In Search Of...The SIU Connection and the Illinois RPG Pipeline

“I am a Saluki, you fools. I am a Saluki, and I will destroy you.” 

- Bob Odenkirk, SIUC Grad 1984

Growing up in the Midwest in the 1980s was interesting. I was far away from both Chicago and St. Louis, the two largest cities, which I didn't get to very often, and stayed relatively stuck in my smallish town.  We had our own run-ins with the Satanic Panic, and generally speaking, I couldn't wait to get out, thinking that if I moved away, I could at least find better access to cool RPGs.

How little I actually knew back then.

I later learned that I actually lived near what I have started calling the Illinois RPG pipeline. Games would flow down from Lake Geneva via Chicago to universities in Champaign-Urbana (U of I), Bloomington-Normal (Illinois State), and Carbondale (Southern Illinois University, SIUC). Mostly via I57. Of course, SIUC was the Alma Mater of Tim Kask and, later, yours truly. 

Given the availability of material, I also assume that there was a pipeline that went through Springfield, IL as well. That route would have been Lake Geneva to Chicago, down I55 through Bloomington to Springfield, and then on to St. Louis and again, Carbondale. 

From the early 1970s through the 1990s, these contiguous corridors stretching from Lake Geneva through Chicago and central Illinois to Carbondale functioned as a sustained creative and distribution spine for tabletop role-playing games, linking publishers, university clubs, conventions, retailers, and designers into what can reasonably be called the Illinois RPG Pipeline.

The Illinois RPG Pipeline was not just a metaphorical flow of ideas, but a physical corridor of products and ideas.

Gen Con in particular was not just an event. It was the first distribution node. Designers, retailers, and university gamers attended in person and brought the product home. Its position in late summer was ideal for purchasing content and then packing it up to take back to school in a few weeks. 

What I once thought was isolation in southern Illinois was in fact proximity to one of the most important role-playing game corridors in the country: a 400-mile pipeline that carried ideas, designers, products, and play culture from Lake Geneva through Chicago and central Illinois to SIU, shaping the growth of tabletop gaming for decades.

Talking with Tim at Gary Con 2025, I learned even more. 

Tim Kask from Little Egypt

Before he was TSR’s first full-time employee and editor of The Dragon, Tim Kask was a married student at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. From there, he cold-called Gary Gygax, having found the Lake Geneva address in the back of Chainmail. Chainmail was popular with the Strategic Games Society then, as it was when I got there a decade later.  Kask got invited up, dropping his wife and daughter off in the Quad Cities, and the rest is history. Kask’s own reminiscences place that contact in late ’73/early ’74, while he was at SIUC. During this time, Kask would talk with Gygax about what a "mess" the rules were and how he taught the SGS how to play, but needed to figure them out himself first. This is key: the rules, given their state, lent themselves to being taught in play rather than being read to play. This became a viral campaign long before that term was coined and is still one of D&D's greatest strengths; people who watch it being played want to play more.

This area of the state in known as "Little Egypt." SIUC's school mascot is a Saluki, an Egyptian running dog. The school's daily newspaper is called "The Daily Egyptian." This dates back to the 1830s, when severe weather caused crop failures in Northern Illinois. The Southern Illinois area (today anything south of I-70) became very attractive to settlers due to the fertile land and rivers (the lower Mississippi and Ohio) that rarely froze. The richness of the soil there is so deeply ingrained that 150 years later, when I was there, people still talked about it.

Kask and I talked a lot about SIUC. Salukis never forget their erstwhile home. Tim lived in married housing while his brother lived in the dorms called "Triads," and he would go and visit him and play D&D. I also lived in the Triads. He was in Boomer Hall, and I was in Wright Hall, separated by about 13-14 years. Sadly, Boomer, Wright, and Allen halls, the Triads, were all demolished in 2012. I guess sometimes you can't go home again. 

But that time was influential in shaping how D&D grew beyond those three little rulebooks. 

Kask refereed the "Qualishar campaign," described in local coverage as the first Dungeons & Dragons campaign played at SIU and likely one of the first outside Lake Geneva. That’s a huge claim, but it’s coming from a contemporary profile built around Kask’s Carbondale years. Note the spelling drift you’ll see in fan histories: Qualishar in news pieces vs. Kwalishar in later forum posts and anecdotes.

Side Note: Kask has also said his first PC was named Kwalish, which fans often connect (informally) to the item name Apparatus of Kwalish. Treat that as apocrypha-but-plausible; it’s sourced to Kask comments preserved in community threads, not a primary TSR memo or publication.

The Strategic Games Society and The Egyptian Campaign

The Strategic Games Society was the gaming group that formed back in the early 1970s at SIU Carbondale. They would meet in the Student Center (3rd floor if I remember right) and play war games. At the time, prior to 1974 their membership was only about a dozen. Tim Kask and his brother were members 14 and 15, according to his recollections. 

Back then, SGS at SIUC was a wargaming RSO (registered student organization) that bridged the pre-D&D and early-D&D eras. Exact rosters are hard to pin down in print, but the through-line is clear: SIU had an organized strategy gaming scene in the early 1970s, and by the mid-to-late 1970s that group was already intersecting with the brand-new role-playing hobby. There’s an active SGS presence today; they still meet in the Student Center.

The Egyptian Campaign (1987–2007)

If you gamed around Carbondale, you probably remember The Egyptian Campaign, the local convention that ran from 1987 to 2007, peaking at around ~750 attendees. It was anchored at the SIU Student Center and, for years, was the spring gaming date on the regional calendar. Even recent DE coverage of successor shows calls out Egyptian Campaign’s footprint and dates.

