Megadungeons & The Mythic Underworld

 Below is another article I wrote a few years ago for an online pop culture website. The humor is a bit bitey because the site owners were into that...

Can Gary Come Out To Play?

A couple of college-age men knocked on the front door of a modest two-story home in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. They were nervous and a bit apprehensive, but they were also filled with a hopeful anticipation. A pretty blond woman opened the door and eyed the young men with suspicion, though she already knew why they were there.

Rolling her eyes, she called out behind her “Gary! Players!”

In his study, Gary Gygax shuffled his work papers into a pile, took a couple drags off a joint and went out to greet the men.

Smiling, he ushered them down into a large basement.

It was full of tables, one of them piled with small dunes of sand. In one corner stood a five foot, open-sectioned miniature castle, its exposed rooms and halls populated with lead minis of elves and orcs.

The young men eagerly smiled and looked at each other.

Gary handed them each several sheets of paper with pre-generated characters on them and pointed to a couple of chairs at a table laden with books and binders. “I have a couple of hours. guys, let’s start you at a town tavern down the road from Castle Greyhawk.”

The Basement King Of Lake Geneva

It was the late 70’s, and Dungeons And Dragons was swiftly becoming a certified phenomenon. Gary Gygax was making enough money off the game to fully indulge in his profitable hobby. He was running games for 10-20 regulars almost every night.

In addition, mostly on weekends but often any day of the week, strangers would show up at the Gygax abode, having heard he was up for DMing for anybody at a moments notice. As long as he wasn’t busy with his huge group of regulars in his closed evening campaigns.

This would not last, as eventually the growing popularity of the game, and larger and larger related projects taking up his time, would make gaming with Gary outside his regular group possible only at conventions.

See, when you get more and more famous and successful, you have less time to kick it with small groups of fans. The only thing I can personally compare it to was when I was a little kid in the late 70’s at San Diego Comic Convention International (one day to become Comic-Con), where I remember cornering Stan Lee in a hallway with several other young comic geeks, where “The Man” happily hung out for a half hour answering questions on everything from Spider-Man to Howard The Duck. From the 80’s on something like that would just not be possible.

But back to Gary.

Birth of The Megadungeon

So early on GG was running impromptu sessions for fans, and nightly for his group. How did he do it? Nowadays most modern story-crafting DMs would balk at the lack of prep time. Also, Gary would often be missing players at any particular session. How do you attend to a running narrative when the player pool shuffled so much, with little to no notice?

The answer is you didn’t. You just centered your gameplay around a megadungeon.

One of the hardest parts of running for a regular group is to consistently get everybody to show up regularly and constantly explaining away character absences. Getting players together for a game is like corralling cats. Jobs, family, and vacations get in the way of regular attendance.

But what about the fragile DM’s precious story? Mr. 5th Edition Dungeon Master needs to script out and craft his little stories, anticipating the players’ future actions.

Well, that was not always the case, Brosif.

Fuck Story

With a megadungeon, there is no story (or if you must, it IS the story). All you need is the adventure location and a separate home base such as a town. The dungeon is itself the tent pole of the campaign.

It’s where you do the dirty murder hobo business of kicking in doors and killing beasties. And the tavern, inn, or whatever is where you retreated to heal, recover, and spend your blood-soaked loot.

Each session ends with the trip back to town. The next with a trip back to the dungeon. Sounds monotonous? Not in Gary’s Castle Greyhawk. Here’s a pic of his first level:

That’s a lot of rooms, right? Not only that, but most levels had sub-levels. Gary’s 12+ level Greyhawk dungeon typically had 100 rooms or more per level.

But believe it or not, Gary was a minimalist. He only wrote a sentence or two in his notes for each room, winging and randomizing elements he had not notated. When a room was explored, he would draw a line through it, and later would restock it or redesign it all together.

He could mix things up and make things as unique as he wanted.

Some rooms would be monster lairs; others might be large halls with pools filled with various magic liquids. One room might contain a dwarven forge; while the next might be an oracles chamber. Some rooms even lead to other worlds, such as Conan’s Hyperborea or John Carter’s Barsoom.

No two rooms out of hundreds would offer the same experience.

