write and talk about stuff I like.

You see, the internet is full of people taking dumps on things - it's full of hate and animosity, contempt and sanctimonious smugness. If you doubt what I say, take 30 seconds, find a random YouTube video, and start reading the comments section.

I rest my case.

Now, I like griping as much as the next guy, but I find that, oddly enough, I don't like talking about things I don't like. I tried being a movie critic, and I found that I always look for some bright spot to take away from a film, even if it is as bad as Batman & Robin or Volcano. I understood that not all movies are high art, and I approached films with a varying degree of expectations.

This led to a number of reviews going up with a, "It's ok," or, "I enjoyed it," popping up somewhere in the review at least half-a-dozen times.

Truth be told, there are very few things in this world I actively despise. Most things I dislike I can avoid, and, like I said, I don't like talking about the things I don't like. The internet, however, thrives on that. Just look around and you'll find numerous "Top 10 Worst" lists and "Such and such, finally explained!"

It gets old, and I don't want my voice to be out there in a crowd of people simply spewing hate around, even if it's hate at irrelevant things.

So my promise to you is that I will rarely, if ever, write about things I don't like. I will try to talk about things that make me smile, or look for the best in the things I have.

A friend of mine once looked at a shelf of mine filled with movies, pointed to one, and asked, "Hey is that any good?" He quickly realized what he had just asked: "Hey, that movie you bought and put on your shelf there, do you like it?" We don't routinely keep things around if we don't enjoy them in some fashion.

This goes for games as well. I have had thousands of games in my lifetime, and I have had several games that I really like, then get over and then dismiss. With some reflection on a game, and maybe playing it a second or third time, things can dawn on me that I really don't like that game, and that there's this other game that does what this game is trying to do way better.

Take my long-running obsession with superhero games. I mentioned that I started with the Marvel Superhero RPG from TSR, then switched to Champions, then to Silver Age Sentinels, Mutants & Masterminds, and then Savage Worlds. There is nothing wrong with any of these games and I had fun playing and running games in all of these systems. Each has its strengths and each has its weaknesses.

I've found that as I've aged, my specific wants from a game change. When I was younger, I wanted simplicity and beat-'em-ups that the Marvel FASERIP system could deliver easily. Then I aged a bit and wanted some more complexity and the ability to customize heroes in many more ways, so I started using Champions. After some time, Champions got old and we were tired of the over-complexity that came with the Hero system, and we moved on to Silver Age Sentinels.

The Silver Age Sentinels Tri-Stat system offered a good amount of customization and fluidity, yet was easy enough to play. I ran two campaigns in it and developed my own superhero setting that I've used ever since using those rules.

Then Mutants & Masterminds came along and knocked it out of the park. The notion of rolling a single d20 for everything was insane, and I bought into it whole-heartedly. Green Ronin did a great job creating a wonderful setting, rules, and went on to develop it over three editions that I both ran and played games in. I was a fan. I rode the tour bus, bought the t-shirt, and was all-around a happy GM with a superhero setting that I thought worked perfectly for my tastes.

Then I got older again, and the flaws of the game started to peek through after years of players figuring out loopholes, my inept handling of rules and campaigns, and new editions changing things over and over again. M&M is still a great game - a great system full of crunch and customization that should make anyone who loves comics blush.

But I found I wanted something simpler, more user-friendly, and not so minute in its detail. I moved to the second edition rules of the Savage Worlds Supers line. Now, I only ran one game in it, but it was a fun time. They have yet to update those rules to the new edition of Savage Worlds, so time will tell if that becomes the one I continue with, or if I go looking for something else.

This kind of took a turn in the middle there to talking about superhero games, which is not where I really thought I'd go. But, hey, it's where I ended.

I'm exhausted and going to bed now.

A Life of Its Own

 This thing isn't exactly going the way I thought it would when I thought it up.

I thought I'd talk about the games in my collection, as that's something I want to do - but this had taken on a life of its own and it's kind of organically becoming something else. I'm not going to force it in one way or another, but there may be some jumping around.

Ever since my brother handed me that Marvel box, I've loved games. I have hundreds of them now, something I never thought I'd have when I was growing up. I remember spending time with my brother and his friends, and seeing some of their gaming collections and being in awe of the sheer amount of cool stuff they had.

I remember being very intimidated about gaming with my brother, and to an extent that feeling is still around today. I've played in several games run by my brother, and I've run several games with my brother in it over the years, and it's always been a great time.

It would be several years after he got me into roleplaying, and several years of me being the designated GM of my small group, before he ran a campaign that I was able to play in. Now, I don't know if that was a conscious choice on his part - a little of, "I don't want my little brother around while I'm gaming with my friends." I really suspect it was a matter of game-content and how gaming groups can be around a gaming table - it was probably not the right kind of atmosphere for a 10-year-old to sit around with some 17-year-olds and play games. Not to say it wouldn't have been fun, but it would have been a strain on him and his friends to manage the content/language/Monty Python references with someone seven years their junior sitting at the table.