I went to it in April of 1988. I missed the preregistration and was unable to get into any games.  It happened around the time of Spring Fest and Carbondale's famous "Cardboard Boat Regatta," so I often missed it. 

What the SGS was doing through the late '70s and into the '80s, as D&D exploded, is harder to document; rosters and meeting records from that era haven't surfaced publicly, but the convention scene that emerged in 1987 didn't spring from nothing. Conventions do not appear ex nihilo. A 750-attendee show requires a pre-existing culture.  One thing is certain: there was quite a bit of D&D being played there.  A side effect of this? Cheap D&D books at 2nd hand book stores. I picked up a near-mint looking Deities & Demigods with the Cthulhu and Melniboné mythos for just $18. And it was not the only one. 

An Aside: The Trampier Thread

Then there’s the Carbondale connection we can't escape: David A. Trampier (DAT) the AD&D 1st edition artist and creator of Wormy. After vanishing from the hobby in the late ’80s, he resurfaced in a 2002 Daily Egyptian ride-along story… as a Carbondale cab driver. He later died in Carbondale in 2014, just weeks before he was slated to surface at a local con (yes, Egypt Wars). If you’ve ever wondered why Carbondale keeps coming up in old-school circles, that story alone would do it. 

Back in the early to mid-90s, I walked by that Yellow Cab depot all the time. There was this bar that all the TAs went to as soon as we were done teaching. There were more than a couple of occasions I left the bar, walked by the Yellow Cab, and got on the Amtrak to see my girlfriend in Chicago. The cabbies all sat outside and smoked. I can't verify this at all, but I know I walked by Tramp more than once.

The Pipeline

From the mid-’70s through the ’90s, a contiguous corridor of publishers, conventions, and university clubs, TSR and Gen Con in southern Wisconsin; Chicago-area publishers and retailers; UIUC’s Winter War; Judges Guild in Decatur; and SIU’s convention scene and retailers in Carbondale, created a reliable Midwest supply chain for RPGs. That infrastructure, plus TSR’s 1979 Random House book-trade deal and later Midwest distributors like Chessex/Alliance, made new D&D material easier and faster to find along this route than in regions that lacked equivalent clusters.

I have no sales figures. I have no hard data. What I do have is the recollections of many gamers and some other anecdotal evidence. But here is what I do know.

Mayfair Games (Chill, Role Aids line) was founded in Spring 1981 by Darwin Bromley, his brother Peter Bromley, and friends, and Darwin Bromley himself had practiced law in Chicago from 1975 to 1981 before starting the company. It was named for the Chicago neighborhood in which it started.  Darwin Bromley was involved with the Chicago Wargaming Association and its CWAcon convention, where the first Role Aids fantasy adventures were debuted and run. Chicago had its own organized wargaming association running its own convention. That's not just a waypoint, that's an active gaming culture node.

FASA (founded in 1980 in Chicago) pumped out Traveller material early on, then Star Trek, Doctor Who, BattleTech, and Shadowrun. Further concentrating RPG/miniature culture (and distribution reps) in Chicagoland. Founder Jordan Weisman was first bitten by the gaming bug in the mid-'70s when he began playing D&D at a summer camp. The game followed him all the way to the Merchant Marine Academy and the University of Illinois at Chicago, where it ultimately pulled him away from his degree and led him to found FASA in 1980.  Weisman and Babcock sold those first Traveller adventures to a local Chicago store before sending them to nationwide distributors. 

FASA brought William H. Keith, Jr. and his brother J. Andrew Keith into the company from freelancing for Game Designers' Workshop. The downstate node was feeding back into the upstate one.

Games Plus (Mount Prospect, IL) has been serving the region since 1982, one of the Midwest’s longest-running RPG FLGS anchors. I would order minis from them and have them shipped to me when I was living downstate. 

Moving south.

Champaign-Urbana (UIUC) as the mid-corridor node. Winter War launched in January 1974 and is still running, often cited as the Midwest’s longest consecutively running independent gaming convention.  This is where Marc Miller tested out some of his classic Traveller adventures. Game Desinger's Workshop actively playtested here as well. My first connection with the Call of Cthulhu game was the summer a friend's older brother brought it back from Urbana. 

Bloomington-Normal, IL was the home of Game Designer's Workshop (1973) and Illinois State University. The GDW collection at the McLean County Museum in Normal, IL shows central Illinois as a parallel wargame/RPG publishing hub feeding the same stores and cons. 

Marc Miller, creator of Traveller, attended Illinois State University (in Normal), where he joined the ISU Game Club, created by future game designers Rich Banner and Frank Chadwick.  ISU is as important to the development of Traveller as SIU was to Dungeons & Dragons. GDW did not advertise locally but instead focused on conventions and word of mouth. 

Decatur, IL as the south-central publisher node. Judges Guild began publishing in 1976 and became the premier third-party for D&D in the late ’70s–early ’80s; TSR’s formal license lasted into the early ’80s. 

Bob Bledsaw was born and raised in Decatur, Illinois, and in 1975 began running a D&D campaign after friends asked for help after four failed attempts to run the game themselves. On July 4, 1976, Bledsaw and partner Bill Owen traveled to Lake Geneva to visit TSR, where they met with Dave Arneson and received verbal approval to produce play aids for D&D. At the time, TSR's general feeling was that no one would be interested in supplemental materials.

By 1980, Judges Guild had scaled to a 14,000-square-foot facility in Decatur with a staff of 42. At that time this central Illinois town was home to one of the world's largest RPG publishers.

