The Important Things

I have been posting to this blog at least once a week for fourteen years. When I started in 2009, my youngest was only seven years old. Today she went through her first breakup.

If you look between all the nerdiness and pop culture and rants from those early years, and sift through the more personal entries, you are likely to find the apprehensive scrivenings of a man terrified at the thought of raising two young daughters destined to eventually, inevitably, become teenage girls.

At the time I was sincerely convinced that I would enter into a period of near-total irrelevance, if not actual derision, during the girls' adolescence. How could I maintain my position as a pater familias once they discovered how many other dads were so much better at it than I was? How would they react once they learned the stuff I thought of as cool was often disregarded or even mocked by the majority of the adult community?

It seems funny in retrospect, as both my daughters have turned out to be outstanding young women with good heads on their shoulders, and they still try to make time to get together to play Dungeons & Dragons with us. But the truth of the matter was that I grew up wary of teenage girls, even when I was fascinated by them as a teenage boy, and really never got over it. Adolescent females were just something I had no experience with.

Likewise breaking up - I married my first girlfriend three decades back and have never broken up with anyone, and if I die never having done so, I intend to chalk that up as a win. But it left me short in terms of providing any real insight or advice as to how to proceed once she decided that action needed to be taken.

We still talked about it, the whole family, last night, and reassured her that her perceptions and feelings were valid and that she was making the decision, even if doing so felt difficult.

And when she returned home this afternoon, having delivered the news that she and her beau would not be seeing each other again, her face streaked with tears, all she said was, "It doesn't feel good to hurt another person." 

My eyes leaked and I agreed, but I was so proud.

It made me think, of all things, of a scene in Babylon 5, an old sci-fi series that somehow managed to blend together Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, and Casablanca. In one episode, the commander of the titular space station encounters a "technomage" named Elric (portrayed by the brilliant Michael Ansara), someone who uses technology to create the appearance of magic:

Elric: We are dreamers, shapers, singers, and makers. We study the mysteries of laser and circuit, crystal and scanner, holographic demons and invocation of equations. These are the tools we employ, and we know many things.

John Sheridan: Such as?

Elric: The true secrets, the important things. Fourteen words to make someone fall in love with you forever. Seven words to make them go without pain. How to say good-bye to a friend who is dying. How to be poor. How to be rich. How to rediscover dreams when the world has stolen them. That is why we are going away—to preserve that knowledge.

At that moment, holding a daughter almost as tall as I am but who still, miraculously, blessedly, craves the comfort of her father's embrace, I wanted nothing so much as the ability to have shared that imaginary knowledge with her; seven words to let them go without pain. Worth more to me in that moment than flight, x-ray-vision, a healing factor...

But she now has an experience that I have not - telling someone face to face that their relationship with you is ending, with firmness and honesty, but also with compassion.

Despite my concerns about my own shortcomings as a parent and teacher, both of my daughters are good humans who make me prouder than they can know.

The Big Game - Can You "Win" D&D?

I played a significant amount of Dungeons & Dragons as a kid. When I was 14, 15 years old, me and my chums from the swim team would get together a couple of times a week to play during summer vacation, usually from early afternoon to late at night, particularly on Saturdays. 

One thing I remember from those times is Mum telling me after the fact about some of her friends asking her if she had any concerns about the game I was playing, as it was the height of the "Satanic Panic." AS she tells it, her response was a "hell no," followed by an explanation along the lines of, "I've met all his friends, I can barely tell they are here in the basement except for the occasional fits of laughter, and it's Saturday night and I know right where he is. How many mothers can say that about their teenager?"

The other thing I remember is my father traipsing into the basement during a game to grab a beer from the fridge while doing yardwork or some garage project or other, taking a lug or two from a stubby bottle of Labatt's and asking with a grin, "so, who's winning?"

A chorus of adolescent boys would try to explain, all at once, that this particular game didn't work that way, and my poor dad would nod grimly in acknowledgment and head upstairs under a cloud of confusion - what kind of game is it where no one wins?

Honestly, I keep thinking back to schoolyard games in elementary school - you played tag because it was fun, not because you were better at it than everyone else. D&D, a cooperative storytelling venture in which the referee and players try to stitch together a drama out of crazed settings, arcane rules for combat and tactical sorcery and polyhedral dice rolls, has far more in common with tag than any sport I can think of.

