Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

After my D&D group fought the harpsichord in the ballroom they headed upstairs in the mansion. But not before they found a secret door behind a drape in the Ballroom that transported them to the Library. Yes, it was all the way on the other wing of the mansion. Yes, I put that in because it's a Clue trope to have secret doors that lead straight across the map. 😂

Then, while trying to leave the library, the group spent a long time cracking up laughing about a trap on the way out. I mean, it was supposed to protect the lord's library from intruders coming in, but this group's trap-finding ability that excelled on finding the secret door failed them when it came to the trap in the narrow corridor. The floor dropped away, plunging two of the characters to the basement level below. Upon that they started coming up with increasingly Rube Goldberg-like ways to try to rescue those down below. Several times I pointed out, "You've been in the basement before. You know where you are. There are stairs less than 50' away from you." 🤣

Only then— well, after that plus investigating the Dining Room because, why not— did they head upstairs. And upstairs they found... spiders!



The main corridors upstairs was full of spider webs. Two of the party members got stuck in the strands. As they struggled to free themselves, the monstrous spider who spun the webs approached and webbed-up the space around the remaining PCs.

It was a tough battle because of the stickiness of the webs. The group kept struggling to get free. Fortunately for them, the spider didn't manage to bite them. I rolled lots of crap attack rolls. 🤷

What I should have done, now that I reflect on it, was have the second Large Monstrous Spider come around at them from behind while they were mostly stuck. That would've made the combat even more challenging. Instead, I had the second spider kind of hiding at the far end of the corridor. By the time the group entered its range they had their plan for "How to fight a Large Monstrous Spider that shoots sticky webs" locked in.

And then they reached the boss. Lord Eito Asano.

To be continued....

Today we played D&D again. It was the second full session of my game, The Collector's Menagerie. After an action-packed session 2 weeks ago where the group got through a lot of challenges today they.... Well, it's not so much that they "hit the skids" as that they fell over laughing.



The laughs today came from two things. First, I came up with names for the menagerie of monsters they're fighting in the mansion. No, I don't mean names like "Sammy the Stirge". I mean names like... if you saw these monsters at a zoo, what would the placards in front of their cages say? Because part of the story here is that these monsters literally have cages. And they were put there by a collector... who wanted to show them off. Hence they'd have labels!

The group came back upstairs out of the basement and ventured into the Gallery next. The gallery is the large room where the collector literally had most of his exotic monsters displayed in cages. And because the collector was a bit snooty— I mean, if you've got exotic monsters in display cages between your Hall and your Ballroom you're going to want to be snooty about it— I decided the placards would be in an ancient language known only to the most learned scholars. Ergo, for roleplaying props, they're in Latin.

But how do you say "Owlbear" in Latin? I punted... and marked the cage "Ursa Noctua". Bear-owl. 😂

One of the PCs is actually fluent in my game's ancient scholarly language. And the players had fun trying to guess the monsters from their high school Latin lessons before his character translated them. I gave them these 6 monster labels:

• Ursa Noctua : Bear owl (Owlbear)


• Versipellis Furtivus : Sneaky Skin-changer (Mimic)


• Arinerum Magni : Large Spiders


• Aves Sanguinarii : Blood-drinking Birds (Stirges)


• Scutigera Cadaverosa : Carrion Crawler


• Belua Excrementum : Shit Elephant

To preserve an element of mystery there were two cages with missing labels.

The group choked a bit on the Sneaky Skin-changer— which they interpreted (correctly) as a Mimic, a classic D&D monster. They kind of assumed it, anyway, the moment they saw the treasure chest with fangs chasing someone in the cover pic (above).

The group really choked on Large Spiders. Even worse than worrying aloud that every piece of furniture they came across could be a Mimic, they fretted that there might be spiders ready to drop down on them from the shadowy recesses of the high ceilings. 🕷️

The one I thought was funniest, though, was the last one in the list. The Shit Elephant.



