Welcome to Greg “Yankee Dog” Vaughan’s One Too Many (Voices in My Head). His last, best chance to exercise those pesky demons. In his column, you’ll find… I really have no idea, but he gave me $20, so… all yours Greg!

[previously]

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“Pass me the twanger,” said my friend, Harley Upchuck.

“What did you just say?” I asked.

“I said, pass me the twanger,” he replied mildly.

“Just exactly what the heck is a twanger supposed to be?!”

“What are you getting at?” he shot back, feathers ruffled.

“What are you getting at?! You’re the one who wants me to pass something called a twanger! It sounds like the mix of some prop from a porn movie and an astronaut drink!!”

Clearly ticked off, Harley got up and walked across the living room to where I was sitting and grabbed the TV remote before heading back to his chair. He gave me a cold, hard stare as he changed the channel with the remote and said, “This is a twanger,” as he held the remote out for me to see.

“Not on my planet, it’s not. Where’d you even get that word, anyway? Just make it up?”

“It’s a legitimate word,” came the reply.

“Shall we consult Webster’s then?” this with my best smarmy smile.

“No! It’s not that kind of word. It’s a… uh… colloquialism.”

“Now you’re just making up all kinds of words.”

“Look, Yankee Dog, you’re not from around here, so you don’t know what kind of words we use in the South…”

***

This was what it always boiled down to. I had moved to the Great State of Alabama when I was in the 8th grade and remained there until my junior year of high school when I moved back to Oklahoma. Don’t get me wrong, Alabama is great, has wonderful food and, like my own home state, is a Mecca of college football, but in the rural area where I resided, if you weren’t born and raised south of Huntsville you were considered a dirty Yankee.

My attempts to explain how my home was Indian Territory during all that Civil War business and the tribes that relocated there just used the White Man’s war as an excuse to take sides and hash out old grievances with guns and knives against rival tribes fell on deaf ears. We Indian Territory folks didn’t give a whit about States’ rights, or emancipation, or the Kansas-Nebraska Act. All we knew was the prison guards were preoccupied and willing to hand out firearms for a pledge of loyalty, so it was the opportunity to finish up some old feuds that had been broken up prematurely by good ol’ Uncle Sam. You gotta’ love opportunism.

Regardless, my Dixie friends remained unimpressed and “Yankee” became a common imprecation for me when I made them mad or they just felt like picking at me. My arguments that hindsight being 20/20 and the fact that the general outcome of that particular conflict made being a Yankee a pretty good deal didn’t sway them either—the blue coats must’ve cheated they’d mumble. But I digress.

Pass the Salt

So there we were in one of our typical standoffs: I, an ignorant Yankee invader, and Harley, a sullen and aggrieved Southern gentleman. We liked to call the days when that happened “weekdays.” Clearly, we had no higher authority to which we could take our grievance, and at the age of 14, I tell you, proving the other guy wrong was a BIG DEAL. Heck, we used to wait for the other to doze off in church just so we could give the offender a good elbow in the ribs… good times.

But then, Harley hit upon an idea. He remembered where he had first heard the word “twanger.” It was from Old Man Finney, and we could just go ask him ourselves.

Now Old Man Finney was a squatter who lived on Harley’s family’s land. He had an old motor home trailer parked under some trees off a logging road a couple miles from Harley’s house. Whenever we were feeling brave or foolish, we’d call the dogs and hop on the dirt bikes or just trek through the trees to check in on the old man to see if he was dead yet and what craziness he might spread our way while we sat out in the dirt in front of his trailer and sipped horrible iced tea.

Me and Harley had a standing bet on both how old Finney was and when he would likely die. We both thought upper 80s—he never told us, and we never asked—and he always seemed to be hovering on death’s door with some cough or rheumatic ailment or other that we were pretty sure was a put on.

Harley thought he’d meet his end by accidentally shooting himself with the homemade crossbows he was always trying to put together, and my guess was that he’d get done in by a bear wandering by that he made the mistake of trying to shoot with said crossbows. Either way, we were pretty sure it would be interesting and that his ghost would show up and curse us out just like any other day. The man’s mouth was a font of creative and often unintelligible curse words that he could throw into any conversation as casually as “pass the salt.” We were in awe of his linguistic abilities and breadth of knowledge, so he was the obvious person to bring in to resolve our twanger controversy.

Y’all Come Back Now, Ya Hear?

We found Old Man Finney in his usual green lawn chair, sitting under the tattered awning outside his trailer. He was sipping iced tea with lemon slices from an old mayonnaise jar and shouting a blood-curdling stream of profanity at a small thorn bush. I may have failed to mention: his eyesight was pretty much shot—probably from who-knows-what hooch he cooked up for his late-night drinking when something a little stouter than iced tea was called for. Meanwhile, his dog (also called Hooch, coincidentally) cowered under the trailer nearby.

My best guess was that Finney had called the bush to come over and heel, thinking it was Hooch, and when it didn’t immediately obey, he proceeded to give it a verbal disemboweling. Hooch was a lazy old dog but no dummy. He could hear his name in that diatribe, and there was no way he was coming out to get in on any of that.

I stopped to (carefully) pet the thorn bush and offer it a doggy treat—why spoil the man’s fun?—while Harley went on over and waited for the fellow to run out of breath. When the inevitable gasp for air came, Harley jumped in, talking at a mile-a-minute, “Hey, Finney, how ya doin? Guess that dog of yours ain’t very smart; probably he’s just shy. I expect if you just sat awhile and stared at him he’d eventually give in and come on over like you told him to. Anyway, the reason we’re here is because we need to know about a twanger…” leaving Harley gasping for his own breath.

“Is that you, boys?” Finney asked, opening his rheumy eyes as wide as he could to glare at us.

“Yep, it’s us,” I said as I jogged over to join Harley as he plopped himself down on the ground next to Finney.

“Well, I’ll be *%$%. It’s about time you boys came out to see me. The two’ve you got more sense in your heads together than that &^*$*#@ dog of mine.”

I’m sure that was supposed to be a compliment, and the two of us combined together might actually be smarter than his dog, but there was no point in trying to explain how that might not be particularly flattering to us. It’d probably just earn us a good cursing—usually fun, but we were here on serious business and didn’t have time for such shenanigans.

“Why don’t you fellers sit a spell,” he said, motioning to the ground… where we were already seated. Old Finney was never troubled if reality didn’t quite fit with his own perception; he just assumed the real world would catch on and get with the program to meet up with his view of it—which it usually did, oddly enough.

“Have some iced tea,” he said with a squinting smile—the dreaded iced tea. We always hoped he’d forget; he never did. He quickly found a couple soggy Dixie cups; he saved them and washed them in his sink each time—we hoped with soap—and we were soon choking down sips of the rancid swill of his that passed for iced tea.

“Uh, Finney, there’s a wood beetle floating on one of my lemon slices,” I politely pointed out.

“Never you mind. He’ll just take a little bite and leave the rest for you.”

“So the reason we’re here,” Harley began, “is because we’re trying to figure out exactly what a twanger is.”

“A *%^#@ twanger, huh? Well, I’ll tell you, tain’t no twerp.”

“Uh, okay. What’s a twerp?” I ventured to ask.

“Now hold on, *&^$*, one question at a time, you ^&#% boys,” he said. “I’m still talkin’ ‘bout a twanger. Now a twanger is somethin’ that’s got some use in it, see? Like this here stick. I can use it to scratch a pitcher in the dirt here, or I can use it to stir muh tea. See?”

“Maybe you should have used it to stir your tea before digging in the dirt with it,” I said as I watched his swirling tea turn a cloudy brown.

“Shut yer yap, boy. Muh twanger stick here can also be used to lay a switch across the britches of some smarty-mouth kid.”