And it was perfect for groups of varying level. The megadungeon levels had many stairways and chutes to other levels, and parties could delve in relation to ability. Noob poltroons could stick to the giant rats and goblins of level one, while tougher adventurers could head to deeper levels, where the rewards matched the dangers. After an evening of ass-kicking, they headed back up and back to town till the next game. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Dungeon As An Entity

Who was restocking this dungeon? Who was coming into this deadly maze to construct rooms? The usual explanation was that some mad wizard was in charge. But that didn’t explain how monsters and undead lived literally on top of each other with little in the way of resources, waiting patiently for characters to come challenge them for the contents of locked chests.

Even as early as 1st edition, the charming batshit whimsy of colossal dungeons with no naturalism was slowly giving way to more realism, but in original D&D unrealistic “living dungeons” were heavily implied in the rules. It was baked in.

The rules for the underworld stated that in the dungeon, doors would automatically slam shut behind the characters, and were usually locked or jammed. The same doors would automatically open for monsters. No character could see in the dark, but all dungeon inhabitants, even evil humans, could see fine; that is unless they were taken prisoner or charmed by players, at which point they lost the ability.

Megadungeons were like haunted houses, they seemed to have their own agendas. An old school dungeon such as this hated player characters and loved its monsters.

This seems perhaps too whimsical and fantastic to many, but the idea of a living dungeon fits well in the madcap world of old D&D.

Online amateur D&D historian Jason Cone, also known as Philotomy, describes the verisimilitude of what he calls the “Mythic Underworld” quite eloquently:

“There is a school of thought on dungeons that says they should have been built with a distinct purpose, should ‘make sense’ as far as the inhabitants and their ecology, and shouldn’t necessarily be the centerpiece of the game (after all, the Mines of Moria were just a place to get through).

None of that need be true for a megadungeon underworld.

There might be a reason the dungeon exists, but there might not; it might simply be. It certainly can, and perhaps should be the centerpiece of the game.

As for ecology, a megadungeon should have a certain amount of verisimilitude and internal consistency, but it is an underworld: a place where the normal laws of reality may not apply and may be bent, warped, or broken.

Not merely an underground site or a lair, not sane, the underworld gnaws on the physical world like some chaotic cancer. It is inimical to men; the dungeon, itself, opposes and obstructs the adventurers brave enough to explore it.”

Megadungeons Become A Dirty Little Secret

But as time rolled by players found such concepts as running gauntlets in super-magical labyrinths to be passe to a degree. But this was not the main reason megadungeons such as Castle Greyhawk did not become the norm in published adventures.

With minimal descriptions and a constantly shifting layout, Gygax didn’t think megadungeons would be all that usable for DM’s who did not create them. And in all honesty, I think he believed most dungeon masters, especially unseasoned ones, would be incapable of the on-the-fly decision making required for a dynamic and ever-changing location. Rather ironic now that we old schoolers see original D&D as having been more about “rulings NOT rules.”

Anybody who ran OD&D by necessity had to be adept at winging things. This is in stark contrast to the more modern editions where “player agency” seems to run the game.

But when it came time to publish adventures for the game, Gary passed on using his precious Castle Greyhawk dungeons and instead focused on ones he used for convention tournaments, such as his classic Against the Giants series. Basically, these were “railroad” adventures, more about getting from point A to point B than sandboxing. When a dungeon was involved, it was just a series of halls or caves meant to be cleared out, not a magical theme park you could delve into again and again.

The linear adventure became the norm, and was of the type DMs would imitate for years to come. By the early 80’s, dungeons of The Mythic Underworld were becoming a lost art.

The Megadungeon Lives Again

About 10 years ago or so a renewed interest in original D&D brought the megadungeon concept back into fashion among gamers old school and new.

For a somewhat outside-the-box list of megadungeons (including the Death Star) check out this article.

The Lichway - "why are they here?"

 

The Lichway is a dungeon that originally appeared in issue #9 (Oct/Nov 1978) of White Dwarf magazine out of England. It was an old favorite of mine, and over the decades I've now used it probably 4 or 5 times. It would have been more than that, but my groups tended to be long lasting, years, and I could only spring it on an entirely fresh group of players. 