I came up with that monster's Latin in-game ancient language name, Belua Excrementum, by starting with the name we came up with when the group fought it in the last session, Shit Monster. "Shit" translates obviously to excrementum, but "monster".... In Latin, "monster" really refers to a thing of enormous size. Like "jumbo". "I have a monster headache" is like saying, "I have a jumbo headache." And the word for very large thing happens to be the word for elephant. Belua. So the Otyugh got the Latin name Shit Elephant. 💩🐘🤣

My D&D group playing my adventure story The Collector's Menagerie spent much of the last session doing battle in the basement. After fighting the owlbear in the Hall to rescue the butler and get some sense of the challenge at hand the group decided that they would clean house bottom to top. Especially because they heard faint cries for help wafting up the servants' staircase from the underground level. Though first they checked out the chirping coming from the Conservatory. Finding there were stirges there, they closed the door on them and left. Then it was time to head downstairs and rescue the servants calling for help.

A Little 9-Ball Torture, Anyone?

On their way around to the stairs the PCs peered through a wrecked door (the owlbear had damaged a lot of things in this part of the mansion) into one of the rooms along the front façade of the mansion.

"The room is sumptuously wood paneled but otherwise Spartan except for a large table sitting slightly askew in the middle of the room," I told them. "The table is quite stout, and about 8 feet by 4 feet across the top. A raised lip surrounds the table top. Below that lip the table is covered with green fabric. Several white, stone balls are scattered across the surface, and two light maces site among them."

"It's probably a torture chamber," one of the players scoffed with a laugh.

Dipshits. Did we not already establish that this mansion is like the one in the game of Clue? It's the Billiard Room! 🤣

(BTW, my description of "light maces" on the table comes from a quick bit of research I did about the history of billiards. I didn't want it to be an anachronism that a wealthy person in this game world owned a billiard table. I'm giving my world a technology level roughly corresponding to 1600. I found that billiards had been around for upwards of 200 years by then. It had been adapted from croquet, though, an outdoors lawn sport that used mallets. Thus the indoor version used small mallets, called maces. The modern version with cue sticks would evolve later.)

As the group descended the narrow stairs a sense of foreboding grew. Occasional cries for help, in a weak but deep man's voice, continued. "Help, help me." The air cooled to a chill as they descended and an awful spell of rot and decay filled everyone's noses.

A wide, plain stone corridor stretch into darkness at the bottom of the stairs. Its end was beyond the reach of the group's lights. The magic lights provided by Ryuu-Han, who had a seemingly endless number of small but useful gadgets in his magical man-bag.

The Crypt 

The group moved in close formation, wary that there might be a trap or a monster crouched in hiding, and not wanting to be split up.

First they peered through an open portal on the left side of the corridor. With their enchanted torchlight they saw a crypt: a chamber with stone pillars and stone coffins, and at the center a bier atop an alabaster dais. There appeared to be a body under a light drape on the bier.

Satisfied that nothing in the crypt seemed to be shaking, the group moved on without checking out its deep shadows.

The Kitchen 

Through a wide door on the other side of the corridor the group found the Kitchen. Prep tables, hearths, and storage barrels were lit at weird angles by enchanted torches knocked to the ground. Here the air reeked of spoiled meat, a different olfactory offense than the stench of trash and waste out in the corridor.

Herran the ranger entered the kitchen first. Herran had taken the brunt of damage from the last two monster encounters, the owlbear and the stirges, so it made sense to send him in first again. 😣

"Guys, it looks clear in here!" Herran announced just before he turned around and saw... a 8-foot long centipede-like creature with a mount full of sharp teeth crawling down the wall behind him.

The monster, a carrion crawler, swatted at Herran with one of its tentacles. It hit, stinging him with a contact poison that caused paralysis. 😨 Herran was unable to move, unable even to speak, as the monster moved around behind him to start eating him.

Fortunately for Herran he wasn't alone. Leoghnie wasn't about to let some overgrown arthropod make a meal out of her friend, even if it was thematically appropriate for being in the Kitchen. 🤣

Leoghnie stepped up, braving the crawler's waving tentacles herself. Sword already in hand, she lost no time joining the fight. With an mighty overhand blow, still aided by the strength enhancement from Kiarana's divine blessing, she chopped a big chunk out of the crawler's side.