My brother chose to let me mature as a gamer for a few years, to shake out the kick-in-the-door-and-kill-the-monster attitude that a lot of us go through when we first get into the hobby at a young age. It makes sense to me that an RPG ran and played by 10-year-olds would be diametrically different than one ran and played by 17-year-olds.

That all being said, I remember when my brother gathered some of his friends together to run a game. I remember there was my brother, Erik, his friends Darren, Jim, and a tall guy I think was named Matt. There may have been others, but I honestly don't remember.

I must have been at least 13 because my brother was running Dark Champions, from the Hero System 4th Edition at the time, and it came out in 1993.

Dark Champions was the superhero game that mirrored what was happening in the world of comics at the time - shoulder-pads, pouches, and anti-heroes. It was Champions, but "Dark." I had graduated from the Marvel Superhero Role-Playing Game by this point and was running Champions 4th Edition for my friends - my first full-fledged campaign with a story and everything.

I was used to playing - well, running - games with two, maybe three players. We had my core two players, Sam and Anthony, and others would float in and out over the years. I was in charge and I was the guy running the show. When Erik invited me to play in this game he was starting up, I remember really wanting to not be the annoying little brother - the youngest kid there who everyone thought was there just because the game was being run by my big brother. I didn't want the other players to resent me for being there, or, worse, resent my brother for making them play with a kid.

I would love to be a fly-on-the-wall in the conversations he probably had with his players, and know what he told them, or what arguments he used to get them to agree with letting me play. I'm grateful to him and to them for letting it happen. They were a fun group, and they never made me feel unwelcome.

I don't remember a whole lot from the campaign, to be honest. I remember bits and pieces of the game - not the overall plotline or anything - but it gave me my first chance to play, at the very least, in a campaign with a character of my very own. I don't remember if this game happened before or after I went to my first game convention, Kulcon II in Lawrence, Kansas, which would have been around 1993, if I recall correctly. I think I'll save my stories about the first two gaming conventions for another time, but I think they were around this time.

So, I may have actually played a game by this point, not just run one, but it would have only been convention games. This Dark Champions campaign gave me the chance to create my own character for, really, the first time.

Now, anyone who remembers Champions 4th edition knows that calling the Hero System and character creation "Crunchy" would be an understatement. I've seen worse since then, but the character sheets were akin to tax forms, and we rolled so many d6's it became ridiculous. I remember counting up the dice for Stun damage, then counting the Body damage, then calculating knockback, and rolling more dice to figure out the Stun and Body damage from that. Rounds of combat were measured in hours of real time in the Champions game.

I loved every freakin' minute of it.

Erik was running Dark Champions, so there was an edge to this game - something darker and more, uh, edgy than a run-of-the-mill, four-color superhero game. I'm sure he wanted us to make our characters accordingly and adhere to the tenets of the dark, comic-book genre that was prevalent in the comics industry and zeitgeist of the time.

I, of course, ignored that completely.

The character I created was a speedster called "Speed Demon," who was a complete rip-off of the Flash, of course. I remember he got his powers after falling into an electrical generator when these gray monsters attacked the power plant he was working at. I want to say he had a supernatural twist to him, but I honestly don't remember. The character evolved many times over the years, and made numerous appearances in subsequent superhero games, converting systems at least three or four times, and each time he got revised a bit here and there, but the core jackass speedster was there.

Anyway, there are a few highlights I do remember from the campaign.

The character Jim was playing stuffing something in his shorts that these big bad golem-things wanted, so they picked him up and "squeezed him in the Jimmies," causing light to explode from his nether-regions. I remember Jim was a student at KU in Archaeology and he told stories of going on trips to Central America where they had to beat "giant" spiders to death by catching them in a garbage bag, and one story where he ventured into the jungle to take a pee and held his flashlight up to his head, the light pointing out into the darkness, and seeing lots of eyes reflecting back at him from unseen jungle-creatures.

I remember someone coming to the door of the apartment we were at trying to sell something, and I think it was Jim who was politely trying to get the guy to go away, when the big guy who I think was named Matt loudly shouted, "Go away," marched across the living room, and forcefully closed the door in the guy's face. I remember Matt, if that was his name, being a big guy with black hair and a pony-tail, but he was super nice and pleasant to be around.

