Category: cabinet of curiosities (Page 1 of 3)

Lo, these many years, I have searched in vain…

July 6, 2025 / / 2 Comments

…until now. At long last, I think I’ve found it. The book I read as a kid and could never remember its title.

At first I thought it was The Sleeping Dragon.

Then Quag Keep.

Then The Twilight Realm.

Then Demons Don’t Dream.

But none were right. I remembered the book was about a group of young people sucked into a role-playing game, but with each foray into these old 1970s/80s paperbacks, I grew less and less confident that I would find the right book, the one from my faded and unreliable memories.

I knew it had a blue cover.

I knew it had people from our world transported into a fantasy game.*

I knew it had to be from the late eighties or early nineties because I read it when I was roughly ten or eleven.

And I knew that it had seemed a bit too “old” for me at the time. Like, I remember the choices of the characters and the conflicts making me feel somewhat uncomfortable at times. I don’t know if it was relationship/sex-type stuff, or just moral grayness, but I remember keeping my reading on the QT. Or maybe I was embarrassed by the role-playing aspect, something I wasn’t sure my parents would approve of…

But over the years, as I’ve Googled what I could remember and crawled through message boards and blog posts, I simply couldn’t find the right book.

Honestly, I figured it must have been one of the aforementioned books and my memories were just faulty or making shit up.

And yet… the niggling feeling in the back of brain wouldn’t go away. I still wanted to know… still wanted to find the book…

Reader, I think I’ve found it.

I’m not sure why my morning scroll through Pinterest looking for old Dragon Magazine covers and fairy tale fantasy illustrations made me think of this book again, or my quest to find it, but I decided to do another round of Google searches and see what might come up.

The keywords were the usual: “portal fantasy,” “role-playing game,” “dice magic,” “1980s,” and yet, for whatever reason, this time, I lighted upon an rpg message board where someone had asked a similar question: Looking for a book… kids transported into a game… can’t remember the title… etc.

I scrolled through the thread. Same old, same old. Quag Keep. The Sleeping Dragon.

And then. Could it be this series by Kevin J. Anderson? Gamearth series? Gamearth, Game Play, Game’s End?

As soon as I saw the title, Game Play, it was like a little chink in my stone wall plunked out, and then the whole edifice crumbled.

Game Play.

I looked it up.

Blue cover.

An RPG that comes to life.

Kids from our world.

Came out in 1989. I would’ve been eight. Maybe nine when I encountered it.

And that cover. It gave me the shivers. Familiar and strange. Like deja vu or a memory or a dream.

*Apparently, my memory is a little faulty because I’m not sure the kids from our world go INTO the game, but instead, the game comes to life. But everything else from the book description sounds bang on. Even the names–Melanie, David, Hexworld–sound right.

A memory conjured from a darkened abyss. Hexworld. Game Play. The blue cover.

I have to find a copy now and read it. Anderson has republished the series but with revisions, so I don’t want to read the newer version. I want the old 1989 one. The one from my childhood.

I am almost 100% certain it will not live up to my memory of it. I don’t even think I liked it as a kid, only that it captivated and intrigued me. It felt weirdly forbidden when I was ten (eight? nine?). I know it will not seem so forbidden or “adult” now to the real-adult me, but I don’t care. I have to find a copy and read it.

I think, at long last, I have found the forgotten book. My quest is nearly complete.

Just goes to show what a fantasy novel, even a probably so-so fantasy novel, can mean to a kid.

It Came from the Game Closet: Hobbit Tales from the Green Dragon Inn

July 11, 2024 / / 0 Comments

I teased this ages ago, but it’s finally here. The first installment of what I hope to be a regular series on the blog: “It Came from the Game Closet.”

We have this closet, you see. It is in our living room, and it is quite tall, and it is filled with games. Stuffed. Bursting. Unruly and untapped.