Many old schoolers probably are more about using Keep on the Borderlands and the Caves of Chaos multiple times (I've used them maybe twice since I was a kid). But while KotB is about as basic and vanilla as it gets (just fight endless caves of humanoids and maybe a nice-seeming cleric is a homicidal asshole), Lichway is an artifact of old indy style D&D like Arduin Grimoire and Judges Guild. The old school common dungeon elements are abundant:

The location has a gritty background (necropolis for deceased undead worshippers).

It has a shallow waterway running through it.

A deep variety of mostly offbeat monsters inhabit the area. 

There is plenty of grim mood and dungeon dressing (hundreds of open crypts, worms that will choke you in the fresh water sources, vampire statues, a long-ranging rustling sound emitted by a unique creature, a horrifying possible no-win scenario...think quick!).

But most iconic to me is the fact that several (and by several I don't mean like just 2) different groups/gangs are currently inhabiting the dungeon with for the most part no real goal or purpose other than await murder hobo's a'coming to call. I mean, there are a pair of Man Beasts (character class out of White Dwarf and another favored old school thing of mine)  just sitting around in a small enclosed hallway. Just like old school you need to inject your own motivations and reasons, whether the designers planned it like that or not (I suspect in most cases not. The style was just to give little description, because D&D was once a game about just killing monsters. Period.). 

I always injected a little of my own juice here and there since the first time I used it as a teen. It was easy just to assume the 2nd level Man Beast, a male, is training his lower level female follower, and a crypt with all kinds of creatures in it seemed like a good spot. 

I think that in all but one of the times I used it, the party manages to release the Sussurus, the ape-shaped thorn creature that emitted a windy sound that put undead in earshot to sleep. In my second to last use around four years ago back in LA the MU cast silence on it. So I've experienced that joy of playing out the party running away in chaotic "every man for himself" style through the part of the dungeon they hadn't explored yet to get away from hundreds of angry undead. Always a hoot. I think a player or two has been lost over the play through due to a bad decision or delay (describing a body being torn to bits by a howling mob of skeletons never gets old), but so far no TPK. but its come close almost every time.

So anyway, my first campaign in my new town the other year ended up geared towards Lichway. It didn't start out that way. This was an entirely new group and I was using 5th edition for the first time. To say I went into it NOT studied up on the rules in an understatement. Since all my players were newish to the edition, I used that as a way to learn. As the players learn while using their characters I would tap into that and learn along. 

And to be honest, on an old school note, I was able to wing things much more than I thought I could. Just tap into the stat base save mechanics for everything and you are good to go. Really, outside of magic use the system is pretty easy peasy. 

But since I was new to it I started slow. Running each game in sort of a simple episodic manner. At first not really looking to the future, but as time went by, the characters made contacts and friends in the way of NPC's, I had to start looking at a direction. And I knew I wanted to use an old school module, in part because I knew the players would not be familiar with anything I had from the old days. They were all a good bit younger than me. 

So first thing was to be prepared to use Lichway for 5th editon. No worries. Really nothing in there was too out of the ordinary. Man Beasts and the Susurrus were needing to be adapted. Not much else. 

But this time I decided to do something entirely different. This was a twist for me, and since it might be for you, you might want to consider it if you ever use this really excellent dungeon setting. What did I do?

Two things. First I decided to give all the groups in the dungeon an actual reason, and actual purpose, for being in the dreary place. A convergence of coincidence for good reasons.

Second, I would have the party, early on adventuring a hundred miles south of the Lichway in the big city Tanmoor prior to the Lichway delve, actually meet and interact with some of the inhabitants whom I had yet to set up shop in the Lichway. There would be a variety of things ahead of time that would set up the dynamic elements within the necropolis. And in so doing quadruple the feeling of gravitas once the location was reached. Sort of a prequel to Lichway as presented, starting  maybe a month before the actual dungeon delve.

I switched the female MU gang leader Dark Odo from a human to a young drow magic user. Highly charismatic and specializing in charm magic, the dark elf enchantress' gang was almost complete as shown in the module.. The Man Beasts were paid scouts and body guards working for Odo, hirelings more than charmed henchmen, while all the other members of the gang were recruited by Odo's considerable, manipulative charms.

Why would Odo go to the Lichway? And who where the unrelated thieves who were exploring the Lichway? Not to mention the former adventuring party that was slaughtered except for Odo's gangs captives. How did the character party get involved in all this? 