Springfield, IL, White Oaks Mall (Center of the State) had two book sellers (Waldenbooks, B Dalton's) that kept a regular high stock of D&D/RPG items from the early 1980s on. This was due to the Random-House distribution deal that put D&D and other games into malls all over. Many other stores also carried D&D and Wargame titles within the city. At one point, a city of just 100,000 people had five sources of D&D books. 

I have talked to gamers from all over. Some had to hunt for books, drive long distances, or rely on mail order. Here, I had choices of a couple of locations in my own small hometown, and I could drive the short distance to Springfield to have even more choices. 

Carbondale, IL, Castle Perilous. Coming full circle, Castle Perilous opened up in Carbondale in 1990 by SIU alum Scott Thorne.  Steve Chenault of Troll Lord Games played games here while searching for Trampier.  

Continuous convention calendar along the route. Gen Con (WI), Winter War (UIUC), and the Egyptian Campaign (SIU) created a reliable annual circuit for retailers, designers, and GMs to move product, run events, and cross-pollinate.

Time Line

1968–1978: Gen Con grows in southern WI (Lake Geneva to UW-Parkside).
1973: GDW founded (Bloomington-Normal, IL).
1974: Winter War launches at UIUC (Champaign-Urbana, IL)
1974: Tim Kask attends first GenCon, begins playtesting D&D at SIUC
1976: TSR opens Dungeon Hobby Shop at 723 Williams St. in Lake Geneva.
1976–83: Judges Guild (Decatur) is a primary third-party D&D publisher under TSR license, then beyond.
1979: Random House distribution deal with TSR begins (book-trade availability).
1980: FASA was founded in Chicago.
1981: Mayfair Games was founded in the Chicago area (Role Aids 1982).
1982: Games Plus opens (Mount Prospect, IL).
1984: Pacesetter was founded in Delavan, WI (near Lake Geneva, WI).
1987–2007: Egyptian Campaign runs in Carbondale, peaking ~750 attendees.
1990: Castle Perilous opens in Carbondale. Second only to Games Plus in size and sales. Still open today!
1987–98: Chessex (Fort Wayne, IN) expands Midwest distribution; Alliance forms through a 1998 merger.

The PLATO Bonus

There was another, parallel pipeline. Gary Whisenhunt and Ray Wood at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale wrote the first role-playing video game in the TUTOR programming language for the PLATO system between 1974 and 1975. Called dnd, it was named after Dungeons & Dragons and is notable for being the first interactive game to feature what would later be called "bosses." 

This makes Carbondale and SIUC part of the earliest lineage of digital RPGs. Dungeons & Dragons and computers go all the way back to their origins and are interlinked. While computers will be forever associated with "Silcon Valley," RPGs will forever be associated with the Midwest. 

The Midwest did not merely birth Dungeons & Dragons; Illinois sustained and propagated the hobby through a connected north-south corridor of publishers, universities, conventions, and retailers that formed a durable cultural infrastructure from Lake Geneva to Carbondale.

Selected Sources / Bibliography

Tim Kask Interview, Part I - Grognardia (2008) https://grognardia.blogspot.com/2008/09/interview-tim-kask-part-i.html Kask's account of his SIUC years, the Chainmail cold call, GenCon '74, and his hire at TSR.

Tim Kask Interview, Part II - Grognardia (2008) https://grognardia.blogspot.com/2008/09/interview-tim-kask-part-ii.html Kask on the development of Basic and Advanced D&D, viral spread of the game, and his role as "midwife" to AD&D.

Bill Owen on Bob Bledsaw - Goodman Games https://goodman-games.com/remembering-bob-bledsaw-sr/ Co-founder of Judges Guild's first-person account of the Decatur wargaming scene and the founding of the company. Essential primary source for the Decatur node.

Bill Owen's ICD/Judges Guild Precursor Blog https://wargamecampaign.wordpress.com/2017/06/10/icd-judges-guilds-precursors/ Owen's detailed account of the pre-Judges Guild wargaming club scene in Decatur and Springfield, including connections to other Illinois clubs.

Marc Miller Interview - The Escapist, "A Perpetual Traveller" https://v1.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/tabletop/columns/days-of-high-adventure/7023-A-Perpetual-Traveller-Marc-Miller Miller in his own words on returning to ISU on the GI Bill, founding the ISU Game Club, and how D&D instantly made sense to him because of prior political roleplaying at U of I.

Dragonsfoot Tim Kask Thread https://www.dragonsfoot.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=92246
Primary community source for Kask's SIUC recollections and the Kwalish/Apparatus connection outside of my own conversations with him.

"An SIU Gaming Club Played an Integral Part in the Development of Dungeons & Dragons" - The Southern https://thesouthern.com/news/local/an-siu-gaming-club-played-an-integral-part-in-the-development-of-dungeons-dragons/article_a2c8bcd5-0d4c-5df3-a4cf-1f3a4225286d.html Local news coverage of the Strategic Games Society and Kask's Qualishar campaign at SIUC.

"Club Part of Dungeons & Dragons Creation" - Jacksonville Journal Courier https://www.myjournalcourier.com/news/article/Club-part-of-Dungeons-amp-Dragons-creation-14341261.php Additional local coverage of SIUC's role in D&D history.

"Exchange Club Played Part in Dungeons & Dragons Creation" - Daily Herald https://www.dailyherald.com/20190818/news/exchange-club-played-part-in-dungeons-dragons-creation/ Third regional news source documenting the SIUC pipeline connection.

Winter War - About Us (official site) https://www.winterwar.org/about Confirms 1974 founding by the Conflict Simulation Society on the UIUC campus.

"A Winter War for Gamers" - Smile Politely https://www.smilepolitely.com/culture/a_winter_war_for_gamers/ Detailed history of the Conflict Simulation Society's founding in 1969 and the birth of Winter War. Confirms the UIUC origin and the 1974 launch.

