“All aboard the SS” You All Meet in a Tavern …in this episode: A voyage through Dungeons and Dragons, Goats Do Roam, and Guesswork. So grab your 10-foot pole and your classic Sony Walkman, it’s time for Geekery and Wine:
The Geek Side – A Voyage through Dungeons and Dragons
Where do I even begin? Trying to describe my life-journey through Dungeons & Dragons is a nigh-insurmountable task. It’s like trying to write a review for pizza. Everybody likes it. Even when it’s bad, it’s kinda good.
Do I start with the friend who had brittle bones and lived 5 houses down from my childhood home? When we were both 10, D&D was something we could bond over.
Or maybe start with the friends in junior high that were the first amigos that shared my love of fantasy and science fiction, who helped me hone my tastes and opinions in those genres?
Or perhaps I should start with the co-ed D&D group that helped me talk to the opposite sex even though I was really shy?
Hmmm…
It might be better to begin with the group of high school friends that played on weekends and was made up of some of the “popular guys,” who gave me an “in” to see that I was worth it.
I could even begin generationally with the purchasing of the core D&D books for my son, because I knew it would be the best way for him, to find his tribe.
Or I could begin at the end. I could start with knowing I would never feel at ease after moving my family across the country until I finally found a role-playing group. And when we played D&D it felt like coming home.
Every step along the way, I gamed. And D&D was the fundamental form that everybody knew. It was how we all spoke Common.
Along the way, there’s been tragedy, too. I’ve lost 3 friends to suicide and all of them were guys I played D&D with. There was also a time when my parents were worried and influenced by The Satanic Panic in the ’80s. About the game I was “obsessed with” and my Dad tore up my books in front of me.
All these were formative and helped to sculpt the creative I am today.
And they’re all interesting asides and I’ll probably come back to them, if not today, then sometime in a future posting.
For me, D&D started with Basic. That’s the Moldvay Set with the red cover designed by Erol Otus that came out in 1981. And our first adventures were Keep on the Borderlands and later on The Isle of Dread. I think that first edition is a huge factor on what kind of player you will end up. In the same way that the Doctor you saw first will always be YOUR Doctor Who. You like that style of play (heavy or light on detail depending on edition) as much as you might like have a weakness for extra-long scarves or fezzes and bow ties in combination.
Everybody has their favorite. Rules lite? BECMI: that’s Basic, Expert, Companion, Master, and Immortal. Love the rules minutiae? 3.5 is number one with a bullet!.
Our early games were wild, free association Mont Haul affairs. That’s Haul with a “u.” And to be fair, lots of dungeon masters go through a Monte Haul phase. You want to see what each of the magical items can do AND you want your players to have a good time, so you basically give away the store. And soon the player characters or PC’s are so utterly jacked and undefeatable you need to sick the gods of multiple pantheons on them in order to give them a challenge.
Now when we weren’t playing D&D we were waiting for the next adventure module or supplement to come out. And our favorite supplier was Sir Jim’s Hobby and Toy Castle in North Platte, Nebraska.
Sir Jim’s was a really great attempt to do something interesting in a town didn’t necessarily do exotic in “that way.” So it was a largely boxy building with a funky castle façade on the front and a tower on either of the two front corners. But again, North Platte didn’t really do fancy in those days, so the castle looked to be built from grey cinderblocks and stopped right on the middle of the sides of the building. Almost as if to say, “You see what we were going for, right? You can fill in the gaps.”
That bit of inspiration was paired with a subscription to Dragon Magazine, a monthly publication by TSR the company that made D&D and I read it cover-to-cover. Every month.
Although I lived for adventuring through modules, most of D&D was the “lonely fun” of rolling up characters and designing the floorplans of Dungeons. Never has so much graph paper been put to such creative use!
And amongst all that die rolling, creativity and gaming statistics here’s a figure that will set you back on your heels.
It’s been 45 years as of January 2019.
And there are now so many ways to enjoy not just the game but the history of the game. There’s the graphic novel, Rise of the Dungeon Master: Gary Gygax and the Creation of D&D by David Kushner and Koren Shadmi. Then there’s the Empire of Imagination by Michael Witwer, and there’s the audiobook Of Dice and Men by David M. Ewalt narrated by the author and Mikael Narramore (the most perfect last name for an audiobook reader since Simon Q. Readswell…a narrator I just made up).
All of them detailing aspects of the game of D&D, the hobby of tabletop roleplaying in general and even the art of the game specifically. Dungeons and Dragons Art and Arcana: A Visual History also by Michael Witwer released in 2018…wow, busy guy.
For me, the grand historical moment where Dungeons & Dragons and my creativity converged was with the campaign setting of Planescape for 2nd edition AD&D.
