The Jerry Jeff Walker concert came and went several weeks ago. We enjoyed it. A beautiful night at the Minnesota Zoo. The outdoor auditorium was full with many "standing room only" spectators. Fortunately we had reserved seats, but we didnt really need them. Jerry Jeff's music has a tendency to get people dancing and singing along. A spontaneous honky tonk mosh pit formed during about the fifth song of the show and stayed throughout. My wife and I didn't dance but we did stand through much of the concert just so we could see the stage.
As mentioned in my previous Jerry Jeff post, I have many of his albums on vinyl LP. That means I'd never heard much of his recent songs until the concert. Though his work during the 70s is clearly his best, the concert convinced me that Jerry Jeff has put out some good stuff in the past 25 years too. So I've picked up a few of his CDs the past few weeks. Yee haw! Now I have some digital Jerry Jeff and can make a mix CD for my truck. The first Jerry Jeff CD I bought was Great Gonzos, which is a greatest hits collection but felt rather incomplete to me, so purchased some of his later full albums to fill the gaps. So now my "truck mix" consists of two discs: Great Gonzos and this mix disc that I made of the other albums.
1. it's a good night for singing (3:41)
2. pot can't call the kettle black (3:07)
3. jaded lover (2:43)
4. lone wolf (3:35)
5. pissin' in the wind (3:58)
6. hairy ass hillbillies (3:25)
7. leavin' texas (4:45)
8. mississippi on my mind (4:24)
9. like a coat from the cold (3:31)
10. navajo rug (3:02)
11. lovin' makes livin' worthwhile (3:40)
12. pickup truck (4:19)
13. man with the big hat (6:01)
14. trashy women (4:37)
15. alright guy (4:27)
16. every drop of water (4:05)
17. cowboy boots & bathin' suitsuits (4:18)
Note that this mix represents my favorite of the Jerry Jeff songs that I have on CD. There are many more favorites that I only have on vinyl and didn't want to go to the trouble of converting to digital or purchasing the CD. It's a nice mix of Jerry Jeff's strengths: honky tonk sing-alongs and pastoral nostalgia. Makes me want to spit sunflower seed shells every time I listen.
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Monday, September 8, 2008
Zanzer's Dungeon
My first exposure to Dungeons & Dragons was in the late 80s when my older brother got the red box Basic set. We were down in the Twin Cities for a family reunion at the time and we read the rules in a camper at a lake and made some characters. Also bought a wooden toy sword and caught some nice sunfish that day. Unfortunately, I don't think we ever actually played a game of D&D and those mysterious red books sat locked in my brother's always locked trunk for about 20 years. The books' cover painting of the horn-helmed warrior battling the red dragon on its endless hoard of gold stayed in my imagination and will always be the iconic D&D image for me.
Not long afterward, we started playing the HeroQuest board game from Milton Bradley. Had lots of fun playing it with brothers and friends, but always figured we'd move on up to the one true fantasy game, D&D, eventually. In 1991, TSR came out with the "New and improved" Basic D&D game, packaged in a long black box like a board game. I bought it at the mall with my little brother and a friend. Finally, the real thing.
The three of us sat down to play the introductory adventure on the floor of our basement. (Only recently did I discover that the best place to play games is on a tabletop). The set came with a poster map of "Zanzer's Dungeon" to be used as the "board". Even at that time, I understood that D&D was essentially a board-less game. Some kind of map is useful for tracking miniatures during combat, but revealing the entire area of exploration before it is even explored seemed against the spirit of the game. Nonetheless, the utter coolness of the map enticed us to unfold it onto the floor and we put our little cardboard foldup miniatures in the prison room to initiate the adventure. "Just like HeroQuest" I'm sure we thought to ourselves.
Not quite. Right of the bat, we were reminded how D&D is different from HeroQuest. The game's "Dragon Cards" method of teaching gameplay described the opening scene in the prison...the quintessential roleplaying scenario. I.e. there are many ways to overcome this obstacle and the scene should be played out somewhat freeform to accommodate the various actions that the players might take to escape from the prison cell. I understand the desire to immediately present the aspect of D&D that separates it from boardgames, but the "no rules" nature of that first scene, at the time, left me wondering "Did we do it right?" Furthermore, the description of that scene indicated that nearly anything the players would try in their attempt to escape the prison cell would be successful. That too seemed to go against the spirit of the game and I was somewhat disillusioned about how the rest of the adventure would proceed.
Fortunately, I think we finished that adventure, but I don't recall it was due to the player characters successfully escaping Zanzer's Dungeon or if they died in the attempt. Unfortunately, I was still asking myself "Did we do it right?" throughout. This caused me to delay our next D&D games until I felt I understood the rules well enough, to the disappointment of the other players. I convinced them that we should go play "guns" in the woods instead.
For the next several years I made attempts to understand D&D satisfactory, and actually ran several feeble D&D games for the players. Still, I never felt like I understood the game well enough to run a quality campaign. Then, Magic: the Gathering arrived and captured my fascination and I generally lost interest in D&D for the next ten years.
...