But in a lot of important ways, I think an enormous group of players in Provo Utah may recently have won D&D; they recently held a game with more than a thousand players, at once, in a single place, in order to set a Guinness World Record.

A game store owner in Provo was told his mall was willing to work with him on a large event, so he decided to fulfill his dream of a record-breaking D&D game. He only needed 500 players to do it, but went big and arranged 200 seven-person tables that he then started to fill with Dungeon Masters and players.

The scenario was called "Dead Wars" and involved the arch-lich Vecna, a legendary villain since I began playing the game in 1979 or thereabouts, besieging a city with an army of the undead. Each portion of the battlefield was represented by a single table with its own DM. Costumed "generals" would run results back to the main DM, who coordinated the results and kept everyone informed as to the overall shape of the battle.

Midway through the game, when he announced Vecna had breached the wall and was standing within the city, he was met with a chorus of boos. And I am not even sure who the biggest hero was or what the best moment might have been, but even if Vecna had ended up victorious, every one of the 1,227 players could lay claim to a Guinness World Record when the dust settled.

Having worked for Games Workshop for over a decade, I am no stranger to big tabletop games, having seen and participated in many at American, Canadian, and even a British Games Day - but those are wargames, and even the largest ones I saw never had over a thousand players engaged at one time.

How do you create a scenario that lets everyone feel involved? How do you coordinate everything so it is actually one enormous game and not just 200 smaller ones? How do you wrap everything up in a way that makes everyone feel satisfied with how they spent four hours of their time?

I don't yet know the details, but I can tell you this much: it all started with a tremendous amount of organization and preparation. 

Store owner Andrew Ashby got sponsorships, got a website and set up a registration process that let established parties sign up with their own DM's but also allowed lone players to take an open seat at a stranger's table. Seeing tables of kids side-by-side with adults playing with teens is one of the best things about this whole affair. 

Chief DM Dax Levine created a scenario that let everyone play in one battle but do something unique at their table, and which would influence the overall results:

(from Reddit)

It was suprisingly smooth, actually. I was prepared for at least a certain level of chaos, but I was shocked how well it went. So, the story was that an army of the undead lead by Vecna was attacking a sanctuary city. All the players were defending the city in some way. There was a head DM and about 200 table DMs. The tables were split into three sections, depending on which part of the city they were defending--tables were either at "The Wall", acting as gatekeepers, or serving as city guard. The tables had different tasks, which added to the success or failure of each section. The table DMs would report to moderators, who would then give updates to the head DM. If sections failed as the story progressed, then things became more difficult and different storylines were activated for the other tables

Edit: I forgot there was a fourth group: the cavalry

Also:

There were 4 roles: gatekeeper, walls, cavalry, and city guard. Each table fulfilled one roll.

There were 3 acts. At the end of each act, the moderators tallied up the successes and failures from each table from each role to tell the DMs which scenario to run for the next act.

For example, my players were gatekeepers. The outer wall fell in act 1, which meant in act 2 there were extra armored Ogre Zombies charging the front

If the cavalry failed to take out the artillery, There would have been rocks falling each round etc.

...but everyone came together for the ending:

Vecna did lose. They had a special mechanic where each table was given a magical spear and they fought an avatar of Vecna. We all had to stab him with it at a certain time (in real time), then we all rolled damage together. I think we did something like 24,000 points of damage collectively.

(another funny comment: "wow, how many players must have canceled to get the number whittled don to just 1200?")

If you go to Reddit and read the comments in the thread, they make three things readily apparent:

1) all us nerds thought this was an absolutely tremendous idea ("Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson were in the Ethereal Plane with giant smiles whilst casting Bigby’s Hand of Wiping Tears of Joy.")

2) the ones who participated will remember it forever, ("my brother was on the wall!" "me too!")

3) pretty much everyone who wasn't there, wishes they had been, including myself!

And of course, in the back of my head, I keep thinking...Provo and Salt Lake City combined are still only 300 thousand people or so - surely Edmonton (pop. damn near a million) could rustle up that many nerds for an even bigger game?

I wouldn't want to run it, but if anyone else sets it up, damn, I want to play in it!

In the meantime though, congratulations to Andrew, Dave and all the geeks in Provo for a job well done and a world record achievement - that is a legit win, in a game where that isn't normally the goal.

A Life of Music and Pain

In the 1920s, a kid named Hiram was born in rural Alabama. His life was framed, if not defined, by physical setbacks and bodily pain from the start, as he was born with spina bifida occulta. It is the least serious variant of that particular defect, meaning a section of his vertebrae never fully fused around his spinal cord, but has been found to compound other injuries to the back. 

