Mike Mearls was a lead developer on 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons and is now the senior manager of the D&D Next team. Mearls co-wrote the 4E Dungeon Master’s Guide 2 with Greg Gorden and Robin D. Laws. He also wrote Mastering Iron Heroes, the game master’s guide to Malhovoc Press’s variant rules for heroic combat. Today, though, Mearls looks back to his early days of AD&D . . . and silent boulders.

Mike Mearls: My funniest GM experience is back in my AD&D days. The characters were exploring the Haunted Halls of Eveningstar, a dungeon in the Forgotten Realms created by Ed Greenwood. This really nasty Thayan illusionist and his cleric of Bane buddy were holed up in the dungeon, and they were epic levels of annoying. The illusionist kept tricking the characters, and the cleric animated the bugbears they defeated and attacked them from behind. Every time the PCs thought they caught a break, one of those two would spring a nasty surprise on them.

Finally, the PCs tracked down the two of them, along with their ogre bodyguard, and gave chase. I had added an escape tunnel to the dungeon that ran down, then up at a steep angle. At the top of the slope was a large boulder that blocked the exit. Between the illusionist and the cleric, they had one spell left: silence, 15′ radius. With the PCs in hot pursuit, the villains came up with a fiendish parting gift. The cleric slapped silence on the boulder, and the ogre pushed it down the slope.

If you’ve played AD&D, you might see what’s coming next. The boulder rolled in utter silence toward the PCs. The next exchange went something like this:

Me: “You rush up the tunnel, when suddenly a massive boulder comes streaking down the slope toward you. It nearly fills the tunnel. Oddly enough, though, it makes no sound as it rushes at you. What do you do?”

Players: “It’s obviously a phantasmal force. They don’t make sound. We keep running!”

SPLAT!

Luckily for the party, nobody was killed, but every PC save for one was knocked unconscious. That has to be my funniest experience, and the closest I’ve come to a TPK with a trap that wasn’t from Tomb of Horrors.

DAY FIFTY-FIVE (later)

Well.

Planning—and subsequently executing—a company picnic is significantly harder than I initially expected.

Here’s my whole freaking Saturday basically wasted, and I’m no closer to having that punch made than I was this morning; just getting the boxes of streamers, tablecloths, and party hats out of their crates and over to the strategically important fountain from Jimbo and Princess Leafy’s room has been a pain, and blowing up thirty-six thousand toxic-slime-mold-based balloons so that I can properly spell out “Welcome, One and All, Friends & Monsters, to the 19X,j78th Annual Celebration of the Azathrax, Hastur, Hastur, Stonebook, Fronkuhnshteen, Devil-Guy, Hastur, and He Who Shall Not Be Named But Who Is Nevertheless a Founding Partner of This Very Large Multidimensional and Exceptionally Evil Corporation Company Picnic: Monsters That Will Kill You, since—872,931 GQM, Let’s Have a BLAST!” on the big banner in the company-appropriate colors has left me dangerously light-headed.

Luckily, it looks like I ordered streamers, tablecloths, party hats, balloons, and a number of other sundry food—and food-prep-items (including paper plates, paper cups, and [apparently] paper forks) from Jimbo’s toxic-mold-related business . . . and that I put the charges on Stonnehyldd the “Smokin’-Hot” Stone Golem’s company credit card.

So that’s good.

Also, there seem to be a lot more homunculi on this level of the dungeon than I remember there being. If I had to guess, I would wager that someone—probably one of my idiot nephews—has gotten a hold of that spellbook that I stole from that one wizard I killed way back in Part 2 and has started experimenting with the poorly annotated homunculus-creation notes in the back.

Either that or I’m significantly more light-headed than I think I am, and am now hallucinating quite vividly.

Regardless, it’s annoying. Back to work, I suppose.

DAY FIFTY-FIVE (very late)/DAY FIFTY-SIX (very, VERY early)

Hallucinatory or not, I was able to convince the otherwise-rampaging homunculi to stop wrecking crap and to help me out by screaming at them that I was all-powerful Xontor, the Lord of Endlessly Devouring Chaos, come to destroy them all, and swinging a garbage sack full of uncooked hotdogs at them as I chased them around the dungeon.

They really seemed to respond to that.

After that brief ugliness, we got down to parlay. In exchange for their lives and some of the tequila that they found in the attic, I have agreed to allow the homunculi to help me make enough punch for thirteen hundred monsters and their families; they’ve set to the task of smooshing grapes, throwing them into 10-gallon coolers full of ice and swamp-water, and mixing in packets of artificial sweeteners with genuinely admirable gusto and no small amount of charming, choreographed dance moves.

Those little guys can really shake their groove-things.

I’m impressed, is all I’m saying.

Also, they made me their king and gave me a very fancy paper plate headdress that smells a lot like the fumes of the rubber cement that I was using to make the “pin-the-crit-on-the-adventurer” boards that we’ll have available for the kiddie-monsters, and also kind of like the indelible paint markers I was using to make the very festive nametags.

Neil the giant acid-spitting giant spider is also here, since he is my assistant and I am allowed to tell him to do whatever I want him to, and he has been giving me very strange looks, which I don’t appreciate very much. Anyway, I’m currently pretty sure that the homunculi are real, is my point, and that they’ve been a great help to me. If Neil isn’t careful, in fact, I’m probably going to give them his job.

He’s not the only one who can bake and decorate 2,000 cupcakes on short notice, after all.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to finish blowing up this bouncy castle. Still feeling slightly light-headed; might try having some more of this suspiciously rubber-cement-flavored tequila to counteract it.

DAY FIFTY-SIX

Well, it looked like it was going to be a disaster. Everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong. There was no one in my corner but me, and Stonnehyldd’s credit card, and Neil, because I ordered him to be there, and dozens upon dozens of almost-certainly-not-hallucinatory (no matter what stupid Neil says) homunculi who worship me as their paper-hatted god-king.

