Did not expect to still be here, but eh

Let’s play the biggest game of kick the can on the internet.

They tend to scorn their old salt lick when it's been there for weeks and it's all dwindled and sad-looking, and the arrival of a pristine new salt lick is always a major pasture event* :) Kind of like when you get to open an exciting new bar of soap after weeks of showering with a pitiful little sliver of old soap, impatiently waiting for it to End.

i'm not as well-versed in literary magazines as i should be (trying to fix that), but here are short story collections i suggest:

lesser known monsters of the 21st century by kim fu (speculative fiction, horror). personal favorite story: "pre-simulation consultation xf007867"

the paper menagerie and other stories by ken liu (speculative fiction). personal favorite story: "the litigation master and the monkey king"

slasher girls and monster boys by various (horror). personal favorite story: "the birds of azalea street"

what we fed to the manticore by talia lakshmi kolluri (literary fiction). personal favorite story: "the hunted, the haunted, the hungry, the tame"

africa risen by various (afrofuturism, speculative fiction). personal favorite story: "a dream of electric mothers"

a small apocalypse by laura chow reeve (literary fiction). personal favorite story: "real bodies"

the secret lives of church ladies by deesha philyaw (literary fiction). personal favorite story: "dear sister"

a phoenix first must burn by various (speculative fiction). personal favorite story: "wherein abigail fields recalls her first death and, subsequently, her best life"

woman hollering creek and other stories by sandra cisneros (literary fiction). personal favorite story: "woman hollering creek"

bliss montage by ling ma (literary fiction). personal favorite story: "yeti lovemaking"

how to love a jamaican by alexia arthurs (literary fiction). personal favorite story: "the ghost of jia yi"

radicalized by cory doctorow (speculative fiction). personal favorite story: "radicalized"

life ceremony by sayaka murata (literary fiction, horror). personal favorite story: "life ceremony"

shit cassandra saw by gwen e. kirby (literary fiction). personal favorite story: "here preached his last"

That's one of those question where the answer hovers somewhere between "no, with a couple of massive caveats" and "yes, but not in the way most people think".

A lot of AD&D 1st Edition's GMing practices are pretty hardass by modern standards; however, they need to be understood in the context that the game's authors were writing for a target audience who mainly played the game in college wargaming clubs, where players would frequently transfer between groups and group sizes tended to be very large – six players per GM was considered a bare minimum, and up to a dozen player characters in a single party was by no means unheard of!

In particular, players would often bring their character sheets with them when hopping between groups, and it was considered a faux pas for a GM to reject an incoming player's existing character or request any substantive changes be made, so managing expectations could be quite challenging; even as late as 2nd Edition, the Dungeon Master's Guide contains extensive discussion of how to gracefully handle players bringing existing characters with them who aren't necessarily a good fit for the present game's tone or resource economy.

The upshot is that the culture of play these iterations of Dungeons & Dragons are targeting inherently obliges the GM to take a much firmer hand to keep things on track than a pickup game that draws players exclusively from within the GM's established friend group might – and to be sure, some GMs abused these expectations to act like petty tyrants, but some contemporary GMs do that, too.

A big part of the modern perception that 1E and 2E were extraordinarily player hostile, meanwhile, has nothing to do with the previously discussed GMing practices; rather, it emerges from the transition away from that culture of play in a slightly unexpected way.

In brief, back when D&D was mainly played by wargaming clubs, it was fashionable to run pre-written adventure modules competitively at conventions; the competition wasn't between players, but between parties, with multiple groups running the same adventure in parallel to contend for prizes. Tournament play sometimes chose its winners based on the fastest real-time completion of the module in question, or set specific objectives within the module which would award points when completed, a bit like speed-running or achievement-hunting in a video game (though neither practice existed yet at the time).

It was the survival module, however, that quickly emerged as the most popular tournament format. In a survival tournament, each player would provide or was furnished with a binder containing a fixed number of pre-generated character sheets, switching to the next character sheet in the set as each preceding character died; the winning group was the one whose last surviving character's corpse hit the dirt furthest from the dungeon entrance.

Many of 1E's most popular adventure modules, including the infamous Tomb of Horrors, were originally written as survival modules to be run at tournaments in conventions. As such, they were designed to kill off player characters both quickly and efficiently, so as to reduce the likelihood that the tournament would run overtime and get kicked out of the convention venue. When they were later cleanup and repackaged as commercial adventure modules, their text rarely bothered to explain any of this – who doesn't recognise a survival module when they see one?

The answer to that question, of course, is kids who didn't come up through the mentorship system of the college wargaming clubs, but taught themselves how to play D&D from first principles using books they bought at their local hobby stores – and when D&D's popularity unexpectedly exploded in the early 1980s, there were suddenly rather a lot of them!

Why publish survival modules as your primary format of published adventure?

"Because that's what we had -- they were already laid out for publication. Why not publish them and make some money off it?"

Did it ever occur to you at the time that publishing adventures like these would shape the larger D&D culture's expectations of what play was supposed to look like?

"It’s hard to get that context just from reading the original Dungeons and Dragons books. If nine groups learned D&D from the books, they’d end up playing nine different games.

"Mornard told us about an early D&D tournament game – possibly in the first Gen Con in Parkside in 1978? Gary Gygax was DMing nine tournament teams successively through the same module, and whoever got the furthest in the dungeon would win. You’d expect this to take all day, and so Mike was surprised to see Gary, looking shaken, wandering through the hallways at about 2 PM. Mike bought Gary a beer and asked him what had happened – wasn’t he supposed to be DMing right now?

“It’s over!” replied a stunned Gary Gygax.

"Gary described how the first group had fared. Walking down the first staircase into the dungeon, the first rank of fighters suddenly disappeared through a black wall. There was a quiet whoosh, and a quiet thud. The players conferred, and then they sent the second rank forward, who disappeared too. The rest of the players followed.

"The same thing happened to the next tournament team, and the next. Players filed into the unknown, one after another. And they were all killed. The wall was an illusion, and behind it was a pit. Eight out of the nine groups had thrown themselves like lemmings over a cliff; only one group had thought to tap around with a ten foot pole. That group passed the first obstacle, so they won the tournament.

At the 1985 Labour party meet, the motion to support LGBT rights as a party was passed due to a block vote from mining unions.

Submitted for classification by @spiderqueenpc

This one hurt, her work had such a profound effect on my life, thoughts, and politics.

May her memory be a blessing