During WWI, his father had fallen from a truck, breaking his collarbone and striking his head. When Hiram was seven years old, his father experienced facial paralysis and was diagnosed with a brain aneurysm which hospitalized him for eight years, leaving Hiram's mother to raise him and his sister Irene.

The family moved to Georgia, and at ten, Hiram traded places with his cousin Opal back in Alabama, so she could attend school out of state. His aunt taught him basic guitar chords and he began playing at dances and church services.

Hiram moved to his mother's new boarding house in Alabama the next year, which she propped up during the Great Depression with a variety of side jobs, including nursing and a job in a cannery. When that house burned down, they moved to another, eventually converting it into a boarding house as well.

At some point, despite their poverty, Hiram got a guitar of his own, and a Black blues musician named Rufus "Tee-Tot" Payne, taught him to play in exchange for meals at his mother's house. Hiram blended Payne's style with country music he had heard, like that of Roy Acuff, but eventually lost touch with Payne when his family moved again.

The next boarding house was in Montgomery, Alabama, and after changing his name (more on that later), Hiram won a talent show prize of $15 for a song whose lyrics he had grafted onto another tune. Performing on the street in front of a local radio station got him on the air a handful of times, and there were so many requests for him that he was given his own 15-minute show to host twice a week - not bad for a 14-year-old. 

Hiram, aged 15

Hiram formed a band and started playing dates around Alabama, dropping out of school at 16 to do so full-time. He and his band began playing around Alabama and eventually around the South. Somewhere along the way, he got talked into bull-riding while at a rodeo in Texas, and injured his back falling from the animal. Starting out at public gatherings and at clubs, gigs at honky-tonks were a mixed bag though, as so much of his revenues went into drinking. 

When the U.S. entered WWII, Hiram's injury prevented him from serving, but all his bandmates were drafted. His drinking worsened, which led many of his replacement musicians to quit, and the radio station eventually fired him for "habitual drunkenness." He ended up working in a shipyard in Mobile for much of the war.

He met his future wife Audrey in Mobile, and after getting married in 1944 at a Texaco station, she helped Hiram get back on the radio, and he also began publishing his own songs, gaining a reputation as a skilled songwriter.

In 1946, Hiram's audition failed to get him on the Grand Ole Opry, but auditioning for a publisher in between ping-pong games got him a six-song contract. When those songs charted, he moved to a larger record company, and in 1947, got his first hit and a spot on Louisiana Hayride. Covers and original songs kept charting until he finally got on to the legendary Grand Ole Opry in 1949, getting an unprecedented six encores in his first performance.

More chart-toppers, bigger tours, and even television appearances kept Hiram's fame star on the rise, but his alcoholism worsened and he entered a sanitarium for treatment. On a hunting trip that same year, he fell and re-injured his back, and he turned to morphine as well as alcohol for the pain. 

Over the next two years, he had an affair with a dancer, became divorced, began seeing someone in Shreveport, and missed enough shows because of that and his drinking that he was fired from the Grand Ole Opry.

In 1952 Hiram married his Shreveport sweetheart but began experiencing heart problems. He came into the orbit of a quack doctor who prescribed a number of drugs, including amphetamines and morphine, which exacerbated his cardiac issues.

On December 30, 1952, he hired a college student to drive him from Knoxville, Tennessee to a show Charleston, West Virginia on New Year's Day. Hiram was out of sorts, in part due to having been beaten up and kicked in the groin during a bar fight a few days prior. His doctor injected him with a B12 shot that also included morphine - Hiram needed to be carried to the car by porters because his coughing and hiccupping left him unable to walk.

Shortly after midnight, the student, who had been driving for 20 hours, stopped in Bristol, Virginia and got a local taxi driver to spell him off. That driver took them to Oak Hill, West Virginia, where they stopped to refill and grab some coffee.

It was only when they stopped that they discovered that Hiram was dead, and had been so for long enough for rigor mortis to have set in.

The man so many people had come to know as the legendary Hank Williams, had died before seeing his 30th birthday.

Despite his poverty, his pain, his questionable judgment, and his many misadventures, in his three decades of life, Williams had 11 number-one country hits and had an astonishing 55 singles hit the top 10. Without question, he can be considered one of the most influential singer-songwriters to have ever lived. 

