Blog of Endless Blogging

Ahhhhh…while I was letting myself out this morning to go to work at some un-godly early hour, my older beagle(she is a little older than two years) came downstairs and gave me a look of, ‘oh, daddy why do you have to get up so early? Come back to bed and snuggle…then you can get up and type on your bloggity-blarg blog!” Oh, Chewie girl, I wish I could.

[Chewie is, of course, named for Chewbacca…she’s not your average beagle. First off she’s tall and lanky…her parents were both 13” but Chew is a good 15”+ at the shoulder. She is extremely agile, an excellent jumper…if she were a human she’d play for the WNBA. She’s regal…like the beagle equivalent of an Amazon princess. She’s also a picky eater and, despite her breed, is not prone to baying, barking, or howling…except at her younger brother when he gets her riled]

Thing is, there’s so MUCH to blog about…once again, I am getting backlogged with my ideas. I prefer to wait for posts to be at least three-quartered baked before being dispersed into the blog-o-verse, but sometimes, I just can’t help myself.

I’ve got the rest of the module series to pen, as well as offer explanation on my leaving off the Gs and D3 from my Top Ten list. On the heels of that there’s a new, related post about Alejandro and Blackrazor. Right now, this very sec, there’s a post about mass combat waiting at home for me to press “publish” (but I wanted people to have a chance to see last night’s D1-2 post first).

I’m also getting more and more itchy to write a post about the astrology of D&D…at least of its creators Gygax and Arneson. But that requires a bit of rectification on my part (I don’t have their birth times), and while I can do it, I just haven’t taken the time to do it. Plus I AM supposed to be working on my other writing project (*ahem*).

Oh…and Strongheart! Did I mention this guy, yet? I may have in one of my earlier posts about paladins. Strongheart, as portrayed in the Saturday Morning Dungeons & Dragons cartoon is the equivalent of a B/X Paladin…that is to say, he’s a CLERIC. And unless I’m very mistaken, the ONLY cleric to ever appear in the D&D cartoon (I own the series on disk and watched it recently, and I can’t remember a single holy man ever appearing).

Hell, he doesn’t even use a sword…instead he uses a golden hammer (I’m not going to post an image here, but if you google the image “strongheart with hammer” you’ll see a couple different still shots).

As a kid, it was always a treat to see these characters from the toy line pop-up in the cartoon series, seeing as how I owned many of ‘em (yep, Warduke was my favorite). But I recall being vaguely disappointed that Strongheart showed up with a hammer…even a cool golden one.

Does anyone besides me think it strange that this is the closest the cartoon series ever got to putting an iconic character class into the show? The cleric has been around since Day 1…heck, longer than the thief (the cleric was at least present in the original game books), and is a ubiquitous party member…I mean, how many times have you heard players arguing over the need for someone of their number to play a cleric. And yet, in a party of six characters none of the protagonists take the role…and none of the NPCs encountered either!

Hell, there’s even an illusionist and a Halfling (NOT “Halfling thief,” mind you) in different episodes. But no cleric.

I don’t know if this is simply some sort of television censorship (probably) or a gross over-sight on the designers’ part (less likely). But the show, while certainly fun and entertaining, never felt like MY old D&D games, even when I was a kid.

Oh, well enough morning ranting. I’ve got some “real” work to do, but I’ll try to get to some of these blog topics over the next couple days. There’s only a couple weeks left in August, and I’ve been slacking!