Yap shut.

“A twerp on t’other hand, ain’t got no use ‘atall. Like that dern dog over there. #@^%$@^, Hooch, get your butt over here!”

The thorn bush showed no signs of approaching, so Finney went back to his instruction. “Sometimes a twerp can be a twanger. Like this here twerp that grows on the side o’ my toe.” Here he removed a boot and showed us a blackened callous on the edge of his big toe.

Gorge rising a little.

“Now sometimes, I takes muh skinnin’ knife and shaves that little twerp right offa’ there. Well it’s hard as a rock, so I can use it under the legs of muh table to make it all steady like. Keeps it from creakin’ and swayin’ so much when I eat.”

Oh yeah, gorge coming on up.

“And some of my dishes don’t set quite right, so I can prop one up under the edge and it’ll hold muh dinner plate straight.”

The simultaneous sounds of Harley and I spitting the tea in our mouths back into the Dixie cups hardly phased the old man in his monologue.

“So those twerps become twangers, an’ then it grows back on muh foot an’ is a twerp all over again.”

“Say, you boys must be getting’ dry. Have some more tea.”

Despite the fact that our Dixie cups were more than half full, he leaned toward us with his jar of muddy tea. That was all the opening we needed, and we both jumped up at the same time.

“Gosh, it’s gonna’ get dark soon,” Harley said as he glanced up at the noonday sun. “My mom’s gonna’ be looking for us.”

“Yeah, we better go,” I chimed in, “We can give the rest of our tea to the dog; he might be thirsty is all.”

We set our Dixie cups down by the thorn bush as we walked back to the trail. Hooch flashed us a grateful grin from the nearby trees—he had used the distraction of our visit to escape from under the trailer and make for cover.

“Alright, well you &^%$$@ boys come back soon, hear?” the old man yelled from his lawn chair.

“We will, Finney,” we called back. I don’t know that he heard as seeing as how he was now yelling at the thorn bush to fetch the stick he fired at it from his crossbow and cursing it roundly for its lassitude.

“See,” Harley said, “told you it was a twanger.”

“You know, Harley, I was thinking. This was a good excuse for us to get out of the house, take a nice walk through the woods, and get some fresh air. And it’s all because of you. Old Man Finney was right, a twerp can be a twanger sometimes.”

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Greg is the creative director of Frog God Games and author of The Slumbering Tsar Saga. You can check them out at talesofthefroggod.com. He is also a regular contributor to Paizo Publishing’s Adventure Paths and various and sundry other things too tawdry to mention here.

Welcome to Greg “Not the Smart One” Vaughan’s One Too Many (Voices in My Head). His last, best chance to exercise those pesky demons. In his column, you’ll find… I really have no idea, but he gave me $20, so… all yours Greg!

[previously]

__

As I type these words, I have put the finishing touches on the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game conversion of Part Eight of The Slumbering Tsar Saga, and Part Seven awaits only its final art turnover before it goes to print. As a 14-part adventure series, that means I’ve passed the halfway mark in this Herculean task (that’s actually Herculean +2 for any of you who are counting), and I figure it’s time to rest my carpal-tunneled, degeneratively arthritic hands and take a moment to reflect upon this milestone… a milestone of pain, in my opinion, as I stare down the home stretch of the last six parts, but a milestone nonetheless. So to take a rest from working on it, I’m going to type a column for KQ.com. Mama never said I was the smart one.

But wait, you say, what is this saga that you speak of? Sure, we’ve seen it in your little bio at the end of these columns, but we just figured it was more of that crap you make up. Well, to answer your so-rudely stated question, as I am its author, technically it would fall under the category of that “crap” I make up, but I assure you it does really exist, and as it bears down on my heart and soul with its incessant burden, it serves as my own White Whale… a White Whale riding a polar bear… on a bike… carrying a monkey… yeah, it’s that bad. So, without further ado a little background. Turn on the Wayback machine, Mr. Peabody…

In Days of Old
Doodle-oodaloo-doodle-oodaleoo (insert your own way flashback lines here).

Waaaaay back in 2004, with the 3E Wave in full swing, I sent a little adventure proposal to the good folks at Necromancer Games… well, they’re demon princes (Orcus and Tsathoggua, to be precise), but good in a sort of Chaotic Evil, eat your face, and use your soul as toilet paper kind of way. They had this really cool series of adventures called The Dungeon of Graves that began with a short background blurb describing an epic battle at an evil temple-city of Orcus called Tsar in which the forces of evil were forced on a long retreat and ultimately led their opponents (you guessed it, the forces of good—okay it’s a little bread-and-butter here) into a mysterious forest. That march triggered a massive trap, or ambush, or News Kids on the Block festival, or some other kind of ultimately bad mojo.

The end result was the forces of good disappeared and years later all that was found in the forest was a massive graveyard (presumably holding the remains of the forces of good) and a massive Orcusophile-inhabited dungeon complex underneath, hence the name: The Dungeon of Graves.

Anyway, it was all way cool and, in true Necromancer Games fashion, way nasty. (I bought the limited-edition boxed set and am now Killer GM #806 for anyone who’s counting).

As cool as it was, I always had a little niggling question in the back of my mind. If the Orcusophilic priests established their new temple in the Dungeon of Graves, then they presumably never went back to reclaim the abandoned temple-city of Tsar. If that’s the case, why not? And what’s been going on there since?

Off the the Races
With that thin veneer of a plot (believe me, I’ve used thinner), I proposed an adventure about what slumbered within the ruins of Tsar—coming up with the pithy title Slumbering Tsar, I might add—and sent it in to the esteemed demon princes. You could say the rest is history, but that would seriously short my word count for this column, so I’ll expound. Basically, I never heard back from them. Yep, story of my life.

Fortunately, ever an optimist or at least a glutton for punishment, after an interval of 6 months or so I submitted it again, hoping it had just been eaten by the email monster. This time I received a favorable email response, and shortly thereafter, I was talking on the phone to Bill Webb, co-owner of Necromancer Games.

These were the heady days of titles like The Lost City of Barakus and The Vault of Larin Karr for Necromancer, so from talking to Bill, mini-campaigns were the hot sellers for Necromancer, and my idea for a simple adventure module to build upon the lore created in The Dungeon of Graves grew. However, the treacherous Fates weren’t done with me yet.

A few months later and many thousands of words into writing my adventure-campaign, I had another conversation with Bill. Printer costs on the bigger books were a killer, and they weren’t selling as well. Lots of BIG products were hitting the market, what with Ptolus and The World’s Largest Dungeon and what have you. So Necromancer was looking in a different direction, to move to more smaller books at a lower price point. Would I be able to break Tsar into three books?

Tampering with My artistic Genius
After a little thought about how it could be done, I decided, yeah, I could find a way to break it up into a three-parter. This actually gave me a little extra leeway in expanding each part, I thought in the throes of my youthful exuberance… and it grew.

The first part clocked in at 90,000 words, the second at 165,000. I was getting nervous—the third one was shaping up to be truly massive and Bill was pinging me for it, wanting to know how this thing was going to end… and it grew… and grew. At 205,000 words for the third part, I called it quits, either from it actually being done or just from sheer exhaustion after a year-and-half of writing—I can’t remember which; the caffeine habit and highballs have a way of screwing with your recall. I kid, of course; I never touch caffeine…

Anyway, with much-shorter fingernails and much-grayer hair, I finally sent in the final turnover on the third part. Then Bill said those two fateful words that caused me more pain than an appendix exploding in my kidney—“art order.” At one piece of art per every 5 pages, that came out to… 130 pieces of art I had to devise, describe, and document so it could go to the artist… Pop! Goodbye little appendney.