"Annual Winter War Gamers' Convention Returns to Champaign" - Herald-Review https://herald-review.com/entertainment/local/annual-winter-war-gamers-convention-returns-to-champaign/article_5f22fea4-2a5b-11e0-9c99-001cc4c03286.html Confirms Winter War as one of the oldest continuously operating wargaming conventions in the world, 38 years without a break.

Books

Gary Gygax, Empire of Imagination by Michael Witwer (Bloomsbury, 2015).

Ben Riggs, Slaying the Dragon (St. Martin’s Press, 2022).

Jon Peterson, Playing at the World (Unreason Press, 2012).

Jon Peterson, The Elusive Shift (MIT Press, 2020).

Shannon Appelcline, Designers & Dragons: The ’70s (2015)

Tim Kask (1949 - 2025)

Today, we lost Tim Kask, and it feels like one of the load-bearing pillars of this hobby has been removed. He was 76, just two weeks shy of 77.

Before he was TSR’s first full-time employee, before he edited The Dragon and helped turn a homebrew wargame into a living culture, Tim Kask was a married student at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale (SIUC). A Saluki. That detail matters more than it might seem. Well. At least to me.

From SIUC, Kask did something that sounds almost mythic now. He found an address for Gary Gygax in the back of Chainmail, picked up the phone, and cold-called Lake Geneva. Late '73 or early '74, depending on whose memory you trust. He got invited up, and the rest is history. Not destiny. Not inevitability. Just a guy deciding to make the call.

Tim and I talked a lot about SIUC. Salukis never really ever forget Carbondale, becomes part of our DNA. He told me about visiting his brother in the Triads, playing D&D there, making space for imagination in cinderblock dorm rooms. He lived in Boomer Hall, I lived in Wright Hall two of the three Triads. About thirteen or fourteen years apart, but close enough that the echoes line up. Same bricks. Same paths. Same sense that something strange and creative could happen there. 

I'd love to know how many games were played in those ugly damn dorms. And we all have Tim Kask to thank for this.

Kask refereed what local coverage described as the first Dungeons & Dragons campaign played at SIU, and likely one of the first outside Lake Geneva. The Qualishar campaign, or Kwalishar, depending on which source you read. The spelling drift alone tells you how early this was. This was before canon. Before anyone knew they were making history.

That Carbondale period mattered. It shaped how D&D escaped the gravitational pull of those three little brown books and became something people shared, argued about, wrote letters about, and eventually built communities around. Tim was there when the game stopped being just rules and became culture.

There is also that wonderful bit of apocrypha Tim himself shared over the years. His first player character was named Kwalish. Fans have long connected that, informally, to the Apparatus of Kwalish. Is it provable? No. Is it plausible? Absolutely. And that feels right for Tim. Part fact, part legend, part inside joke, all wrapped up in the living memory of the game.

Tim Kask was never just an editor. He was a bridge. Between Lake Geneva and the rest of the world. Between amateurs and professionals. Between "this is a fun idea" and "this is something worth taking seriously."

Rest well, Tim. The dice are still rolling because you helped get them out of the box. I'll roll some dice in your honor or use a Quatro's cup with some chits, or my SIU cup.

October Horror Movie Challenge: The Conjuring (2013) - The Conjuring Series

The centerpiece of the Conjuring Universe, the one that started it all.

The Conjuring (2013) - Conjuring Timeline 1968-1971 

Ok. There is lot going on here. Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga star as real-life couple and demonic investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren. The Warrens' investigations also gave us the Amityville Horror story and film franchises. Maybe I should have included them in this. Nah.  Lorraine Warren even makes a cameo appearance in this movie, before her passing in 2019. 

First off, Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga are both fantastic. I have enjoyed everything they have been in even when the surrounding movie was terrible.  This movie is not terrible. 

And honestly, the whole cast is fantastic.  Ron Livingston and Lili Taylor as the Perron parents, and Joey King as one of their daughters. All also based on real people. 

The Annabelle sub-plot is only the prologue to the main tale. 

By 2013, the haunted house genre seemed played out, but this movie really revived it. Revived isn't right, it brought back to life. And there are a lot of great scares here. The demon grabbing Christine's leg is certainly going to give someone nightmares. 

We learn the house is cursed by an accused satanic witch who killed her baby and herself in a satanic ritual at 3:07 am, when all the clocks stop. 

What makes The Conjuring stand out is the execution. James Wan stages his scares with precision. Long takes, creeping camera movement, and subtle sound design build tension until it’s unbearable and then the hammer drops. The clapping game in the cellar remains one of the best set pieces in modern horror, not because of gore or CGI, but because of its timing and restraint. 

When things happen, they happen all at once. 

Turns out the place is full of ghosts and demonic forces. 

There are a lot of parallels between this and Steven Spielberg's Poltergeist. You would be excused if you thought  they were based on the same story and told from very different points of view. 

NIGHT SHIFT & Occult D&D

There is no end of material for either my Occult D&D and NIGHT SHIFT. I mean, this is a NIGHT SHIFT campaign right here. Ed and Lorriane are by the rulebook occult scholars and a psychic. The scene where the occult investigators come into the house is fantastic and feels like found footage.  Not to mention, there are more secret rooms in this house than in a Gygax dungeon.

October Horror Movie Challenge 2025
Viewed: 8
First Time Views: 6

October Horror Movie Challenge: Annabelle (2014) - The Conjuring Series

Now we come to the first proper sequel, or prequel to the Conjuring universe, 2014's Annabelle. 