In my next post I'll lay out how I took my first 5th edition campaign towards the Lichway, and why all the NPC's are in it when the party finally shows up at the Korm Basin necropolis. 

Cheers

Kevin Mac

Roll20, where've you been all my life?

 

Until recently I had almost zero experience in playing RPGs online. That's mostly because I had zero interest in it. With the exception of a handful of times in my life I was always able to get some kind of group together for face to face. My most recent long term groups lasted about 10 years. We played 1st edition D&D, Call of Cthulhu, Champions, Runequest, etc. But in the end it disbanded as I made the move out of Southern California. It took awhile to get a Group together in the new town, and even that only after I made the dreaded switch to the newest edition. I sailed along with That for awhile, but the couple who helped me start the group moving away, combined with The apocalypses, shut that down. 

A local DM suggested I try out Roll 20. It seemed like time to give that a shot. But rather than try to get in on a game to experience it from the players side, I dove into learning enough about the system to get a campaign up and running. As cornerstone players I tapped a guy who was going to join our face to face game right before The Virus hit, and an old player of mine from my home town Los Angeles, and recruited a couple of others and got it going. 

Though I was a Roll20 noob, I just started small and used each session as a chance to learn a bit more each time. I marveled at the way I could yoink a map out of a google search and lay it right down and put squares on it. The first couple of games were set in the hobbit shires, so I just needed country roads, farm fields, and hobbit houses and cottages. 

I discovered a token maker, and loved it. I could put any creature or NPC into a cool little ring. Players pointed me out to artwork online and I whipped up tokens for them. 

Suddenly buying and painting miniatures seemed like a real hassle (I never loved it... the process was a necessity). With the tokens the sky is the limit. Just put some keywords into your Google machine, use a stamp app to make it look like above, and get on with it.

Players are granted control of their token. DM has his. Move them around the map you laid out (maybe going that extra mile by locking the grids in properly for ease of tactical movement). The majority of the rest of the work is using your actual books next to you. Or use PDF stuff if that floats yer boat. Find a map online that suites your encounter then slide it into a page and place grids on it. Wow. 

The above video is of my "Control Center Alpha." My set-up for game night. The music in the background is live from a college radio station, playing from my alma mater Santa Monica College's radio station KCRW, and what is playing was totally unintentional but so appropriate for the moments before everyone logs on to play. When I'm in the "command chair" I feel a lot like the guy running games from behind the scenes in Larry Nivens D&D based novel Dreampark.

Man, I'm loving it. I want more. This may be an unpopular opinion, but I may like it more than face to face. My DMing is more concise, focused, and this format appeals to my episodic style. I keep it tight now that I'm not right in front of faces waiting on my next utterance. Not seeing the players has helped me open up in a way. I know, right? Somehow impersonal is making it more personal for me. Yeah, its weird. 

Dawn Of DUNGEONS & DRAGONS

 

A couple or so years ago I wrote a series of articles on RPG related things for an online pop culture website. This site was created mostly by talkbackers on Aint It CoolS New who jumped ship from there when AICN creator Harry Knowles got sucked into the #metoo morass. Below is one of the first items I wrote for them. 

The website asked for content featuring fairly raw humor, so I accommodated as best I could. Also a certain amount of artistic license was used here where salient details were somewhat lacking. Please excuse the formatting as this was copied directly from the for mentioned website.

At first Mary Jo Gygax had no reason to believe her young husband Gary was anything but a hard-working family man, who committed much of his spare time to his kids and political volunteerism.

But mysterious late nights with sketchy friends and missed family dinners led her to believe her hubby just might be slipping some Wisconsin salami to some Lake Geneva hussy.

Creeping down the basement steps of one of Gary’s best pals, she steeled herself for the sight of a sexual liaison, but instead found something potentially more terrifying; Gaz and his pals stooped over a table laden with maps and miniatures, recreating some Napoleonic combat or other.

Gary wasn’t a cheating bastard; he was a wargame god.

“this will get me sooooo laid one day”

The Fresh Prince of Lake Geneva

Gary spent his earliest years on the mean streets of Chicago, but when he started showing a childhood proclivity towards gang warfare, the family up and moved Fresh Prince style, but instead of hightailing for Belle Aire, they went for rural Wisconsin.