You see, we have filled this closet with games, but we’ve hardly ever played ANY of them, we’ve just let them languish in the game closet and think to ourselves, our heads nodding with pensive melancholy, “Someday… someday…”

And yet, “someday” never comes. We keep putting new games into the closet and never playing them.

Until now.

I’ve opened the weird sliding door of the weird corner closet with the triangle-shaped shelves and I’ve pulled out a game. It’s one of the few games in the closet we’ve actually played, but we haven’t played it in a long time, and it gives me warm fuzzies just looking at the box’s cover art, so it’s the first one I picked.

I wasn’t able to PLAY play it (it’s not really a game that works solo because you need the other players to play the hazard cards), but I did use the cards to make up my own stories and added in a few hazards just to keep it fun. I tried to imagine myself as a hobbit sipping a pint at the Green Dragon, regaling the crowd with my masterful yarn-spinning skills. I felt silly at times, yes, but I had a good time.

Hobbit Tales is a storytelling game, and as such, it lends itself to use as a storytelling tool. As I was playing it solo, I realized how I could use it for my writing and role-playing game prep (I should have realized its use for RPGing sooner, since the game literally bills itself as an aid/companion to the first edition of The One Ring RPG… I feel a bit dumb about not catching that until now).

Each card has a title, a picture, and a quote from Tolkien’s fiction, and thus there are lots of jumping off points for storytelling/prompts for writing and gaming. Yes, there are a gazillion writing prompt-generators out there, digital and analog (I have these really cool Writing Dice, in fact, that my husband got me for Valentine’s Day), but there’s lots of charm in using the simple story seeds from the Hobbit Tales cards.

The open-ended quality of the titles, illustrations, and quotes means they’re flexible enough for any kind of fantasy story, and because they are simple and often archetypal, they prompt lots of symbolic and even mythic ideas.

For instance, one of the random cards I drew “Weather-beaten Traveler.” This immediately prompts me to think of types of weather that could beat someone down: rain showers, snow storm, wind storm, floods, even sandstorms and drought. And the idea of a “traveler” is so basic and yet full of possibilities. The traveler could be a stranger in a strange land, a person seeking a way back home, an explorer, someone on a quest, or someone simply out for a stroll who got caught up in a weather phenomenon.

What would happen if I drew such a card as a prompt for a story, or to give me something to insert into a story where I’m stuck?

I’m currently working on Norse City Limits, an urban fantasy inspired by Icelandic sagas and old 1940s film noir, and my main guy, Grettir, is about to speak to a dead man (could be magic or Grettir could simply be hallucinating due to a drug-induced haze… I don’t know yet). If I wanted to, I could play a free-association game with my “weather-beaten traveler” card.

Perhaps the dead man is a vagrant, caught up in a web of lies and vice that he’s totally alien to, just the wrong man at the wrong time.

Or perhaps he was traveling to find Grettir, got caught and killed by Grettir’s enemies, and now he’s shown up anyway in the form of a corpse.

Or perhaps he wasn’t killed by humans at all. Maybe the weather killed him, an extreme form of weather (and maybe that weather was caused by a spell or a god), and his death is a portent of things to come.

The Hobbit Tales cards are really fun in this regard because they spur ideas, invite me to play with archetypal elements, and provide several points of entry, all without being too specific or “out there” in content. Nothing in these cards will veer my stories wildly off-track or be too wacky.

The uses of these cards for role-playing games is obvious. Instead of a random encounter table, simply draw a card from the deck, or several cards, or a adventure card and a hazard card and try to combine them into a unique encounter, combat, trap, or puzzle.

Sometimes writing prompts from outside sources are too particular or too prescriptive. There are times when that specificity or oddball quality will instigate an exciting and unique story idea, but more often than not, I end up with something that doesn’t fit my sensibilities as a writer.

With the Hobbit Tales cards, I have prompts and ideas that work much better with the kinds of stories I like telling and which can easily be integrated with my current works-in-progress (if need be).

