(late October 2022)
I recently listened to an episode of In Our Time, a BBC Radio chat show about various topics, mainly historical. This one was about the poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I have never read it but knew the gist of the poem and, of course, its most famous stanza:
Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.
It was a thoroughly interesting show and I learned quite a bit. I didn’t know that Coleridge was friends with William Wordsworth and that the poem was inspired by some comments from the man who wandered lonely as a cloud. One panelist noted that Coleridge tweaked his work for a long time after completing it, if not the rest of his life. There are something like 18 distinct versions of the poem due to his tinkering. Panelists also discussed the piece’s place in the Romantic movement, Coleridge’s life, and so on. Very interesting stuff. I am now determined to actually read the thing – one version of it anyway. Until then, I will have to be content with Iron Maiden’s song based on the poem.
I found the rarest of things in the wild – a pay phone.
It’s located at a mall in the suburb of Monona. I go to the barber shop there and arrived a couple minutes before they opened one day and so I took a short stroll and discovered this remnant of a bygone era.
No, it didn’t have a dial tone.
********
After our trip to Milwaukee, I had a short 3-day work week as Thursday saw the Frau become a gaming widow once again when I left for Gamehole Con, a tabletop gaming convention held here in Madison every fall.
Several friends from the Chicago area come up for the occasion and tradition dictates that we all gather for some curry-laced gluttony on Wednesday night at Swad, an Indian restaurant in Monona, not too far from that pay phone above. This is the 9th incarnation of the convention yet no one recalls when we started this gastronomic pre-con pilgrimage.
Some highlights of the weekend.
In the dealer room I spied an Oktoberfest board game which looked like it was right up my Strasse.
I am not sure exactly what this game entails. Perhaps some of the meeples are shaped like big-bosomed Fräuleins clad in Dirndls. A resource management game where you have to acquire steins of bier und pretzels?
I ran two sessions of Trail of Cthulhu this year. It’s a pen and paper role-playing game based on the horror fiction of H.P. Lovecraft designed by Chicagoan Kenneth Hite. The scenario on Thursday took place in the fictional northern Wisconsin town of Four Pines. When the northern lights flash in the sky, the residents must choose someone to go on what they ominously call the Coldest Walk to appease the creature in the woods which is the Wendigo, a loathsome fiend of Native American lore that is infamous for its foetid odor of decay and its appetite for human flesh.
Only it’s not.
It’s really the Great Old One Ithaqua!
(Anyone reading this lose 2 sanity points.)
I like to add a little Wisconsin flavor to the story and so, when players go to the local tavern, some old duffs tell their characters lumberjack and Ole & Lena jokes and there's a band playing old timey Scandinavian folk music - usually Hardanger fiddle tunes - which I provide via a laptop, if I have one at my disposal.
My own tradition (OK, it started last year) for running these games is to provide kringle, an oval shaped Danish pastry filled with stuff, for my players. For this game, I had one of the Bavarian cream persuasion. My other scenario on Saturday took place in Alabama and so on Friday I took a nice walk over to Lane’s Bakery to grab a pecan kringle for my players.
My walk took me under one of the old Quann Park bridges – single lane!
The morning doughnut and coffee rush was over and Lane’s was left with a small group of old duffers having their kaffeeklatsch. I was in luck as they had a pecan kringle for me and it got paired with a vintage 2022 bottle of sweet tea for that extra little bit of Southern verisimilitude.
The second session went very well. It takes place in Alabama in 1936 and the players were investigators sent to the town of Rosa in order to retrieve a diary that had been stolen. It was written by an 18th century necromancer and its recovery was imperative lest the tome and its descriptions of hideous magical rituals that would put Aleister Crowley to shame therein fall into the wrong hands.
The game was a hoot. One player, a woman from Chicago, was a blast. She was familiar with Cthulhu role-playing games and was simply an enthusiastic participant. Great fun!
When I wasn't running a game, I was a player.
In our game, a rich guy died after drinking coffee out of a weird chalice. As we are investigating his death, his body begins to become bloated and expands. Eventually it blows up into this hideous coffee blob creature. My character’s super power was to be able eat rotten food and learn the weakness of any creature. And so I ate the rotting remains of a McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish from a nearby garbage can to learn that the coffee creature could be defeated by adding cream. Lots of cream. This seemed appropriate considering we were in the Dairy State.
I also played a round of Unfathomable, a board game.
But some of the players are actually human-Deep One hybrids and are traitors seeking to sink the ship! I ended up being one of these. At first I was sneaky, not wanting to reveal that I was compromised. Then I threw caution to the wind and just went on a rampage of sabotage and mayhem.
What fun!
Truth be known, I played many fewer games this year than in years past. Normally friends would register for very few events so we’d have a lot of time to wander into the games library, borrow a game, and play for hours. This year most of my friends had rather full schedules. On the plus side, we had some wonderful late nights in the hotel lobby drinking beer and BSing. Also, I got a chance to hang out with a couple people who are friends of friends that I have kinda sorta chatted with in the past. This year we were able to have longer conversations and get to know one another better.
A friend of mine, who runs Call of Cthulhu games (like Trail but with a slightly different set of rules), revealed that he is writing a scenario which would be played out in real life up north at his cabin in Mountain in the northeast part of the state. (I have written about visiting there previously.) Furthermore, he was considering running a scenario called Beyond the Mountains of Madness, a sequel to H.P. Lovecraft’s novella At the Mountains of Madness at Gamehole Con. Lovecraft’s story chronicles the fate of an Antarctic expedition and I believe that Beyond allows the players to be members of the crew sent to figure out what happened to the previous and highly ill-fated expedition.
Beyond is an epic story and it would probably take the bulk of the 4 days of the convention to run. While the entry fee would be steep, all proceeds would go to charity.
Every Gamehole has a touch of the bittersweet to it. All of my Chicago friends that come up for the occasion were also friends of my dearly departed brother. Plus he attended the first couple years of the convention so there are always those moments where I think, “He would have loved this!” or “He should have been here for that.” And every year I have one of those moments where I think I see him. He, like many a gamer, was an overweight white guy and there are times when I am scanning a hall full of overweight white guys that a face that looks like his sticks out and that part of my brain that does facial recognition has a few neurons misfire.
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