Annabelle (2014) - Conjuring Timeline 1968-1970

Ok, now we are in the 1970s, the start of the modern Satanic Panic. 

There is an attempt here to connect this all to the Manson Family murders, which I understand was an inspiration for some part of this series.

John and Mia Form (Ward Horton and Annabelle Wallis) are a new couple and Mia is very pregnant. John gives her a gift of the Annabelle doll. 

We are treated to a scene later, Mia's point of view of the adopted Janice, aka Annabell, from Annabelle: Creation, killing her adoptive parents. The killers come next door and attack Mia and John. One of the killers kills herself, holding the Annabelle doll.  We do learn that the killer was Janice/Annabell. Is the doll the same one as in A:C? No idea, but we do know they were all made by Samuel Mullins.

The predictable spookiness starts. BTW, this series does a lot to make rocking chairs scary. The sewing machine was stressing me out, too. My mom was a seamstress, and she used to run needles through her fingers all the time. The TV going out was too much like Poltergeist. 

The actors are not great, save for Alfre Woodard and Tony Amendola, who are both always great. To be fair, Ward Horton and Annabelle Wallis are not given a lot to work with. 

I had heard that this was the weakest link in the series, and I can see that. It is certainly not as good as Annabelle: Creation. The movie is slow, unnecessarily so, really. Annabelle: Creation really redeems this series so far. 

NIGHT SHIFT & Occult D&D

You know I love 1970s occult horror, and there are plenty of ideas here, even if the movie itself didn't fully take advantage. 

October Horror Movie Challenge 2025
Viewed: 7
First Time Views: 6

October Horror Movie Challenge: Late Night with the Devil (2023)

 Oh. Now this one was so good. I had been waiting to do this one for a bit, and it did not disappoint. 

Late Night with the Devil (2023)

Late Night with the Devil (2023) is one of those movies that grabs you from the very start and doesn't let you go until the very end. It takes the form of a “lost” late-night talk show broadcast from Halloween night, 1977, and gradually descends into chaos, possession, and live-on-air damnation. It is rather great to be honest.

The always amazing David Dastmalchian gives the performance of his career (so far) as Jack Delroy, a talk show host desperate for ratings. He is part Carson and part Jerry Springer. His Halloween special promises seances, psychics, skeptics, and, of course, Lilly D'Abo, the young survivor of a Satanic cult. Played with equal amounts of innocence and horror by newcomer Ingrid Torelli. As the broadcast unfolds, things start to go very wrong. The brilliance of the film lies in its commitment to the format: the cheesy set, the awkward banter, and the canned applause, all slowly giving way to dread as the occult elements seep through the cracks. The cinematography is an art of its own. The on-set show, the backstage, the unfolding horror, all seen via a different lens.

What makes it work is the restraint. For most of its runtime, the horror is suggestive: a flicker on a monitor, a sound from offstage, a psychic’s nervous glance. Then, when the supernatural finally takes the stage, the gloves come off. By the finale, we’ve left the safety of “TV land" and "Standards and Practices” and plunged into something raw and terrifying.

Thematically, it hits a sweet spot. It’s about the start of the 70s Satanic Panic, the exploitation of trauma for entertainment, and the cost of ambition. But it never feels preachy, it’s too busy building atmosphere and keeping you glued to the screen. Dastmalchian is excellent, walking that fine line between smarmy showman and desperate man circling the drain.

There is no way this movie would have been as good as it was without the talents of David Dastmalchian. Though even then it would have been good. This one is my favorite movie of the challenge so far. 

NIGHT SHIFT

Found footage is a great tool. We saw this in "The Blair Witch" and now in "Late Night." Found footage of, well, anything, is a great hook. Found footage of demonic possession? That's a golden hook.

Occult D&D

This movie is the Occult era gift wrapped. It is the start of the modern occult era, so to speak, and everything I want to try to capture here. I love it.

 

October Horror Movie Challenge 2025
Viewed: 4
First Time Views: 3 

October Horror Movie Challenge: Jennifer (1978)

Tonight's movie is a complete attack of opportunity, but I am glad I found it.

If the Exorcist spawned hundreds of imitators, then Carrie (1976) spawned at least a dozen or so as well. 

Marketed at the time as a kind of Carrie knock-off (and yeah, the comparisons are impossible to avoid), this one has a twist: instead of telekinesis, the outcast girl at the center of it all has the ability to control snakes. This comes seven years before Jennifer Connelly's bug-controlling powers in Phenomena (1985).

Lisa Pelikan stars as Jennifer, a poor girl from West Virginia who earns a scholarship to an elite girls’ school. She doesn’t fit in, wrong background, wrong accent, and, well, she has that weird “snake thing.” The wealthy students torment her endlessly, and like in Carrie, the cruelty builds until it finally explodes in a climax where Jennifer unleashes her reptilian powers in full. The bullies learn the hard way that mocking the psychic girl is always a very bad idea.

The movie sits in an interesting middle ground. On one hand, it wants to be a serious supernatural thriller, and there are moments where it almost works, Pelikan does a great job selling Jennifer as fragile but simmering with potential rage. On the other hand, it’s also a 70s exploitation horror film, which means you get plenty of lurid bullying sequences, nudity, sexual assault, melodramatic overacting, and snakes crawling across every possible surface. The tone veers from tragic to campy to horror, sometimes in the same scene.

Star Lisa Pelikan was quite good in this. Better than the movie actually deserves to be honest. I can't help but think I have seen this one already; something about her performance was so familiar to me. I may have seen a lot of 70s/80s horror featuring a redhead outcast girl with psychic powers.  I am going to say "First Time View."

