Just shy of the second anniversary of the newsletter, I've hit 2,000 subscribers. That's super cool. Thanks for coming along with me.

Also, contrary to previous reporting, I will not be at Dungeon Con 2 this weekend. If you were hoping to meet up with me there, let me know, I'll make it up to you.

When this thing showed up at my house, I thought it was a joke. The Land of Eem Deluxe Edition (2025) is the most massive RPG product I own. The slipcase is 5.25 inches deep! Of all the posts this year, this one is the one I have struggled most in tackling. So, owing to its size, we’re going to go through the whole thing this week, bit by bit, starting with the stuff in the Deluxe that aren’t books.

First, there’s a box labeled “Meeples, Dice and Adventuring Supplies.” If I bought the dice, they’d be in there, but I have enough dice. I did get the cattypillar patch and the meeples, though, so that’s where they live. The meeples are delightful? They aren’t something I would have sought out, but I am pleased to have them. I don’t know if there were plans for more stuff to stick in here, but the large empty space makes for a nice dice tray. Next is the screen, which is…surprise! A screen. It has all the stuff you expect on the screen, including a painting of a jaunty expedition into the Mucklands. Finally, there is the Mucklands Map. It’s a big fold-out board hex map of the Mucklands sandbox (see Thursday’s post) and it is a nice thing to have. I kind of wish I could get a Forbidden Lands map like this.

Here’s the thing about this massive slipcase that merits a whole post: my kid couldn’t ignore it. It’s giant! He saw this thing sitting on the table in my office and just had to know what it was. He pulled the whole thing apart, spent hours looking through it. His most interesting reaction was to the map, which for a couple of weeks kept disappearing because he was using it. For what? One spring day last year, I found him and the neighbor kid sitting under a tree with just the hex map, making up stories about the various features. When his journal came home from school at the end of the year, I found several drawings of Mucklands adventures. It got into his seven-year-old head.

This is the power of Land of Eem.

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I used to have a long list of things from my childhood that were lost or mostly forgotten that I wanted to see again. For the most part, I've gotten that list down to just two. One of them is a ghost book with a story about a large bearded man of metal sitting in front of a cellar door. That's not the one I am looking for today.

In elementary school sometime around '87 or '88 probably, my friends and I all bought the same book at the book sale. It was oversized and either monster or alien themed. Aesthetically, in my mind's eye, it looked more like the mask book above, but in practice, it resembled the model book below. Each cardstock sheet had parts that were perforated, which allowed you to punch them out, then fold, slot and tape them together into...well, models or masks. I can't really recall. There was maybe a robot. I remember something red with bug-eyes, and something green that was lobstery.

Memory is a tricky thing. All of that may be correct, or it could be entirely wrong or, most likely, it is warped by age and proximity to other memories. Until I found these two books last week, I thought I was maybe making up the idea of punch-out models entirely. But now I have something to go on. Does any of this ring a bell for you? Let me know!