The Path to Publication Never Runs Smooth
With only three fingers left on my right hand and a keyboard smeared with blood, tears, and even a little feces (okay, but that was from the monkey being carried by the polar bear on the bike with the… oh, never mind), I managed to hack out art orders for the three books and send them in.

The books were edited, laid out, and sent to the printers in China on a long, long, slow boat ride. In fact, this was about the time rumors of a 4th Edition of the world’s most popular roleplaying game were beginning to circulate and 3E sales suddenly stumbled.

Necromancer’s publishing partner for the books pulled the plug to avoid taking a bath in a slumping market, and there my epic adventure series died, poetically perhaps, in some nameless jungle in Southeast Asia.

Not that the quest ended there, mind you. I am, after all, of limited mental faculty and a true glutton for abuse. Necromancer Games soon went on a hiatus, and while many discussions were had about resurrecting the adventures and Necromancer actually released the first one in a PDF-only format, nothing ever grabbed enough momentum to really get going.

Alnernatives Are Few
I started shopping the title around a bit—anyone want to publish a 450,000 word adventure? I can’t blame them, Open Design wasn’t really doing books of that size, Sinister Adventures was still being birthed and focused on Razor Coast, and Paizo adventures are only about 210,000 words for an entire Adventure Path so this would count as two APs and change. Whaddya mean you don’t want to devote an entire year of your product line and hang your financial well-being on the success of a single monster adventure series I wrote?

Well, okay, when you put it that way, I wouldn’t either.

While everyone involved listened very politely and some even crunched numbers with me to see if it could work, realistically it just wasn’t a good fit for anyone’s product line or a good risk for them to take. Here I was all dressed up holding a behemoth book and with no place to go.
With just a Few Tweaks…
Then Bill Webb got bit by the publishing bug again. Necromancer Games had been silent for too long, and he wanted to at least get this thing out the door as a last hurrah if he could. Thus was founded Frog God Games, spiritual heir of Necromancer Games.

All I needed to do was revise the 450,000-word adventure to the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game rules. You can’t see it, but my face has a little tic when I type that. That’s only like, oh, 5,000 stat blocks plus every mention of a Spot, Search, Listen, Hide, Move Silently check included in the text… tic, tic.

On the Threshold
So that’s where we are. I subdivided the books into 14 parts to accommodate a realistic revision schedule and monthly releases, and in the last 6 months, we’ve gotten six of the parts published and out the door with the next two in the queue, ready to go, and a compilation of the entire thing into one massive hardback tome when all is said and done sometime this summer.

People have been incredibly supportive of the project and patient in its year-long-plus release schedule—diehard old Necromancer Games fans and even Pathfinder fans who had never really heard of Necromancer. And Frog God Games has expanded into multiple projects due to its success.

The “series” is now called the “saga,” not because it has suddenly sprouted Beowulf and a bunch of Nordic kennings but because the journey of the book itself has been a personal saga, and it continues. Now, I can spout some kennings if you want, believe you me, but I’ll save those for another… word-collection-type thing. (See how I snuck one in right there to say “column”? Pretty Old World, huh?).

If this Story Had a Moral It Would Go Here
Many lessons have been learned on this journey. It introduced me to the publishing biz and its many facets. It led me into part ownership of an RPG publishing company, which is really kind of cool. It showed the power that a loyal fan base clamoring for a product can have.

Also, it exposed me to a great deal of derision and mockery by my playtesting group (a normal thing for me) as they pointed out every typo and ill-conceived idea I had come up with, and exposed them to PC deaths on a geometric scale (a normal thing for them, heh, heh) as I took out my revenge on their sorry characters. But mostly it made me realize, as I continue this months-long process of going through and updating every, endless stat block, that I really want to punch the guy in the face who decided that it would be way cool to add a template or PC class levels onto every freaking monster in the adventure. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go take a beating.

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Greg Vaughan is the creative director of Frog God Games and author of The Slumbering Tsar Saga. You can check them out at talesofthefroggod.com. He is also a regular contributor to Paizo Publishing’s Adventure Paths and various and sundry other things too tawdry to mention here.

Welcome to Greg “The Most Dangerous Game” Vaughan’s One Too Many (Voices in My Head). His last, best chance to exercise those pesky demons. In his column, you’ll find… I really have no idea, but he gave me $20, so… all yours Greg!

[previously]

__

“And that puts you at −75 hp. The soul trap releases your soul, finally allowing you to die after undergoing the most abject, excruciating pain and humiliation known to man or any other sentient species… Kevin, are you paying attention?”

New Kev looked up from his artfully stacked tower of polyhedral game dice, “Huh, what was that?”

Apparently New Kev’s mind had wandered—I call him New Kev because I can’t call him Kevin J anymore, and there’s another Kevin in my regular game, so I can’t call him that either. I was perfectly content to call him Kevin J since that wasn’t his middle initial, yet I had somehow cleverly (and unconsciously) engineered it to appear that way in the publication of the trilogy of Pathfinder Society scenarios that he and I had co-authored together. Some people think I take glee in the misfortune of others… but that’s actually only true when it really hurts and I have somehow engineered it or might be able to take credit for it at least. In this case, Paizo had thoughtfully removed the J from the publication after learning of my deception, and Kevin had told me that he liked the J because that was where he kept his mojo. Well, that couldn’t be allowed to continue, so the J was banned, and he was back to just New Kev until I could find some other suitable form of torment for him…

I thought I had succeeded at just that having spent the last 17 minutes describing in lurid detail the effects of my soul-catching, boiling-water elemental enema trap that I had just unleashed upon his favorite character in our Pathfinder game. But apparently his attention had waned after the description of the first few feet of bowel immolation. Go figure. Now he seemed to be in a sort of game haze, disconsolately stacking and restacking his hardly used game dice—strangely, a condition I see a lot at my game table and have yet to put my finger on a source. I’m thinking of getting the house checked for radon.

Finally breaking from his mystery fugue, he said, “You probably shouldn’t put that trap in your next Pathfinder Society scenario.”

“And pray tell why not exactly?” I demanded with no small amount of indignation.

To this he reminded me of my previous month’s column and the fact that, last he checked, Paizo was a company still in the business of making money and not alienating and driving off its own customer base. I reluctantly conceded the point. Anyway, our game seemed to have come to a satisfactory conclusion (to me at least), so I could pack up my stuff, and he could get to rolling up another new PC when he asked me, “Are you guys going to do a Christmas hog?”

“I think you mean a Christmas ham, and I’m sure we’ll have a ham and maybe some turkey when we get together with my family next week.”

“No, I mean a Christmas hog. My cousin owns some land and has an overpopulation of feral hogs wandering around on it. This weekend we’re going to continue our family tradition of hunting a few of them and having a Christmas hog for dinner. You’re invited to come if you want.”

I thought, sure why not, and after securing the permission of my wife to be gone from the house for a few days (unfortunately a disappointingly easy task, usually accompanied by a gleeful little giggle), we made our plan.

The plan in question seemed to involve showing up at his cousin’s land with guns of various caliber, insufficient food and cold-weather gear, and an abundance of holiday season optimism. We arrived at just before sunset and had soon set up our perimeter consisting almost entirely of empty coolers within which we planned on transporting our hunters’ bounty. New Kev’s cousin left in the truck, decked out in full camouflage ghillie suit, to set up at another location a few miles away, leaving us alone to plot our kill.

Almost instantly, the sun set, accompanied by a precipitous temperature drop, and we found ourselves in pitch darkness in the middle of the wilderness. I tried to maintain a stoic air as I questioned our strategy while lining my sweatshirt with the wrapping paper and napkins from the Subway sandwich I’d eaten for lunch, “K-K-Kevin, are you s-s-sure that your cousin had to take the tr-tr-truck with him?”