The last thing I remember was roleplaying disadvantages, or "Disads" as we called them. It was the first time I really experienced a mechanic that tried to make you roleplay or act in a certain way in order to emulate a trope of the comic book genre. I had some kind of heroic disad that meant I would help those in need, always, and when a bad guy we were watching or following or some such started roughing up an innocent bystander, I ran in and clobbered him with a run-by attack. I recall my brother telling me that I jumped the gun a little bit on that, but we all had a good time and I think we lived through the encounter.

The only other things I remember from the game was terminology from the system. Disads were disadvantages, Perks were Prequisites, Body, Stun, Knockback, that sort of thing.

Now, I held onto that Speed Demon character for a long, long time. I had his character sheet for well over a decade, but it has sadly been lost in the shuffle of multiple moves, cleansings, and other natural/unnatural disasters. The character lives on, however, and would make numerous appearances in subsequent campaigns ran in, well, Champions, obviously, Silver Age Sentinels, Mutants & Masterminds, and I believe I statted him up in Savage Worlds at one point.

My Brother, Erik

It was a great experience, and I remember it fondly. I know I'm one of the lucky ones who has a brother that never made me feel like I was unwanted or an annoyance, when I know I was most certainly the latter more than once in our relationship. As I said I'm grateful for him and the guidance and counsel he's given me over the years. I greatly treasure the relationship I have with my brother, and in the times when things were strained between us, I never stopped thinking of him as my best friend.

My sister, on the other hand, is a complete butthead.

Just kidding, Ellie, I love you, too.

Trying to Get this Organized

 Not a huge one tonight, and believe me, I don't want to get away from doing this on a regular basis.

I've been busy reconstructing some holes in my books, RPGs, and board games recently, so I have a lot coming in and have been busy getting things added to BoardGameGeek and RPGGeek in an orderly fashion. It let's me add dorky widgets like this:

This will show you 20 random items from my ever-growing collection of board games and RPGs.

I may have gone a little overboard, but my wife seems happy with all this.

Like I said, it's either this, or black-tar heroin, so ...

I hope people are enjoying this, and I know it's only getting started, and I expect a rocky start as I find a groove, but please know that anyone and everyone who gets some enjoyment out of this makes it all worth it. I'd love to generate some discussion and maybe spark a few creative fires.

I'll be using this outlet for a lot of creative things, so please bear with me.

I'll be talking a bit about miniature painting soon, I think, so stay tuned.

Getting Ready

 So I've been preparing, and wracking my brain for things from my youth that mean something to me. It has led me to an interesting discovery - setting side role-playing books, there aren't a whole heck of a lot of fiction books that really stand out that made an impact with me in my pre-college days.

To tell the truth, college kind of killed my joy of reading, not that reading has ever come easy for me. Not for any literacy reason, but as I got older, reading got harder and harder to do because it made me fall asleep. On top of that, as I entered college, I was required to read books I really had no desire or real drive to read. With a few exceptions, any fiction I was required to ready was very few-and-far-between, and in those cases it was generally academic-style work that I felt was rather irrelevant.

Now, I know I'll probably ruffle some feathers with this, but I never understood why we were required to read "classics" in American Literature that, while important historically, no longer reflect the way writing is done now. To me, it's like the Rolling Stones - I don't particularly care for them myself, but I recognize their impact on music.

I wouldn't have a problem learning about the classics, but requiring us to read things like The Scarlet Letter and Great Expectations was, to me, frustrating as all get out.

This outlook followed and influenced my view of film as well. If given the choice between sitting through another film by Francois Truffaut again or being stung by a wasp, I'd take the wasp every time - at least it's quick.

I digress. I'm getting off track, here, and likely making some folks angry at the same time.

What I'm trying to get across is that there aren't a lot of books that strike me as making a big impact from my childhood. It's a brief list, and I thought I'd share it.

• Fox in Socks by Dr. Seuss
• Marvel's Greatest Superhero Battles by Stan Lee
• Superman IV: The Quest for Peace from DC Comics by Bob Rozakis (author), Curt Swan, Don Heck, Frank McLaughlin, Al Vey, John Beatty, and Dick Giordano (artists)
• The Dragonlance Chronicles Trilogy by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman
• The Forgotten Realms Pools Trilogy (Pool of Radiance by James M. Ward and Jane Cooper Hong; Pools of Darkness and Pool of Twilight by James M. Ward and Anne K. Brown)
• The Bill, the Galactic Hero series by Harry Harrison and others (Robert Sheckley, David Bischoff, Jack C. Haldeman, and David Harris)
• The Apostle of Insanity trilogy from the Mutant Chronicles (In Lunacy by William F. Wu, Frenzy by John Allen Price, and Dementia by Michael A. Stackpole)
• Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

Why Fox in Socks? Simply because I remember my dad reading that to us as kids. Understand that my dad is an actor - a very good actor, though he won't admit it - and he'd get really into reading us stories. I don't remember exactly what he'd do, but I do remember being read this as a child.