I was—truly—up against impossible odds.

And as deeply hungover as any creature has ever been.

But somehow, against all the naysayers and my own better judgment and what I take to be actually quite a bit of rubber-cement-fume poisoning and stupid Neil’s stupid complaining, I pulled it off.

The company picnic was a roaring, smashing success.

And by “success,” I mean “fire.”

And by “fire,” I mean “horrifying series of mega-scale explosions, with several subsequent crater-causing detonations, plus attendant fires.”

And by all that, I mean that once everyone got there, the dungeon was burned to the ground for the insurance money.

This year’s picnic theme of “Let’s Have a BLAST!” was ironic in only the cruelest way possible, is what I’m getting at.

Everyone at the company picnic was incinerated—except for me, my immediate friends, and all of the other major named NPCs, of course, surprising no one—and the Exceptionally Evil Corporation has shut the place down forever.

It was Kevin the Chuul who was behind it, apparently . . . he was working for one of the partners at the Company who “wishes to remain nameless, mwah hah ha!”—with Wallyworkle Tinklehammer as their explosives-expert—all along.

I should have suspected.

As I look back now, in retrospect, I suppose that it WAS a little suspicious that somebody (probably Hastur, if I had to guess randomly) got the pavilions ready without me doing anything about them. I probably should have noted more thoroughly, also, that those aforementioned “pavilions” were just giant tents full of barrels of something that smelled like nitroglycerine . . . of course, at the time, I innocently assumed they were for the end-of-the-night fireworks show.

Hmm. Looking back, too, it DID seem a little weird that someone (again, probably Hastur) had them set up right next to the BBQ pit.

And it was possibly TECHNICALLY suspicious to string all those fuses to them, running back to the now-revealed-as-fake cult-headquarters in the woods, where someone in the company (once again, I’m going to go with “probably Hastur” on this one) had been planning this all along.

Well, hindsight is 20/20.

I barely even blame myself for not noticing that somebody (definitely Wallyworkle, in this particular instance) went back and replanted all of the limpet mines that my prankster dwarf/pirate nemesis buried all over the kickball field. That was a REALLY hard thing to notice.

ALSO: do not ask me about the exact logistics of “burning down” an entire dungeon, because I have no idea. It’s apparently possible, though.

The point is, there was a fire. A big one. Among the casualties are a bunch of people I didn’t know . . . and much more importantly, all of my stuff, the opera and everything it represents, and—of course—all of my hopes and dreams.

My idiot nephews, just so you know, survived only because they were hiding in the secret passage underneath the strategically important fountain when the explosions went off. They were smoking cigarettes and looking at girly magazines, as it turns out. I survived only because I was down there, too, yelling at them to get back to work giving away hot dogs.

Neil was there as well, shouting something about his stupid suspicions about a fire that I was not paying attention to because I was—admittedly—pretty hung over.

Everyone else I know survived due to a combination of luck, not being invited to the company picnic, immunity to fire, previous knowledge of what was going to happen, and/or a set of poorly explained and overly contrived circumstances that I don’t want to get into right now.

ALSO: everyone I know is now homeless and out of a job.

That, unfortunately, does not include me—I’m just homeless. Due to a typo on my application, I still work for Dark Lord Torkleheim . . . even though he, himself, is out of a job.

This has not been the best company picnic ever.

According to Kevin the Chuul, though—who I bumped into just a moment ago as he was heading out the door to his new gig as head of a new dungeon that he just got promoted to run—this also isn’t the WORST company picnic ever.

Apparently, I’m supposed to buck up. And to look on the bright side. And to smile when life gives me lemons and such . . . according to him, at least.

I find that less than encouraging—again, surprising no one.

Then he said something about how he probably wouldn’t have been able to get away with it, if only there had been some meddling kids . . . and then I guess I took a swing at him, but his Armor Class is way higher than I was hoping, and then he zapped me with his paralyzing tentacles and scuttled away laughing and going “woop-woop-woop.”

Today has kind of sucked.

DAY FIFTY-SIX (much later; FINALE)

Tearful goodbyes. I hate them.

Loathe them, actually. Despise and detest and dread them, in point of fact. I find them quite grueling and oppose them on general principle, as do all good goblins.

And in my defense, I did try to get out of them by hiding in the secret passage underneath the strategically important fountain room . . . but since that’s the only part of the building still standing, and it’s now on the surface of what used to be the dungeon, sitting crooked in the still-smoldering wreckage of what’s left of the Ridiculously Toxic Posie Coffee-House & Local-Art Co-Op, right where it jams sideways into the remnants of the now-upside-down Level 68+1 Club, I wasn’t hard to find.

I wept like a child when Princess Leafy hugged me and told me to be good.

Her first words.

It seems, then, that she and Jimbo are off, bound to seek their fortune in the wide world as wandering toxic-mold-related acquisitions and development coordinators, which doesn’t sound promising . . . but to tell the truth, it sure as hell sounds better than my next gig.

The Dark Lord has decided, after the events of this weekend and few swigs of what looks suspiciously like my bottle of rubber cement, to pursue a career in freelance villainy, with me at his side—and has hired on my three idiot nephews to be part of his evil cadre. We’re going to be sailing the seven seas, pillaging as we see fit and carving our name upon the history of the waves in blood and booty—according to him—just as soon as we find a boat.

So it looks like I’m now part of a four-goblin, one-Dark-Lord, no-actual-ship pirate crew.

Which is going to be just awful, I have no doubt.

I tried, DESPERATELY, to get Jimbo and Princess Leafirellha a job with us—and maybe some of my other friends, too—but Torkleheim turned me down flat. Because he’s a jerk.

So.

