19th Level

To start off this blog it seems reasonable to give a review of a book I've just finished reading, Andre Norton's Witch World , first published in 1963. And me being me, the mere use of the word "reading" needs a bit of explanation. A few years ago I began a subscription to audible.com and have greatly enjoyed reading unabridged audiobooks. I listen to them when I'm driving alone in my car and when I go for walks or do "mindless" chores. What brought me to this book? Amusingly, the famous "Appendix N" of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Masters Guide (1st edition), a bibliography of literature that helped inspire the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons game of the late 1970s. I recently received my pdf copy for my pre-order of Goodman Games'  Dungeon Crawl Classics  role-playing game which aspires to provide a D&D-like game for playing an "Appendix N"-like game (indeed, they reprinted Appendix N in its entirety). A...

Welcome to my little corner of the internet. So what's this blog all about? It's my attempt to create a blog of things that are of interest to me and, hopefully, to some others. I've tried my hands at a hardcore political blog and while I'm a political junkie, wading into various culture wars as a primary focus got to be a bit on the painful side. I'm also a huge gaming, science fiction, and fantasy geek. So how to tie this all together? Well, looking at the title there's an obvious reference to Dungeons & Dragons and other roleplaying game - "I'm a 19th level elven wizard with +5 against orcs so don't mess with me!" Needless to say this blog will spend a fair amount of time discussing tabletop gaming. Then getting a little too clever by half we've got a reference to Stephen King's  Dark Tower  series. Without going into spoilers, that number takes on a significance in that series of novels. I was introduced to Stephen King...