The Vacuous Grimoire

From Grognardia, quoting Gygax's Dungeon Masters Guide:

 A book of this sort is totally impossible to tell from a normal one, although if a detect magic spell is cast, there will be a magical aura noted. Any character who opens the work and reads so much as a single glyph therein must make 2 saving throws versus magic. The first is to determine if 1 point of intelligence is lost, the second is to find if 2 points of wisdom are lost. Once opened and read, the vacuous grimoire remains, and it must be burned to be rid of it after first casting a remove curse spell. If the tome is placed with other books, its appearance will instantly alter to conform to one of the other works it is amongst. 

My question: What are the fictional (invisible) books that are bad for a reader's mental health? The Necronomicon (and other Lovecraftian creations); the manuscript in Amis's The Information...

Flexing against resistance

Via a comment on Grognardia: Two Amazon reviews by the late Dr. John E. Holmes, who wrote the rules for the first basic set of Dungeons & Dragons.

One is for a collection of stories by the early-20th-century fantasy writer A. Merritt; the other is for the fourth edition to Aids to the Examination of the Peripheral Nervous System:

For every muscle there is a photo of a clinical evaluation showing position of the limb etc and the instructions ("The patient tries to flex against resistance"). For each muscle there is listed the spinal segments and periferal nerve. Included are standard sensory maps and plexus diagrams. Fits into your instrument bag or white coat pocket. Worth getting if you see only 5 neuro-muscular problems a year!

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Still not sure what the relationship is between this blog and my Tumblr. Are they friends? Enemies?

Advertising age

Today, James at Grognardia reflects:

When I entered the hobby, if you played a science fiction game, you either played Traveller or Space Opera. I was a Traveller man back then, so Space Opera was one of those games I noticed on game store shelves and whose ads and articles I saw in the pages of Dragon but which I never actually played.

I've already written about how I didn't actually play D&D that much (though I was fascinated by the rulebooks), but I have such strong memories of reading the ads in Dragon—for games I'd never play, for games that I'd never even seen on the shelves. I'm coming to believe that, in their unavailability—shall we call it invisibility?—they were as fascinating to me as the few games (D&D, Gamma World, Top Secret, a few others) that I did play.

Part of the fun of reading Grognardia is that James (who I gather is around my age) will frequently review a game that I recall seeing ads for in Dragon: Bushido (RPG of feudal Japan), Superhero 2044, et al. It's like hearing the other half of a conversation that got broken off decades ago.

English books of a French Canadian

Can someone help Sam? Did he simply dream it all?

There was a series of novels I read at summer camp after fifth grade. The setting was a group of friends sitting around and playing a D&D-type game, but with a hexagonal gameboard. But very quickly it cuts to the world of the game and follows the characters as they go to war. Not sure whether they were in the dwarf-elf-human-etc character-class system of pseudo-D&D, but I imagine they were. Kind of, also, like Dragonlance? Anyway, their fates are determined by the humans who are "playing" them.

And then the twist is, it turns out some higher-level world is "playing" the humans! Which is worthy of William Sleator?

Anyway, I've asked some people, but none of them could help me. Maybe because I borrowed the books from a French Canadian? But they were in English!

Any idea???

Now I remember...

...why I called the column "Astral Weeks"!



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An archive of sorts is available at the L.A. Times site; there are numerous omissions, alas.

Some of my favorite columns concerned a Charles Fort biography; an 1881 New Zealand novel; a discursus on the Ouroboros; secret histories; structural vertigo in Catherynne M. Valente; Joe Haldeman; wow I wrote a lot of columns!; repetition (via Robert Silverberg and Osamu Tezuka); Christopher Miller's overlooked PKD takeoff, The Cardboard Universe; the forgotten pulp writer/physician Miles J. Breuer; Dash Shaw's Bodyworld; a DeLillo rarity; D&D stories; John Crowley (and again).

And then I wrote some things that could only loosely be called "columns": a cento; a J.G. Ballard abecedary; a two-part meditation on short stories; notes (and notes on notes). Editors David Ulin and Nick Owchar were always willing to go with these somewhat unorthodox formats—amazing!

All the way to the bank!

(Via Ta-Nehisi)

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I wasn't much of a wargamer, but I did enjoy Ogre! Grognardia remembers:

...It was fun to watch too and everyone had their own opinions regarding the "best" tactics to use. I think that's what made the game so much fun: there was no sure-fire way to win, but that didn't stop everyone I've ever known declaring that they'd figured out the "secret" to Ogre. For example, I know several gamers who claim that there's no way the ogre player can win, while several others claim just the opposite. I'm no great tactician myself, so I can't say with certainty whose claims are right and whose are wrong. I can only say that Ogre is one of those rare games that really is different every time you play it, depending on the scenario and the person against whom you play.

