Not GILTy

Hey, what happened to all the game idea posts? There was a lovely harvest of them early this week and then nothing. Is it because arctic weather snapped back into effect?

There ought to be a name for that last blast of winter that comes after a week or so of premature warmth, just when you start to let yourself think that spring has arrived. It's like Indian Summer's evil twin. I've heard people call the sneaky warm period "Strawberry Spring", but I don't know if that's real or just from a Steven King story. I was thinking something more like "Fuck You Winter".

Yeah, you're probably going to say, where are my game idea posts? Good point, but I did just put up 1300 words on Superman, sex pulps, and the secret history of weightlifting. That ain't knockwurst! I do have a few new GILT ideas, or reworked old ones, but they don't seem to come as fastly and furiously when you're living in gamer exile. Actually, there was a period, about two months after leaving Boston, when I felt like I was generating scores of beautiful mad ideas a day. I think I was sweating them out of my system or something. But now, not so much. Maybe I need more structure to bounce things off of. If I started up something like bryant's old weekly idea mash-ups, would people play along?

You can always stroll down memory lane with my de.icio.us/robotnik/gilt tag. All of my old LJ games-I'd-like-to are there, and a number of yours, although I know I'm missing some goodies.

Treasure Type E

"OK: any historic figure."
"I'd fight Gandhi."
"Good answer."
"How about you?"
"Lincoln."
"Lincoln?"
"Big guy, big reach. Skinny guys fight 'til they're burger."

So Clinton Nixon and Vincent Baker have been "interviewing" each other in a thread at Fair Game—I put scare quotes around "interviewing" because it looks suspiciously like two friends just having a fun, free-ranging conversation—and one of them asked the other who their dream gaming group from history would be. They both had great answers:

Clincent: I'd like to play a game of Dogs in the Vineyard with Thomas Jefferson, Mae West, Wyatt Earp, Mark Twain, and Ambrose Bierce. Twain's the GM, of course. Jefferson's all "the-what-the-what" when he finds out what happened in the western US. "A theocratic governorship? Nonsensical fantasy!" And we all laugh, and Mae's character shoots someone in the face and then she winks at me across the table.

Vinton: We're playing My Life with Master. It's me, Jesus, Salvador Dali, and Christopher Robin Milne (as an adult), with Michael S. Miller GMing. Jesus gets really into it, he's all like "yessss masssster" and rolling his eyes wildly, but Michael makes Salvador Dali cry. Christopher Robin Milne OWNS the horror revealed.

I especially like that "of course" Twain's the GM. Like, duh.

I'll have to think about who my dream gaming group would be. Some of you have already heard my reverie about Elvis Presley's Jungle Room at Graceland, and how it is the Platonic Ideal of the 1970s rec room, and how certain I am that if Elvis had lived only a few more years he would have played D&D there with the Memphis Mafia, because that is so clearly what the room is built for. But it wouldn't have been a dream game, it would have been lame as hell, because Elvis wouldn't DM, he'd get Sonny West or somebody to do it, and Sonny would just totally kiss up to Elvis and give his character 18/00 Strength and 18/00 Charisma and tons of magic items and every other dungeon room would just be elf girls in white cotton panties.

I'm posting a lot, huh? You might think that means I have no work to do... but really it means I have lots of work that I don't want to do. I want somebody to "interview" me!