Ryuu-Han acted next. Speaking words of magical conjuration he thrust his hand forward and launched a glob of acid at the monster. The acid sizzled and burned the creature's slimy hide.

Otonio stepped up to fight, as well. The group had been skeptical of him. With his foppish attire and noble lineage they suspected he was just cosplaying as a guard officer for his two-days-a-month duty. But he plunged his rapier deep into the monster's body, killing it.

Kiarana stepped forward to cure Herran's temporary paralysis with one of her spells. But the danger wasn't over.



The group's focus on the battle in the kitchen created a perfect opportunity a pair of ghouls hiding in the darkness in the crypt to attack. Yes, there were monsters hiding in the darkness the group didn't detect! And with the group's big warriors fighting the carrion crawler toe-to-... hundred toes in the kitchen, the ghouls attacked from behind against the unarmored Ryuu-Han.

The ghouls were human-like forms dressed in clothing hanging in rags over their mottled, decaying flesh. Bones poked out, mouths were full of sharp teeth, and eyes burned like hot coals in their sunken sockets.

"Zombies!" shouted Ryuu-Han.

Otonio once again rushed forward, defying his typecasting as the idle rich kid. One of the ghouls lunged and bit at him. Its sharp teeth tore through his handsome doublet but— CHUNK! couldn't penetrate the thin layer of mail hidden underneath.

As Ryuu-Han and Otonio started to fight back, the cleric Kiarana— still in the kitchen— spun around in anger at the report of undead. She raised the holy sunburst medallion from her neck and called upon the power of Reema, Goddess of the Sun and its Life-Giving Warmth. Rays of light burst from her medallion, passing between the arms and over the shoulders of Ryuu-Han and Otonio, and striking the ghouls. The power of the sun lit their undead bodies. Their skin glowed and started to crackle. Their eyes flared from smoldering orbs to burning flames. In a split-second flash that seemed to play out in slow motion, their bodies burned to ash.

Kkarana hadn't just invoked her power to Turn Undead, she made it a Greater Turn Undead.

To be continued....

My D&D group made great progress in our session this past weekend. It was a short session, just a bit over 3.5 hours, but they got through several combat encounters. That's great compared to past groups I've DMed which would spend the same amount of time on just one encounter.



After getting the skinny on the situation from the butler, realizing they're in a dead guy's mansion filled with escaped monsters— aka The Collector's Menagerie— they prioritized what they'd do.

Given a choice between "Wand in the Library", "Chirping from Drawing Room", and "Calls for help from the basement", they decided to check out the chirping first. I thought for sure they'd go for the free magic wand first but I'm the DM, I don't make these choices.

As they entered the sitting room the sound of bird calls grew louder. They were coming from an adjoining room with sliding partitions hanging slightly ajar. Light streamed through the cracks. Two PCs, Herran the ranger and Leoghnie the fighter, prepared to continue into the next room while Kiarana the cleric stayed in the Drawing Room. It was at that point they noticed that Ryuu-Han the mage and Otonio the rogue had disappeared. They were back in the Hall scouring the owlbear's makeshift nest for loot!

Herran and Leoghnie slid open the doors and moved forward. They found the Conservatory, a room with various musical instruments such as a harpsichord and a standing harp. Light came from an intricate, glass-paneled ceiling. It was like a greenhouse. And up in the eaves of the glass roof were a number of brightly colored, loud exotic birds. Except not all of them were birds....



Some of the flyers in the Conservatory were stirges, a classic bloodsucking monster from D&D lore. Two flew down and attacked. One bounced off Leoghnie, unable to get a grip; but the other latched its talons onto Herran's shoulder and plunged its needle-like beak into his neck.

"Fuck this shit!" Jersey-girl Leoghnie grumbled as she stepped back through the door and closed it behind her. Herran did the same.