It can even be argued that his first hit, "Move It On Over," helped pave the way for what would eventually become rock and roll. His influence on the rockabilly movement cannot be denied, with artists like Gene Vincent, Carl Perkins, and Elvis Presley covering many of Williams' songs.

The link between blues music and rock is well documented, but knowing that such an influential figurehead in country and western music, at one of its most formative stages, learned some of his craft from a virtually unknown person of colour, is certainly food for thought.

Critical Hit or Morale Check? D&D: Honor Among Thieves, Reviewed

Fenya and Bobby and I took advantage of an empty Sunday night last weekend to see the Dungeons & Dragons movie, Honor Among Thieves. As someone who is both a dedicated movie fan and who has also played D&D on and off since he was about 12, I felt a certain obligation to get in on the opening weekend (despite D&D's parent company engaging in recent behaviour that is a long ways from Lawful Good) but I was also really looking forward to it. 

The moviemakers and cast seemed intent on both having and providing a good time, and initial reports were pretty positive. My only concern was the writer/directors' pronouncement that there would be no meta-narrative; that is to say, no mention of players, dice or experience points and the like - no Jumanji-like overlay of the real world and the fantastical one where D&D adventures take place.

This disappointed me because if you take that away, are you really making a D&D movie? Or are you just making another heroic fantasy movie in one of the many worlds that D&D campaigns can take place in? If it was released under a different title, would it be recognizable as Dungeons & Dragons?

Well, the answer is an emphatic "yes," and Honor Among Thieves is a great time to boot.

And if you don't know an owlbear from a displacer beast or can't tell a d6 from a T4, you will still have a great time, but there are treats galore for those who know the exhilaration of risking everything on the roll of a single die -that is, a twenty-sided one. This is made apparent very early, when Chris Pine's character Edgin the Bard keeps referencing how important his backstory is to the context of his current situation, and I immediately recognized the wink.

D&D: HAT is set in the Forgotten Realms, the game's most prolific setting for dozens of adventures and a series of novels that must number into the hundreds. I cut my teeth on Greyhawk myself, so my exposure to the Forgotten Realms has been limited to three published adventures I have participated in, two as a Dungeon Master and one as a player. Hearing familiar towns and places like Icewind Dale mentioned was gratifying, sure, but when a character reveals that their axe was made by Ghelryn Foehammer of Triboar, being able to whisper to Fenya that my paladin had 'met' this individual was maybe the nerdiest moment I have had at the movies.

There are plenty of other nods as well, like spells and magical rules working tactically in a rules-compliant way instead of being a hand-wavey means of solving a problem or advancing the story. Monsters looking and behaving the way the Monster Manual describes them. The 'pet' non-player character who is better in practically every way than the party he is helping. But most critically, watching a group of disparate characters work together to solve a problem, not necessarily by the most logical means ("I have 50 feet of rope, I bet I can tie it my axe and throw it across the chasm...") but by doing what will combine the most fun with the least chance of one of them dying - even if those odds are not that great.

This is not to say the directors didn't take a few liberties with game mechanics, but even that is excusable through the judicious application of another important rule...

As someone else told me, there is no overt meta-narrative or referencing in the movie, but it always feels like it is present, maybe just a little offscreen.

And through most of the film, no one is interested in saving the world - the party in helping one character try to reunite his family through the only means he feels he has available to him. And watching the evolution of the scheme to do so as well as the re-evaluation of the goal itself makes for an engaging and occasionally surprising heartfelt tale.

If anyone asks me if they should see Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, I will tell them, "only if you enjoy a fun adventure movie with fantastic but relatable characters and almost no other connection to our 'real' world."

But if they are a D&D player, past or present, I will likely insist they see it and tell them I intend to go again with the Icehawks, hopefully this Friday.

Nine Decades, Two Continents and Six Children; Gerrit Top, 1932 - 2023

Even when it is inevitable and arguably even a blessing, death is almost impossible for us to accept.

Audrey's father passed away peacefully on March 23, about five weeks after Jenny, his wife of nerly 63 years, finally accepted that she could not care for him at home any longer. My own mother faced the same agonizing decision with my father, and all the reassurances in the world are not enough to salve the pernicious pain of feeling like you have betrayed a loved one.

After a rough start at the facility in Calgary, realizing he was not there to visit, Gerrit quickly accepted his situation, telling his visitors and caregivers that it was actually "a pretty nice hotel." His children made certain that Mom was able to visit him every day from High River. But his condition and level of comfort worsened until he finally passed away early in the morning the Thursday before last. 