Also, the artwork and aesthetic of the game is charming and a pleasure to interact with. I like taking out the cards and the green coasters and spending time with them.

As a game, Hobbit Tales is low-stakes, congenial, and more about creativity and having fun with mates rather than the competition of who has the most points at the end. Yes, it is “competitive” in that there can be a winner at the end (teller with the highest score at the end of all the rounds), but that’s really not the impetus for playing. It’s much more about enjoying Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, pretending to be a hobbit, and flexing your storytelling muscles.

For people who are intimidated by the improvisational storytelling, the game might not be as enjoyable, or it might take some time to realize that none of these stories will end up being “good.” The fun is in trying to tell the story and include the hazards if necessary, not to be some brilliant performer.

In some ways, it’s a good lesson for everyone, professional storyteller or amateur: Have fun and don’t worry about whether something is “good” or not. Let the creative voice do its thing. Let go of perfection and have a good time.

Don’t Call It a Resolution

January 4, 2024 / / 1 Comment

I’m hoping to blog more in 2024. I have an idea for a series of posts about board games, and since this term I’m teaching British Lit, Short Fiction (which will mostly entail reading short SFF stories with my students), and Creative Writing, I figure I’ll have a few things to say about writing, literature, and the fantastical as it pertains to my work in the classroom.

For Brit Lit this semester, my focus is on monsters. We’ll start with Beowulf, then The Tempest (and perhaps A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Macbeth too), and finally Shelley’s Frankenstein. What makes something a monster? Are monsters made or born? How does our idea of the monstrous change over time?

Mostly I wanted to teach these three texts, so I created a driving question to link them all. But mostly, I just wanted to read them with my students. I’m curious to see their reactions, especially for Beowulf, which is always a harder sell in an all-girls school. I mean, I’m a woman and I love Beowulf, but when I’ve taught it to young women in the past, it’s been a mixed reaction. The only major female character is a monstrous fen-hag, and the other women in the story serve as peacemakers and such (to solidify alliances and end blood-feuds), so I get why for some of the young women I teach, there’s not much to engage them.

But I’m hoping some of them will come to love the action, the world-building, and the overall spirit of the poem. I myself read it in high school (part of it anyway), and I’ve loved Beowulf ever since.

I’m not making any kind of resolution to blog everyday or anything. Not that such a goal is bad; I’ve attempted every-day blogging before and it was great. But I can’t meet such a challenge this year, nor do I really want to. I’m more focused on staying consistent with my fiction writing and increasing my word count in that realm. But I still like blogging and don’t want it falling dormant. Thus, my commitment to a more regular blogging habit for 2024.

Maybe once a week? Maybe once every two weeks? Maybe several times a week? I don’t have firm plans as of yet. I’m waiting to see how these first few weeks of January shake out, how much time I can actually find to blog more frequently, and how easy it is to find topics to write about. As I mentioned earlier, I have plans, but maybe those plans aren’t tenable. Time will tell.

One of my biggest goals/ambitions for this new year, on a personal level, is to finally start playing more of the board games and role-playing games that adorn my shelves. We have an entire closet filled with board games we’ve (mostly) never played. This is so frustrating! I LOVE board games, and yet here in my very house there languishes a collection of sundry entertainments and diversions of which I have never availed myself. This is madness!

I plan to correct such mismanagement by taking one game out each week and learning to play it. I may play it with husband or friends, or I may play solo, but either way, I’m committing myself to playing the board games in my house. Carpe diem and all that.

I’m going to try blogging about the games too; I just need a snappy name to call this “regular” feature. (I have “The Things That Shaped Me” feature which I should also get back to, but maybe I’ll call my board game excursion “Cabinet of Curiosities” or something of that sort… which I know is already a tag on my blog, but this will just make it more official.)