I thought the rest of the party would rally to Conservatory and fight the stirges. Instead they just said "Nope!" and closed the door on the monsters. Well, except for the one stirge that hooked a ride on Herran. Herran pulled it free, and Leoghnie turned it to pulp with a blow from her massive sword.

"The Hall, the Library, the Conservatory, this place is like Clue!" Herran's player, Barbara, exclaimed.

"With an owlbear in the Hall and stirges in the Conservatory it's like cursed Clue," I chuckled.

The title of the D&D adventure I put together most recently is The Collector's Menagerie. This became evident to my D&D players only after the initial combat encounter in the adventure. They'd defeated an owlbear in a wealthy person's mansion. After killing the monster they rescued the man in the tuxedo who'd called for help... and they got to him just in time as he was nearly dead. Kiarana came through with a cure spell just in time to revive him. Then they learned... the rest of the story.



The man in the tuxedo was not the lord of the manor. He was Jenkins the Butler. The lord of the manor, Lord Eito Asano, had died recently. In questioning the butler— who was alive but very weak— and adding in some knowledge from two PCs who knew a bit of background about Asano, they determined:

• Lord Asano died some number of days earlier. According to the butler, he died of old age; not an injury or foul play.


• Jenkins and the household staff were keeping mum about Asano's death as it had been his wish to summon his sons from the capital city before publicizing his death.


• Asano was "old money", having inherited wealth 50+ years ago from a now-defunct noble family. (That family was House Sujin, rivals of Ryuu-Han's ancestors, House Hannam.)


• Asano had a penchant for collecting exotic things— particularly exotic creatures.


• Asano reputedly had "bangin'" parties when Otonio Tashara was a kid and too young to attend but has been a recluse for the past 10-15 years.


• Asano employed some kind of magic that fortified the cages his monsters were kept in. The magic seems to have lapsed, or been countered, or something, as the cages all opened at the same time recently.


• Several household staff are still in the mansion, hiding from the monsters and trying to stay alive.

Especially with other house staff alive and under threat, the group resolved quickly that they needed to conduct a room-to-room search. The butler told them that a few staff were holed up downstairs, in the kitchen. In addition to that bit of info they heard a few noises as clues: a deep male voice begging, "Help! Help me!", coming up from a servants' stairwell as if in the distance; a loud chirping, as if from large birds, coming from the direction of one of the rooms on the main level, and the sound of wood scraping as if something heavy was dragged a short distance on the floor, coming from another room on the main level.

The party let the butler go and lined up to investigate one of the rooms.

Yes, in the mansion of a whodunnit murder mystery, they let the butler escape after the first scene! 🤣

D&Deeeee! I got to play D&D today. Of course, I had to run the game myself since I'm the forever DM. This is the game I got rolling two weeks ago with an unexpected monster in the city drawing 5 brave adventurers together.

There's a trope in TTRPGs (tabletop role-playing games) of "You're all sitting comfortably in a tavern when..." something happens that brings everyone together. Often it's something on the level of Lassie runs, barking, into the tavern, and someone translates from Dog to English, "What's that, girl? Timmy fell down the well?" And away we go.

I started this game with this prompt, as the players were doing different things in a tony neighborhood near the city center:


It wasn't just a grizzly bear, a few of the sharp eyed characters noticed. It was an owlbear.



A dangerous magical creation that put a huge, sharp beak atop the powerful body of a grizzly bear.

Five heroes from different walks of life quickly assembled. One of them was even a patrol leader with the city guard, with 3 men-at-arms assisting him.

While the guard lieutenant gave instructions to his men at the front steps outside the mansion, the other heroes swung into action.



Bounding through the doors first was Herran the Woodsman. No fan of city life, he was in the downtown core to retrieve his prized weapons from a wizard he hired to enchant them. Now armed with not one but two magic wakizashi he felt ready to take on a challenge.



Next on the steps was Leoghnie, a warrior from a foreign land thousands of miles away and across the sea. She drew a massive sword, itself a curiosity in this realm, and she paused to catch her breath before going in.