“Yeah, he doesn’t like to sit in the cold. He keeps it running with the lights off and watches for the feral pigs to come up to his bait before he shoots them.”

“He sh-sh-shoots his rifle from inside the truck? Isn’t th-th-that awful loud?”

“Naw, he doesn’t use a rifle. He’s a bow hunter. He just leans out the window and pops ‘em with his bow. If that doesn’t do the trick, he’s got a big ol’ knife that he’ll use to finish ‘em off. He says it’s cool; I think he just watched too much Crocodile Dundee as a kid. He won’t even get out of that heated truck unless he’s got a sure kill lined up.”

I sat down on one of the coolers to try to stay warm in my “Italian BMT” coat while New Kev finished compiling all of our gear. During this process, he maintained a running monologue about the feral pigs and how they were mostly harmless unless they gored you with a tusk or came upon a sleeping or wounded person. In that case, apparently, they turned into homicidal killing and eating machines that brought to mind images of the pigs in the movie Hannibal that had been trained to eat people—the sound of agonized screaming serving as their dinner music.

When he ran out of things to say about the pigs, he proceeded to describe the other dangers of the woods we were in and tended to focus on owls (not that big of a deal, in my mind) and bobcats (ambush hunters that leap from trees or cover and can make short work of a helpless human caught unprepared, or so he told me). As he wrapped up that cheery diatribe, he handed me a heavy bag of half-rotten vegetables and told me it was bait for the pigs. My job was to walk to other side of the pond we were near and start scattering the stuff in a line to draw the pigs to us and our kill zone. As a parting gift, he handed me a small plastic whistle. He said it was a call that was designed to sound like a wounded rabbit, something that was sure to draw the hungry pigs to us.

As I wound my way through the trees thinking about feral hogs, wounded rabbits, and Hannibal Lector, I saw ahead an area where the trees squeezed close together into a kind of bottleneck. Kev had admonished me to move as quietly as possible to not scare off any game in the area, but it occurred to me that that sort of bottleneck—where I’d be vulnerable squeezing through trees—was just the sort of place that I’d set up an ambush if I was a bobcat. Discretion being the better part of valor, I decided that speed rather than stealth was my friend here, and I took off at a loping run to try to burst through the trees as quickly as possible and, therefore, foil any Viet Cong-style traps that local felines might have laid.

Unfortunately, my intentions were more capable than my execution as I burst through the narrows and almost immediately snagged a root with my foot and fell headlong onto the ground, dumping my bag of bait and dropping my rifle in the process. The rifle discharged into the air, nearly giving me a heart attack, and as I looked up, I came face to face with a bobcat that had apparently not been setting an ambush but rather peacefully napping in what it thought was a secluded hollow where it wouldn’t be accosted by clumsy, loud humans carrying poorly managed firearms and smelling of Italian submarine sandwiches. The shrill, howling screech and four-legged leap that followed would have done any bobcat proud but merely seemed to chagrin this one as it watched me gallop off into the trees on all fours—still screeching with abandon.

I hadn’t made it far before I realized that I was utterly and totally lost. I knew I had gone away from the pond but had no idea which way I had gone in my headlong flight careening off assorted trees and obstacles. To my credit, my display of alarm seemed to have embarrassed the bobcat sufficiently that it had slunk away to avoid being associated with the mad human in any way. Alone, without a light, and still smelling strongly of salami, I decided it was time to break out the rabbit call. I figured that if I attracted a bunch of pigs, the guys were sure to follow. I didn’t want to be stuck on the ground with a congregation of man-eating swine, so I climbed a nearby tree before sounding my distress call—and nearly fell out. Evidently, the cry of a wounded rabbit sounds eerily like the scream of a human infant. Not a comforting thought in my current surroundings.

My theory proved itself true, for in no time at all, a respectable herd of feral pigs had gathered at the base of the tree and were soon licking the bark where a trail of Subway napkins had stuck here and there. They never really looked at me, though, which made me feel better. I continued blowing the call, feeling safe in my perch, as I thought about how animals had good low-light vision, but I wondered how well they could see in pitch darkness such as we were currently experiencing. If they couldn’t see that well, then all they were really following was the sound of the call… that was emanating from the vicinity of my face!

I never saw the owl until it was right on top of me… literally… in my hair… its wings beating the stuffing out of my face. I had let go of the limb before I realized what was going on and soon found myself on my back amongst the wild pigs… and they found the source of the delicious Subway napkins—a flailing, wounded human apparently wrapped in a meat suit. One appeared to be seriously considering whether my face might also have that meaty Italian taste when it was startled by an arrow that thunked into the tree trunk next to my head. The next instant, it fled as my vision was filled by the sight of New Kev’s cousin, screaming like a Comanche, decked out in camouflage paint and full ghillie suit, descending among the pigs like the Harbinger of Death, knife in hand.

Everyone scattered at once, two of the pigs and I going in one direction while the confused owl and the rest of the pigs went in another. I left Kev’s cousin behind to the Friday-the-13th sound of knife cleaving pig flesh and enough blood-freezing squealing to curl the hair at the base of my neck. (I was able to compose myself enough to curtail the squealing after only a couple of minutes.)

I kept pace with the pigs fairly well until we reached the narrow spot where I had first fallen. As I leapt through behind the panicked sow there was a rifle crack, and the first pig juked left and was gone. I hit the deck as the other pig seemed to have the same idea and landed on my head, quickly burying my face in the pig bait I had dropped earlier. The second shot missed and that pig went squealing into the darkness. Soon New Kev loomed over me, rifle in hand, and I vaguely recalled my own diabolical laughter as his most recent PC had received its much-celebrated disemboweling. Could this all have been a Deliverance-style ploy to get me into the benighted woods among a clan of blood-crazed killers?

It turned out not to be the case as Kevin realized that the half-naked, wallowing thing on the ground was not some wounded feral pig but rather a middle-aged, suburban ape with a shirt half-eaten by wild hogs, an owl-scratched, garbage-smeared face, and a pair of drawers in serious need of changing.

We all laughed about it later in the truck after New Kev’s cousin came hauling the carcass of a freshly slaughtered hog out of the woods. Well, they laughed about it; I mainly tried to keep from jumping at every small noise and ruining another pair of underwear. Kev said he thought that I knew he was joking when he said his cousin hunted from the truck. Turns out, he was actually something of an extreme-hunting survivalist freak. Kev figured the fact that his cousin hunted with bow and knife while wearing a camouflage suit would be enough of a clue for me to catch on… well, I suppose under the right circumstances it could.

Kev’s cousin leaned back in his blood-spattered gear as we drove home and said, “Best Christmas hog hunt ever.” He glanced my way and took in my general disheveled appearance and said, “Are you injured?”

Mustering all the dignity that I could, I replied solemnly, “No, no I’m not.”

“What’s that red stuff splattered all over you?”

“Um… mainly red-wine vinaigrette.”

The blood-soaked maniac looked over at Kev and rolled his eyes as if to say, “Where do you find these weirdos?”

__

Greg is the creative director of Frog God Games and author of The Slumbering Tsar Saga. You can check them out at talesofthefroggod.com. He is also a regular contributor to Paizo Publishing’s Adventure Paths and various and sundry other things too tawdry to mention here.

Welcome to Greg “Not a Wus” Vaughan’s One Too Many (Voices in My Head). His last, best chance to exercise those pesky demons. In his column, you’ll find… I really have no idea, but he gave me $20, so… all yours Greg!

[previously]

___

As an RPG writer, I am sometimes beholden to that merciless taskmaster, that sadistic overlord, that destroyer of hopes, dreams, and aspirations… no, not my editor… a product review. Actually, I jest. I love getting product reviews of things I’ve written, and everybody I know who writes RPGs does too. Good or bad, all are useful and informative.

