FUTUREFASTERPLZ

I caught the Ashley Madison documentary on Netflix. Ever tell you about the husband of a woman I worked with who got outed in that info dump? This was after I had quit, but it was such a cliché. They were a very religious couple, and not the “walk in Christ’s footsteps” kind. I’ve known a few good folks like that. These two? The other kind: self-righteous, judgmental, using the Bible to beat people down.

We used to have serious fights about sexual orientation. She thought it was a choice. Fought, fought, fought. Evolution too. She once accidentally CC’d me in an email where she told our coworkers she hated my guts. Yeah, it was that bad. But you know what they say, judge yourself by your enemies.

So, Ashley Madison. The husband, Mr. Perfect, had an account under his own name (of course) and a username: “The Ravisher.” I kid you not. THE RAVISHER.

They divorced, obviously. That’s all I know because I lost track of them, thankfully. I had forgotten all about this until the documentary jogged my memory. Honestly, I can’t imagine how anyone—THE RAVISHER included—thought things would end any other way with that website. It was a honeypot, a blackmail machine in the making. For the record, I wouldn’t know firsthand. I’m an old-fashioned, one-woman man.

That said, I’m not in the judging business either. Different strokes for different folks. It's your thing, do whatcha wanna do.  If you’re into non-monogamy, best to be upfront and find people on the same page. That’s what really made THE RAVISHER the bad guy. He and Mrs. Stone Thrower should’ve had a conversation and gone their separate ways if they couldn’t work it out. 

At least that's my take, but like I said, I'm old-fashioned. But not old fashioned enough to throw stones at people about their sex lives. 

If you’re ever in San Jose, California, you might want to make time to visit the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum. Operated by the mystical Rosicrucian Order, the museum boasts the largest collection of Egyptian artifacts in western North America. Visitors rave about its gardens, immersive exhibits, and art, but few mention the mysterious 3,000-year-old mummy known only as Usermontu.

The mysteries surrounding the mummy begin with the name Usermontu, which wasn’t his at all. Rather, it was the name inscribed on another wooden coffin into which the mummy was placed sometime after preservation. The actual Usermontu, or “Powerful is Montu,” was a priest. Had his remains been in the box, they would have been preserved using entirely different methods than those used on the otherwise unnamed body found within.

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Any Dungeon Master who has been around for a while probably knows--and maybe even resents--how much epic fantasy has come to dominate the gaming landscape. While the sub-genre's sprawling worlds, intricate lore, plot-armored characters, and ubiquitous magic can make for great novels, it can make for restrictive storytelling, especially if you, like me, are drawn to the gritty and fast-paced sword and sorcery fantasy of an earlier era. 

Running a classic sword and sorcery style using vanilla Dungeons & Dragons can be a headache. The core conceits of epic fantasy seems to be baked in, and the long-lasting popularity of Dungeons & Dragons has, in turn, influenced epic fantasy fiction so much that the two things--game and fiction--has become in many, but not all, cases a snake eating its own tail. 

For my money, there are plenty of other systems better suited for running a sword and sorcery campaign (to be tackled in a future post), but if you're not ready to jump ship and learn a new set of rules, you can still capture some of the flavor of the adventurous tales of authors like Robert E. Howard and Fritz Lieber with the following twelve tips. 

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The Black Stork (1917) is the kind of movie you can’t believe is real when you first hear about it, and very few people have. It’s a product of America’s early twentieth century eugenics movement, and was considered by many to be in very poor taste, even for an era in which average Americans thought it a perfectly fine idea to warehouse and sterilize in mass those they deemed genetically “unfit.”

The Black Stork tells the story of a couple who foolishly ignores a doctor's advice to not marry—he has some kind of genetic condition, apparently—and then has the gall to question a eugenicist physician’s advice to just let their sickly newborn die. Mom comes around after a vision of the sordid life of madness, murder, and worst of all, dependence on society, that her adult son will live, and ends up agreeing with the doctor that it’s better for all involved if he dies then and there. After all that, it’s revealed that this was just a dream. 

You might have thought it was the plot that turned the critics and audiences off, but that was only one small part of why The Black Stork wasn’t considered fit to fly. The real problem, at least for a sizable portion of viewers, was that it was based on a true story, and that the physician in the film was played by none other than the real life eugenicist doctor who inspired the film: Harry J. Haiselden. 

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Long ago, I abandoned the traditional black skin and white hair look for drow elves, instead envisioning them as pale, almost translucent, and mostly hairless creatures. This adaptation seemed more appropriate for an underground environment. While nature played a part in this decision, the primary motivation was the sheer terror these ghastly, vein-traced pale beings instilled in my players. Ambushed by deathly silent, bald humanoids, my group found these creatures far more frightening than the pseudo-svartálfar of Dungeons & Dragons lore.

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