Getting past that, I remember this yellow book featuring the Thing and the Hulk on the cover. The book belonged to my dad, and he let me read it. It had a collection of various stories including the Hulk vs. Thor and the two-part story that would make an important impact on me to this day - Fantastic Four numbers 25 and 26 originally published in 1964, a full 15 years before I was born. This story single-handedly introduced me not only to the wonders of comic books, but to my absolute favorite superhero of all time - to this day, bar none - Ben Grimm, The Thing. In the story he goes toe-to-toe with the Hulk, and I remember the cover. The Thing is a big and strong guy, but the Hulk is drawn bigger and more menacing. I remember reading the story and being awestruck when the Thing goes face-to-face with the Hulk and he knows he can't match him blow-for-blow, and that there's little hope of winning the fight ... but he does it anyway.

This story showed me that The Thing was a guy who'd take a beating and get back up, every time, no matter what. It endeared The Thing to me for all time. There has never been a time in my life when I didn't love The Thing. The story showed me that even superheroes argue, get into fights, and in the end find common ground against a greater adversary. It also taught me something that I didn't realize until later in my life - that the villain of a story isn't necessarily evil, but rather could be misunderstood.

That comic led me into the comic book store with my father where I bought my first comic book - the comic-version of the movie Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. Say what you will about that movie, it holds a warm place in my heart because I remember it so vividly. What the comic book showed me, however, was that the same thing in different mediums could be different. The comic book was created based on an earlier draft of the script, so it had a lot of differences in it that weren't in the movie. It was different, but not in a bad way - it gave me a brief glimpse behind the curtain of creativity and showed me that different mediums could be used in different ways to tell the same story in different ways and that just because I saw the movie, a book or comic book could tell me another aspect of the story.

I really think it's what led me to love extra features on DVDs so much, honestly.

I remember reading the Dragonlance Chronicles Trilogy by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman was a book I read in junior high (yes, we had junior high, not middle school). It was a big, thick, white book that I remember was over 1,000 pages in total. It took me a while to read through the whole thing, but I remember feeling a huge sense of accomplishment when I read the last page and knew that I had read that thing cover-to-cover. I was proud of myself for doing it. The books were pretty good, too.

Staying in the Dungeons & Dragons vein, the Forgotten Realms Pools books (Pool of Radiance, Pool of Twilight, and Pools of Darkness) were books I picked up entirely due to playing Pool of Radiance on the Commodore 128D my brother had. It was all because of the gold box SSI game that I never, ever really beat. I remember finding the book and being like, "Cool! I played this game!" Then I found out there were two others, so I had to read them, too. I don't remember much from the series, to be honest, but the books are memorable to me for the simple fact that I made the connection that video games could be books, too!

You'd think that those books would start me down the road of reading copious amounts of Dungeons & Dragons, Forgotten Realms, and Dragonlance books ... but you'd be mistaken. I tried picking up some Dungeons & Dragons novels, but never really got into them. I think I may have tried to read another Dragonlance trilogy and kind of gave up on it. I never ventured into the Realms to read about Elminster or Drizzt, not even once.

The Bill, the Galactic Hero series was a random find at Borders back in the day. I remember finding the "Vol. 1" book, which turned out to be the second book in the series (which was confusing, to say the least), Bill, the Galactic Hero on the Planet of Robot Slaves by Harry Harrison, stood out on the shelf. Upon reading the back of the book, I remember thinking of the RPG Paranoia and thinking this kind of satire was right up my alley. The books weren't hard reads, or long ones at that, but they were very enjoyable. They were tongue-and-cheek, and weren't afraid to parody things that I loved - like the movie Aliens in Bill, the Galactic Hero on the Planet of Zombie Vampires. It's a series I read through once, and think I will read through again now that I have another 25 years of experience with which to interpret the stories of Bill, with two "L's."

The Mutant Chronicles is a universe that I stumbled upon when I read Frenzy, by John Allen Price. As it turned out, this was the second book of a trilogy, but I didn't know that until I made it to the end of the book and saw ads for the other two books. Nowhere on the cover of the book do I remember seeing anything about it being a "Book 2" in a series, or else I probably would have passed on it. I'm glad I started with the second book - it turned out to be the best in the series. I read the other two and found that I really liked the universe. I discovered that it was a RPG and board game, and it struck me as interesting. I'll talk more about the Mutant Chronicles in a later post, as my irrational love of it is long and well-documented. Needless to say, it would take almost 20 years before I was ever able to play in the Mutant Chronicles universe at Gen Con 2018.

