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Mikey Mason, having listened to Allie Goertz’s Dungeons & Dragons song “Tonight,” decided to compose his own. It’s about that time when your campaign was plagued by an idiot player who kept on getting his characters killed. But because he was the game master’s brother, he stayed in the game, again and again. You know, that game.
For me, it was a Cyberpunk campaign and the game master’s brother (who had just gotten out of jail) insisted on provoking gun fights with heavily-armed strangers as often as he could. He ran through three characters in that session, and never saw a causal relationship between his behavior and their mortality.
-via Nerd Bastards
Patton Oswalt’s book Zombie Spaceship Wasteland includes his reflections on the impact of role-playing games upon his life. This is followed by a lengthy poem entitled “The Song of Ulvaak,” which is about one of Oswalt’s own characters. Allie Goetz, who composed the Dungeons & Dragons song “Tonight,” has put the poem into music. It’s a lovely, haunting poem, especially as Ulvaak becomes aware of his true nature.
-via Uniblog
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Allie Goertz wrote and performed a touching song about how gamers escape from their mundane lives into worlds of their own creation. “Tonight” captures the role-playing experience so very well. -via Nerd Bastards
Previously:
Dungeons & Dragons Song: Roll a D6
A Song about the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual
Gary Gygax was, perhaps more than any other single individual, responsible for inventing the role-playing game and Dungeons & Dragons specifically. He failed his last saving throw three years ago, to the lament of the gaming community. Now there’s a project to build a grand monument to his life and work. The government of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, where Gygax reigned, is granting space in a public park for this purpose:
The Gygax Memorial Fund has reached a huge milestone. We have been granted land for the memorial site at Donian Park. Donian Park is a four acre open space site which encompasses a wetland and the 100 year recurrence interval floodplain along the White River in downtown Lake Geneva.
One Boing Boing commenter has put it best: “He will be critically missed. We should all observe a moment of silent (10′ radius).” Link -via Boing Boing | Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Zero Charisma is a film project led by Katie Graham, Andrew Matthews, and Thomas Fernandes. They hope to raise $15,000 to turn the above trailer into a feature-length movie. Here’s a synopsis of their story:
Scott Weidemeier spends his time in exactly three ways: working a menial job at a local donut shop, caring for his abusive grandmother, and running The Greatest Dungeons & Dragons Game of All Time. Though overbearing and short-tempered, Scott is a hero to his fellow players–that is, until neo-nerd hipster Miles Butler joins the game, fueling Scott’s rampant insecurity and alienating him from his own players. Can Scott overcome his contempt for the mainstreaming of nerdery, or will this clash of the subcultures come to a head?
The best line from the trailer: “I weep for the women of your generation.”
Link via Nerd Bastards
Connor Anderson and Zac Smith made this outstanding parody of Far East Movement’s “Like a G6.” Truly, contrary to the airy video of Far East Moment, this is how the good life is lived: in a basement, all night, with candles and Coke.
via Nerd Bastards | Previously: Song about the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual
Would you like to smell like an orc? You’re most of the way already, but let’s finish you off with this new scent from Black Phoenix Alchemy Labs. The company describes it as “Field grey courgette musk, roughly cured leather, and vetiver.” It’s one of several scents based on D&D races, character classes, and alignments. Oh, they don’t call it D&D, of course, but that’s the obvious inspiration.
Link via Atomic Nerds | Previously: Play-Doh Cologne
Ugh. It’s been about seven years since I’ve played Dungeons & Dragons, and it shows. I scored only 8 out of 22 (although I did recognize that one was not, as suggested, a “coast guard spork”). My usual weapon of choice for fighter characters was a polearm of some sort, so I expected to do a bit better. How well did you do?
Link via Ace of Spades HQ
Now that Generation X is moving into middle age, they are leading a resurgence of the game Dungeons & Dragons. The game that “taught millions of geeks to socialize, empathize, level-up (in game and in real life) and emerge from the dungeons of their solitude to tell heroic stories” is being taught to second generation players and celebrated by those who grew up with it -and who credit the game with helping them to grow up.
Looking at PlaGMaDA, I remember how D&D taught me to love maps and hand-draw them myself. In that trove of old gear I found at middle age, I had discovered my beloved backdrops for heroic stories and imaginary derring-do: the Craggy Hills, the Untreaded Lands, the Lorsearch Plains. Mountains called Ramen-Nashew I’d painstakingly scribed with a blue quill pen. Here, an evil wizard’s lair etched in Magic Marker. There, an underground labyrinth guarded by traps and monsters, with rooms numbered from 1 to 37, which I had drawn on aqua-lined graph paper, now smudged, almost sepia-tinged with age.
But by playing RPGs (role-playing games), I was not only teaching myself shoddy draftsmanship. I also learned to be confident and decisive, and to feel powerful. Even feel cocky. Some of the guts and nerve I role-played began to leak into the real world. By the time I graduated high school, I had transformed. I had used escapist fantasy to gather strength for later, when I was ready to come out of my shell. In this sense, the wave of nostalgia I’ve felt also springs from a desire to pay tribute to D&D. To thank the game for the gifts of creativity and self-actualization it bestowed upon us.
Author Ethan Gilsdorf relates his experiences and those of others in this article at Salon. Link -via TYWKIWDBI
She loves playing Dungeons & Dragons, but she wants more. Can true love drag a nerd out of the basement long enough for a dinner date? The animation by Brad Jonas accompanies a song by the Doubleclicks. -Thanks, A Seventy!
For more than thirty years, Dragon magazine published a regular Q&A column for Dungeons & Dragons players who need clarification about rules and backgrounds. Chris Sims of Comics Alliance combed through the archives to find the strangest and/or most disturbing questions that ever made it into the magazine.
“Monster Manual” is a song by the band Mixel Pixel. It tells the tale of a role-player’s struggle with a particularly brutal Dungeon Master, who is throwing just about every creature in the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual at him. The video is animated by Dan Meth, whose work has been featured extensively on Neatorama.
via Popped Culture | Mixel Pixel | Dan Meth
Wired has a gallery of user-submitted celebrities who have been “rolled” as AD&D characters. Here’s George W. Bush’s (by “Spherical Time”):
17th -level politician
Chaotic Neutral Human
Strength: 11
Intelligence: 10
Wisdom: 6
Constitution: 12
Dexterity: 10
Charisma: 16
Special Abilities: Always wins eligible elections, takes no damage for corporate connections, has the ability to prevaricate perfectly, and always goes first in initiative in attacks via other countries.
