My D&D timeline

c1981 - Get Moldvay Basic set, later Cook/Marsh Expert set, mess around for this for a while, primarily focusing on the Keep on the Borderlands and some half-ass homebrews.
c1983 - Get Advanced Books, for the next couple of years try very hard to make AD&D work for my group.
c1986 - Become interested in the Mentzer boxed sets, and more importantly, the Gazetteers. Go back to basic/expert style D&D for several years, starting again with the Keep on the Borderlands.Continue to play AD&D in Jim's killer campaign. In retrospect, I can't help but wonder if it was the original Unearthed Arcana that drove me back to the simpler rules of Basic/Expert.
c1989 - 2nd edition AD&D comes out. My group drops most of our BECMI gaming in favor of playing the crap out of 2nd edition. David Dalley runs his Krynn campaign, one of the best campaigns I've ever had the priviledge to play in.
c1993 - Running the Rules Cyclopedia, once again relying on the Keep on the Borderlands and the Gazetteers.
c1994 - Don McKinney runs a super campaign using the RC, with the highlight being a partial run of Night's Dark Terror.
c1996 - Run a superfun hybrid 1e/2e AD&D game set in the Bandit Kingdoms.
c2001 - After a lull 3e draws me back into DMing. Run a short campaign based on Quasqueton and the Caves of Chaos, set in "Greymoor", the World of Greyhawk version of Blackmoor. Somwhere around this time I started getting really into OD&D.
c2002 - Back to AD&D 1st edition for a short but entertaining high level campaign that ends with a party armed with Hammers of Thunderbolts pretty much destroying the Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl.
c2006 - I hop on board the 3.5 bandwagon with the Wild Times campaign, the best campaign I've run since the Bandit Kingdoms and the '80s Gazetteer game. Heck, maybe better than those. Have some good times in the World of Alidor. Run OD&D as a con game, which was a hoot.
c2007 - Run Moldvay Basic as a con game for ten players, the most I've ever managed at a single session. Good times.

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Putting together this timeline was a fun exercise of the ol' noodle. I've omitted a lot of brief experiments and flubbed games and I've probably flubbed at least a few dates. Hopefully I haven't forgotten to mention any totally rad campaigns.

If anybody else tries putting together a similar timeline please let me know.

Beyond Vanth

In a comment over on Doc Rotwang!'s blog I mentioned that I keep a mental list of settings alternatives to Vanth, the sample setting for Encounter Critical. I'm not good at keeping mental lists (just ask my wife) so I decided that it was probably time for me to record it somewhere.

Any other kitchen sink gameworld

This one's a no-brainer. The setting material of Rifts and the World of Synnibarr could both be playable under EC with a little work. The various mini-settings provided as examples in Tom Moldvay's Lords of Creation could be used individually or as part of a universe-hopping campaign as intended. Indeed, I don't see any reason why my own Lords of Awesome run couldn't have been played under Encounter Critical rules. Counte Dante wouldn't have suddenly become a trapeze artist, but otherwise the adventure pretty much stands as written.)

The Hole

An awesome mini-setting found in issue number 1 of Pyramid magazine, back from when it was a print venture. The whole is a small realm apparently in the bowl of a large crater. People from various times and universes find themselves mysteriously transported to the Hole. No one knows why. And no one has ever escaped. Various ramshackle societies have been built by the unwilling emigres to the Hole. It's sort of like an Al Amarja/Riverworld mash-up. Very keen. You can get access to The Hole by tracking down the original issue, subscribing to the online version of Pyramid (or so I'm told), or buying GURPS Best of Pyramid volume 2.

The Gilligan Islands

When I first read them mention of headhunters in the description of the Warrior profession I knew exactly what Hank Riley was talking about. As a wee lad Star Trek was the only show I liked better than Gilligan's Island. Note that I am not talking about simply "Gilligan's Island" but rather the Gilligan Islands, the aggregate of all the crazy stuff that did or can take place in and around the setting of the TV show. One island of this mythical archipelago still has Japanese troops fighting World War II, others host mad scientists or swarthy commies or crashed astronauts or whatever. In essence, it's the Bermuda Triangle of the Pacific.

Revolt on Antares

This TSR minigame of space operatics is the bee's very knees. And it is rife with interesting characters, political factions, and ancient alien artifacts. Will the PCs align with the Imperial governor, or one of the psionic families? Is an uprising of the nonhuman natives in the works, or an invasion by the tentacled Silakka? And could there be any galactic heroes that are cooler than Doctor Death, the battlefield zombiemaker, or the Nullspace Kid?

Thundarr the Barbarian

Show me another show that features Conan with a light sabre fighting alongside a magic princess and an angry wooky against mutant wizards and I will TOTALLY WATCH THAT CARTOON.

This comic

That's a robot GI and Universal Studios monster commandos taking off into space with crazy ass writer Bob Kanigher. Or maybe the guy with the pipe is actually J.R. "Bob" Dobbs. Either way it works. It totally works.

quote of the day

After Star Wars was released, it became apparent that my story — however many films it took to tell — was only one of thousands that could be told about the characters who inhabit its galaxy. But these were not stories that I was destined to tell.