Anyway, I’m not calling any of this a “resolution.” I make New Year’s resolutions, and I’ve already made a few in other realms of my life for 2024, so I’m not opposed to resolutions in general. But I’m not making a blogging resolution this year. Nothing that firm. This blogging commitment is more of a New Year’s inclination. An urge to blog more. Let’s see how it shakes out.

Further Thoughts on Middle-Earth

January 2, 2021 / / 0 Comments

I have been thinking about why I love Middle-Earth so much. I know that lots of Tolkien fans have argued that Middle-Earth feels more real than any other secondary world, that it has such depth and detail and history, and that Tolkien wrote about it with so much love for the landscape and languages that it all feels as if Middle-Earth really IS our world, but eons ago, beyond the mists of our own knowledge. I would agree that Tolkien created a hyper-detailed sub-world, and that the history and legends and descriptions are so vivid that Middle-Earth feels REAL.

But is that all? Is this the only thing that makes me love Middle-Earth?

I’m not sure “world-building” is the only thing that elevates Middle-Earth above all other fantasy realms for me. If it were just “world-building,” then Westeros and Essos (from George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series) would be just as enticing. I’m sure for some people, Martin’s world IS more enticing. But not for me. The intricacies of Middle-Earth’s history, or its landscape, or the depth of its lore aren’t what make me love it. Otherwise, Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere would be at the top of my list. Sanderson’s created world is arguably more intricate, more detailed than is Middle-Earth. But the Cosmere does not cast the same spell over me.

Tolkien, of course, often writes in a “high style” that feels archaic and shrouded in the long-forgotten mists of time. Is it this tone, perhaps, that makes Middle-Earth weave its spell upon me? I do indeed think that Tolkien’s tone and style are part of the equation.

But I also think it’s more than tone. It’s the particulars of his myth-making: the Trees of Valinor, the Silmarils, the Ents and Balrogs, the Dwarves and dragons and barrow-wights, the Elves, the hidden kingdoms like Gondolin; it’s Gollum and the Nazgul. All of these things — the essence of these imagined things — are what draw me into the world. The simple things too, like the light of the stars or the flowers of Lorien. All of them stir my heart deeply. I do think they beckon to some yearning in my imagination, a desire for the real world to become somehow deeper and more wondrous, to resemble the wonders of Middle-Earth…

Tolkien gets at this idea in his essay “On Fairy-Stories” when he explains that fairy-stories (and all fantasy) help us with “recovery”:

Recovery (which includes return and renewal of health) is a re-gaining — regaining of a clear view.

This regaining allows us to see the natural, physical world with fresh eyes. Things like rocks and leaves and flowers are renewed in our imagination because fantasy stories have helped us recover this “clear view” of them:

Fantasy is made out of the Primary World, but a good craftsman loves his material, and has a knowledge and feeling for clay, stone and wood which only the art of making can give. By the forging of Gram cold iron was revealed; by the making of Pegasus horses were ennobled; in the Trees of the Sun and Moon root and rock, flower and fruit are manifested in glory.

This is why Middle-Earth works so strongly on my own imagination. It recovers for me that clear view of the world, of nature, and even of abstract things like goodness, evil, courage, honor, envy, friendship, longing, love. As Tolkien puts it, the particulars of Middle-Earth — the Silmarils, the Ents, the Elves, the Misty Mountains, the Shire — all of it helps renew in me a love for stars, and trees, and songs, and mountains, and green hills and summertime. I return to Middle-Earth again and again, loving it more and more each time, because it helps me regain something I’m always on the verge of losing: my wonder and joy for our world, for the world of God’s creation. Tolkien helps me recover this wonder and joy; his Middle-Earth is “made out of the Primary World,” and in being so made, manifests the real world’s glory.

That is why I love Middle-Earth so much.

