View From the Bushes

I was reading the latest 900 words column by Jim Ward of Fast Forward Entertainment. It's a column similar to "View from the Bushes," only interesting, funny, insightful, and longer. In any case, he was talking about his experiences playing D&D with Gary Gygax back in the 70's. Now first off, I'm obviously jealous. He's very modest, but to give you an analogy it's like he's saying he learned Aikido from Morihei Ueshiba or Perl from Larry Wall or Christianity from...Okay that's probably a stretch.

At one point in the story, he mentions how tired he is of hearing gaming stories. I definitely agree with that. I've found just about every gaming story I've ever heard to be tedious, juvenile, incomprehensible and plebeian. Except my own, which tend to at least be better than anything starring Ben Affleck. Of course, the proof is in the pudding, so for your edification I offer the story of the nether cow.

We were in high school going through a heavily modified Temple of Elemental Evil. I was playing a Drow (In my defense I'm pretty sure this was before "The Crystal Shard" was published). We ran into a wight and the mage asked my advice on what spell he should cast. I told him to polymorph it.

"Into what?"

"A cow."

Well the DM being capricious and cruel (as most good DM's are), decided that it worked but only succeeded in changing the wight from a glowing eyed, life-sucking undead, into a glowing-eyed, life-sucking undead who could trample and gore. So we fled.

Not too far away, our dwarven fighter had recently managed to escape from captivity wearing nothing more than what god gave him. As he scoured the dungeon looking for arms and armor (finding some of the former and none of the latter due to his diminutive stockiness), he stumbled onto the room where we had left the nether cow. By this point I was using my insta-evil-cred(TM) to negotiate with one of the bad guys. The negotiations took place at the end of a large hall with multiple exits. Suddenly, like a scene from a Scooby Doo cartoon, I catch sight of a naked dwarf clutching a small arsenal of weapons running repeatedly into and back out of the hall being chased by the "Nether Cow." The cow won that contest, and there was much laughter.

Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero,
Ross