Everyone is headed out now.

General VanO’Shaughnessy says that he’s going to try to link back up with his old group of traveling Tragedians; last time he left them to run a long con, according to him, they were on their way to perform something called “The Murder of Gonzago” at Castle Elsinore. Barring that, he says he has an “in” with a pop-and-locking break dance team that does antidrug message skits at some junior highs around the area.

I wish him the best. Maybe I’ll see him again someday.

Mr. Bliss has a bunch of other dungeon rental properties to look after, of course, but he says he’ll try to keep in touch. He promised to give his wife a copy of the play, and to tell her and her transdimensional book club about my Kickstarter project. He also said he would look into any job openings with his pantheon, but I think he was kidding.

I’ll miss that guy, even if he DOES use his superpowers to cheat at cards.

Kyle the evil pseudodragon is headed back to his actual job, which is apparently working the drive-up window at a local dry cleaners. I keep forgetting that I wasn’t actually able to hire him, and that he just kind of hangs out with us because he likes us.

I’ll miss him most of all, I think.

Wallyworkle Tinklehammer is now the executive assistant to Kevin the Chuul. The only reason that I didn’t strangle him to death with my bare hands for ruining my life is that he happened to be toting a gun larger than my torso at the time he told all of us . . . and he had Chris the Maintenance-Yeti with him, which would have gone poorly, since I think Chris hates me now for going on a date with Abliguritia, plus he’s several size categories larger than me and my Strength score is like the square root of his.

He’s working at the new dungeon, too.

Dead-Neck McGee the stupid cleric ghost and Neil the giant tie-wearing giant acid-spitting spider are taking off together to go open a theme bar in some evil city or another.

I hope to never drink there.

And, I guess, Stonnehyldd the “Smokin’-Hot” Stone Golem has decided to finally pursue her true passion—directing—and is headed back to grad school. She gave me a big hug and thanked me for letting her remember her dream and told me to always be myself, which admittedly didn’t elicit the same weeping hysterics that Princess Leafy’s hug got out of me. Why my idiot friends think Stonnehyldd is so attractive, I’ll never know. She’s WAY too tall, and that skimpy outfit looks ridiculous on her.

Anyway: speaking of attractive, Abliguritia is moving back home to live with her parents in the Dwarf-Filled Mountains of Most Exceptional Mysteriousness. She gave me a mix tape, which nearly brought tears to my eyes, and then she smooched me right on the cheek IN FRONT OF EVERYBODY, which would have been the best moment of my life except that I’ll never see her again, or give her the beautiful life and rosy-cheeked gobbo-dwarf children she so deserves.

She rode off into the sunset on her Harley, leaving me with only heartache and a desire to find something to play this mix tape on.

Now I’m sitting here on a smoking chunk of my old home, watching the last of my life in the dungeon burning down into low cinders as the sun finally sets, listening to my three idiot nephews and Captain Dark Lord Torkelheim practice singing sea chanteys and passing a bottle of rubber cement around.

And I’m still hung over.

Worst day ever.

This entry concludes Season One: Dank Dungeon Days of Oh, I’m Going to Get Killed Any Minute Now: The Ongoing Diary of Thppgrg, Goblin Minion by Clinton J. Boomer.

Stay tuned here for Season Two: Wandering Monsters & Random Encounters, coming soon, only to KoboldQuarterly.com!

DAY FIFTY-FOUR (date in t-minus 7 minutes)

I owe my friends. BIG TIME.

Quite literally, actually. I very specifically had to sign actual paperwork documenting that I, in fact, owe my friends and that, very specifically, what I owe them is quote-unquote BIG TIME.

So now I’ve got clean pants, and money, and reservations to what is apparently a very nice restaurant on Level 77 with a name that I initially took to be Italian for “The Palace of Galloping Curds,” except that when I said that, Kyle the evil pseudodragon slapped me right in the face and told me to never speak those words again.

Also, they gave me a haircut.

This is all thanks to General VanO’Shaughnessy, and Mr. Bliss, and Jimbo and Princess Leafy and Kyle, and Wallyworkle Tinklehammer, and even Dead-Neck McGee the stupid cleric ghost and Neil the giant-tie-wearing giant acid-spitting spider.

Apparently, Neil and I are cool again, since—again, apparently—I wrote him a really good letter of recommendation this week. So that’s sort of a weight off my shoulders. I’d actually forgotten that we were fighting, to be perfectly honest, but I suppose it’s just nice to have one less enemy in the world.

Man. I’m the luckiest goblin in the whole world, with the best friends ever. And now they’re all yelling at me to get out of the bathroom and to go on this date. Oh, by all the various deities of the goblin pantheon, I’m nervous.

DAY FIFTY-FOUR (date time)

It’s going really well, I think. Abliguritia keeps laughing at all of my jokes, and touching her hair—which is the CUTEST blue mohawk you’ve ever seen, except with these parts on the side that hang down to her shoulders that look kind of like blue-dyed girl-sideburns, but which aren’t—and playing with her dagger-pierced, flaming-skull-themed earrings—of which she has several dozen—and saying that she’s having a really good time.

She sounded slightly shocked the first time she said it, but I’m not offended. In her defense, I’m quite a bit more shocked that she’s having a good time than she is.

We’ve been drinking very good wine, which I think has helped.

Also, it has been mentioned that her dad really, REALLY wouldn’t want her to go on a date with me. Which is a good thing, because making her father angry is, I have come to understand, a very big part of Abliguritia’s dating strategy . . . and lifestyle in general. That led me to mention my idiot nephews Pp’grgth, Grg-thpp and Winslow, and how much I hate them, and how one time I stapled their dad’s head to a log back when we were kids, and I think she swooned.

The breadsticks are really good, too.

Anyway, I’m currently locked in the bathroom at the Palace of Galloping Curds, or whatever it’s called, and I’m feeling really positive about this date.