In fact, there are never enough reviews out there, so all you readers get off your duffs; you think plunking down your hard-earned cash for a product comes with no strings attached? Heck no. You buy something, you’ve got responsibilities… a duty to the buying public—you owe us reviews! Okay, that may be a bit extreme, but we do appreciate reviews whether they be through KQ, Paizo.com, DriveThruRPG, EN World, wherever. We love ‘em…

All that said, I received my first 1-star review this weekend. Okay, the first one I’m aware of, anyway. I suppose there could be some anti-Greg Vaughan website out there where the legions of disgruntled gamers gather to bash me and burn me in virtual effigy. But if so, I wish they’d contact me because I own the domain names GregVaughanHate.com, WorthlessWriter.com, GregAVaughanMustDie.com, and assorted variations using dirty words. I’d totally cut interested parties a good deal on buying them from me.

But enough ego stroking… I received this bad review at Paizo.com for a Pathfinder Society scenario I co-wrote as part of a trilogy in the Year of the Shadow Lodge adventure cycle. If you’re unfamiliar with what I’m talking about, feel free to pop on over to Paizo’s Pathfinder Society and check it out. I’ll wait to finish this column until you get back… honest.

The trilogy is called The Heresy of Man and is this nice little plot arc set in the atheist nation of Rahadoum and deals with some of the country’s unique political, cultural, and historical landscape… blah, blah, blah. If you know me and have experienced any of my adventures (or have perhaps played in any of my games), you know the adventures I write or run are about one thing and one thing only… how many PCs I can kill or send home crying to their mommas. My poor, abused regular players have lost all emotional sensation of loss, grief, or disappointment. They just keep coming back for more like that mangy dog you always see in the alley behind the restaurant—sure it knows somebody is going to throw a rock at it, but hey, this time there might be fettuccine! I call it lobotogaming. It’s great fun… well, for me anyway; who knows for those zombies.

Back to the subject, though. The scenario is the second one of the trilogy, called Where Dark Things Sleep. Oh, and I lied: it wasn’t just a 1-star review but would have been lower if the rating system would’ve allowed it. How do I know this for sure? Well, I got a little hint from the review’s title:  “If there was something below one star, I’d use that.”

“I really dislike scenarios where the primary objective is to kill as many characters as possible. I actively dislike both this and part one and will be avoiding anything by this author.”

Short and sweet—I like it. In my defense, while she has clearly hit the nail on the head as to my primary objective, my secondary objective was… well, no, that was to kill characters, too. My tertiary objective involved a large sum of money and a talking vole named Sam, but that’s just complicating matters, so we’ll not get into that.

I co-wrote this scenario (and the other two in the trilogy) with a guy named Kevin Wright; I know the cover says Kevin J. Wright, but that’s not his name. It’s Kevin L. Wright if you really want to know. I have no idea where the “J” came from. All I can think of is maybe I accidentally called him that one time while thinking of Star Wars novelist Kevin J. Anderson. Regardless, “J” is obviously very popular as a middle initial (certainly more so than wimpy “L”—what’s that supposed to be, “Lynn” or something?), so you might consider using one yourself. What were we talking about?

Now the real story behind this scenario is that while I was at Gen Con this year absorbing the usual threats and curses from people who have had the misfortune of playing through one of my adventures with a particularly favored character, one small voice reached me through the din. I don’t recall the guy’s name, but he mentioned he really enjoyed my Pathfinder Society scenarios because they allowed the players to really get into the adventure without having to constantly worry about the threat of death hovering over their heads.

Yes, yes, I nodded, knowingly. It’s always best for players to not use their favorite characters when they go through my adventures… wait, what?!?!

Sure enough, the guy had the temerity to tell me that my PFS scenarios were (gasp!) easy. I could feel the gorge rising in my throat at his words. Now, if you’ve never experienced the feel of gorge rising, I highly recommend it. It’s a bit uncomfortable at first but lends a real flair for the dramatic. Unfortunately, gorge that riseth tends to also falleth, as this unfortunate fellow discovered when he experienced the sensation of gorge falling—on his feet, specifically. He definitely picked a bad day to wear sandals, but I digress.

After wiping the remaining gorge from my face with the newly purchased Gamer Chick Magnet T-shirt he was holding in his hand (he told me I could keep it, nice guy that fellow), I mumbled something about the chicken teriyaki at the food court and excused myself to ponder the gravity of what I had just heard. I… me… yeah, that guy… had just been told that my scenarios were easy. I’m the guy whose bio for convention appearances says my dream is to have a vintage WWI fighter plane with a stamp on its fuselage for each TPK I cause—a sadistic Snoopy for the gamer crowd. This suggestion of leniency on the part of my scenarios could not be allowed to pass unchallenged.

Some might say the fellow had been adequately chastened &emdash;he was currently in the restroom picking teriyaki reruns out of his Birkenstocks, after all&emdash;but something had to be done. My image as a heartless cretin was in jeopardy. I had to get paybacks against anyone who dared to scoff at my adventures as easy.

I was already slated to write this trilogy with Kevin, so once I was back in town, we had a development meeting, and I laid out my plan. He thoughtfully reminded me that, though he was all for the carnage I proposed, the destruction of PCs technically had to be done within the framework of the Pathfinder RPG rules. (So much for the free cigarette lighter to be secretly distributed to GMs with each copy of the scenario—you know those record sheets are highly flammable.) Some compromises were made, some rules were stretched, broken, bent back into shape, and repaired with bubble gum and paper clips, and then stretched some more: the end result was The Heresy of Man trilogy.

And here we are, back to the review. I guess maybe I could put some sort of Surgeon General’s warning on my games: “Warning, this scenario was designed with the sole purpose of messing up your junk… may be harmful to pregnant women, but the results are still out on that. If you experience priapism for more than 4 hours… whoa! what’s that all about?”

Or maybe each adventure should come with a coupon for either a free carton of Ben and Jerry’s or a box of Kleenex. You get the idea. I would say I’m torn between my urge to commit bloody violent mayhem on all PCs that enter into one of my adventures versus the desire to reach out to gamers who are looking for a more mature, thoughtful game where things like diplomacy and character development are the order of the day, but that would be a lie.

I’m pretty much just out for the whole death thing.

The reviewer closes by stating that she will avoid anything by me in the future, and I kinda’ think she’s probably got a good idea there. It doesn’t seem likely that I’ll be changing my tune in that department, and to be fair, I don’t expect consumers to change theirs just for my benefit. There are enough masochists out there for me to keep writing stuff for a long time. That Kevin guy, though, I hear he read this review and got all weepy and soft. So you might watch for some new titles by him involving things like elves, unicorns, and/or double rainbows. Meanwhile, I’ve got to get back to writing my newest scenario, Wusses Die First.

Greg is the creative director of Frog God Games and author of The Slumbering Tsar Saga. You can check them out at talesofthefroggod.com. He is also a regular contributor to Paizo Publishing’s Adventure Paths and various and sundry other things too tawdry to mention here.

Welcome to Greg “Manly Man” Vaughan’s One Too Many (Voices in My Head). His last, best chance to exercise those pesky demons. In his column, you’ll find… I really have no idea, but he gave me $20, so… all yours Greg!

[previously]
___

Though I am an Okie through and through, I spent a portion of my years—specifically the junior high portion—in rural Alabama in the small town of Wetumpka. There, my best friend Harley Upchuck and I spent many a summer day playing D&D and then heading out into the woods for hiking and camping fun. While I’ll be the first to admit that I am no outdoorsman, I was a Scout in my youth… well, a Cub Scout anyway. So I, like many of my scouting peers, feel a certain justification in pretending to be outdoorsmen and getting into all sorts of trouble and mayhem that only the outdoors far from civilization can provide…

I can just envision the Donner party’s exchange before heading out on their fateful trip.