Just before Leoghnie continued, a cleric came up behind her. Kiarana Dawnseeker, a priestess of the Reema, placed her hand on Leoghnie's armored shoulder and said, "The goddess of the sun strengthens your hand."

Leoghnie felt new power coursing through her veins. Her massive sword felt almost lighter in her hands, her heavy armor less weight on her shoulders. She had the benefit of the spell Bull's Strength.

Herran had already sprinted into the mansion, his path guided by the sounds of growling and cries for help and the occasional "Hooo!" 🤣 He dashed through the foyer, past paintings hanging askew on the walls or knocked onto the floor with huge, bear claw-like slashes through them, and rounded the corner into the Great Hall.

There, past a wide staircase leading to the second floor, he saw the owlbear hunched over the body of the man in the tuxedo. With swords quick to hand, Herran engaged.



Herran got in one swat before the owlbear struck back. Rearing up to its full 8' height it swung at him with both of its huge, powerful claws. Both penetrated Herran's mail.

Having connected with both claws the owlbear trapped Herran in a bear hug. The best trapped him against its chest and bit him with its sharp beak. Herran was now badly wounded.

But the fight was far from over.

Leoghnie rounded the corner next, and she was fresh to the fight.

Leoghnie saw her newest ally about to be shredded by the owlbear. "Oh, HELL no!" she sputtered and strode forward. She whirled around her massive greatsword, putting all of her strength into the windup, and unloaded on the beast like a coiled spring.

The sword form Leoghnie chose wasn't the most accurate. The exaggerated windup meant she took her eyes off her target for a fraction of a second. But the tradeoff in accuracy was more than made up for in its impact. In D&D terms, her Power Attack maneuver did 27 HP of damage. Her massive blow sent the beast staggering. It roared in pain. But it maintained its grip on Herran. Could she stop the owlbear in time?

To be continued....

Update: The adventure continues in part 2!

I've been thinking lately, I'd really like to play D&D (Dungeons & Dragons). It's actually been almost two years since I played last!

The odd thing— odd for me, anyway— is that I don't care a lot right now about making this a campaign. I just want to roll the dice and work the mechanics. Y'know, open the door, kill the monster, find the treasure.

That's odd for me because, as a GM at least, I've always been the one obsessing about how the story has to make sense. For example, who build the dungeon? How do the monsters get breathable air, potable water, and nutritious food down there? 😅

Of course, since I'm the forever GM, wanting to play D&D really means I have to run the game in D&D.



I have a lot of friends who like to play role-playing games but virtually none willing to GM them.

Well, it's a good thing I kind of like designing adventures!

A week ago I wrote Signs Of Life about how I'd been "caving" (hiding in my proverbial cave) the week before and finally got out, a little bit, on the weekend. This past week and weekend the pattern repeated, for better and for worse. For worse, last week was another week of caving. The DFC problem I wrote about with respect to blogging is a struggle with life in general right now. But for better I had a closer-to-the-old-normal weekend.

Yeah, Saturday I took it easy. I already wrote about that. I was dealing with side effects of Covid-19 booster in addition to my (now) usual lethargy. Oh, but I did enjoy a soak in the hot tub and I also did some vacuuming in the house I'd been putting off for two weeks. Then Sunday I put the pantry back together!



Recall we'd cleared out the pantry, even removing the shelves from the wall, when we discovered a ceiling leak. That was... back in mid-August! 😳 Repairs took weeks to get scheduled and were only finished about two weeks ago. I procrastinated re-hanging the shelves right after that— which turned out to be a good thing because there was another leak just a few days later. 😡 It took a few days until I was able to deal with that problem— which turned out to be a one-time leak from our clothes washer. Then it was another week until I had energy to deal with the pantry. But finally I did it.

Sunday I cleaned and re-hung the shelves. Seeing it ready to go inspired Hawk to help, and together then we refilled the shelves. No, they're not as full as they were... 11 weeks ago when all this plumbing crud started. We moved some of our pantry contents to storage in the garage. We'll shift it back gradually over the coming week. Or maybe it'll wait until next weekend.