On a brief tangent, there was a television show on the Sci-Fi Channel at the time called Sci-Fi Buzz. It was like Entertainment Tonight, but all about Sci-Fi movies and the like. I loved it. I watched it religiously. Turns out it was hosted by Mike Jerrick, and he lived in Lawrence and his daughter went to school with me. When I found that out later, it blew my mind. I mention Sci-Fi Buzz because they had a thing where you could call in and recommend something for others to read or watch or play, what have you, and I called in about the Mutant Chronicles novels, and they actually used it on the show. I had no idea they were going to use it at all. I was watching the show one Friday night and suddenly, my voice came on after the commercial break talking about the Mutant Chronicles books. It was cool for a teenager at the time to be a part of something like that, even if it was very much on the outer edge.

Apparently, the show is on YouTube.

Finally, there's Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson. This was a book that my brother told me about and I have ended up reading it several times over the years. The thing that sold me on the book was the first chapter where the main character, Hiro Protagonist (not a joke), is delivering pizzas for La Cosa Nostra Pizza, where you get your pizza in 30-minutes ... or else. It's a cyberpunk novel, and I'd truthfully love to see it made into a TV series one day. It weaved technology and mythology together in a fun and interesting way, and it's been one of my favorites for a long, long time.

This has just been a glimpse into this, and I'll try to talk more in-depth on each of these books/series in the future.

A Place to Start

There are a lot of things on my shelf, and it's not easy to pick a place to start. Not everything that I have is fresh in my memory, and I'm in the process of gathering up some important books that were important to me at one time or another, or were intriguing to me at some point in my torrid affair with the gaming subculture.

It shouldn't surprise anyone, especially others who have games or, really, collections in general, that I have a lot of games that I haven't played. Truthfully, I have a lot of games that I haven't even read. I have gaming books I've had for years and never cracked open beyond flipping through them to see the pretty pictures.

Now, there are some gamers out there that have a massive collection, and they know everything that it everything about their games, and can go on about all the minute details therein. I am not that person.

Sure, there are some games I have that I can dive into immediately, and give you a good rundown of the setting, system, what-have-you, and why I care enough to have it on my shelf. I want to use this as a way we can both find new and exciting things about these games that maybe some of us, myself included, didn't know. So, I'm thinking of tackling this in a slightly different way - I'm going to start talking about a game that I have never, not once, played, read, or even seen played in the 26 years since it was published (at least the edition I have).

I would love to tell you that this is a game that has intrigued me for so long and it's sat on my shelf since purchasing it at Gen Con 26 years ago, but that would be a partial lie. It is a game that I found intriguing, and it is a game I bought 26 years ago, but, as with anything over the course of a quarter-of-a-century, it's a game that I sold off or lost within that timeframe in one of those naturally-occurring cullings that occur for various reasons.

In fact, this is a game I ordered and received in the mail today, and this is the first time I've looked at the physical copy of the book in years - so long, I can't remember when I looked at this book.

The game is called Fading Suns.

I'm a science fiction fan. I grew up watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Babylon 5, Star Wars, X-Files, and so many others. I've never really gravitated to one IP in particular - Star Trek was fine, with Deep Space Nine being my favorite, but to tell the truth, I never finished watching the series. Probably the show that comes to mind that I am the biggest fan of would be Babylon 5, but I can get more into that another time.

Fading Suns is one of those games that's been around a while. It first came out in 1995/1996 from a company called Holistic Design. This is the edition I remember buying at Gen Con back then (incidentally my first Gen Con, so expect me to talk about several games that came out in this timeframe), and it's the edition I now have, crease in the cover and all.

What I didn't know was that Holistic Design started out as a video-game company in 1992, and they released four games before they ventured into the realm of pen-and-paper roleplaying. None of their video games ring a bell for me, so I can't really talk about those at all.

Fading Suns was to be developed at the same time as the video game, Emperor of the Fading Suns (available at GOG apparently). To be honest, I never played the video game, and really never knew it existed until it was far past its prime.

The inspirations for the game lie in Frank Herbert's Dune and Isaac Asimov's Foundation books, and looking it over it very much reminds me of The Expanse series of novels (and television show) by James S. A. Corey.

What intrigued me about the game was that it was a hard-science game (which was a thing at the time, remembering the other hard-science fiction game that came out at the same time, Blue Planet), where people were tired of the technobabble so often seen in things like Star Trek basically acting like magic in space. People wanted a foundation of realism in their science fiction - something that they could at least wrap their brain around, or attempt to.

The game was designed by Bill Bridges and Andrew Greenberg. Bridges was behind one of my personal favorites, Werewolf: The Apocalypse, but seems to have faded from the more public gaming scene in the last 15 years. He is heading up a new edition of Fading Suns that was Kickstarted in 2020 and is in the process of fulfilling now (gonna have to look into that ...). Greenberg did work with White Wolf as well, mostly with their Vampire: The Masquerade line, went on to teach at the Art Institute of Atlanta and is now the executive director of the Georgia Game Developers Association. He is listed as the Director for Holistic Design, Inc.