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The almighty Lev Grossman on how D&D influenced him:

What else? We were always drawn to the weird, fringe stuff like Barrier Peaks and Queen of the Demonweb Pits, and the more arcane weapons. I have spent literally hours of my life just contemplating the meaning of the Bohemian Ear-Spoon.

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Speaking of D&D, I just read Joe Daly's Dungeon Quest (Book One)—weirdly exhilarating and very funny...

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...annnnnd speaking of D&D: Jenny D reads my Dungeon Master's Guide essay in Bound to Last—and reminisces about those "Wordly Wise" books!

D&D or the Memory of Childhood

The Complete Review takes a look at Sean Manning's anthology Bound to Last, which features my piece on the Dungeon Master's Guide.

Among Park's observations: the influence of Appendix N, "Inspirational and Educational Reading", where: "Gygax lists 28 authors who had the biggest influence on the creation of D&D" -- many of whose books Park later sought out, though he notes: "The titles were enough. Playing D&D could create the adventures like the ones contained in those novels." (Amusingly, Park also notes he didn't actually play the game that much -- but that the book about it so fascinated him.)
Park also has a nice observation on the lingering influence of such influential works read in youth:

I keep meaning to read Georges Perec's Life: A User's Manual. But I don't, maybe because I want it to be the Dungeon Master's Guide.

Eschewing hundreds of years

From Time Out Chicago, a nice review by Jonathan Messinger of the anthology Bound to Last:

One of my hands-down, unbreakable, no-foolin’ rules for survival is to do my best to avoid writers writing about writing. It’s fine for instructional purposes, I suppose, but usually the navel-gazing seems so reflexive that I grow wary the universe may implode. The flip side of that is the simple joy of reading a writer you admire write of an author he or she gets down with.

Part of the beauty of this book, too, is the leeway the authors were granted. Ed Park (Personal Days) eschews hundreds of years of literary history to instead extoll the virtues of Gary Gygax’s Dungeon Masters Guide, the handbook to hours of enraptured childhood gaming, written in the style of an RPG manual...

True neutral

Alignment chart for Community characters.

(Via Kosiya)

Radio-Ed

I was on WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show this morning, talking about my contribution to the book Bound to Last: 30 Writers on Their Most Cherished Book. You can listen here! (Editor Sean Manning and novelist Sigrid Nuñez were also on.)

Some more info on Bound to Last here. I wrote about Gary Gygax's Dungeon Masters Guide. More soon...The book is really good!

Book Notes™ With Ed Park

I. Closing out my D&D/RPG "trilogy" of tales (thus far comprising "Welcome to Tyosen™!" and "Cow Vase") is "Dungeon Masters Guide," my contribution to Bound to Last: 30 Writers on Their Most Cherished Book! (Sean Manning put it together.) Pub date is October 26. The interviewer inside my head wants to step in for a moment.

Q: Are all these pieces part of some greater work?

A: I can't answer that right now, I'm sorry!

II. Speaking of "Cow Vase"—it will be included in the forthcoming book Significant Objects (Fantagraphics, 2011)!

III. F.S. Yvonne Woon's YA novel Dead Beautiful is out—what a cool website!

IV. Jenny D on her Kindle experience.

V. Lev G on his Yale experience.

VI. My sister went to Montreal and got me this Ed the Happy Clown comic. Someone should write something about Chester Brown's notes on his old work—the notes are equally fascinating!

VII. I think that's all for now...

Reducing the area

Silence through the ages.

(Via Grognardia)

Too much sugar

This could be a Lydia Davis story in another universe (from James Maliszewski's Grognardia):

MANY ELVES (Roll 1D20 three times):
1. Have never known another of their kind.
2. Have hair of white or silver.
3. Become intoxicated if they consume too much sugar.
4. Have shadows that seem "alive."
5. Sleep standing up -- and only for an hour or two each day.
6. Claim to have visited other worlds.
7. Call all non-elves "ephemerals."
8. Periodically spend all their funds on worthless baubles that they soon tire of and give away.
9. Devote themselves to a single weapon and will never even touch, let alone wield, another.
10. Can determine if a person is a magic-user simply by sight.
11. Consider silver more valuable than gold.
12. Find the concepts of aging and death endlessly fascinating.
13. Believe politeness is a form of dishonesty.
14. Disappear on the night of a full moon.
15. Refuse to accept magical healing or any other clerical spells.
16. Engage in conversations with beings others cannot see.
17. Are superb mapmakers.
18. View dwarves with strange interest.
19. Will not allow non-elves to watch them eat.
20. Refuse to sign their name to any document.

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UPDATE: Sarah has found an important corollary.

The New Yorker's Book Bench rounds up some literary news

On the usual topics—you know: Finnegans Wake, Tony Judt, D&D...

