First blog.

This is my first foray into the wonderful world of weblogging. Here's an "up to speed" description of what I've been doing or thinking about in the field:

I've just finished reading J.R.R.'s Fellowship of the Ring, and am about to get started on the Two Towers. The more I read, the more the idea of Dungeons & Dragons seems to come from the Lord of the Rings. The pace, the diverse groups of nonhuman characters, the fighting and days of traveling around. And the obsession with geography and maps. A notable feature of D&D that didn't stem from LOTR is the cleric. (Which is strongly based, IMHO, on the Archbishop Turpin from the Song of Roland. I hope I got that reference right, since I don't have Roland here with me.)

I've also been playing the Fellowship of the Rings TCG from Decipher. It's been a lot of fun, but we've noticed some bad clumping of cards in the booster packs. Hopefully this will help keep me from buying more than I should.

All this LOTR stuff has got me jonesin' for some D&D again. I'm working on a clever map-drawing program that will show the players what they can see of a dungeon. (Hopefully, it'll be expandable to show outdoor environments and stuff too.) The idea is to make map making much less time-consuming and move the game along.

That's the summary for now. More news to follow.

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