Oh, but this weekend wasn't just about cleaning and putting things back together. We also were social! We met some_other_dave for dinner Friday night then had a couple of friends over Sunday afternoon/evening to play cards and get dinner out together.

A few weeks ago I blogged about strengthening trust between players in role-playing games, "Trust & Promises in Role-Playing Games". It was inspired by a blog I'd seen on Gnome Stew on the same topic. Well, the Gnomes wrote a sequel to their blog, "Earning Their Trust: The Rules" and it has inspired me to write on the topic again.

The focus of the Gnomes' latest article in the series is how game masters (GMs) can use game rules well— or poorly— to make or break the players' enjoyment of the game. The gist is that slavish adherence to "The Rules" generally weakens enjoyment of the game and that good GMs will think about when it's right to loosen up their interpretation/application of the rules to promote everyone having a fun time. That's pretty much in line with an idea I wrote about in a few blogs entries back in January, "What's Your Roleplaying Game About?" and "Taking it Easy with Encumbrance in D&D". What really resonated with me in the Gnomes' latest article, though, was one of their sub-headings, Punitive Parent VS “Cool Mom” GM.

Within that phrase it was the two words Punitive Parent that really resonated. ...And not because I've ever been punitive parent or worried about being one, but because it immediately struck me, "OMG, 'punitive parent' totally describes almost all the GMs I played with in my teen years!"

What's a punitive-parent type GM? It's someone who's actually more than just a stickler for the rules. Getting stuck on rules is a trap that a person with low imagination or low confidence might stumble into. Using the rules so as to be punitive, though, is different. It's more. It's not lack of creativity or courage, it's asserting your will over the players' style of play and using the rules as punishment to enforce compliance. It's being a dick.

How is a dick GM different from a mere rules-stickler GM? A rules stickler can be tedious but ultimately they're likely to be fair. A dick GM goes out of their way to use and abuse the rules, including making up new rules at the table, to punish players for not doing things their way. For example:

• One GM in high school would enforce trivial rules to slow down the game every time he hadn't prepared actual content for the game session. I remember one full-day session when we players spent the whole day rolling dice to see if our characters could avoid getting lost in the forest, forage food, cook it safely, and survive the effects of dehydration, starvation, and food poisoning. Yes, we were making Fortitude Saves to see if we puked from eating undercooked deer meat! That dick had the gall further to gaslight us into thinking we wasted a whole fucking game session rolling not to puke because we weren't playing intelligently enough.


• One of my GMs in high school would keep a ledger of black marks against players for actions he deemed to be "not in character". Each black mark was an experience point penalty, meaning it slowed your character's advancement. (Advancing characters is a huge part of RPGs, BTW.) Nominally these were judgments that you weren't playing your character "in character" and thus not eligible to advance. Except in reality the black marks were arbitrary behavior grades. If GM thought you, the player, weren't taking things seriously enough, black mark. Making a joke at the table that he didn't like, black mark. Speaking out of turn too much, black mark.

Yeah, I played with a bunch of dick GMs in my teen years. Partly it was common cultural assumption of how the game was supposed to be played back then. Partly it's because people who are dicks are often ego-driven and thus attracted to GMing because they see it as an opportunity to flex on others. And partly it's because enough of us gamers put up with dick GMs treating us poorly. (Why did I/we put up with it? I reflected on the social dynamics of speaking up about problems players/GMs in another blog after I tried— and quit— several virtual gaming groups during the Pandemic.)

And yeah, players can be dicks, too; it's not just GMs. In addition to fellow players being a big part of the reason I quit or nearly quit multiple new games I tried a few years ago, I still remember games from 20+ years ago when I, as a GM, ended a game or asked a player to leave because the player was being a dick.

It's like how when people ask me at work, "What do you look for in hiring a successful sales candidate?" My concise answer is, "1) ... 2) ... And 3) Don't be a dick." I'll start using the same Rule Number Three for deciding whom to play with in roleplaying games.