Day 1: “Captain, are you sure it’s a good idea to press on through the Sierra Nevada with winter coming on? Seems like it might be dangerous.”

“Nonsense, I’ve got my scouting background to fall back on if there’s any trouble.”

“Eagle Scouts?”

“No, Webelos.”

Day 15: “Well, Ms. Imelda May, you sure do look delicious today… er, I mean succulent, no, I meant pretty, yeah, pretty that’s it. Aw, who am I kidding? Somebody get the stew pot!”

So with that background in mind, what happens when a group of middle-aged men with little to no real outdoors experience gets together for a weekend of camping and rock climbing? You get the Men’s Mountain Adventure, that’s what.

Delmer Bradley had never been camping—he told me one fine spring day—and mentioned that he had just bought an air mattress, so the prospect of doing so did not sound daunting to him. I immediately scoffed at the idea of his air mattress and explained, as an experienced outdoorsman, how no finer comfort could be found for sleeping than the freshly cut green boughs of a Douglas fir. When he later told me that his wife, Dottie, had scoffed at my claim of outdoorsmanship, the trip was official—we were going camping! He then almost immediately said that his wife claimed that we’d never last through the weekend. Irritated by this seeming clairvoyance I asked, “What? Do you have a walkie-talkie in your pocket or something, Delmer?” to which he held up his Nextel Wireless DirectConnect phone. Sigh. Cityslickers.

In no time, the crew was assembled and we were headed down to the Wichita Mountains for a weekend of camping, climbing and, most importantly, no wives. As we headed out, Dottie handed Delmer his Nextel—which I had cleverly hidden in their car before we left—and warned him to be careful because there were real dangers out in the wilderness (here she looked significantly at me). I was so offended that I stopped polishing the pins of my merit badges—the old Scouts shirt still fit… barely.

“Just what do you think he’s going to need a cell phone for, Dottie?” I asked. “He’s going to be in the wilderness away from all wives. And besides, he’s got me there in case something happens.”

When she caught her breath again from her bout of very unladylike laughing—I would say it could be accurately characterized as a braying laugh—she said, “In case there’s an emergency, moron.”

“Well, we’re going to be 2 hours away. I would suggest that if there is an emergency that you call 9-1-1 rather than calling Delmer, because I don’t think we’ll be able to make it back in time. Plus I expect it’s pretty expensive to break out the rescue helicopter just to comfort some distraught wives.”

I thought this last quip was a bit clever, but the reemergence of the donkey laughing suggested that she thought otherwise.

“No, you idiot, in case you have an emergency, and we have to bail you out.”

Mustering all the dignity I could in my much-too-small Webelos blues without bursting the buttons, I assured her once again that there would be no wives needed on this trip. Then our party packed into two cars and off we went down the highway, the sound of the braying donkey laugh ringing in my ears… until we made Delmer turn off his Nextel.

Arriving at our campsite, we immediately set up the necessities after a short argument over who had forgotten to buy ice for the drink cooler. (I argued I had taken on the duty of preparing the greenhorn, Delmer, for wilderness survival, so while technically it had been on the list of things for me to do, surely somebody else should have thought of it.) Todd set up his portable generator and satellite dish, so we could see if there were any good games on while the others pitched camp and I proceeded to explain to Delmer the finer points of tree selection for the crafting of a green-bough mattress.

“But these aren’t Douglas fir,” Delmer said. “These are scrub oak and some kind of tree that appears to only grow in puddles near a Port-a-Potty.”

I good-naturedly took him aside as the wilderness novice that he was and helped him select a good blackjack oak to make his green-bough mattress—though, in his defense the tree had been dead a good 2 or 3 years and was dry as a matchstick with an exceedingly large number of acorns to remove. But I explained how after the first night of no sleep, he’d be so exhausted that he wouldn’t even notice the intense discomfort in his back and limbs.

The rest of the first day passed uneventfully although a weather report did come through that mentioned thunderstorms with chances of tornadoes over Lawton.

“Shouldn’t we be concerned?” Delmer asked.

I comforted him with my best outdoorsman look and said, “Naw, Lawton’s a good 10–15 miles from here.”

“More like 5,” Todd chimed in.

My outdoorsman look turned into a withering glance toward Todd (witnesses later stated they could discern no difference between the two) and said, “Yeah, okay maybe 5 miles. But it would take a tornado at least… 20 minutes to get here from there.”

The experienced campers among us put our heads together to come up with an emergency weather plan.

I turned back to Delmer, “There’s a hamburger joint over in Meers and a Love’s Country Store near there. We can go grab a bite to eat and pick up some ice for the drinks.”

On the way into Meers, Delmer called his wife on the Nextel to let her know we were okay. “Everything is fine, honey, we’re just getting some ice.” Reception was bad, so that was about as far as the conversation went.

By the time we got back to camp, it was dark and we decided to turn in for the night. At about 2 am, Delmer burst into my tent, waking me from a blissful snooze.

“I hear sirens, I think there may be trouble… hey, is that my air mattress?”

I mumbled something about field-testing his equipment as we all stumbled out into the darkness. There was the vague sound of sirens in the distance, which we agreed could possibly be the tornado sirens coming from Lawton. We would have turned on Todd’s TV, but somebody who had thoughtfully bought the ice at Love’s had just as thoughtfully left one of the open bags sitting on top of the TV set and pretty much shorted out the whole system as it melted.

Thinking back to my days among the Scouts I said, “Well, I don’t remember them saying this, but it seems like a good place to hide during a tornado would be up among the rocks where the mountains can give us shelter.”

The thought of a night climb terrified Delmer (and didn’t exactly sit well with me either), but nobody could come up with a better idea, so up the rocks we went in the pitch dark. After many bumps, bruises, short falls (the Wichitas aren’t the highest peaks in the world), and much general cursing wherein my name seemed to come up quite a bit, we found ourselves in a sheltered dell where we could wait out the imminent storm—which never came.

Not a drop of rain fell that night, and I’m pretty sure the wind never rose above a decent gust. So in the morning we found ourselves tired, battered, and completely lost on account of climbing the mountain in the dark. I felt, as the senior outdoorsman, that it was my duty to keep the group together and maintain its morale and kept insisting that this current trail was the correct trail back to the camp. After the 43rd time, their faith seemed to be waning. At one point, I even managed to filch Delmer’s phone and, in a show of confidence, called Information for the number of the Lawton Domino’s Pizza, reasoning that they would surely deliver as far as our campsite, and since we were nearly back, we’d have some hot pizzas waiting for us. Once again, reception was a problem, and the call disconnected just as I was asking for help with the number.

The second night on the mountain was in the exact same dell where we had spent the first night, having faithfully led my companions by hook and crook back to the point where we had started in a masterful feat of land navigation. They failed to appreciate the sheer chances of me pulling that off, so we all pretty much just went to sleep grumpy.

However, the next morning we did manage to stumble back into our campsite fairly quickly although I had trouble convincing any of the others that my exclamation of “Oh, thank God!” upon first seeing the camp was really just an expression of my gratefulness that none of our stuff had been stolen.

Finally, we were back in camp. We had food left over from Meers and some of the ice had made it into the cooler, so there were cold drinks. At last, we could spend the rest of our camping weekend blissfully away from all wives. And that’s when we heard the sirens again, only this time they were close enough to recognize as the sirens of emergency vehicles. Then we heard the whomp-whomp of the helicopter overhead. In moments our campsite was awash in Park Rangers, Sheriff Deputies, a volunteer rescue team complete with bloodhounds, and all of our wives—Dottie leading the pack.

