Dungeons and Dragons 4.0 Announced...
Bush praises Wizards of the Coast's "Bold support of abstinence only initiatives."
Without it there would be no World of Warcraft. Without it Jack Chick would just be a fundamentalist freak, rather than a fundamentalist freak with a cult fandom, and Tom Hanks wouldn't cry in the dark whenever anyone mentions the words mazes and/or monsters. Without it Rivers Cuomo's fan base would have a collective 50% less body fat. Most importantly, without it I would have had a real job between the years 2000 and 2005, when I fed my family (barely) writing books about buried treasures, hideous monsters, and elven maids with improbably large breasts.
Yes, today it was leaked that Wizards of the Coast will be releasing a 4th edition of the venerable Dungeons and Dragons role-playing game, which for 30 odd years has lurked in the dankest corners of the pop culture basement, inspiring freaks and geeks to acts of d4 heroism, to songs about of all sorts to swing singlehanded fuel the explosive growth of the Slim Jim, Cheeto, and Mountain Dew brands. Well, they didn't really so much announce 4th ed. as announce they were announcing something, and then forget to hide the new forum they'd cleverly disguised under the name "D&D 4th Edition Forum"
For those of you curious (and bereft of hope) enough to care, here's a screenshot of the now removed forum.
The official announcement is scheduled for tomorrow, at
GenCon Indy 2007, a 4 day celebration of all those things I find far cooler than any 34 year old man ever should.
So if you, like me, felt a strange disturbance in the force today, a tingle in your spider-pants, and a desperate need to hole up in the library with pencil, ruler, crinkled graph paper, and an annotated edition of The Bloody Crown of Conan... now you know why.
Patrick Y invented italics, actually, back in the summer of '02, but traded away the patent for a pack of Wheat Thins, and a favor to be named later.
Little Wizard Needs Food...BADLY
A pair of chaotic evil gamers named Michael and Iana Straw have plead guilty to child neglect after failing to stop playing Dungeons & Dragons Online to feed their two young children.
The children of Michael and Iana Straw, a boy age 22 months and a girl age 11 months, were severely malnourished and near death last month when doctors saw them after social workers took them to a hospital, authorities said. Both children are doing well and gaining weight in foster care, prosecutor Kelli Ann Viloria told the Reno Gazette-Journal.
Now, I'm no DM but I would wager their actions will certainly result in an alignment change and or a loss of level or Paladin status. Oh, and jail. I find this an especially odd story because I've never heard of hardcore gamers that didnt have a treasure hoard of delicious snacks within an arm's flop of the keyboard...
They had food, they just chose not to give it to their kids because they were too busy playing video games.
Oh, well that explains that.
I knew they had food though. The only remaining mystery is where did the pair get all the gold pieces come from to pay for the high speed internet?
Michael Straw is an unemployed cashier, and his wife worked for a temporary staffing agency doing warehouse work, according to court records. He received a $50,000 inheritance that he spent on computer equipment and a large plasma television, authorities said.
I guess somewhere in the orgy of spending and gaming there was some actual, real-life sexual contact becuase the two dumb asses rolled-up a couple of new human characters. Frankly, those two babies are off on a quest to a better place.
Why couldnt it have been World of Warcraft? Or meth? Dungeons and Dragons needed this PR hit like a prismatic spray to the face.
Since Gary Gygax conjured up a turn-based role playing game and published it through his company, TSR his wonderful game has been called everything from satanic to brainwashing.
For now, their vile campaign is at an end. Ogres Michael and Iana, hand in your character sheets: your're done. You face the maximum banishment of a dozen years in one of Nevada's dungeons. The couple are imprisoned in a soul trap where inmates that harm children are preyed upon at every turn. Their two younglings are doing well and putting on weight in foster care.
Finally, some in the media will take this incident as an opportunity to beat up video games...but I have another axe to grind. I would like to point out that this could never have happened if they were playing D & D like God intended - with a pencil, character sheet, painted figurine, and bags of doritos and dice. There's just no way that you could assemble an entire campaign of such heartless souls that would play through the cries of hungry babies. That's why we pick up swords in the first place. To smite such evil.