A high school drop-out, and an uninspired sometimes-college student, Gygax built his strong, professor-like vocabulary by indulging in science fiction and pulp fantasy while working a variety of low-end office jobs. Conan The Barbarian, Lovecraft heroes, and John Carter of Mars were his muses.

Continuing his interest in table top gaming as years rolled by, Gary remained active in the wargaming community, and wrote many articles for wargaming magazines and coming up with his own games. Always yearning for new ways to approach his games, Gary was an early adopter of multi-sided dice, discovered in math teacher supply catalogues. In 1967 he founded GenCon, a yearly meeting of wargame wonks in Wisconsin. Not long after he would produce Chainmail, a warfare simulation with fantasy elements, which would become an early template for Dungeons and Dragons.

A Dork Named Dave

“Me? Not so much”

Along came Dave Arneson, a Minnesota University history student who also loved wargames. Dave had, for the time, unique ideas about his wargame sessions. Not satisfied with merely simulating exact history, Dave liked to explore alternate histories and outcomes. He was also a proponent of “Braunsteins,” an unpublished wargame notion were non-combat goals were introduced into the rigid wargame rules.

This quickly evolved into the idea of players actually taking on the roles of individuals in the game (commanders, town mayors, community leaders and businessmen) and making non-military decisions outside of game task resolution, almost entirely based on whim. Role-playing, to put it simply.

You might remember playing Monopoly as a kid, and your friends or older siblings wheeling and dealing and negotiating outside the rules. Yep, we were all role-playing landlords and train barons. We were Braunsteining.

Dave expanded upon these games by inventing his game world,  Blackmoor (widely recognized as the first true fantasy role-playing setting), and his sessions deviated heavily from the stodgy, popular wargames of the time. He injected fantasy elements, quests for gold and monster killing, and scenarios lifted from fantasy literature.

You Got Your Dave In My Gary Butter

Dave and Gary came together like chocolate and peanut butter at GenCon 2, bonding over a mutual love of naval-based games.

Not long after, Arneson would adopt Gygax’s Chainmail rules for his games for his personal home campaigns, but also addended it with what would later be recognized as the Dungeons and Dragons tropes that game is known for, including the improving hit points concept, character development from session to session, and most importantly dungeon crawling.

His players tiring of simple castle sieges, Dave filled the basement levels with traps, magic, and monsters, and had them delve beneath rather than breech the upper walls.

D&D is Coming Together

Gary must have loved the Blackmoor games, because he quickly invented his own setting, Greyhawk. Gary and Dave began to collaborate on a unique game combining their games and rules, and Gary wanted to hustle on it as there were other wargamers with similar publishing aspirations.

Unable to find publishers, Gary and pal Don Kaye tapped friend Brian Blume (one of two brothers who would eventually lead to the downfall of Gary’s version of the company) for the moolah, and they were off and running with a first run of 1000 copies. Tactical Studies Rules (TSR) and Dungeons and Dragons were born. It was 1974.

Arneson was not a partner, and most of his rules were not incorporated into that first version of D&D (though the tropes he invented would be), but he contributed a supplement, Blackmoor, and would briefly work for TSR. But he would soon leave to pursue a separate career in game design.

Dave would receive co-writer credit for a brief time, but that was removed with the publication of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, a somewhat different game. Still, it’s main concepts were all Arneson, and he filed several lawsuits, breaking up the friendship. In 1981 they settled, and Dave received co-creator credit and a royalty sum. This soothed the seething tensions between Gary and Dave, and the old school dorks were friends once more.

The Band is Breaking Up

Dave moved on anyway, and eventually landed a prestigious position at Full Sail University, teaching game design for many years. But he continued his home Blackmoor games, sessions that for decades gamers would beg to participate in. At conventions they often got the chance.

Before long, due to the death of TSR partner Kaye, and a buying of more shares by Brian Blume and his brother, Gary found himself the minority shareholder of the company, effectively more an employee than partner in the company that was fast becoming a huge success despite a variety of negatives.

For one thing, stories both true and false about the game in the media (gamers gone missing and suicides) caused a certain amount of eyebrow-raising scrutiny for the hobby, along with religious tongue clicking (Gygax and his wife actually left the Jehovah’s Witnesses due to pressure within their local chapter).