Apparently, during the height of the storms hitting nearby Lawton, she had received a call from her husband stating that we were getting ice, which she took to mean a hail storm was pounding our camp. In a panic she had called the other wives and had reported that we were stuck somewhere in the mountains in the middle of the storm and needed rescuing. The Park Rangers and Sheriff Deputies went out that night and drove around with their emergency sirens on to attract our attention but couldn’t find us. Then the next day a telephone operator reported that somebody had called her for help from somewhere up on the mountain before being cut off. That’s when the search party was formed, and they put the rescue helicopter in the air.

So, as a whole, I have to rate the Men’s Mountain Adventure at best as a “qualified” success as an exercise in outdoorsmanship, and I can’t wait until next year.

By the way, do you have any idea how much they charge you for having to use the rescue helicopter?!?!

___

Greg is the creative director of Frog God Games and author of The Slumbering Tsar Saga. You can check it out at talesofthefroggod.com. He is also a regular contributor to Paizo Publishing’s Pathfinder Adventure Path and various and sundry other things too tawdry to mention here.

Welcome to Greg “Twinkle Toes” Vaughan’s

[previously]
___

O-Town is what I call Oklahoma City… no, not normally, only when I’m trying to rhyme something with “beat down.” It’s also where I live. Okay, I think that’s all the explanation I need there. Moving on…

I work (I mean my real-life day job, not my spectacularly jet-set, James Bond lifestyle of freelance RPG writing) in a conservative industry at a little office building on a busy intersection in a little corner of Oklahoma City. Kind of a Clark Kent sort of deal but without the glasses and the little forehead curl.

Like Clark Kent, sometimes you hear that cry for help and have to rush off to find a phone booth (good luck), or a semi-clean public restroom (yeah, right), or more likely get arrested for public indecency while trying to change into your Superman skivvies in the middle of a street. I think my metaphor is beginning to break down here.

It was no cry for help that nearly caused me to be arrested for public… did I say indecency? I meant intoxication. No, it was something much more insidious and threatening to the very moral fiber of this great nation. I call it Office Morale Day…

Because conservative industries in a depressed economy get, well, you know, depressed, somebody on the great Ladder in the Sky decided what we needed was an Office Morale Day. I’ve got to hand it to them because usually their idea of morale boosting is sending a memorandum that the beatings will continue until morale improves. This time, however, it was much, much worse… a parking lot carnival.

Now, I’m not against parking lot carnivals. I generally just ignore them. However, they often have food, and this one was no exception: catered bar-b-cue, state-fair-style corn dogs, and oh! oh! funnel cakes! Let the games begin!

About 45 minutes and 9,000 calories later, I was agreeably stuffed and supremely sleepy. Just about time for a quick nap under the desk. Then I heard the shrill, tornado siren voice of “Robert” screeching, “A boxing ring! They’ve set up a boxing ring!”

“Easy, easy, Robert,” I said, “I’m right here. And how did you get that tornado siren under my desk?”

Robert is one of those guys that everyone has met. The kind that never played any sports in school but talks as if he won State in all of them. There’s never a competition he didn’t trash talk about or a game he didn’t bet against you in. The sheer volume of words he could generate on any subject in which he had exactly zero experience could choke a water buffalo. Okay, I don’t know if that is true, but I think water buffaloes are funny, so I threw it in there anyway.

Sure enough, a quick scan of the parking lot showed that a giant inflatable boxing ring had been, well, inflated—complete with massive, 2-ft.-long boxing gloves and safety helmets. Apparently, it also came complete with “Blake”—another coworker of mine—wearing a set of said gloves and helmet and looking at me with murder in his eyes as he stood before the entrance to the inflat-o-ring.

It seems Robert had gotten to him first and given him an earful about something I may or may not have said about his maternal great aunt… some people are so sensitive. So Robert quickly brought me helmet and gloves, and as my hands slipped into the 20-lb., canvas-covered foam polystyrene, I knew it was on. Oh yeah, eye of the tiger, baby. No wait, even more than that, eye of the dire tiger, baby.

In a flurry of crowd-gathering catcalls, taunts, and slurs, I found myself in the inflate-o-ring facing off with my new arch-nemesis, Blake. “You ready to go, Greg?” he asked.

“Oh yeah, eye of the dire tiger.”

“Eye of the what?”

“Uh, nothing. Nevermind.” Stupid non-gamers.

I noticed that the buckle on my safety helmet had slipped so that I was looking partially out the earhole, so in true Queen’s Rules fashion, I held up my right hand to single a timeout and tried to adjust my headpiece.

WHAM!

My vision blurred, my jaws stung, and I was now looking fully out the earhole of my helmet. Blake had won the surprise round. But now, the game was truly afoot… er, a-ring… uh, whatever.

Helmet righted, I faced off against Blake. Initiative roll. I won. I held my action to see what his move would be.

He came in high, massive foam gloves up. My Dodge feat saved me as I ducked aside and brought a right in low under his gloves. The blow wasn’t hard—he must have some sort of damage reduction—but it made him bring his gloves down. What’s this? I seem to have iterative attacks? I never knew I had made 6th level!

Oh well, waste not want not; my left came in high over his gloves and hit him in the face. He staggered and went to one knee: that’s one fall. Aw, now I see his weakness: DR 10/blow to the face. The crowd went wild. Somebody really needs to shut off that tornado siren.

The next few rounds were more dance and jab than fight… as much as you can call two middle-aged men in work-casual attire on a giant moon bounce wearing 20-lb. plastic gloves dancing and jabbing. I had given up my place in the initiative order and needed to get it back.

After a few failed feints and, I admit it, a trip attempt, I stepped back and readied an action. My Bluff roll was high; he bit. POW! A right to the cheek! Blake was down again. Two falls.

The next round I got cocky and tried an Acrobatics check to tumble through his threatened spaces. Instead, I stepped too close to the edge of the ring and my foot slid into a foot-deep seam in the canvass. “Hold on a sec, Blake,” I started to say.

WHACK!

Two falls to one.

Now was go time, but I realized that it was about 120 degrees in the inflate-o-ring, and about 15 minutes earlier, I had eaten the equivalent of 3/4 of a cow and a goodly amount pig chased with lard and sugar. The signals from inside were telling me I had to end this quickly or the ring was going to get a new paint job… and not in a color anyone wanted to see.

Now when I was in high school and part of college, I played football. That doesn’t really have any bearing on this because I now weigh approximately 40 pounds more than I did then, but it makes me feel good to say that first to support the notion that there was some sort of athleticism at work here.

Really though, it was just that I outweighed Blake by quite a bit and used this to my advantage. I let him take a swing and performed a bull rush. I pushed him back across the ring, and he couldn’t get his gloves up effectively. He took a swing at me and then tried to retreat further. Aha! Attack of opportunity for me. A crit! Blake went down in a heap, the crowd went wild, Robert the tornado siren got even louder, and then the cops pulled up.

Shaken and dizzy from the heat, exertion, and far too much bar-b-cue, I clambered out of the ring. Blake sat up in a daze, saw the cops, and then helpfully laid back down as if unconscious. Thanks, Blake. Looking around, I realized that I was the only member of management in the parking lot. Where had the rest gone so suddenly?

I shuffled up to the police officer and he asked, “You got a permit for this carnival?”

“A permit? Well, I uh…” I was taken aback. I hadn’t arranged the carnival. Where were the managers who had ordained Office Morale Day?

“Is that illegal gambling going on over there?”

I turned my gaze to Robert and the crowd in time to see wads of dollar bills being stuffed into pants pockets.

“Gambling? Well, I uh…” This wasn’t going well, the heat was still intense in the parking lot, my nerves were shot, and I could feel a stampede forming in the bar-b-cue below.

The officer must have seen my face pale and my forehead break out in a cold sweat. “Sir, you don’t look too well. Have you been drinking in this public venue?”