Last Sunday we drove from my sister's house to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin to visit the Dungeon Hobby Shop Museum. That was the main item on our agenda, though when we arrived around 11:15am it was closed. We temporized by skipping ahead to everything else on our list: seeing Gary Gygax's home and searching for the Gary Gygax Memorial Bench and Memorial Brick. Oh, and along the way we acted like characters in a horror movie— or would that be foolish adventurers in a D&D adventure— ignoring the peril of a monster swarm around us.

After all that we came back to the Dungeon Hobby Shop Museum. We kind of had to, as our car was parked there. 🤣 Fortunately the museum was open by then.



The museum inhabits a building, a converted old house, that was the first headquarters of TSR after Gary Gygax moved it out of his house, a few blocks aways. We dropped a ten-spot to cover the $2 admission for the 5 of us and went in.

One of the things we would've done at the museum if we'd been able to visit at the start of the day would've been to buy dice... to bless them by rolling on Gary Gygax's memorial brick!



The museum even has these gumball machines converted to dispense diceright inside the door, apparently to aid diceless travelers in their new quest! Though as my brother-in-law quipped, "For $1 they're not going to be good dice." 🤣

The museum has a lot of D&D memorabilia from back in the day, most of it dating to (in my estimate) the late 1970s and early 1980s. Though a few thngs, like copies of the Chainmail rules book, are older.



This is a "brown box" printing of the Dungeons & Dragons rules, likely printed in 1978. The dice next to are ostensibly the set that came in the box. I'm a bit skeptical about that detail as those dice look a bit too high quality for what was commonly shipped back then. It's before my time as a D&D player, though, so I can't say with certainty. But I know my boxed set from 1982/1983 came with shitty dice. 🤣



These Basic D&D boxed sets are from around the time I entered the world of D&D. The one on the right is likely the one my cousins owned when they introduced me to D&D in 1982. When I bought my own copy months later it was a "red box" similar to those in the middle— though not in Japanese or German like the two examples here.



The thing that made me ache the most with nostalgia was this mailer envelope from the Dungeon Hobby Shop (above). The art is amusing... but it's what came inside that made me the most melancholy for having missed it decades ago. This manila envelope with collectable art on it was used to send a catalog from the Dungeon Hobby Shop.

Here's the flip side of that envelope:



The flip side shows the dragon from the previous scene now under a Charm spell cast by the adventurers.

The Dungeon Hobby Shop Museum we visited is named in honor of this gaming store from decades ago. The museum also has a copy of the catalog that would've come in this, circa 1980. The manager took it out of a glass display case and gently flipped through the many pages to show us. It was beautiful and also painful.

It wasn't seeing the 1980 vintage prices that hurt. The fact that rule books cost, like, $4.95 back then, I'm at peace with. What made me ache was having missed the opportunity to shop such a huge selection. When I was getting into D&D in the early 1980s game books were hard to find in my area. There were none for sale at any store in my suburban town. I know, because my dad in a moment of real empathy, drove me around to, like, a dozen different stores looking for them. We struck out until we went to a hobby store closer in to the big city. And even there was just one shelf of D&D. Oh, what I could have bought with my money saved from delivering a newspaper route starting at age 10!

Sometimes a walk down Memory Lane is not all fond memories. It's not necessarily memories of things that were bad.... It's sadness at being reminded there were amazing things you missed out on.

But hey, enough melancholy.



As I mentioned above, the museum is in the building where TSR's HQ moved to after it moved out of Gary Gygax's living room. I mean, TSR would've been a garage-shop operation at first... except that Gygax didn't have a garage. And since this building is familiar to old-time TSR employees, those who come to visit sign one of the doors in the place. I only recognized one of the names/signatures on the door, that of Larry Elmore. He drew the drag in the upper right of the main panel.

I'll end on a high note. Behold!



Lots of people who worked at TSR back in the day were artistic. One crafted this 3D beholder. I'm not sure this is something I ever would've bought— not that this one-of was ever for sale. Where would I put it? But I would've bought a huge canvas map like the one on the wall behind the shelves. Alas that's also a one-of, hand crafted by one of the TSR employees years ago for her game.