Occult D&D & NIGHT SHIFT

One of the big bads of the various Appendix N books are Snake Men and Serpent Men. Jennifer could very well be the offspring of these serpent men surviving into modern times. Or at least the 1970s.   

October Horror Movie Challenge 2025
Viewed: 2
First Time Views: 1

October Horror Movie Challenge: Messiah of Evil (1974)

 I have wanted to see this one for some time, based on the movie poster alone. It was not exactly the movie I thought it was going to be, but glad I finally caught it. The poster claims "From the makers of American Graffiti," and that is true. The Husband-and-wife team Huyck and Katz (writers-producers-directors) did write "American Graffiti" and then would go on to direct and write "Howard the Duck," and write for Indiana "Jones and the Temple of Doom."

Messiah of Evil (1974)

This movie follows some old tropes. Old, even by the time of this movie and certainly one we have seen a lot. A woman, this time Arletty played by Marianna Hill, is searching for her artist father who has ended all communication with her. Told in flashback to her psychiatrist she talks about how she arrives in the coastal town of Point Dume, formerly "New Bethlehem," to find him.  She finds instead an odd man Thom (Michael Greer), and his two young groupies Toni (Joy Bang) and Laura (Anitra Ford). They are also interested in Arletty's father.

We learn, through various means, that the town is cursed and that during the Blood Moon the people will change and begin to eat raw flesh. This is told to us a few times to make sure we remember it. Even dear old dad comes back from the dead to tell us.

Anyway, town's people start dying, Arletty reads some of her father's notes talking about how he is changing, and she notices she is changing the same way.  The groupies get picked off and eaten by the townsfolk and soon they come after Arletty and Thom.

In the end, Arletty is in the mental institution, but you get the idea that she is already dead.

The movie is all mood with some standard 70s-era zombies for blood and gore (and not a lot of that). It is not great, but not terrible either. We have seen the "Woman searches for lost family and only finds dead people" trope many times here. Hell, this isn't even the first one this month. But maybe there is something to that. Instead of a castle in Europe, it is an artist colony in California. 

I think this film had high aspirations and a limited budget for achieving them. 

Featured Monster: Ghouls

The movie is unclear on what sorts of undead the town's folk are. But the connection to "new religion" and Donnor Party made in the tales of the Blood Moon lead me to conclude they are ghouls. Granted not the grave robbing undead, but something a little more intelligent than a zombie and less powerful than a vampire. 

Now. It would be foolish of me to think this movie had any influence on the Monster Manual at all. But that doesn't mean we can look at ghouls a new way because of this movie.

The film's dream-like, or more to the point, nightmare-like quality makes it a good model for a Ravenloft adventure. Especially if you imagine Point Dume as part of Ravenloft.

The whole trope (woman seeks out weird family) really is a model for Ravenloft. Adding in the walking dead just seals the deal.

October Horror Movie Challenge 2024
Viewed: 24
First Time Views: 13

From Imirrhos to Mystara: The Known World

 Been rather busy this week, but this one came across my feed, and I thought it was interesting. I love the Known World, also known as Mystara, so any details about it's history.

The video is about 2 hours long, so pop some popcorn and settle in.

Monstrous Mondays: A Monster of a D&D Book!

Something a little different today. Instead of talking about a monster, I have a monster of a D&D book. The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons.

I picked up this massive 576-page book last week. The pages are glossy, full color on heavier stock so this book is massive. When I picked it up at my FLGS I was reminded to "lift with me knees."

This book covers the evolution of original D&D from its Wargame birth to the dawn of what would become the Holmes Basic set and the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons game.  

The book is divided into four large sections with a Preface, Foreword, and Afterword.  Let's look at those first.

Our Preface comes to us from Project Lead Jason Tondro. I freely admit I have no idea who he is. He gives us an overview of what this book is about. There is section mentioning that D&D originally catered to middle-class (and even mid-west) white men. This is not in debate really. He also mentions some of the more problematic issues with early D&D, from plagiarism to cultural appropriation to sexism and a bit of slavery. Look. All of this is true and things we have known for a very, very long time. To pretend they were not there, or clutch our pearls because someone brought it up is laughable at best. Acknowledge the past and move forward.  In truth this takes up less than 1/3 of a page of 576 pages. If this section bothers you, then you are looking for things to be bothered by.

The Foreward, though, is far more interesting. It comes from Jon Peterson who has the credentials and bonafides to back up all his claims. While he is credited with the forward his fingerprints are all over this book. The sad truth is there are few of the original old guard left. Peterson's dedication to the history of RPGs and D&D in particular is well known and respected. 

Part 1: Precursors is very interesting. It covers the games and the correspondence between Gygax, Arneson, and others between 1970 and 1973. While some of this in well known, it is great to have it all in one place along with copies of the letters and drafts sent back and forth. One thing is obvious from the start that Tolkien and Middle-Earth DID play a pretty large role in the creation of this game. 

Among the treasures here are copies of the Chainmail Rules for Fantasy.

Part 2: The 1973 Draft of Dungeons & Dragons is also a treasure since unlike OD&D and Chainmail (both of which I am familiar with) this is the first time I have seen this. It is a fascinating read in and of itself. Is it a *playable* game? I don't know. But that is not important really. What is important in the nascent RPG game design going on here. The maps and note alone will be enough for someone out there to go and attempt to play some sort of Ur-D&D for their group. 

Part 3: Original Dungeons & Dragons is the most familiar. I have owned the Original set for a while now and even played a few games with it. What is most interesting here are the sections on the 1973 Draft vs. the Published versions and the Brown Box vs. White Box versions.

The biggest feature of this part is the scanned version of the OD&D rules, complete with Hobbits, Ents, and Balrogs.