George Lucas

a book note

The Ascent of Wonder: The Evolution of Hard SF (Tor, 1994) is a delightful volume collecting almost 70 hard sci-fi short stories. The authors represented range from the father figures of science fiction (Poe, Wells, Verne) to the classics (Asimov, Clarke) to more modern figures like Niven, Brin, and Gibson.

I'm having scads of fun jumping around this thousand page tome, reading whatever catches my eye as I flip through. The editors do a good job introducing each author, trying hard in a few paragraphs to give some personal history and to attempt to fit the author's work into the overall dialog of the genre.

I'm no expert on science fiction and my tastes generally run more towards trashy space operatics and sword & planet stuff, but I give Ascent of Wonder a hearty recommendation.

I love this panel.

From "Holy Zeus", a fairly recent installment of Bob the Angry Flower.

Secrets of Cinder, Part 3

The psychosexual gods

Clerics are all perverts, but not in the way you’re thinking.

Let me explain that religion, the act of worship and the belief in gods, is a strictly human proposition. You know how we humans think of dwarves as miners and elves as woodland frolickers? Yet most folks wouldn’t be shocked to meet a dwarfish sign-painter or an elfin sea captain. It’s just that our stereotype is that dwarves are grubby underground pioneers and elves prance around in forests all day. Similarly, most races, dwarves and elves included, secretly stereotype humans as god-worshippers.

And guess what? They think we’re weird. Elves think we’re hilarious, the way members of Western civilization look down at ‘primitive’ beliefs and laugh. All religions look like cargo cults to elves. Dwarves generally think of us the same way a lot of people look at furries. Some dwarves just leave well enough alone, others laugh maliciously at the perverseness of religion, while the dwarven majority just think humans are creepy freaks to be avoided.

Cinder contains many beings that various humans have called gods over the centuries. Maybe a tired old earth elemental sleeping in a mountain finds itself worshipped by local humans. Perhaps a vampire finds itself pacting with its local source of blood and the humans on the other end of the transaction perceive the situation as sacrificing to a rather nasty local deity. Many beings and forces were proclaimed gods by misguided humans.

The advent of the Age of Clerics changed all of that. With the development of a professional class of miracle-working priests false deities could easily be found out. Only True Gods grant their followers divine spells, after all. Still, the work continues in remote regions of Cinder as the clerics of the three faiths seek to eliminate their weaker competition. Once the false gods are sufficiently suppressed perhaps the three true faiths can get around to having a proper religious war. Until then, it is not unknown for clerics of the Church, the Twelve, and the Frog Gods to cooperate in heathen-harrying and idol-smashing.

What remains unknown to all Cinderians is that in many ways the so-called True Gods are less real than the various spirits, monsters, and wizards worshipped in earlier eras. The Twelve Gods are not beings like humans, but more powerful and made of finer substance. The Gold Dragon is not a celestial lizard and the Frog Gods are not amphibians. None of the gods have agency or sentience or will or desires or bodies or thoughts or emotions. Nor do they reside in heavenly abodes, for they do not reside anywhere.

Instead, the True Gods are nothing more or less than psychic manifestations of the untapped sexual energies latent in the human race. The gods represent and embody sum vectors of human psychosexuality, they describe hormonal/psychic trends. The Frog Gods represent the libido unchecked, the id unleashed. The Gold Dragon is symbolic of the sublimation of sexual urges, the overriding of base urges for the good of the community. The Twelve, taken as a whole, are an attempt to mediate between these two extremes.

The act of preparing daily spells is basically the intentional repurposing of sexual energy, the way a steam engine repurposes heat into mechanical energy. The worship of the True Gods charges the batteries that clerics can draw upon. This is why sexual taboos are so important to all three faiths. To not participate in the required orgies is to directly withhold energy from the clerics of the Frog Gods. And Priests of the Gold Dragon are celibate, not because the Dragon commanded it, but because their spells won’t work otherwise. Not that these facts are consciously understood by the clergy, but the most advanced clerics can dimly perceive the direct threat to the faith of sexual impropriety. That’s why the Dragon Pope is always going on about sex outside of marriage, even though he doesn’t really understand his own obsession.

So you can see why the elves think we’re funny and the dwarves find us creepy. Their limited sets of sexual rules are all rationally designed to ensure the perpetuation of the species and clean lines of inheritance. But human clerics seem to make new rules up for no good reason, which looks pretty kinky to outsiders.

The first cleric was a retired prostitute. She wasn’t trying to found a religion, she just wanted to improve her post-professional sex life with some meditation. It all sort of got out of hand after that. In the annals of history it wasn’t the first time a really good orgasm had been mistaken for divine revelation.

Escape from the Dream Realm

Here's an Encounter Critical adventure I made over lunch today.

(Click for bigger.)

I don't really get it either.