Focal points

NYT:

On Friday afternoon a woman taking an adult education class at the museum accidentally fell into “The Actor,” causing the tear. Officials at the museum said that since the damage did not occur “in the focal point of the composition,” they expected that the repair would be “unobtrusive,” according to a statement released on Sunday.

From the Parkives: Fiction about falling into artwork!

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And (via Levi, Thos., James): D&D banned in prison.

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More:

A drawing by Lucian Freud valued at more than $100,000 was accidentally put through a shredder by Sotheby’s in London in 2000. A man tripped over his shoelace on a staircase at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England, and managed to shatter three Qing dynasty porcelain vases, as The Guardian reported.

Addendum to last couple of posts

I. Speaking of D&D, two recent fictions of mine—in PEN America and for the Significant Objects project—found me reimagining my RPG past.

II. More small Read Hard reviews! This one's from The Guardian:

It all sounds distractingly kooky, but the Believer's writing is generally sharp, funny and insightful enough to keep you hooked, even when you could have sworn you had no prior interest in Malibu-based 50s surfer gal Gidget or what happened to the guy who invented Dungeons and Dragons.

(That last reference is to Paul La Farge's incredible piece, "Destroy All Monsters.")

III. This is not related to anything: Dennis Lim—the Man Who Never Blogs—is blogging from Sundance!

The thundering of the dice

My latest Astral Weeks column (all these posts begin with "My latest Astral Weeks column...") looks at Gamer Fantastic, an anthology of stories inspired by gaming, particularly RPGs.

If a rich, well-orchestrated RPG bears similarities to a work of fiction, what happens when a work of fiction is about an RPG? The answer, in the anthology "Gamer Fantastic" edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Kerrie Hughes (DAW: 310 pp., $7.99), is something akin to vertigo. Despite the goofy cover (a kid giddily wielding a Nintendo handset, planet exploding in the background), "Gamer Fantastic" is more about this blurring between RPGs and reality than remote-control video mayhem. The brisk opener, Chris Pierson's "Escapism," manages a clever twist on the character of the first-person-shooter-obsessed teen, but most of the other 12 stories here involve significantly lower technology. As with writing stories, the games in question are primarily built of words -- albeit with oddly shaped dice thundering in the background.

I also give a nod to my current home page—James Maliszewski's Grognardia.

"Everything I Know I Learned From Dungeons & Dragons"

When I was a kid, the country went through a full-fledged Dungeons & Dragons hysteria, where the fantasy role-playing game was accused of everything from turning kids onto Satanism to encouraging them to kill themselves.

Decades later, we’ve now reached a point where D&D is seen as sort of a harmless, if incredibly geeky pastime.

But isn’t there a third option? Dungeons & Dragons isn’t a dangerous, evil force in the world, nor is it just harmless fun; it’s actually one of the most worthwhile activities ever created, and there is literally nothing better for turning a kid into a thoughtful, creative, passionate, open-minded adult.

—Brent Hartinger, The Torch

(From James)

New to the marginal links: a blog called Grognardia, "an exploration of the history and traditions of the hobby of role playing." From a recent post:

One of the difficulties in discussing old school gaming is that the tradition of treating "D&D" as a very broad term is alive and well. Now, as I said, this practice has deep roots. So too does the practice of claiming that too much deviation from the core concepts of the game -- whatever those may be -- results in one's playing "not-D&D." Consider, for example, the cases of both Empire of the Petal Throne and Arduin. In both cases, you have games that are clearly derivative of OD&D, using not just the same terminology but in many cases the very same mechanics. And in both cases the very conception of what a roleplaying game is shows the clear influence of D&D.

Table-Talk of Parkus Grammaticus for August 12, 2008

I. The FedEx guy just buzzed, bearing...


—Personal Days' Italian incarnation! (Maledetti Colleghi—sounds like a campus novel!) As you can see, the cover art is taken from the Cape edition, though the spine does a little mirrory thing that is unusual and weirdly eye-grabbing:


Part I, "Can't Undo," is rendered "Impossibile Annullare"; "Replace All" is now "Sostituisci Tutto"; and everyone's favorite, "Revert to Saved," is now "Ritorna Alla Versione Salvata." Love it!

II. Eager to borrow my life coach? Listen to Jenny D on Bat Segundo, talking about her new novel, The Explosionist. (Hear her say: "He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird.")

III. Maud and Levi bond over Iris Murdoch.

IV. Ta-Nehisi: Which edition of D&D should you teach your child?

American nerd

Ta-Nehisi: "I can draw a direct line from, say, The Labyrinth to Dragonlance to the Uncanny X-Men to Follow The Leader to It Takes A Nation Of Millions to Hold Us Back. What is Rakim's 'Microphone Fiend' if not an origin tale? And what is Rakim, if not the greatest verbal swordsman of his era?"

Plus: Fan mail from a co-author of the Dragonlance series.