And that’s when I threw up on his shoes.

Office morale improved considerably. They say I’ll get my shoelaces and belt back after the arraignment.

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Greg is the creative director of Frog God Games and author of The Slumbering Tsar Saga. You can check them out at talesofthefroggod.com. He is also a regular contributor to Paizo Publishing’s Pathfinder Adventure Paths and various and sundry other things too tawdry to mention here.

Welcome to Greg Vaughan’s One Too Many (Voices in  My Head). His last, best chance to exercise those pesky demons. In his column you’ll find… I really have no idea, but he gave me $20, so… all yours Greg!

(Actually, this is a very special recounting of his Gen Con experience this year.)

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My name is Greg Vaughan, and I’m a gamer. At least, that’s what my badge says.

Between you and me, though, I prefer the subtle melodrama of professional wrestling (it’s real you know!), and I’m a lifetime subscriber to Cat Fancy magazine. Just a regular Joe.

In an effort to get in on this new “reality TV” thing (I think it’s really gonna to take off in the next few years), I have set out to create and star in my own series that takes a look into the seedy and secretive subculture of the “RPG gamer.” Extensive research has led me to the conclusion that that best time to observe the gamer is in the annual pilgrimage to the mecca of gamer interaction—the “gaming convention.” With keen instincts for observation and journal in hand, I intend to be accepted into and observe the gamer in his natural environment: I’m going to Gen Con undercover…

Day 1—Thursday

Arrived at airport and showed cabbie my gamer badge. I let him in on my secret mission and asked for any pointers he could give. He was able to carefully mask his obvious enthusiasm beneath a curious rolling of his eyes and mentioned something about paying the tip up front. I happily obliged, wanting to learn these gamer customs in all situations, and gave him the customary 20-spot that he informed me all gamers use in the matter of tipping. When he left me at my hotel and received the second half of the tip (another $20 that he assured me was a part of the gamer culture), he laughed uproariously as he drove away. Unsure if that is another part of the culture or a feature of Indianapolis cabbies. Will have to study further.

Heading across the street for a bite to eat, I witnessed the wondrous costumes and pageantry that accompanies these gamer conventions. One man in a particularly convincing costume of a village drunk (complete with odor of stale beer and urine) asked me for a dollar. I happily showed him a twenty—held between two fingers like a prize—and, to remain in character, playfully told him he would have to perform an authentic drunkard’s dance for it. The doctor says I’ll regain feeling in the fingers as the severed nerves heal. May need more twenties.

Day 2—Friday

With much of Day 1 spent in a local ER, this was my first full day to experience the “Con” as they call it. I arose early and headed across the street to a local bagel shop for a quick bite to eat. I stepped up to the counter and cheerfully ordered a sesame seed bagel with two containers of almond-flavored cream cheese. The clearing of a throat caused me to turn and face a very large man—apparently there was a line I had failed to notice that wrapped around the interior of the entire store. I gave him my best cheery smile and joked about the dangers of getting between a guy of his size and food. Took most of an hour to get all the sesame seeds out of my nose.

Anxious to see the fabled “Exhibit Hall,” I resumed my mission. But the mission is thirsty work (plus I still had the better part of half a sesame seed bagel wedged into my sinuses), so at one point when I saw a moderately attractive woman—though she had strange, probably congenital, condition causing her pointed ears to protrude considerably—I paused to ask her if she knew where I might find a decent frappacino (a staple of gamers I am told… by a cabbie). She told me what I could do with my frappacino, which was both unpleasant and anatomically unlikely. Apparently, I had found a LARP room and proceeded to hurry out before the rubber tip came off of her otherwise historically accurate rapier.

Friday night was a highlight, as I was invited to attend a secret meeting of an award-winning, Illuminati-esque organization working behind the scenes of worldwide gaming called the WereCabbages. I was allowed to join in their annual game of Werewolf, a charming little game of whodunit where the participants all use mob mentality to vote on who will be lynched, all in an effort to unmask a werewolf secretly in their midst. For the fourth straight game, I was lynched despite being an innocent villager. I began to think that they didn’t really think I was werewolf but just enjoyed voting to lynch me… at least once before the game actually started. Plus, they seemed to invoke the “lynched villagers have to leave the room” rule only when I was lynched. These gamers, they are a lot of jovial and good-natured jokesters. Took notes to better emulate their interactions. Also made sure to secretly place as many of their 4-sided dice (d4s they call them) as I could find on the floor outside the door in the dark hallway. I hope you wore shoes… hippies.

Day 3—Saturday

The main event, the center ring, the grand cotillion—the Ennies. I managed to secure an exclusive pass to enter this hallowed event after giving the standard tip to only four gamers, at least one of whom I’m pretty sure had no affiliation with the event. These gamers and their subtle networks, I must learn their secrets. Inside the event, I found both a buffet with bruschetta (woohoo!) as well as a burly chap with a full beard and the trappings of a Mongol warrior. In congenial fashion, I asked him what foul creature had so beset him with an ugly stick to which she responded with a stiff arm to my jaw, and I spent the next 20 minutes coughing up bruschetta. These LARPers are everywhere… and sensitive.

The parties after the Ennies were quite extravagant with too many gamers dressed as Visigoths packing bars in sweat-soaked crowds attempting to recreate the entire Visigoth sacking of Rome—the golden beverage to simulate the gold of Rome, and the Visigoth gamers as… well… the Visigoths. No less than three bearded warriors, again women—perhaps dwarves, I was never completely sure—laughingly asked me for “tips” (evidently having spoken to one big-mouthed cabbie), and one lass who was well into her cups said something about crossing the Rubicon. I decided to not stay around for the rest and left with what shreds of dignity and meager remains of my spending cash I had left, only to find back at the hotel that my erstwhile roommate had rented my bed to a group of latecomers who had driven all day and turned in early. The hotel was sold out of other rooms, and somehow my credit card had been cancelled for multiple charges to assorted sordid online institutions—a parting WereCabbage hoax, it seems.

I soon found that the Indianapolis bus benches were only moderately softer than the sidewalks themselves, but there was no way I was going to try out one of the flower beds that tipsy gamers kept making short visits to between trips to the bars. The ambience wasn’t great, but it beat the five gamers currently in my bed.

Day 4—Sunday

Heading home today. Ought to have enough material to cook up a decent show concept for the producers. Woke up to find that my shoes had been donated to a homeless guy during the night. I know, because he was still tying them when I woke up. He seemed unconcerned with my protests, and when I leaped off the bench in pursuit, my foot found one of the d4s I had picked up from the night before. Added to my notes: a 60-year-old wino can still outrun a gamer with a plastic punji stake firmly embedded in the sole of his foot.

As I gathered my few possessions—my swag bag having been lost in the previous evening’s free-for-all—and hobbled for a cab, I was approached by a man asking if I knew of any hotels nearby that had vacancies. Nearly bit off three of his fingers before he got away.

The cab ride to the airport was sullen, and I only looked up at the end and realized it was the same cabbie as before when he opened the door to let me out. He took one look at me—unshaven, unshowered, with bus bench hair, and no shirt (where had that gone?)—took a cursory sniff and told me my mission must’ve been a success in discovering the secret life of a gamer. As a parting gift of congratulation, or perhaps mercy for the passengers on my upcoming airline flight, he handed me a bar of soap… it had a d4 embedded in its center.

Reality TV, it’s definitely the wave of the future, and I’m going to be onboard. I wonder if Real Housewives of Sioux City is looking for a gaffer or key grip.

Greg is the creative director of Frog God Games and author of The Slumbering Tsar Saga. You can check them out at talesofthefroggod.com. He is also a regular contributor to Paizo Publishing’s Adventure Paths and various and sundry other things too tawdry to mention here.