I'm gonna be a guest (of honor? of dishonor?) at Dungeon Con 2 in Fort Wayne, Indiana, next week. If you know my history of traveling to Indiana, you might call adding a second trip in one year an act of extreme hubris, and I would agree. If I make it there in one piece, it ought to be fun, though! There are still some seats available in my Sunday morning Call of Cthulhu game! 

Through Dungeons Deep: A Fantasy Gamer’s Handbook (1982) is one of a crop of books about RPGs that came out around the same time, pretty early in the lifespan of the hobby. What is Dungeons & Dragons (1982), Fantasy Role Playing Games (1981) and Dicing With Dragons (1982) are all further examples of the genre. I love books like this. I love the idea of having four of them on store shelves at the same time, all vying to explain this strange new phenomenon to anyone whose eye they could catch. I think Signe Landon’s cover is perhaps the most striking of the group. Landon was apparently active in the Star Trek fanzine scene (illustrating Kirk/Spock slash fic, going by one example I saw online) and also the Starsky and Hutch fandom? I never knew such a thing existed.

Anyway, TDD purports to be an introductory guide to RPGs, but functionally, it is an introduction to best practices for D&D. Granted, at this point in time, those best practices generally apply to all the other fantasy adventure games on the market as well. After the basics of play, Author Robert Plamondon goes through just about every aspect of the game and explains the various ways they function, how game masters should present them and what players should expect from them. I have said previously that RPGs have always had a hard time explaining what they are to people outside the hobby. Plamondon honestly does a much better job of it than anything that would appear in an RPG rulebook for close to another decade. Unfortunately, he explained RPGs so well in a 300-page hardcover that cost more than most RPG rulebooks at the time, so most folks probably missed it.

I love these sorts of books as much for the glimpse they provide of the hobby scene as anything else. There is less of that material here than I'd prefer, though there is a primer on painting miniatures and some reviews of magazine and RPGs. There’s only ten RPGs in the review appendix, if you can believe it. My favorite review is for DragonQuest: “I haven’t read DragonQuest.”

I painted this ogre a couple weeks ago and just passed him on the shelf, which made me again marvel at how he came out. Which is not me bragging, though I am proud of the paint job. Really, I spent an embarrassing number of hours on him across several days. I got the red skin pretty good from the start, but everything else was a struggle and twice I messed up so badly I thought I would have to start over from scratch (the leathers, and the yellow metal bits), but I managed to repair the screw ups.

One night, I went to bed just utterly dejected by my progress and seriously considered painting over the armor bits with metallic paint. But then the next morning, I couldn't really see what got me so negative. Which is sort of the magic of miniatures? You gotta give them room to breathe sometimes. A lot of his appeal is straight up from the pose and the quality of the sculpt and at the end of the day, even a bad paint job on this miniature would probably still have that spark of awesome, you know?

Anyway, I like how he came out. I like that my ogres are red. I like that he has no metallic paint but his metal bits looks enough like metal without doing any tricky techniques. I like how bright he is. Mostly, though, it's that ration of how big a disaster he seemed while I was painting him relative to the fact that he looks perfectly fine now that I am done that makes me love him.

I could have done the tongue a little better, but I'm taking Kenny Rogers' advice. Gotta know when to walk away!