On This Day in 1938...

You don't need ergotized rye, Salem-style witchcraft, or even Cthulhu to stir-up some real mass hysteria. All it takes is a decent script, some voice actors and radio. Oh and someone like Orson Welles or perhaps whomever really wrote the six installments of the Great Moon Hoax.

Re-listening to this classic radio broadcast is a fun Halloween-time thing to do. Especially while we're working on a few more Mucoid posts. But even while we're finishing-up a map of a Mucoid Cylinder, and jotting down doodles for possible tripod-designs, there's something intriguing about taking this sort of thing 180 degrees in the other direction and making it all one big hoax or hallucination, either orchestrated by nefarious ne'er-do-wells with some sort of anarchistic scheme of fomenting maximum chaos and panic (like Trey's Reds or Shaver's Dero?), or maybe it is all part of a sinister plan being put into operation by some evil Fu Manchu-type genius...or maybe it's just a bad batch of contaminated beer or bread, spreading weird visions thanks to the chemical peculiarities of some new strain of fungi accidentally discovered in the depths below some ancient ruins of a Lost City purported to be the ruins of some unknown pre-human race...

In the meantime, Watch the Skies and if you need a bit more Martian cheer during this most wonderfully frightful time of the year, go check out...

http://www.war-of-the-worlds.org/

Happy Halloween!

It Came From You Tube

Recently we were contacted by Andy Haynes. He's part of a group of gamers who are now creating some really funny web shorts explaining various aspects of playing Dungeons & Dragons. Now we're big fans of Bill Cavalier and his Dungeon Bastard series at You Tube, so we were curious about what Andy's group might be doing. The first video we watched was one called 'Attacks of Opportunity and You.' It made both of us laugh quite a bit. Yes, it's about D&D 3.5 mechanics, but it's still really funny and very well done. The group behind this, an up-and-coming outfit named Penfound Productions, have also uploaded a short & silly bit on Alignment, and they have also done an 'Episode 0," as a tentative pilot for a possible series called Rolling High. The Zero Episode looks at Character Creation. It manages to skewer a few sacred cows pretty well...

Here's the Attacks of Opportunity and You video...

We wish Andy and his friends all the best and look forward to their next webisode!
And yes, you might recognize the lead character above from A Light in the Darkness.
Small world, huh?

Maybe the Rolling High Team will do a web short dealing with some Old School faves such as Homebrew Rules, Saving Throws, or TPKs...it would also be fun to have these folks take a look at the Dungeoncrawl Classics RPG...whatever they do, it'll probably be funny, so we'll be watching.