The only World of Darkness games that intrigued me were Werewolf and Mage, so Bill Bridges's name stood out to me, even back then when I didn't pay too much attention to things like that.

Fading Suns, while being a hard-science-fiction setting, was drenched in this ultra-gothic motif, which is prevalent all over the World of Darkness games, so the two of these guys fit right in.

From what I recall, the game was set in the far, far future, when the universe is old and the Sun is dying (hence the Fading Suns), and humanity has achieved interstellar space travel thanks to these huge gates they found in space left behind by some ancient alien species that's no longer around.

I'll try to summarize as best I can from the Wikipedia entry:

The feudalistic empire called the Known Worlds arose out of the remnants of the scientifically advanced Earth civilization that fell apart in the previous centuries. It was thanks to these ancient "jumpgates," relics left by an alien race called the Anunnaki - a kind of analog to the Vorlons in Babylon 5 who guided and genetically altered species for their own end, and who "waged a devastating war many millennia ago using them as tools and weapons."

Borrowing from the Cthulhu Mythos atmosphere, the Known Worlds are a "very superstitious and dangerous place."

There are five Noble Houses, five guilds within the Merchants League, and six sects of the Universal Church of the Celestial Sun.

Strict religious codes dictate daily life in the Known Worlds. The game picks up after centuries of war and most worlds have slipped backwards in technology (reminding me a bit of the Mutant Chronicles), to a "level not much more advanced than 21st century Earth." The alien Symbiots, the ancient Vau, and the barbarian empires of the Kurgan and Vuldrok all bide their time for a chance to toss humanity out on its ear.

You can play as a member of a Noble House, one the merchant guilds, or a member of one of the various religious sects. A few alien races are playable, like the "Ukar and Obun, and the six-limbed, bestial Vorox."

The game isn't without some form of magic, interestingly enough, You can possess psychic powers or what they call "Theurgy." Psionicists are seen as 'demon worshippers' and heretics and despised by and hunted by the Church, or forced to join the Church so they can presumably use their dark powers in the name of the Lord. Theurgy is a sort of "divine sorcery" where members of the Church call upon saints and angels to grant them magical powers.

I didn't know about that last part - I figured it was a science-fiction game through-and-through, so the psionics don't surprise me, but this Theurgy is interesting.

Looking through the book, the game is set in the year 4996 (so not really close to that whole Sun burning out thing I mentioned earlier). What really hits me from my fresh look at this game is the deeply-ingrained religious aspect that there is within it. I don't mean the book is preaching about God and religion, but religion has a heavy influence in the setting of the book, which is rather fascinating. It very much reads like a step into the dark ages, but with spaceships and aliens.

I didn't know that about this game back then. Like I said, I thought it was just a hard science game. I haven't seen the hard science in the book I was expecting, but the setting is very intriguing. I'm interested in finally reading it after all these years and want to look into this new edition that's coming out. 

Oh, yeah, a new edition was Kickstarted last year and is coming out soon. I can't tell if it's coming to retail, so I may have missed out. Both Bill Bridges and Andrew Greenberg are involved in the new edition, so that's promising.

I think I'll call it a night with that, and I may jump back into Fading Suns as I have more of a chance to read the book.

A Lot on My Mind

 As the title suggests, I have a lot on my mind lately. Some of which I don't want to talk about here at the moment.

I enjoy a good game. I have lots of board games and lots of role-playing games, and I even partake in the occasional Xbox One and PS4 game, though I consider myself first and foremost a tabletop gamer more than anything else.

I have nothing against video games - I love them, in fact. I love them for the stories they tell. I'm one of those guys who sets a game to the easiest possible setting so I can get the story front and center. Being a lover of movies and growing up on comics and sci-fi/fantasy novels, this shouldn't really surprise anyone who knows me even a little bit.

Like I said previously, the "Curated Quarantine" got me thinking and reminiscing about days gone by. Call it a mid-life crisis, but, as far as I'm concerned, if this is the way I deal with mid-life is going back and re-buying old RPGs and board games from my youth, then I'm sure no one will fault me for doing that instead of something more destructive and stupid.

I mentioned the "Satanic Panic" last time. My parents aren't idiots, so they understood that all that crap was ... well ... crap. As far as they were concerned, I was smart enough to not run around in steam tunnels and stay in my room with my friends and run games for hours on end. They didn't have to worry about me being somewhere they thought may be unsafe, or somewhere where I'd make a bad choice and do something regrettable. Instead, I was safe and sound in my house, or my friends' houses, rolling dice and creating. Granted the first few years were essentially comic-book slugfests, but who cares - we had a lot of fun.