Also, seriously, this bathroom is nicer than my level of the dungeon.

DAY FIFTY-FOUR (still date night)

Abliguritia has very good taste in films. Specifically, all the movies looked stupid and terrible and so we ended up going to a roller derby exhibition instead.

I yelled a lot and threw a cup full of soda at a referee, which apparently earned me points. Then, Abliguritia had me hold her spike-covered leather jacket while she ordered more drinks, and she ended up telling me all about her sleeve tattoos. One of them is from the play.

Yeah: the one that I wrote. That’s right. She’s a huge fan.

This is going well.

DAY FIFTY-FOUR (later in the date)

We’re at a piano-jazz club. It’s awesome. They have free mints!

The two of us have been dancing, and I bumped into a hobgoblin who reads my blog, and he gave me his business card and shook my hand.

I looked super-cool.

DAY FIFTY-FOUR (now probably into the next day)

Holy crap. This is crazy.

We just broke into the Ridiculously Toxic Posie Coffee-House & Local-Art Co-Op where Abliguritia works, and she let me make my own latte using the machine, with extra caramel, and I got to try out the fancy whipped cream dispenser they have here. It can shoot whipped cream a LONG way.

She also showed me some of her charcoal sketches, which are really good. I told her so, too—and specifically mentioned the parts that I really liked—and she blushed and punched me in the arm.

Then, Abliguritia turned on the stereo, and now we’re sitting on the roof listening to a bunch of very intense bands I’ve never heard of and drinking micro-brews.

DAY FIFTY-FOUR (end of the night)

That . . . that was crazy.

Our cab driver ended up being Dan, the CR 17 ice elemental druid/monk with a master’s degree in art history that I tried to hire. He was really cool and called me “sir” . . . but most importantly, I actually have a witness that Abliguritia kissed me RIGHT ON THE CHEEK and told me to call her some time.

Best day of my entire life. WOO!

DAY FIFTY-FIVE

Oh, yeah. I really ought to start working on that company picnic.

According to these notes, we’re supposed to have a performance of the musical at some point tomorrow, along with everything else.

Plus, it looks like I’m going to need to find enough hot dogs to feed thirteen hundred monsters. And their families. And to get some punch made.

DAY FIFTY-FOUR (I think. Later than this morning, most likely in the . . . I’m going to go with mid-afternoon, now, probably? Also, I’m pretty sure the dates on this diary have gotten a little mixed up.)

Fridays. Yuck.

Locked—as is so often the case—in the bathroom.

Just woke up in the middle of a large—and seemingly quite important—business meeting and hastily excused myself to use the lavatory. I have no idea who any of the people in that boardroom were, or what level of the dungeon I’m on, or even what the presentation was about, precisely, although judging by the overhead slides it appeared to be on the topic of some major developments within the Exceptionally Evil Corporation, particularly with regards to purchasing . . . something?

Developing something? Acquiring, exploiting, and then—presumably—re-selling something? Subsidiaryizinging something, or maybe hostile-takeovering . . . something else?

Building, maybe, like, a stirge-powered nuclear reactor or whatever?

Hmm. I really ought to figure it out before I go back in there and finish giving the presentation, I think.

Everyone seemed enraptured by what I had to say, at the very least. So that’s good. A couple of people were even crying, which I take to be the mark of good management. It means they’re engaged, emotionally and intellectually.

Come to think of it, it might actually have something to do with a new slew of employee healthcare options, benefits, or a retirement plan. I certainly do seem to be clutching a large number of sweat-dampened “Understanding your New 401(d6 slashing/piercing and force) Package” pamphlets. A lot of them have notes scribbled in the margins, too. And there’s a big picture of a large, bloody axe on the cover, along with a wildly spinning severed head.

Maybe I should read these over.

Also: Where did I get this briefcase? It’s quite nice. That has GOT to be half-halfing/half-centaur-skin leather. Pretty impressive, honestly.

And . . . am I wearing a suit-coat?

ALSO: Don’t care. Date tonight.

DAY FIFTY-FOUR (after work)

Man, my job is annoying. Right as I was punching out, the stupid bosses—Dark Lord Torkelheim and Stonnehyldd the “Smokin’-Hot” Stone Golem, and also Heywood Rantoul, the cowboy naga lich—all wanted to talk to me about something to do with the company picnic this weekend, especially the topics of the kickball tournament, logistics for hosting the Haunted Home Office in, I guess, some pavilions or something, and especially the exact, most-current locations of the t-shirts for the event.

The three of them all kept interrupting each other, so that was funny. They seem really worked-up over this. Especially about the stupid pavilions.

Also, I think I’m in charge of the BBQ cook-out. Possibly also the fireworks. And something about a three-legged race, although there was a great deal of consternation as to whether or not that term was politically correct or not, or if it was racist, technically, or just insensitive, and whether the company could get sued over it. It was amusing to hear Heywood Rantoul argue about sensitivity training more and more shill-ly (if that’s a word) and at increasingly higher volumes in his thick redneck accent.

He seems pretty sensitive about not having legs.

Or hands.

Anyway, I was pretty sure that my go-to answers of “don’t know, don’t care” to all of their queries wouldn’t have looked particularly good, so that was a problem. Fortunately, at that exact moment, Jimbo and Princess Leafy showed up with the t-shirts for the event. Apparently, I put them in charge of the t-shirts. So that’s good.

The t-shirts are quite festive, made of a unique bright-neon-orange hypo-allergenic cotton/lycra/toxic-slime-mold blend designed to fit any size from Diminutive to XXXL Colossal-Plus, and they all have “Azathrax, Hastur, Hastur, Stonebook, Fronkuhnshteen, Devil-Guy, Hastur, and He Who Shall Not Be Named But Who Is Nevertheless a Founding Partner of This Very Large Multidimensional and Exceptionally Evil Corporation Company Picnic” printed on the front and the back in screaming neon-green, along with whatever stupid made-up date it is this year and our company motto.