Also, Gary had become obsessed with playing D&D, and it occupied all of his free time. His longtime love of marijuana, the lure of young snizz his new celebrity afforded him, as well as a growing cocaine devotion, helped finish off that marriage, and Gary and Mary Jo divorced in 1983.

“I can’t believe you’re taking half the dungeon!”

Gary continued to be the face of the popular game. While the Blume family continued to run the game aspect of TSR, Gaz was sent off to Hollywood to get the entertainment division off the ground. In gamer circles, tales of Gary doing copious amounts of blow off of young gals’ tatas while cavorting in hot tubs were legendary. He co-produced the popular D&D cartoon, and worked hard (as hard as you can work while playing D&D 15 hours a day with a coke straw glued to your schnozz) to get a D&D movie off the ground.

Villainy Most Foul

The Blumes were back in Lake Geneva having their own party, buying up a fleet of company cars, overstocking the supply cabinets, overstaffing the offices, and believe it or not using company funds to hunt real treasure at the bottom of the sea. Before long, under the leadership of Tweedledumb Blume and Tweedledumber Blume, the three hundy million dollar a year company was several million in debt. Gary, who was close to locking in Orson Wells and John Boorman into his D&D film project, was informed of the Blume’s intention to sell off his beloved company to nix their debt. Spitting out his doobie, and knocking Traci Lords off his junk, Gary boogie-nighted out of his rented Hollywood mansion and hightailed back to the hearth fire in Wisconsin for a little aggressive TCB.

Captain Gygax: Civil War

His tussles with the Blumes and attempts to restructure the company could fill a library’s worth of books, but the long and short of it is Gary got things back on track. He helped hire a Hollywood friend’s sister as a business manager for TSR in 1984, perhaps the greatest mistake of his career. Her name was Lorraine Williams, and that name may as well be “Hitler” to many old school D&D fans.

Gary soon learned that Lorraine, though an excellent manager, held D&D players in low regard, and actually belittled Gary about it. Gary tried a Machiavellian move or two, but it was to no avail. The Blumes sold their shares to Williams, and with a cackle and flash of brimstone, she became the true power behind TSR.

Gary eventually said “screw it” and went on to try his hand at new gaming ventures, but like a modern Moriarty, Lorraine stymied him at every turn, eventually owning (through lawsuits most foul) and shelving his promising Dangerous Journeys game system.  Though he would always have his name linked to D&D, Gary would never replicate his original game’s success.

“I rolled a natural 20!”

Moving On

TSR sallied forth without it’s founders. To quell outspoken media critics, new editions of D&D purged Christian and demonic elements, and each such edition grew further towards glossy mainstream fantasy and away from the beloved old pulp novels beloved by Gary. Dungeon crawls became passé. Video games would have a bigger influence on D&D gameplay than dusty old fantasy tales.

Through the late 80’s and into the 90’s, and to Lorraine’s credit, TSR actually thrived despite many poor ideas, such as a Rocky and Bullwinkle RPG that included the use of hand puppets (can you imagine?). D&D remained strong, and expansions into comic books and novels were a success. But it would not last.

TSR over extended itself, and poor sales of things such as an attempt to enter the collectable card market doomed the company.

In short, Lorraine eventually sold out to Wizards of the Coast, makers of Magic: The Gathering, who themselves soon sold out to Hasbro. Dungeons and Dragons, once an underground playground for overgrown Conan fans, was in the hands of the owners of Transformers and My Little Pony. For good or bad.

Wrapping Up

Both Gary and Dave never lost their love of gaming, and the hobby continued to be the major force in their lives. Dave continued running his coveted weekly home games all the way up to when he died. Over the years many fans would live their dreams of getting to play at the tables of Gary and Dave at various gaming conventions. Gary passed away in 2008, and his old pal Dave died in 2009.

Lorraine Williams still stalks the Earth, laughing her last laughs at Gary, Dave, and their gamer ilk.

"...and your little dog Toto too!"

Spider Spider, Burning Bright...

 Seeing as years ago Grognardia was my inspiration to do some rpg blogging, it makes sense that I can still get inspired by posts there to make my own posts on related subjects. But in this case James' post about spiders reminded me of a game related spider thing that happened earlier this year. Early in the campaign the characters were travelling through hobbit lands, and killed a wayward giant spider on a rainy night while taking shelter in an old cottage. The local governess was pleased, and let them stay at her estate in cozy, round halfling guest cottages.