Audrey's father and I could hardly be more opposite and like a lot of dads, his relationship with his children, particularly his three daughters, was complex. But his ethos of honesty and hard work are difficult to deny. 

Growing up not only during the Great Depression but also under Nazi occupation in Holland greatly shaped his attitudes and priorities. When he at last established his own farm, he put in over thirty years of back-breaking, risky toil, a veritable serf to his own fields and livestock. But he did so without complaint and had little respect for those who groused about their relative misfortune.

The burial and memorial service were both held yesterday in High River, and Gerrit's second-oldest son, Garett, delivered the eulogy. After the service, I told him, as someone who has shared the awful privilege of eulogizing a parent, how good a job he'd done. Garett was grateful but expressed a concern he had maybe run on too long, something I did my best to dispute. "Your father," I said, "was a ...difficult man to encapsulate," which made him smile and nod.

How do you take the measure of a man after he has gone, particularly one whose life was so long and so wide-ranging? I had known the story about Gerrit narrowly escaping a roundup of Dutch men and boys in his village of Putten who were then sent to a labour camp, where most of them perished. But hearing Garett attribute his father's mistrust of police to the fact the roundup was accomplished not by Nazi soldiers, but by police officers from Putten, fellow Dutchmen, was a revelation. 

It could be said that Gerrit Top was a hard man, and hard men may be difficult to like. But if so, his hardness also gave him the strength to endure so many hardships and obstacles, and a job that has buckled or broken many a man. 

But the true measure of Gerrit Top can be seen in the family he leaves behind, including his beloved wife Jenny, his six children and 13 grandchildren, including my own two daughters. Watching his offspring, as well as many grandchildren and extended family, come together to comfort each other and to support their mother was honestly awe-inspiring, and lends so much credence to Gerrit's own claim that the greatest thing he had ever done was to have children.

I say this with caution, knowing how much the man hated to be bored, but Gerrit, I earnestly pray that you rest in peace.

Gerrit's Obituary

Gerrit went peacefully to be with his Lord on Thursday, March 23, 2023 at AgeCare Midnapore, Calgary, AB. He was born August 21, 1932 to Gerrit and Aalbertha Top at Putten, Gelderland, Holland and was the third of four children.

After six weeks in army training in 1952, he received his papers to immigrate to Canada where he was sponsored by the Donkersgoed family at Iron Springs, AB. There he met Jenny Oldenburger at the Iron Springs Christian Reformed Church. They married in April 1960 and had six children.

His first years in Canada were spent working in the sugar beet fields around Iron Springs before going on to work building elevators with the Alberta Wheat Pool in a variety of locations in the province. He and Jenny began their life on a small dairy farm outside of Turin, AB until 1969. From there they moved to Parkland, AB for a year and then settled on a farm at Cayley, AB where he developed another dairy operation and farmed there until 2004.

He semi-retired, built a house and shop just outside High River where he still had beef cattle. In July 2021, he and Jenny moved into town until the time of his passing.

Gerrit had a lifelong love for farming, working with cows and the land which he never quit doing until the last two years or so. He loved to travel throughout the world with Jenny and they were able to go to many locations in Europe, South Africa, Central America, Mexico and Canada. His favourite activities included camping and Sunday afternoon drives where he could appreciate the beauty of the world God has blessed us with.

Over the years he was involved in church, Pro-Life, High River Rotary Club, Foothills M.D. as a councillor for 9 years, curling, woodworking, trees and landscaping and many other interests.

He is survived by his wife of almost 63 years, Jenny and 6 children: Betty (Hank Klooster), Rocky Mountain House, AB, Jack (Angie), Blackie, AB, Garett (Sherry), Brant, AB, Vera, High River, AB, Audrey (Stephen Fitzpatrick), Edmonton, AB and Alan (Cristin), Cayley, AB. He is also survived by his grandchildren Jenna, Mark, Kara-Lynn, Jasmine, Alex, Trey, Bryce, Fenya, Glory, Micheal, Briely, Austin and Dominic as well as 8 great-grandchildren.

He was predeceased by his parents, Gerritt and Aalbertha, his brothers Heimen and Henk in Holland, his brother, Wim, from South Africa, one sister-in-law, four brothers-in-law as well as a number of his adopted Donkersgoed family members.