Part 4: Articles & Additions covers the evolution of Original D&D via the published supplements and articles in Strategic Review/The Dragon. I covered some of this history here as well with my coverage of the Owl & Weasel and White Dwarf Magazines. This one is also quite interesting because of give and take between Gary's vision and others' input. This includes other writers, such as Dave Arneson, and the public.  It seems inevitable that AD&D would rise out of all of this.

This part, the largest, has complete scans of Greyhawk, Blackmoor, and Eldritch Wizardry along with selections from the Strategic Review and The Dragon.

Missing from this history is Gods, Demi-gods and Heroes. No real reason is given for this. I speculate it is due to one of three reasons. 

1. Space. at 576 pages and a MSRP of about $100, this is already a massive tome. 
2. Copyrights. A lot of the material in the original GDH belonged, or now belongs, to other companies, and reprinting was a problem. Of course they did still print the Hobbits.
3. Moral Grounds. It is possible that the editors did not want to include it since it had stats for gods that you could kill. Gods still worshipped and honored by people today. 

I suppose it is also possible that it was not included (much like Swords & Spells wasn't) since it did not further the central thesis of this book; the evolution of D&D. 

A bonus is an original D&D Character sheet. I never owned one of these, so I made a photocopy of it to see how it would work; both in black/white and color.

Not too bad really. Maybe I use this for a character someday.

So. Who should buy this book?

Well, I guess anyone who wants to read more about the history of D&D and is willing to shell out $100 for a coffee-table-like book about it.

#AtoZChallenge2024: N is for Appendix N

The original 1st Edition Dungeon Master's Guide for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons is a treasure trove of material for running an AD&D game. It is also a treasure for running any sort of game. What it lacks in organization is something 2nd Edition attempted (and had some success with) to fix, but it makes up for in sheer volume and charm.

The tome, in addition to various details for the AD&D game, also has many informational appendices. One famous one was Appendix N.

Titled Appendix N: Inspirational and Educational Reading it is the only Appendix that doesn't offer direct advice above "read these."

Now, over the years, there has been something a cottage industry with the circles of "old school" gamers to study these books as if they were some sort of literary canon, ancient wisdom handed down from sages to us mere mortals.

Well...yeah, I mean there are some good books here sure, but you can play and enjoy D&D and never have read any of them really.

There are many links to explore these texts. Here are just a fraction.

• What is Appendix N? (Goodman Games)
• Appendix N (D&D Lore Wiki)
• Gary Gygax's Appendix N (Goodreads)

There are even books about it.

• Appendix N: The Eldritch Roots of Dungeons and Dragons, Edited by Peter Bebergal (the better one)
• Appendix N by Jeffro Johnson

Now, I am not trying to discount the effect these had on the writing of Dungeons & Dragons. I think I made clear at least some of these on H is for Hobbit day. Even the new 5th Edition D&D Player's Handbook revisits this list.

At the time I started playing D&D I had read the Hobbit. And that was about it. I was working through Lord of the Rings at the same time. I would quickly pick up Moorcock's Elric saga which is a natural step before getting into H.P. Lovecraft.

I actually found that a similar list in the Moldvay Basic book was much better. I also created my own "Appendix O" (the DMG has Appendix O) because it comes after N (and O for occult) of my own books that influenced my writing.

The Witches of Appendix N

A little project I have been planning is "The Witches of Appendix N." This would cover the various witches in these books and how I could represent them as AD&D characters. Some are easy, like Morgan Le Fey from Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions or the winter witches of Fafhrd's homeland in Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd & Gray Mouser series. Others have close ones, like the works of H.P. Lovecraft. And some don't have any at all. 

I have never read some of these books despite knowing about them for 45 years, and others I have not read in a very long time. So, it might take a bit for this project to see the light of day. 

--

Tomorrow is O Day, so I am taking us back to where it all began with Original D&D.

#AtoZChallenge2024: J is for Jennell Jaquays and Judges Guild

A double one today, but related topics. You can't talk about the early days of Dungeons & Dragons and not mention the Judges Guild. And you can't talk about the Judges Guild or D&D and not mention Jennell Jaquays.  She was there at the start, but now sadly both have passed.

Judges Guild

The Judges Guild began in 1976 in Decatur, Illinois. Just on the other side of Springfield from where I grew up. Being situated between Chicago/Lake Geneva and Carbondale (SIU) with U of I in Urbana and Judges Guild in between put me on a pipeline of D&D materials that, honestly, I thought everyone in the country had access to. That was not the case, as I discovered later. 

I discovered the Judges Guild very early on. Back then they were one of the very few companies allowed to print D&D compatible products. Among their contributions were a set of Ready Ref Sheets to be used by Dungeon Masters (originally called Judges) and character sheets.  They began to expand out with their own journal and a series of adventures.  From the Judges Guild Journal I came across the Mystic and the Warlock classes. While I didn't like them as such, they convinced me that a Witch class was a viable option.  Though they would also do their own witches with the Psychic Witch and in the adventure Witches Court Marshes. There was also The Illhiedrin Book, which was a fun, if simple adventure. 

But what they are most well known for are two adventures. One is Dark Tower, which I will talk more about below, and the other is The City State of the Invisible Overlord. Both are considered among the best of all of the early D&D products.

I am using them in the past tense. Yeah, they are still around, but they have been dropped by everyone. You used to be able to buy their PDFs from DriveThruRPG, but they are no longer there.  Why?  Well blame it on the son and grandson of the late owner Bob Bledsaw, Sr. BBII and BBIII turned out to be rather racist and held some pretty awful beliefs. You don't have to take my word for it, but I did document it all in a couple of posts a while back.