So as you can see, I'm not the typical tabletop gamer of my generation. I didn't start with a "Red Box" Dungeons & Dragons set. In fact, I didn't even play D&D until the second gaming convention I ever went to - Kulcon 3 held at a Radisson Hotel in Topeka, Kansas in the early or mid-90's. It was an RPGA game, I played a Paladin, had a good time, and then didn't touch D&D again until the third edition came out in 2000.

No, my descent into the belly of El Diablo was at the instigation of my own brother. Now, he'd played D&D amongst other things. He's about seven years older than me, and, to his credit, he never was one to shy away from spending time with his younger siblings - he never once complained about his annoying brother and sister (at least out loud where I could hear it). He was the one who introduced me into gaming in general, both tabletop and video games.

I remember we had an Atari 2600 growing up, and then a Texas Instruments home computer. I think it was a TI-99/4A, but I don't remember specifically. I recall playing things like the E.T. game on Atari and Space Invaders on the Texas Instruments, but very little else. Probably the biggest thing I remember, at least about the Texas Instruments computer, was the smell it had. I know that's weird, but it had a distinct smell - or at least the room we had it in did. I can't really explain exactly what the smell was, but if I were to sniff it again, it'd take me right back to tapping away at the loud keyboard in our playroom. We didn't graduate to a Nintendo until much later.

My brother got a Commodore 128D for Christmas one year, and that became the thing we played. We had tons of games for it - Ultimate Wizard, Mail Order Monsters, Save New York, Rampage, Gauntlet, and so many others. It was a blast. We had to run games in BASIC (load "*",8,1 will be ingrained in my brain until I die, and even then ...) and it was the most awesome thing ever.

Now, my recollection of these actual events are likely clouded by retelling and over-dramatizing it over the years, but I remember when I was about nine or ten years old, my brother called me into his room to discuss something with me. I went in and he handed me two boxed sets - one yellow and the other blue. It may have just been one set, I really don't remember exactly, but I remember it as him handing me copies of the Marvel Super Heroes Role-Playing Game Basic Set (yellow box) and the Advanced Set (blue box). He then placed his hand on my shoulder and pointed at some bookshelves that he had mounted on the wall next to his room door on those old metal brackets.

The shelf was full of a variety of books - most of which I don't remember at all, except that he pointed at some books that said, "Rifts" on the side, and said, in quite possibly the most important brotherly advice he ever gave me, "Never play that game."

So two things were born that day - my fervent love of the Marvel Super Heroes Role-Playing Game and my unfailing dismissal of the Rifts universe at large (and, really, the whole Palladium system in general).

I had two real friends at the time (Sam and Anthony), and both were interested in playing when I showed them what I had been bequeathed. Despite their interest, however, neither was interested in actually running a game, so the duty of "Judge," as the MSH RPG called the role, fell to me. Therefore, out the gate, I was the designated game-master for our little group, and thus began several years of running games for my friends.

I didn't get to play in anything for a few years as my brother was too busy with other things to run games for me - and besides had a bad outing trying to run my sister through a game and killed her character off or some such. To this day, my sister still blames him for it and hasn't ever been one to roll dice with us on really any occasion.

On a side note, I think it's been at least a decade since my sister sat down to play so much as a board game with me. She embraced art and theater on her own, and is quite happy with her lack of gaming street-cred.

The Marvel game still holds a place in my heart to this day, and has always been there in the back of my head as something I remember quite fondly.

Anyway, it was the "Curated Quarantine" that made me think of all those memories, and many more thereafter, that has spurned me into writing the very words you see before you now.

So it is with this that I will set out to write about things - probably mostly gaming things, that are on my shelf. I will likely wander off the beaten path from time-to-time, and write about other things, but as of right now, I want to write about my love and passion for games - especially the games that have stuck with me, influenced me, and to this day make me smile.

I look forward to continuing down this road and I hope that someone, somewhere, who might read this, will smile in return, for that will make it all worth it.

A New Beginning

It's been years since I sat down to write actively, and so much has happened since then. To be honest, this is something I should have started at the beginning of this whole pandemic-thing we're all going through. Instead, I hunkered down, started working from home, and life went on.

My family and I have been lucky given the state of things - when the pandemic hit, my wife was on long-term disability through her job and that simply continued through the end of 2020. Other things happened since then, but nothing that would derail us as a family, so rest assured.

Alas, I'm getting ahead of myself. It is late, after all, and it's been a long day involving kids going to dance, gymnastics, a friend's child's birthday party, and our normal Saturday gathering at our good and dear friend, Noah's house.

So I guess a little about me to get things started.

