Notes On the Vice D&D Article

So Vice asked me to write a thing about D&D--it went up today and it's here.

Footnotes:

This picture's from this session.

Last e-mail exchange before the article went up:

Unless you relish kicking off a "fake geek girls" panic in the comments, it's probably good to note (in their credits or in my bio) that these photos are from my actual weekly game group.

-Z


Haha good point. Will make a note. 

-J

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Ohhhh, the Facebook comments.

They're actually worse than the comments on the Maxim article, which were mostly just amused. Also there are some awesome girls fucking shit up in the Facebook comments now, so that's fun.

The Richard Lindgard quote is often misattributed to Plato.

The Ice T quote is from just after he finished doing a passage for a Driz'zt audiobook.

The character sheet and sketch are both from Connie's pig-head-helmet-wearing half-elf thief, Gypsillia.

The "spells from Tizane's brain" listed inside the ring of dots are from when she drank a potion allowing her to learn spells by eating a spellcaster brain and then ate a temporal duplicate of Mandy's character's future self.

"a three-headed god that carries a panther-skin bag and throws a magic brick for 5-50 points of damage"--No Cha from Deities and Demigods.

"Patton Oswalt played a drunken dwarf" --as related at Skylight Books.

"Marilyn Manson says he was a dark elf" --as related at Laney's wedding.

"VICE international atrocity expert Molly Crabapple played a thief" --here at our place.

"...Stoya, for a druid with a dog named George?" --ditto.

The fucked up gray factory thing was some scenery I built originally for 40k, the green guy is a Reaper ice devil, the minotaur's also a Reaper, the goblin is a Reaper deep gnome.

You can read some prime Clark Ashton Smith here.

A fine example of Jack Vance's prose is here.

My favorite Lieber is The Snow Women, for example:

This outwardly comic combat had sinister undertones. Particularly when working all together, the Snow Women were reputed to wield mighty magics, particularly through the element of cold and its consequences: slipperiness, the sudden freezing of flesh, the gluing of skin to metal, the frangibility of objects, the menacing mass of snow-laden trees and branches, and the vastly greater mass of avalanches. And there was no man wholly unafraid of the hypnotic power in their ice-blue eyes.

I was surprised to be asked to write an article about D&D for Vice, but the distinguishing characteristic of the world is that it is reliably both large and strange.

Edit: Holy shit...

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