The Things That Shaped Me: MERP

June 2, 2020 / / 2 Comments

20200602_152730

My parents always loved making a big deal out of birthdays, but my tenth birthday was by far the biggest deal they ever made. They decided we were going to drive to Chicago for a family trip (we lived in Michigan, for geographical frame of reference). Why Chicago? Why my tenth birthday? I have no idea, but I made no objections. Who wouldn’t want to go to Chicago for her birthday? We were going to stay at the Water Tower Place hotel, eat at Ed Debevic’s, visit the Field Museum and the Shedd Aquarium, AND — this is the thing my ten-year-old brain was inexplicably most excited about — we were going to bring a portable TV/VCR in the minivan so my brother and I could watch movies during the long drive (this anecdote tells you how old I am that DVD players and screens didn’t come pre-installed in vehicles).

We rented a slew of movies, but the one I remember most was The Hobbit — not Peter Jackson’s Hobbit franchise (which hadn’t been made yet) — the Rankin-Bass animated movie from the 1970s.

This movie… let’s just say, this movie will make a future appearance in The Things That Shaped Me series.

We watched it on the way to Chicago and then on the way home to Michigan, so it served as a bookend to the birthday trip, an opening act and a closing act. I was obsessed with The Hobbit — book and movie — and by extension, Middle-Earth. But only The Hobbit-version of Middle-Earth. I hadn’t read The Lord of the Rings yet.  At ten-years-old, I wasn’t a good enough reader to handle the lengthier, weightier Rings books.

20200602_152858But I loved Tolkien’s world: the forests; the mountains; the dragons, goblins, elves, and dwarves. Mirkwood was as real to me as the little patch of woods that surrounded my grandmother’s house. The Misty Mountains were unspeakably enchanted, a world within a world filled with treasure, ancient lore, and shadowy creatures; I longed to travel there. And the map of the “Wilderlands” and Thorin’s map were like sacred manuscripts.

Although the trip to Chicago was exciting, what I wanted more than anything for my tenth birthday was something much simpler, and at the same time much stranger: I wanted the boxed set for MERP: Middle-Earth Role-Playing.

20200602_153018Back in those days, I had never played a role-playing game before. Frankly, I didn’t have anyone to play a role-playing game with. But I wanted MERP. The cover illustration alone was worth it. Also, there was something dangerously appealing about role-playing games. These games came with a dark reputation back in the 80s and early 90s. I was forbidden to play D&D; I had to work hard convincing my parents that other RPGs were okay and not gateways to Satanism. Somehow, I convinced them that MERP was alright. Maybe they figured a Tolkien-influenced game couldn’t be too bad. But the mystique, the forbidden quality of RPGs was still there, even if the cover said “Middle-Earth Role-Playing” and not “Dungeons and Dragons.”

The old MERP game came in a box, with the core book and several other supplements, including cardboard playing pieces and two ten-sided dice. Whenever I see pictures of the old MERP books — the core book, the different supplement books for the peoples and creatures of Middle-Earth — an overwhelming wave of nostalgia washes over me. I can’t quite explain it; like all old memories, it’s both intense and inexplicable. I can see and smell and sense all the moments from those old days, but I cannot make you see and smell and sense them in the same way.  Memories are like dreams; once we start to tell about them, they inevitably lose their magic, they become pedestrian and plain, they don’t capture the electricity and potency of what we see in our heads. Opening that box-set on my birthday and seeing those Angus McBride illustrations, holding the cardboard cut-outs and the ten-sided dice — it’s a feeling I find hard to describe. When the opening pages of the core book promised that “this game lets you step out of this world and stride boldly into Middle-earth,” I believed it: I was going to stride into Middle-Earth. I was going to experience adventures I’d never experienced before.

20200602_152810This memory is so strong, so central to my childhood, that I know I cannot convey to you what it really felt like. Flipping through the old MERP books brings me back to the past, to being ten-years-old, to being in the backseat of our minivan, watching the Rankin-Bass Hobbit, to being a kid who loved fantasy and who felt like she had to hide that love from the outside world. And there was the forbidden danger of role-playing games: the thrill of reading something that was maybe a bit too adult, a bit too beyond my ken.