As of the writing of this, I am a 41-year-old man living in the Kansas City area with my wife and 2 1/2 kids. More about that later. I have four college degrees, a wonderful family, and a job I love, so one could say I'm living the American Dream - I have an "Atomic Family" and generally have a happy existence.

I was born at the end of 1979. One week before the end, to be exact - on Christmas Eve. I was a few weeks early and, I guess it could be said I really wanted to see the last week of the 70's. I grew up mainly in Lawrence, Kansas. Yes, Supernatural fans, that Lawrence, Kansas. Let me assure you, however, that the real Lawrence, Kansas has significantly less demon activity and mountainous Canadian countryside, and more to do with "Cruising the Square" and KU Basketball than anything else.

I have two loving parents, grew up with my older brother and sister, all of which I am still close with. My parents divorced in 1998, but I've maintained a good relationship with both my mother and father in that time. We're a close family, we love each other, and I'm truly a lucky guy (note I didn't say, "Blessed") to have them in my life.

My wife and I met at a gaming convention (more or less) twelve years ago, in 2009. To be more accurate, we met at my gaming convention - a convention I started with friends because 2009 was the first time in 13 years that I was not able to go to Gen Con - the largest and greatest tabletop gaming convention in the United States. I got it in my head I'd take the Bender approach and have my own convention, with blackjack and hookers, but forget the blackjack (and hookers, really). I can write more about that little thing called KantCon at another time, but I'm just giving the Cliff's Notes version of my secret origin story here.

Now, when my future wife and I met, she was dating someone else, and it would be another year-or-so before I would figure out that this girl liked me and I liked her back. We started dating, got engaged, I graduated from school, we got married, we got pregnant, we "adopted" her younger sister, she graduated from school, then we had a beautiful daughter. A year-and-a-half later we had my son as well.

My kids and my family are my life. My friends, too, but I really just count them as extended family at this point. I'm a walking cliche, I know - I'm a guy with two-and-a-half kids and a loving family who lives and grew up in Midwest Kansas as a vanilla, white, Anglo-Saxon, protestant, sheltered liberal.

Now I may go into further detail on this secret origin at another time, but suffice it to say, I'm a generally happy, nerdy, totally "normal" guy.

What is my goal here? To have an outlet. To put the proverbial pen-to-paper and spew forth things into the void for posterity. Should anyone listen to me for any particular reason? Nah, I don't have anything special to bring to the table except what I've got - my perspective and my life experience, much as it is.

I'll tell you what really got me thinking about this, however, and it's not anything that I've mentioned thus far. Sure, I have a family that has always been supportive of my writing and my creative outlets, but someone not connected at all to me, my family, or really even my state (to my knowledge) did a series of writings throughout the last year of this pandemic called, "Curated Quarantine."

This gentleman is named Chris Pramas, and he doesn't know me. Hell, I don't know him very well past his writings and tangential meetings at Gen Con over the years, and supporting his company, Green Ronin Publishing. His series was a brief glimpse into the games on his bookshelf - games that he has collected over decades of being a tabletop gamer.

Yes, a tabletop gamer.

I guess that's not such a taboo thing any more, but while I was growing up, and no doubt when Mr. Pramas was growing up, it wasn't something that one advertised widely. You see, back in the 1980's and 1990's, when I was a prime young-un, a little thing called Dungeons & Dragons was one of the things that came to the forefront of an epidemic known as "Satanic Panic." More specifically, a lady named Patricia Pulling spread the absurd notion that D&D led to satanic worship, delinquency, and a myriad of other things. Needless to say, it was all complete and utter bullshit, but the effect was that if you were one of those guys who were into role-playing games, you were one of those weirdos that liked to run around in steam tunnels and have mental breaks with reality on a regular basis.

Nowadays, gamers have a lot better press. Probably because all of us who grew up in the 80's and 90's now work in all sorts of fields and don't run around in steam tunnels and live in our parents' basements - we became movie stars, CEOs, and generally successful people. Now, we have proponents of the tabletop gaming scene like Critical Role and others, and Dungeons & Dragons is a much more widely accepted thing now that Hasbro has owned it for almost two decades.

All that aside, Mr. Pramas (I don't know if I should call him, "Chris") did a post a day, more or less, about something in his collection. Now a chunk of what he wrote about were wargames, which never really interested me, but the other things he wrote about were predominantly role-playing game books. I greatly enjoyed journeying down the occasional rabbit-hole and being reminded of games from my past that I had forgotten, or at least filed away in the dark recesses of my nerd-soaked brain.

He talked about great games that I remember having great times playing or running with friends, or some I just read and never got around to. Games such as Underground, Paranoia, and a plethora of others.

So I decided to start with doing the same.

In my next post I'll talk a bit more about why I'm doing this, and where I intend to go, but for now, I need to get some sleep.