In recent years I've come to see D&D in a different light and this year I got the hair-brained idea to run the Zanzer's Dungeon adventure via email with some of those same friends. No poster map this time, just the imagination, and the rules will just be guidelines. I didn't put much thought into organizing the game ahead of time, but just presented the opening scene exactly how instructed by those wonderful Dragon Cards:
Not long afterward, we started playing the HeroQuest board game from Milton Bradley. Had lots of fun playing it with brothers and friends, but always figured we'd move on up to the one true fantasy game, D&D, eventually. In 1991, TSR came out with the "New and improved" Basic D&D game, packaged in a long black box like a board game. I bought it at the mall with my little brother and a friend. Finally, the real thing.
The three of us sat down to play the introductory adventure on the floor of our basement. (Only recently did I discover that the best place to play games is on a tabletop). The set came with a poster map of "Zanzer's Dungeon" to be used as the "board". Even at that time, I understood that D&D was essentially a board-less game. Some kind of map is useful for tracking miniatures during combat, but revealing the entire area of exploration before it is even explored seemed against the spirit of the game. Nonetheless, the utter coolness of the map enticed us to unfold it onto the floor and we put our little cardboard foldup miniatures in the prison room to initiate the adventure. "Just like HeroQuest" I'm sure we thought to ourselves.
Not quite. Right of the bat, we were reminded how D&D is different from HeroQuest. The game's "Dragon Cards" method of teaching gameplay described the opening scene in the prison...the quintessential roleplaying scenario. I.e. there are many ways to overcome this obstacle and the scene should be played out somewhat freeform to accommodate the various actions that the players might take to escape from the prison cell. I understand the desire to immediately present the aspect of D&D that separates it from boardgames, but the "no rules" nature of that first scene, at the time, left me wondering "Did we do it right?" Furthermore, the description of that scene indicated that nearly anything the players would try in their attempt to escape the prison cell would be successful. That too seemed to go against the spirit of the game and I was somewhat disillusioned about how the rest of the adventure would proceed.
Fortunately, I think we finished that adventure, but I don't recall it was due to the player characters successfully escaping Zanzer's Dungeon or if they died in the attempt. Unfortunately, I was still asking myself "Did we do it right?" throughout. This caused me to delay our next D&D games until I felt I understood the rules well enough, to the disappointment of the other players. I convinced them that we should go play "guns" in the woods instead.
For the next several years I made attempts to understand D&D satisfactory, and actually ran several feeble D&D games for the players. Still, I never felt like I understood the game well enough to run a quality campaign. Then, Magic: the Gathering arrived and captured my fascination and I generally lost interest in D&D for the next ten years.
...
In recent years I've come to see D&D in a different light and this year I got the hair-brained idea to run the Zanzer's Dungeon adventure via email with some of those same friends. No poster map this time, just the imagination, and the rules will just be guidelines. I didn't put much thought into organizing the game ahead of time, but just presented the opening scene exactly how instructed by those wonderful Dragon Cards:
The two of you awaken in a musty room. The floor and three walls are solid stone, but the fourth wall is of thick iron bars. You're in jail!
The last thing you remember is being hit on the head by a couple of ruffians.
A hairy, whip-carrying monster enters the hallway in front of the jail. Behind it follows a brawny man with bound hands. The monster stops in front of your cell, then says in its hobgoblin-accented voice:
"Jerj wise to your tricks, prisoners. Lie face down on floor. Don't try anything, or Jerj bash you good!"
Do you follow Jerj's orders or do you try something?
My friends played along and now they've escaped the dungeon and it's become a full-blown campaign. I did make several modifications to the Escape From Zanzer's Dungeon to give it a little more internal logic, but tried to maintain the adventure's flavor, whimsy, and introductory intent.
The major change was to the map. As originally designed, the map was crammed into the poster space and offered little choice of movement (primarily due to its introductory nature). My revised design stretched it out significantly and added a four-way intersection to serve as hub of the dungeon and offer at least a taste of choice of movement.
The second change to the adventure was to combine and reorder the encounters. Some new encounters were added. Some encounters were dropped completely. Some of these dropped encounters were too much of the introductory nature, such as the convenient series of equipment rooms right next door to the prison cell. My preference was for the escaping characters to be relatively lightly equipped for much of the adventure.
There were other minor changes that I made, such as the distribution of treasure and also the prevalence of healing potions in the original adventure. Originally, the players were to miraculously find healing potions after every encounter to restore them to full power. I stopped doing this after a few encounters, since I felt it goes against the spirit of game and also because the players were good enough that all the healing potions were unnecessary.
In their escape, only one player character died. Pike, the feeble village militia squire, got his head twisted off by a giant snake which guarded an enticing room of treasure. Fura and Barab fought their way to freedom. Unfortunately, their self-serving and talkative cellmate Axel (non-player character) was castrated and met his doom to Zanzer's horny mandrill warrior. Zanzer himself narrowly escaped death, activating his flying spell scroll and escaping just before Barab's magic mace finished him off.
To wrap up, I'm pleased that I was finally able to run the Zanzer's Dungeon adventure for my friends with no regrets. If only I could now go play "guns" in the woods back at the farm.
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