Our company motto is, apparently, “Monsters That Will Kill You, since -872,931 GQM.”

I’m presuming that’s a different stupid made-up date, but from a very long time ago.

There was some argument, then, about whether we were going to get into trouble for not having shirts ready for Fine-size and smaller creatures, especially since one of the heads of the accounts receivable department of the Mostly Submerged Frozen-Lake Dungeon is technically a sentient ebola virus, as well as whether or not using the term “Fine” was bordering on harassment—sexual or otherwise—of some kind. This devolved into several people shouting over one another about whether some sizes are not, in fact, “fine,” as well as whether it’s wrong (and, more importantly, legally actionable) to say that someone’s outfit looks “fine” if you really mean that it’s properly sized for a creature two size categories smaller than Tiny, and also Princess Leafirellha started crying . . . which made Dark Lord Torkelheim start crying, too.

I think he’s under a lot of stress. I understand, man. I understand.

So, during their talk, I snuck out.

Don’t care. Date tonight. Must try to see if I can get reservations to . . . a restaurant.

Also, must attempt to locate clean pants.

DAY FIFTY-FOUR (date in t-minus 45 minutes)

No luck finding clean pants. Or a restaurant in this stupid dungeon that isn’t booked solid on a Friday night for seven o’clock dinner. Or, now that I consider it, any money to pay for dinner, a movie, and maybe dancing if I play my cards right.

I’m supposed to pick Abliguritia Thundersmasher-Roth up at her place on Level 3 very shortly, and it’s not looking good.

DAY FIFTY, late night, [panic mode activated]

Aaaaaagh! Date on Friday AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!

DAY FIFTY (very early)

With . . . with . . . Abliguritia Thundersmasher-Roth! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!

DAY FIFTY-ONE

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!

It is Tuesday now. Lots of stuff going on around here. I do not care about any of it.

Or, I suppose—more accurately—I am earnestly, completely incapable of caring about any of it. At all.

Feelings of rawest, most abject mortal terror are most decidedly settling in, kicking holes in the walls, pouring beer into the couches, and otherwise making themselves right at home inside the parts of my skull where the jangling, overstimulated raw nerve endings of my ganglia are most directly related to the interlinked tasks of reminding me that I have nausea-inducing stomach pain and that my chest is pounding very hard, like it is being slap-bongoed with sledgehammers, except from inside.

It is quite distracting.

I am experiencing my intermittent adrenaline-dump headaches in seven full dimensions, three ghost directions, plus one rapidly oscillating and sphere-shaped backward angle that I’m calling the “partridge-in-a-pear-tree” zone, and in anywhere from nine to sixty-three different colors at any given time; between the hiccups of my ongoing slow-motion heart attack, I am actually able to feel the onset of my constantly tingling fingers and toes losing their sensation, floating away, and then snapping back into reality, often pointing in the wrong directions or attached to the wrong appendage altogether; I have lost my appetite for anything except—perhaps—salted butter wrapped in bacon and batter-fried in rat oil, like Mom used to make.

My bowels, I should add, are a twisted and writhing coil of ugly, bathed in acid.

It would be even worse if I had access to butter, bacon, or salt, I presume. As it is, I’m just chugging mouthfuls of rat oil. And coffee.

Those parts of my brain not most directly related to experiencing this stress—and the accompanying surreal immediacy of actively watching myself stare blankly and slack-jawed into the blinding flash of my own existence’s ultimate stage fright, as if my entire life up until this interminable, stretched-wire second has been a flashback leading up to that horrible, inevitable moment wherein I will—this Friday—humiliate myself in front of Abliguritia Thundersmasher-Roth, probably by ogling her boobs, pouring an entire bowl of soup down my pants, or referring to the wine as “good, but a little wine-y”—are all basically on lock-down.

Also, I appear to have gone at least somewhat blind from the shock.

I don’t care.

Similarly, I do not care that my nephews, along with Mr. Bliss and Wallyworkle Tinklehammer, have been exploring the previously unknown catacombs beneath the strategically important fountain. I do not care that they have found weird, Lovecraftian stuff down there, all oozing with blasphemous menace, some of it dealing with pretty out-there conspiracy theories linking Roswell and Jack Ruby to the Great Flood. I do not even care that some of what they have found in the basement may border on copyright infringement due to the (apparent) use of intellectual property and associated materials owned by the Disney corporation.

Oh, and the show is going further over budget, too.

Don’t care.

I am on auto-pilot. I am ignoring everything. With a little luck, it will go away.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I need to hyperventilate until I cry and pass out.

I have a date on Friday to prepare for.

DAY FIFTY-ONE

Nothing to report. Stuff is occurring, probably. Do not care.

DAY FIFTY-TWO

May or may not have talked to my boss today; may or may not have either been given an assignment or a promotion by either Dark Lord Torkelheim or Stonnehyldd the “Smokin’-Hot” Stone Golem. Not sure; have not slept. Do not care.

Date tomorrow night.

Also: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!

DAY FIFTY-TWO (later; evening)

That sounded like explosions, somewhere around here. Do not care.

DAY FIFTY-TWO (later; very possibly morning[?]-ish except the sun isn’t up.)

I swear to the unholy pantheon of all goblin deities that something is chirping outside, but those just CANNOT be birds. It might actually be screaming, come to think of it. And I might smell the smell of that particular kind of smoke that comes only from haunted forests being set on fire by dwarves.

Do not care.