The dead giant spider was placed by and Ettercap, who called upon all spiders large and small in the local area to descend on the domiciles and attack the party. The characters awoke in the dark covered in small spiders, and ran outside to face a half dozen of the giant variety. It was a nasty fight, but the PC's prevailed. 

Later after the game, the players had logged out and I was cleaning things up. That's when I notices something odd. A spider on the 50 inch TV screen I use for running the session. A small spider, about the size of "O" on your keyboard, was just running around. 

I like spiders, and heard long ago it was bad luck to kill one. So I tried to knock it into a glass but nothing happened. It was immune to my touch. A ghost spider? OK, this may sound silly, but for a few seconds I thought (being new to Roll20) that the program could mess with you with animations depending on what you did in the game. Maybe just based on the word "spider" in text somewhere in token notes. But good sense prevailed, and I realized quick that a little spidey had gotten inside the screen. Wow. This had never happened to me before. 

Odd, right? I mean, I'm running a spider based session and I spider invades my game map. Anyway, here is cell phone video I captured it with.

You'll notice the fellow runs through a door into the domicile, past a couple of swarms of spiders, then out a small round window. Clever little guy.

Obligatory 5th Edition post

My experience with an D&D beyond 1st edition could fit into a thimble. In the early 90’s one of my players wanted to run D&D, so she went out and bought the 2nd edition stuff. She ran a few games, but I don’t really recall the major differences in systems.

One of the main reasons I stuck with 1st edition all through the 90’s was probably because most of my players tended to have very little gaming experience until they came to my games. “I always wanted to play but never go the chance” people. I of course was the “seasoned veteran,” and was able to lead these gentle lambs through many a campaign with 1st edtion. Hell, they didn’t care. That was a time of wide-eyed wonder for my players, it seemed. And I often had a lot of females in games then (at one point in the mid-90’s outnumbering the guys at many sessions), and in my games they tended to lean heavily towards role-play (especially shopping trips, which in D&D, Call of Cthulhu, and Champions was always great for developing those “winging it” DM muscles), so task resolution was not the main source of fun during those times. We’d have these amazing several hour session with minimal combat or action.

From around 2000-2008 I was not gaming, and not even really keeping up on what was going on with D&D. My stuff was all in boxes in a garage, and my internet interests were more about comic books, music, and movies.

Then out of nowhere *BAM* I’m running games for a regular group, reading about D&D and other games constantly online, and started this friggin’ blog. Gaming and D&D was all up in my grill. Still, I’m not exactly Grognardia James in terms of my knowledge of the history of gaming, and what is going on in the OSR. Obviously I’m a much better talker than a listener. Powergame Dan sometimes marvels at what I know that is going on in gaming and the OSR, but really it’s reading Grognardia and a couple of other select forums that gives me any particular knowledge on what is going on. And that knowledge is not exactly deep even after three years.

And in all honesty, looking at online stuff about gaming is starting to lose it’s luster. “G whiz” factor is gone. It might be different in my case if I was back in semi-retirement gaming-wise. I’d look online and do a shitload of “remember when.” But with a full and regular group going, I’m trying to enjoy that more. In some ways because I’ve slowly realized that it is a fairly rare and precious thing.

As for 5th edition, well, it’s not very relevant to me. I don’t think D&D is relevant at all any more. You don’t see it getting played by characters in films or TV shows like you sometimes did in the 80’s and 90’s. You never hear it getting joked about. Even the Ubergeeks on The Big Bang Theory don’t play it. In dorkdom these days, it seems pretty bottom of the barrel. If you watch Attack of The Show for a week you might hear a smarmy D&D reference, but even in venues like that it is rare.

So I don’t much care. I have a KOTOR campaign going, a Runequest campaign just started, a 1st edition setting to get back to, a player who is regularly running 1st edition games for us, and am itching to do some Call of Cthulhu before too long. I have plenty on my plate. So let me join the throngs of “happy wanderers” and toss my own “I wish them well” into the ring. That’s it, Mac, Smile and wish them well. But it’s ok if inside you just don’t give a rats ass.