• Choose a Side, Or One Will Be Chosen For You
• How to Destroy a Legacy in a Week

So, yeah, they might still be around, but they are dead to me and many other gamers. Which is too bad because they once had some quality products.

Jennell Jaquays

Sadly, we lost Jennell earlier this year.  I had never met with her face to face, though we had spoken together many times online. She was a compassionate, understanding, and wonderfully funny soul. I had been looking forward to seeing her at Gary Con this year. BTW, they had a wonderful tribute to her and to Jim Ward, who had also passed this year.

Jennell was there in the beginning.  You can't go through the early days of our hobby and not see her name on something. Whether it was early Judges Guild material, articles in Dragon magazine, or her works, both as a writer and artist, for Dungeons & Dragons, Traveller, The Fantasy Trip, and Runequest.  Her work in the Judges Guild Journal and the Dungeoneer pages are still some of my favorites from the dawn age of RPGs.

While her work on Central Casting is justifiably lauded, it was her Dark Tower adventure in which she gained her highest accolades. It was so good that it not only made the list of The 30 Greatest D&D Adventures of All Time, it is the only non-TSR/WotC entry on the list. It was also updated for D&D 3.5 and again for 5e.  Though I admit, I am also rather partial to her TSR adventure "Talons of Night." Her adventures were so non-linear in their design that the style is now known as "Jaquaysing a Dungeon." With this being the proper spelling.

Her continued work in video games, like Quake, kept her close to RPGs. 

Her wife, Rebecca "Burger Becky" Heineman, has a GoFundMe. Initially, it was to cover medical expenses, which, sadly, she still has.

she created the adventure Dark Tower which 

Goodman Games (a good company) has been producing their Original Adventures Reincarnated series, and Dark Tower is again the only one in the series that is not a TSR adventure. They are also producing a line of material that Jennell had been working on prior to her death. Materials of hers she bought back from Judges Guild.

• Judges Guild Deluxe Collector’s Edition Vol. 2 – The Works of Jennell Jaquays
• 5E – Original Adventures Reincarnated #7: Dark Tower (3-Volume Slipcased Set)
• Dungeon Crawl Classics #105: By Mitra’s Bones, Meet Thy Doom! – Jennell Jaquays Variant Cover
• Dark Tower (original)

I don't have the new Dark Tower 3-book set yet. It is the only one I am missing.

Both these topics represent a loss. One, Jennell the loss due to her death. The other, Judges Guild, the loss because the current owners decided to burn up 40 years of goodwill and fandom in a week. 

Tomorrow is K, and I will talk about the Known World

Mail Call: Black Magic Ritual Kit (1974)

 Well, I finally picked up another "Holy Grail" item. It makes me glad I didn't spend a lot at Gary Con.

This is the "companion" game (I am not sure that is what this really is) to the Witchcraft Ritual Kit (1974) I talked about back in 2020. Both are from Avalon Hill.

Let me just start off with this. Man, the '70s were weird. 

This "game" has a board that looks like an altar set up from an occult bookstore's own manual of rituals. There are a lot of pieces here with various names of demons and angels on it. There is a "Rule book" and a "Manual of Interpretation," just like the Witchcraft Ritual Kit. It is also written by the same "Dr. Brooke Hayward Jennings," whom I still have found nothing of.

What I said about the Witchcraft Kit holds true here, too. It's 1974. The biggest movie in the world right now is "The Exorcist." Time Magazine is talking about the Occult Revival and the Return of Satan. An maybe, just maybe, Avalon Hill knows about a game featuring fantasy magic and wizards coming up. Well, they do know about it; they rejected it just a bit back.  Hippies have not yet become the Yuppies and they are searching for "alternative experiences."  What is a game company known for its war games and battle simulations to do?

Knock together some vaguely occult-looking games, put them into their standard "bookcase games" box, and slap some softcore porny covers on them. Next step...profit! 

Maybe. I don't think these games ever sold very well. There are so few of them on the aftermarket and the ones I do find are really expensive. I got this one from eBay from someone who I don't think knew what they had (based on their other sales), but I was bidding against someone who did know. Thankfully, the amount I set aside for this was much less than my final bid.

I got it just over the weekend.

What treasures are to be found here?

I love it for the cover alone!

AND, as a special bonus (and one of the main reasons I like buying these used games), someone included their own spell!

It has the same production values as the Witchcraft Ritual Kit and the same head-scratching "What do I even do with this?"

"Hey babe, come back to my pad, and I'll show you some magic."

You've got to love the covers, though. It makes me wonder what Avalon Hill product 712 was. (ETA doesn't look like there was one.)

According to BoardGameGeek, quoting the company history, "Top management decided to leave the realm of games and produce a couple of do-it-yourself kits entitled BLACK MAGIC & WITCHCRAFT." These were both advertised for a short while as a "Leisure Time Game." Neither come with, or need, dice (an Avalon Hill staple) and candles and incense are not included.

Both of these "games" are very strange, and I am not sure what events led to their publication, except for the ones I have outlined in speculation above. Neither game appears in the catalog included in the box.

Long-time readers know of a condition called "Traveller Envy," where I am constantly looking for board games to supplement my D&D experience, particularly my campaign "War of the Witch Queens." This is certainly why I bought it, but I am still stumped on how to add it. 

I mean, the demons all seem to be taken from The Lesser Key of Solomon, so I have that working in my favor since so many other games do the same thing. 

Honestly, just reading through it all is fun. It also gives me some ideas for my 1976 and 1979 campaigns. Though in different ways.

In any case, it is a wonderful curiosity from the 1970s Occult Revival and is sure to confuse anyone who tries to clean out my collection after I am gone!