DAY FIFTY-TWO (the black hours of torment when the nightmares take flesh)

Shaendralya just showed up, heavily armed and with quite an adventuring party in tow, with a half-flaming cult hot on their heels, along with several wildly firing robots with miniature ballistas mounted in their chests, also severely on fire. From what I can discern from the surprisingly well-enunciated and exposition-heavy screaming, the heroes were apparently marching on the dungeon, cutting through the haunted woods to use Sigvald’s secret entrance to sack the place, when they accidentally stumbled upon my prankster-pirate/deliveryman-dwarf nemesis in the midst of rigging the kickball fields for the company picnic with limpet mines in the middle of the night.

Oh, yeah. I’m in charge of the kickball tournament this weekend; must try to remember that. It would have been a really good prank to pull on me, now that I think of it.

The altercation between the heroes and the explosive-laden pirate-dwarf, and the subsequent escalation of open fire, spooked the hidden cult that’s been living in the woods; the situation rapidly deteriorated into a large-scale shooting match, with all invested parties simultaneously heading—of course—toward my room.

I’m not sure who the robots are with, precisely, but they sure do like shooting; whoever built the buggers should be applauded for the enthusiasm of the little guys, if not their accuracy. And if I’m being completely honest, I’m impressed by their teamwork in bumping up their individual reload-speeds. That’s just good design.

Fortunately, I’ve been sleeping in Sigvald’s closet, since I lost the rights to his old bed to Kyle the evil pseudodragon in a game of poker the other day (apparently, I tried to beat a straight flush with a “go fish”; like I said, I’ve been a bit out of it), which he then traded to General VanO’Shaughnessy Blah-blah-blah #3 for some vinyl records and first “dibs on figs” in the case of pre-painted miniatures they’re buying, so I wasn’t actually in the line of fire when everyone showed up.

My quick-thinking allowed me to stay completely hidden—safe in the closet—while an enraged flesh-golem con-man engaged with and subsequently fought off the last of the invaders.

Or, well . . . I mean, I assume that he’s going to eventually fight them off. They actually still sound pretty enthusiastic out there, now that I mention it, but I’m sure it’s just a matter of time. Any second now.

ALSO: do not care.

Date tonight.

DAY FIFTY-TWO

Have not technically slept.

Since . . . uh, Sunday, I think it was.

This is going to be a very difficult day.

DAY (technically night) FORTY-EIGHT . . . later on than my other two entries today, obviously, and very, VERY possibly already quite a bit into the dark beginnings of DAY FORTY-NINE. I still don’t have a watch. And I swear, this had better be my last entry today, or I am going to be very put out.

Things have gone from bad to worse to better to much, MUCH better to just truly, deeply surreal. I am once again writing in the bathroom. This is for several reasons.

First off, I have locked myself in here until the shakes subside.

I am—it seems—much more capable of being shocked than I had most previously suspected, even considering everything I’ve been through recently. This, itself, comes as something of a shock to me. Thus, I would consider myself—at the moment—doubly-shocked. Shock-squared, perhaps.

In point of fact, I may be shocked to the actual power of shockedness itself.

That’s a lot of shock.

As I’m sure you’d agree.

That, in turn, caused me to drink quite a bit. Which is the second reason I’m in the bathroom. I am very good at doing shots of Wild Burning Wyvern, I have noted, swiftly and in rapid succession, as well as Jamaican Horse Tranquilizers, which is what I think those pint-glass-filling-things were called, and also whatever that particular thick, blue, potentially Martian liquor was that Jimbo was drinking out of a jug (possibly … Rainbow-Connection Uppercut? Rattner-Comedy-Heist Underwhelmedness? Railroad-Concussion Underpants-Salesroom? Not sure; will require further study), but I am observably quite a bit less good at holding them down and/or not-blacking-out temporarily after drinking them.

Anyway: on the topic of more psychological (and less physiological) shocks to my system, I do not like to think of myself as someone easily undone in the realm of mental capacities. I’m stoic, and world-weary, and put-upon, and yet have—I like to think—a begrudging respect for weirdness. I don’t like it, and I want it off my lawn, but I don’t freak out about it.

I’m like a mid-story Lovecraft narrator in that regard, I suppose. That, and my racism. And my body odor.

My haircut too, kinda.

But my point is this: when those idiot nephews of mine, while goofing around with the map they found in that stupid demon-faced monument, discovered a secret staircase under my strategically important fountain that leads to a part of the dungeon that not even Mr. Bliss was previously aware of, I did not “freak out.”

I took it in stride. These things happen around the three of them. Pp’grgth, Grg-thpp and Winslow have some type of plot-advancement-based, cartoon-physics-related feats. I’m sure of it. It’s the only way they could have survived this long.

Some day, I’ll even prove it.

Likewise, I did not lose my cool and start gibbering when I found out that General VanO’Shaughnessy Blah-blah-blah #3 refers to my superior as Stonnehyldd the “Smokin’-Hot” Stone Golem, or when I learned that that’s what pretty much everyone else calls her, too.

I accept that she is apparently very, very attractive to other people. People who don’t work for her, I guess. Some people have a thing for women carved out of marble.

And I didn’t miss a beat just now when I observed my boss, Dark Lord Torkelheim, doing “the Hustle” in a skin-tight, chest-baring neon unitard with flared bell-bottoms while shouting for the crowd to “check out his sweet moves.”

I didn’t even weird-out when he drunkenly introduced me to his buddy from the edition-change-related-anxiety-support-group that he’s been attending, a Gargantuan-size multi-headed fellow whom I believe to be an otyugh with both the half-white-dragon and half-red-dragon template, a smattering of skills I had never heard of and levels in what might be a Psychic Warrior variant from a now-defunct publisher.

I even let the two of them goad me into asking the DJ to put on some Bay City Rollers without much more than an eye-roll.

