The Thing in the Basement, Part II

After I wrote this post on Monday about my childhood neurosis and ongoing phobia about the basement in my childhood home, my wife goes and posts this image to my Facebook page.

 

She thinks she's pretty funny. She got a good laugh out of it. Me? Not so much.

The Thing in the Basement

Dylan Hartwell, the Digital Orc had a post last week that I somehow missed until this morning. It brought to mind a memory from the past.

Some may call it a memory, others may call it "emotional scarring." Tom-ay-to, to-mah-to.

The home where I grew up had a partially unfinished basement. There was the family room at the bottom of the stairs, then the room doubled back, following the stair-wall to a bathroom and my oldest brother's bedroom. Then there was a door that led to the hallway under the stairs. This area, nearly two-thirds of the basement area--was known as "the messy room."

Immediately inside that door on the left was a series of built-in shelves, attempting to make use of the space under the shelves. On the right was the "fruit room." Straight ahead was the furnace, water heater, water softener, and the laundry. The rest of the space was piled with boxes, clothes, old toys, dad's table saw, etc. There were two pathways through and around "the mess" which led to my father's study.

That room freaked me out.

The whole basement did, actually. The family room was where my oldest brother dragged me on Saturday night to watch "Thriller Theater" or somesuch program with him. It's where I was exposed to great, bad horror movies. It was where I later peeked over the couch as I watched my brothers watching Alien on our very first Betamax. (It was rated 'R' of course so I was restricted from watching it.) But it wasn't just the movies. I was convinced that there was something that lived down there...somewhere. (Actually, I KNEW where it lived. It lived under the stairs, in the space behind the folding chairs and card tables. It lived back there between the decades-old cocktail napkins and paper plates. It lived back there and KNEW, somehow, when you were alone in the basement.)

It also didn't help that the stairway itself wasn't square. One wall gradually slanted inward, so that the bottom of the stairway was narrower than the top. It wasn't really noticeable except to your subconscious mind.

The lights to the entire family room and hallway "complex" were controlled by light switches at the bottom of the stairs, but on the family room side of the wall. Very early in life I mastered the art of hitting ALL the light switches at once as the sprint upstairs began. Just typing this, I can feel on my right arm the sensation of "something about to grab me" that I was always convinced was just about to happen. And you know the worst times? When you'd MISS one of those lights and have to go back downstairs to turn just the one off. Because then, you know, the creature was AWARE that you'd been down there and AWARE that you had to come back down and he was closer to the stairway than he normally was and....

Well, you get the picture.

The basement was finally finished nearly two decades ago. I have a wife and kids of my own. The "messy room" no longer exists. Dad's gone now, but mom still lives in the home. And do you know, even now, some 40 years later, I still feel like my 3-year-old self, fighting the desire to sprint up the stairs as I hit all four light switches with my "about to be grabbed" right hand?

D+D=(πR²)∞ or Something Like That

This so TOTALLY describes a player in my group. Maybe every group has one, I don't know. But this is something that he would stay up nights creating.

This is a man who once took an hour of a gaming session calculating falling damage and terminal velocity in 2nd Edition AD&D game terms.

This is a man who worked the numbers and MacGyverred a short-range nuclear missle from a +2 javelin and some miscellaneous alchemical and magical items.

This is a man who.... Well, you get the idea. Like I said, it may be true that every group has one, I consider ours to be the best. He's not only an engineer, he's a chemist, loves geology and fossils, and works for the Government in a forensic role. I'm an English major and an attorney: all that "math stuff" is arcane writing to me. I look up to this guy for what he knows and what he does. What he does in the game? Well, I have to respect that too, even though it causes no end of trouble.

Remember the story from last month about an NPC who had a ranger's wolf scare him? That actually happened over a decade ago. It was our engineer's wolf; this was the ranger who designed the "javelin of destruction."

Suffice it to say: the "crying stableboy who peed himself" is legendary around our table now.

It's become one of our catch-phrases and one of our favorite memories. In fact, NONE of his characters is allowed to speak to children for this very reason.

I don't think I'm going to let him see this picture, though. It may give him ideas.

**h/t to Tom at Yawning Portal for the image.

Will o' Wisps and Basilisk Smoke

Yeah, yeah.... Put your bestiaries and rulebooks away. I know that basilisks don't smoke.

Except on those rare occasions where starving adventurerers throw their recent kill on the spit. Yeah. I went there. Merry Christmas.

Instead, the title means to me the etherealness of my goals and dreams for this last week of 2011. I left my office on the Friday prior to Christmas with great goals and ideas of what I was going to accomplished over my ten-day holiday vacation. There were some great gaming goals: posts, adventures, maps, and even some miniature painting.

Ask me which of those have actually been accomplished. Go ahead.

Nothing.

I sat down Christmas afternoon and *POOF* it was all gone. Motivation, ideas, germs, drive, etc. It was all gone. Much like basilisk smoke in the wind, completely irretrievable. I've tried for days to remember, and all my ideas are gone.

That's depressing enough to drive me into a mini-buying spree. For that, however, I need to wait for my next paycheck. So...strike two.

I guess I'll go through and update my 2011 totals and see if a good night's sleep does any good. As for all of my friends: may you have sufficient creativity and imagination to get you to the New Year.

Stay dicing, my friends.

**EDIT: Wow. Could I be any more depressing? I guess I could if I really tried, but it's not worth the effort. I found a couple minis pictures on my hard drive and realized that I was going to do a review of some Pathfinder minis. So, hopefully, that means my brain is back on board!

Motivations

This post is dedicated to every DM who has ever had a Warmage -- or a trigger-happy magic user of ANY type -- in their party.