Whenever I look at those MERP books now, after all these years, I feel the excitement of ten-year-old me, the sense that I’m about to embark on a strange, unknown, wondrous adventure — like Bilbo stepping outside his door to find the Lonely Mountain. But how can I make you feel these same feelings, or catch a glimpse of what they mean to me? I can’t. I can only hope that perhaps you loved MERP as a kid too, or that you know what it feels like to watch The Hobbit while the moon is rising between the clouds on a summer’s night.

A Wizard of Earthsea and How Great Books Can Inspire My Writing

August 12, 2018 / / 0 Comments

earthsea_coverWhen I wrote the second draft of The Thirteen Treasures of Britain, I was also reading The Last Unicorn. Even though my story and Beagle’s had little in common, the music of his prose, the vitality of his world made an impact on me while I was writing. I wanted my book to capture some strain of the magic that I felt The Last Unicorn possessed. Even though I knew my own novel would never equal Beagle’s masterpiece, I wanted to try. In short, The Last Unicorn was inspiring. It energized my writing, and I found myself more joyful while I read it, and more joyful while I was writing my own story.

It’s no secret that I’ve had trouble finishing my second novel, Ysbaddaden and the Game of Chess. I’ve had babies, become the mother of three children all under the age of five, struggled to navigate the demands of teaching, mothering, and adulting, and all the while, I’ve felt less joyful and more overwhelmed. My writing time has evaporated, and with it, a lot of my enthusiasm. I’ve still managed to push on, to write even when it feels like a slog through the Swamps of Sadness, but without that spark of joyfulness that I felt when drafting The Thirteen Treasures. So this second book is taking an eternity to finish.

Curiously, at this very moment, I’m reading another classic of fantasy literature (A Wizard of Earthsea), and I’m finding myself suddenly joyful and energized again, inspired to sit down and work on the draft of my own novel.

Just like what happened with The Last Unicorn.

Le Guin’s prose, the depth of her world and her themes, the way I become completely immersed and lost in her story, the way it feeds my imagination — all of these things remind me of what it’s like to be a fantasy writer, to dream up characters and places and fantastical creatures. And when I do sit down to write, I feel nourished by Le Guin’s story. Great writing makes us as writers see what’s possible, what can be achieved with words, and when I know there are storytellers out there who have reached greatness, then in some small way, I hope I can reach it too. I know I won’t; that’s not the point. It’s the striving for greatness that gives me energy, that helps me find joy in my writing.

I am, at times, haunted by Ray Bradbury’s maxim to “write with gusto.” So much of my writing over the last year and a half has not been filled with much gusto. But when I read a great book — fantasy or otherwise — I gain some measure of gusto, some “kick-joy” (as Kerouac? would say), and I begin to wonder why I don’t just read great books all the time. If these books work like a tonic on my brain, why wouldn’t I imbibed every day? Why am I spending time on things that don’t fill me up with this kind of excitement and awe?

I suppose it’s because we don’t know which books will contain the magic until we start them, and I’m the sort of reader who hates to abandon a book once I’ve started it. There are a few that I DNF, but they are very few. And I also feel obliged to read widely in my genre, most particularly the books being published right now; I can’t exactly restrict myself to the Great Classics of Fantasy if I’m trying to keep up with what’s being written currently. Of course, I’ve read some current fantasy that has indeed been the magical-kind-of-great that I’m describing in this post, but without the benefit of time and distance, it’s hard to know which of these books will be The Ones, and which won’t.

Maybe I need to constantly have a great book on hand, for those times when my verve seems a little limp. I can always read more than one book at a time; I’ve been that kind of reader since I was a kid. But now I realize that I DO need to keep pumping blood into my imagination via these great books. I need Ged — naming the otak, struggling against the shadow, overcoming his pride — and others of his kind to journey with me, keeping me on the path of adventure, like Gandalf and the dwarves leading Bilbo to the Lonely Mountain.

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