But for all my affectations of wry, unamused tolerance for strangeness, I did not imagine for all the world that I would wind up dancing and subsequently chatting with Abliguritia Thundersmasher-Roth tonight. Or that she would find my knowledge of dwarven humor so charming. Or that I would somehow wind up asking her out on a date for this coming Friday.

Or that she would accept.

Hmm. Odd, that. These shakes are not going away.

DAY FORTY-NINE

Hung over. Still in state of emotional shock. Having difficulty tasting food.

This is actually pretty okay, since I eat rats.

Checked the Kickstarter campaign for the Maxx Thrust-Gofast video-game. Zero dollars raised, two comments posted: one from my mother, telling me that I should probably lower my goal to under $3 million, and one from “Gobo-Stabba-2000,” who logged on to inform me that “yar, I’ll pledge one bent copper if ye punch yer worthless gobo self right in yer ugly gobo face, ya bugga!”

I presume that one is from that pirate —or dwarf—with whom I am, now that I consider it, still engaged in a prank war. It’s not from my mom’s IP address, anyway.

Going back to bed. Big, bright Monday tomorrow. That is a thing that will happen.

DAY FIFTY

Oh, cool. So, it seems that the shock has worn off. Now in raw, abject panic.

I have a freaking DATE with the most beautiful dwarf-girl in the WORLD in less than five freaking DAYS.

Must fix every single terrible thing about myself. NOW.

DAY (technically night) FORTY-EIGHT . . . later on than my other entry today, obviously, or possibly into the very beginnings of DAY FORTY-NINE. I don’t have a watch.

Okay, so now I’m at this stupid night club.

It is very loud, and quite hot—as well as stuffy! Woo!—and just stupidly overpriced, especially for a place without Guinness on draft. Or coasters. Or, as far as I can tell, anywhere to sit OR stand that isn’t being occupied by at least two—and occasionally up to two dozen—aggressive idiots.

I suppose, however—from a purely managerial perspective only—that I can kinda see why even the sodas here cost 18 gold apiece: it must be very expensive hiring security guys who are that breathtakingly rude, and who also have necks that abnormally large. In addition, it cannot be cheap to bribe the fire-code people as much as they must be getting bribed in order to jam this freaking many drunk, hormonal, and sweaty nonhumans into a place of this loudness, darkness, and size every Saturday night. And cleaning this place has got to be both tiresome as well as costly, now that I think of it.

Mostly I’m thinking of it just now because my feet keep sticking to the floor. My heart goes out to the guy in charge of getting this place clean in the mornings.

Or more accurately, I suppose, my heart goes out to the guy who has to work for the guy who is in charge of it . . . because if I’ve learned anything in my one-week tenure as an Associate Project Double-Interim Vice Director for the Department of Levels 1 & 2, it’s that the job of actually scrubbing stuff pays WAY less than the job of telling someone else to scrub, and be quick about it, and to do it right this time.

Hmm. That thought actually brought a little smile to my face.

Yes, I do quite like being in charge, I’ve noticed. I grow more evil by the day, it seems. Or night. Whatever.

Anyway, I’ve barricaded myself in the men’s room to write.

I know. It probably seems pretty “uncool” of me to be jotting down my thoughts about the failures of polite society, the tragic rarity of Guinness, and the systemic inequalities inherent in capitalistic society in my diary, locked in the bathroom, while a bunch of my idiot friends drink heavily, dance to hard-house/dub-step remixes of Top 40 dance hits and make out with each other in drunken and misguided attempts to make each other jealous . . . but, in my defense, these people aren’t actually my friends.

They’re co-workers. Mildly tolerable co-workers who are also in the play I co-wrote with my actual friends, at best. And, in the case of the punk-rock dwarf girl dancing with a balding yeti who is just way, WAY too good at pop-and-locking for me to not hate him, an unrequited crush.

And family: someone got my three idiot nephews in, as well. I have my suspicions that the stupid gnome Wallyworkle they’ve been hanging out with has a side business printing fake IDs. The trio of them, admittedly, are doing a pretty impressive job of recreating the vibe from the “Roxbury Guys” sketch on SNL—specifically the one where Jim Carrey was the guest star—but sadly, it’s in a completely un-ironic and more acne-ridden way.

I’m trying to avoid them, which is not “uncool.” That’s just plain common sense. There’s nothing uncool about common sense.

Oh, and there’s also a familiar face: Shaendralya is here, and looking—in the opinions of my friends, if not mine—quite fetching in what appears to be a tube-top/mini-skirt combo that has been savagely attacked with a razor, go-go boots, and what I would consider a really impressive amount of make-up with sparkles in it. From the way she’s flirting with the bouncers, it also appears that she’s gotten over Sigvald.

Good for her.

Although I will definitely be locking up the door to his old room tonight, as I am not particularly interested in being stabbed this evening; she has been drinking a great many drinks, provided en masse by a staggering number of admirers, in a shocking variety of colors, and seems to me quite heavily armed for a night out on the town. Her hair alone has got, like, sixteen daggers in it . . . and it looks great, in all fairness to her.

Got a lot of … pizazz, I guess. Pep, maybe?

Oomph?

I don’t know a lot about hair. Hers is very complex, and unnaturally bright.

Anyway: my actual friends—that being Jimbo, Princess Leafy, Mister Bliss, General VanO’Shaughnessy Blah-blah-blah #3, and Kyle the evil pseudodragon—are probably fine. When I left for the bathroom, they were having an intense, top-of-their-lungs and more-than-slightly-inebriated argument—over the music, several rounds of shots and more than a little fist-based table-pounding—about “diaper golems”: specifically, whether they could be animated, and how useful they would be, and what CR. Also: the spell requirements, minimum caster level for creation, and base price. My friends are weird.

But they’re doing this rather than making fun of me for not trying to dance with Abliguritia Thundersmasher-Roth or buy her a drink and make “small talk,” so I guess I love them a little bit for that.