I’d always found the different planes of existence a really cool idea in D&D but just never felt like it was all that well developed. Or at least not in a way that this “Bear of little brain” could understand. If you aren't familiar with the idea of the different Planes of existence, it’s essentially this. Each element: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water has its own world within the greater multiverse. Every deity that exists has its own plane or a plane that it is tied to. And every can encompass EVERY. So, you can go to Mount Olympus, or Asgard or even, with a little leniency from the DM, Miskatonic University in Arkham, Massachusetts to summon Yog Sothoth.
But what truly defined and brought alive the Planescape world was the art of Tony DiTerlizzi.
What was amazing about this time, in the mid ’90s is I’d recently graduated college and gotten married and I didn’t even really have a D&D group at the time, but these books fired my imagination and I imagined the games I might run someday. My worry was that the campaign setting was so vast, I’d never be able to be prepared for where my players might want to go.
Later, Tony and Holly Black created The Spiderwick Chronicles which I read to my children. And even now I have his Realms book on my coffee table.
The grand coming home for me with Planescape happened just a few months ago and it wasn’t even technically D&D. I called it Amazing Adventures in Plansecape.
I had taken the game Amazing Adventures which is a Pulp Heroes Role playing game (think The Shadow, The Phantom, and Doc Savage) and contains many of the same game mechanics of the old Moldvay Basic set and thrown the heroes into the Planescape setting. The good news many of the heroes had firearms that could easily dispatch the sword-wielding monsters and their primitive armor. The bad news, once the ammo was gone guns were basically unwieldy clubs!
I used the module collection, The Infinite Staircase as the mechanism to get them from plane-to-plane and it is really fun. I talked about it on James Intrecaso’s podcast Tabletop Babble. https://dontsplitthepodcastnetwork.com/table-top-babble/108
You can still find all the Planescape supplements at DrivethruRPG.com. This site has digital editions of all of the old Planescape books and, if you have a fellow gamer who works in the Staples copy center, you can have a nice spiral bound copy of the book to run your game from.
So, now that it seems to have finally come back into the public consciousness, with celebrities copping to playing and even leading campaigns live online, when someone asks if you have you tried D&D or when was the last time you played, say yes to trying it for the first time or say yes to coming back, because I can’t think of a better way to spend an evening or an afternoon than creating epic stories with some of your closest friends.
Most recently on Amazon, the Fifth Edition D&D starter set was on sale for $9.59. I got it for my youngest daughter for her birthday. Maybe the tradition will continue with new adventures!
The Wine Side—Goats Do Roam
To start with, Goats Do Roam is an odd name and the bottle has an illustration of a goat that’s reminiscent of a script illumination from the middle ages on the front of the bottle. So, yeah…goats.
If you are still learning your varietal combinations, this is a play on words. Please forgive me if this is totally obvious to some folks, but just in case. There is a kind of wine referred to as Cotes du Rhone, it is a blend of varietals from southern France. And it is pretty darned delicious. Buuut, you can’t call something Cotes du Rhone unless it is actually FROM that area. Kinda like how you can’t call something Champagne unless it is from the Champagne region of France. Everything else is a sparkling wine. There are many of these substitutions and we can totally talk about them later on. Another example is Bordeaux. Bordeaux is a red blend from the Bordeaux region of France consisting of Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot, Cab Franc, and others, but if you get the same sort of blend and it is from, say, Oregon, you are going to be getting something called a Meritage. What is a Meritage? Basically that vintner’s take on Bordeaux.
Right. So and thus…Goats Do Roam is a South African vintner’s take on Cotes du Rhone. Wheeew!
And what is that blend exactly? Grenache, Syrah, and Mouvedre. Sometimes called the Holy Trinity. There is even an Australian vintner from the Barossa Valley that has a label that is called The Holy Trinity.
So, I tried both the 2015 and 2016 vintage of Goats Do Roam and they were both great. By the way, I recently found out this is called a “vertical tasting” although, mini-vertical tasting is probably more apt with just two years.
The wine starts with a fruity plum taste that then cascades to the edges of the tongue and becomes a bit bitter. It’s very smooth and this could be the tannins presenting themselves and that bitter flavor lingers on the tongue but not unpleasantly.
And I have to say I was having a really tough time coming up with the scent and flavor combinations. So I turned to an old friend when it comes to olfactory descriptors. Last year my wife went on-line and found an 88 aroma collection case. Inside are small vials of liquid like you might expect to find in an old school chemistry set. Inside, organized by number is an amazing collection of scents. Green bell peppers, tea, blackberries and oh-so-many varieties of flower that I am not-at-all familiar with. I’m not the 8 Crayola of nose identification but neither am I the 128 either.
It can be a magical experience finding the matching scent. It’s like when there’s a word you can’t think of, but it’s there. You just know it. Finding the scent gives you the words to express that smell that was before just simply generally pleasant or floral.