And yes, of course Princess Leafirellha is here at the bar. She’s 35. She’s probably the only customer here with a favorite stuffed toy—Nursie Flap-Flap, of course—a binkie and a copy of “Goodnight Moon” in her diaper bag, but as the particularly big-necked door-guy said, it’s valid ID.

Anyway, diaper golems became a topic of conversation—and I subsequently left—after I tried semi-successfully to steer the ongoing debate away from the topics of deeper religious meaning in Pixar movies, the exact words to the “New Justice Team” theme song from the superhero episode of Futurama, and/or who would win in a fight between Princess Celestia and . . . well, anybody, actually.

These are stupid arguments, not worth discussing.

Everypony knows that only Batman could beat Princess Celestia, that ridiculous fan-fic Dead-Neck McGee has been writing notwithstanding.

Oh, yeah: Dead-Neck McGee the stupid cleric ghost is also here. I did not invite him.

And now someone large is pounding on the door. Time to go get a drink, I think.

(Also Titled: The Ongoing Diary of Thppgrg, Goblin Minion)

DAY FORTY-EIGHT

So, the show is going . . . oddly.

The second and third nights of rehearsals were, if anything, a step up in the general-insanity department, and I sincerely expect tonight’s extra-long Saturday-evening session of blocking, line-reading, and screaming, explosion-filled hysterics to be downright, full-blown, abject madness.

Quite a few fights have broken out over how to do the ostrich-jousting sequence at the end of Act 1, in particular.

Apparently, the ostrich costumes are racist to were-ostriches, but actual ostriches are too weak to hold up some of our more . . . “Large-plus and larger-size” cast members, but dire ostriches are prohibitively expensive to rent, and the first prototype animatronic rob-ostrich that was build by our crack team of robo-imaginationator-eers blew up.

This is primarily because our crack team of robo-imaginationator-eers is composed entirely of my three idiot nephews and a pyromaniacal, half-deaf gnome named Wallyworkle Tinklehammer, who seems unnervingly overjoyed at having a cabal of youthful degenerates to throw explosives for him, and upon which to test his new steam-driven combination morningstar/nunchaku/crossbow device, the “Tinkle-Hammer 3000.”

It’s apparently a pair of crossbows, linked via chain, that shoot morningstars instead of crossbow bolts. Or nunchaku, when you hold down the secondary fire button. And which runs on steam. He’s been spending a lot of our now-severely-depleted-budget on building the thing, which would be a pretty serious legal issue if he wasn’t also the treasurer of the Art Co-Op that’s producing the play.

Wallyworkle has also been making weird, vaguely threatening, and ominously maniacal comments about getting access to the blueprints of the entire dungeon, just for fire-code reasons. I assume it’s nothing.

Anyway, I expect someone to storm out in frothing, indignant rage within fifteen minutes of getting on-set tonight.

And then, unless I get much, MUCH better at telling people to shut up, and to go away, and to just, please, really, leave me the hell alone, afterward I’m going to be dragged to a trendy dance club down on Level 68—it’s called “The Level 68+1 Club,” quite uncreatively—by General VanO’Shaughnessy Blah-blah-blah #3, Jimbo, and several other members of our ever-snowballing Unrequited-Admiration Octrangle to “blow off some steam.”

I told my stone-golem boss/director flat-out that I like my steam just the way it is—that is to say “neither blown, nor off, nor involved in any way with experimental nunchaku—based weaponry”—but she just laughed and told me that I had quite the sense of humor.

She said this, I should note, while gazing longingly—and, might I add, somewhat wistfully—at Greg the vampire accountant in his vampire astrophysicist costume, under a lederhosen-themed vampire-yodeler disguise, all while General VanO’Shaughnessy Blah-blah-blah #3 gazed at HER, semi-surreptitiously, with equal—if not profoundly, pathetically MORE—wistfulness, simultaneously making wildly exaggerated hand motions imploring me—from the bottom of his heart, behind her back—to accept her invite.

Ugh.

Anyway, the group of people who will be guilting me into pretending to have fun with them tonight will include not only all of the original, founding Messy-Longing-Octrangle-Society members mentioned previously—some of whom will say they are not going, but who will no-doubt meet us at the club—but also a truly ridiculous gaggle of new, additional love-lorn, star-crossed lonely-hearts, approximately quintupling the size of our little cadre. As far as I can tell, every single person involved—no matter how tangentially—with the production of Margin of Errors: +/-L.OV[E] is now desperately, head-over-heels, brick-to-the-skull, pants-on-head STUPID in-lust with someone who isn’t interested in them.

It’s just like Jr. High all over again.

Fortunately, the aforementioned gaggle of mixed crushes will probably include Kyle the evil pseudodragon with a troubled past and nothing left to lose—he’s easily my favorite new addition to our angst-ridden clique, since as far as I can tell he just likes hanging out with us morbidly romantic folks and occasionally making hilarious, incredibly rude off-the-cuff jokes.

He had one particularly catty bon mot yesterday about taping a candy bar to the middle of Chris the Maintenance Yeti’s back that had me smiling for HOURS. This was after I found out that Chris—much like myself—has the hots for Abliguritia Thundersmasher-Roth, but that—unlike myself—he had the gumption to actually ask her out on a date. She accepted, which was unfortunate. They’ll be at the club. Tonight.

I really needed the acerbic pick-me-up, is what I’m saying.

So, after rehearsal this evening, there will be hours of stares of longing, and awkward pauses, and heavy drinking, and no doubt a whole lot of tears, bitter recriminations, and bouts of sob-choked self-examination, most likely in the bathroom. Also, dancing.

It will be just like rehearsal, except with dub-step.

I hate all of those things.

Except heavy drinking, I suppose. So, then . . . count me in, I guess.