Here’s what I was able to ascertain from the 88 Aromas kit. Goats Do Roam has the smell that is most often referred to in the wine world as “barnyard.” Here’s the weird part…that’s a good thing! There are notes in this wine that suggest the smell of leather…like a saddle. And an earthiness that is kinda like a well-fertilized field, with everything that suggests. And the lingering flavor for me is plums.
I found Goats Do Roam at New Hampshire Wine and Liquor Outlet in Nashua for $11.99 but when I went to find an option online I found it for $7.99 from The Wine Buyer (winebuyer.com) and $9.99 from the International Wine Shop (internationalwineshop.com). The same shop that had the awesome Mar De Frades I talked about a few episodes ago. So…yeah, go with one of the last two would be my advice. Well, depending on shipping and tax.
Audio Goodness – Guesswork
The most exciting thing for me about the novel Guesswork: a Prim and Odin Mystery was that it was going to be another collaboration with a dear friend.
My friend Scott and I had met many years before, when I had first moved to Denver. We had been in role-playing sessions together at various conventions and eventually we decided to play in a weekly game together. And I would put that role-playing group up against any I had ever had the privilege to be in. It was a round-robin group. So, that meant, unlike other groups that had a single Dungeon Master all the time, in this case, everyone who wanted to, could choose a game that they enjoyed and game master it for the rest of us. The games we played were incredibly diverse as it was up to whoever was running the table what the game was. Eventually, we found that we wanted a game that had fewer rules and tables that needed to be constantly consulted so Scott wrote a role-playing game and called it The Window.
I was always really comfortable around Scott so it wasn’t long before we were looking for other creative projects to work on together. He knew the director of the Denver Art Museum, and maybe I wanted to develop something for them. Why, yes, I would.
We came up with a computer game called “What The?,” which museum-goers played as they entered The Retrospectacle, a collection of many of the museum’s long-stored/little-seen pieces. What was my contribution? Why funny voices of course! I think I must have done something in the neighborhood of 20 voices for that game. And we also had the chance to write the scripts together which was amazing and wonderfully collaborative.
We also had a thought to try and do a live-action role-playing game at one of the conventions. It was to be festooned with Circus performers in a big top and was entitled Punish the Monkey. It was incredibly clever for the two of us in our twenties.
We ultimately did another piece for the Denver Art Museum called The Adventures of Roxi the Robot and The Adventures of Scoop the Fox. Scott, in a fabulously retro move, designed the game to be played on the Nintendo DS and was carried around the new Hamilton wing of the museum by young patrons. The experience was wonderful and memorable. But it seemed we weren’t done yet.
You see, Scott had been working on a mystery novel set in Colorado in the 1980s. Why the 80’s? Mostly because he hated the idea that so many elements of the mystery could be solved by the use of cell phones. They detracted from character interaction and was just way too much information in the hands of a protagonist…thereby lessening the dramatic tension of the mystery.
There were similar flavor notes reminiscent of the Punish the Monkey LARP we had made together. There was a fair and a “sideshow guesser.” Layered onto this was a teen detective and plot and characters that were more realistic, darker and more tragic, yet in other ways more hopeful.
Doing the character of Odin was my favorite. He had this resonant voice that contrasted delightfully with Aunt Veronica and Primrose Whistler herself.
And I am about to tell a bit of an audiobook secret. Many times characters are ones that we cast in our minds but are really disguised versions of famous actors. Or probably more accurate to say, that is the mental totem in mind while portraying that character.
But In this case, Odin was literally no one I could think of. He was so incredibly distinct I just had to play him as he was written. And I think the character is the better for it.
Find Guesswork on Audible.com, iTunes or Amazon. To check out all my audiobooks go to Lastwordaudio.com, and be sure to never miss a release by signing up for Monkey Missives.
Before I sign off, I need to give special thanks to “pearable” who left this review on iTunes:
Get your geek on!
One of the things I love most about the 21st century is how much easier it makes “finding the others” - you know what I mean... the fellow enthusiastic, passionate lovers of whatever you’re into.
For geeks, nerds, whovians, jedi’s, metas, brown coats, trekkers and trekkies alike - go ahead and click “subscribe” now... you’ve got a home with Colby here, and he won’t let you down!
For geeks, nerds, whovians, jedi’s, metas, brown coats, trekkers and trekkies alike - go ahead and click “subscribe” now... you’ve got a home with Colby here, and he won’t let you down!
Thanks, pearable, that means a lot.
Next Time on Geekery and Wine: The Stanley Parable, Plantaze Crnogorski Vranac, and A Journey to Nerdopolis.
Until then…
My Geeks
My Nerds
My dear, dear friends…
Adieu
