We were close: the monsters were hopping, the treasure was flowing, the music was thrashing. But real life intruded and our blog-o-thon didn’t make it to the holiday.

But I was the only person on the block who set outside and “played” the keyboard for the very few trick-or-treaters in our neighborhood. I don’t know how to play to the keyboard, but I didn’t know how to play the drums or the bass guitar either.

Regardless, October is still a great month and let’s keep this pointless tradition alive next year.

Also, RIP D.H. Peligro. “One Way Ticket to Pluto” remains the gold standard on the speed I want to play. I also was lucky enough to be mocked by the man himself when I saw them playing in New Orleans.

Praise from Caesar.

Another great artifact: the Sword of Kas. The +6 defender status is only part of its known powers. It causes double damage to any extraplanar entity. It has one prime power, and that could end up being a daily death spell or meteor swarm. And it is consistently evil, highly manipulative, and will attempt to control the user at every opportunity.

I know that if this sword started to command me, I would be right on board, I seldom play a good aligned character; as you know, it is neural evil or bust for this guy. When the sword that I scooped out of the treasure trove starts telling me to use fireball and lightning bolt after raising my major attribute one point, I am listening. Better than listening to that stupid paladin or cleric.

I loved the “artifacts and relics” section of the 1st edition DMs Guide. Of course I did. It had the Eye and Hand of Vecna, the Crown of Might, and my favorite, at least at the time when I first read the tome, the Axe of the Dwarvish Lords.

The blade is a sword of sharpness and the head is a +3 hammer. Also, it expands and contracts so if Migath the Merciless wants to throw it as a hand axe, she can. Assuming Migath is not already a dwarf, she gains all the dwarf abilities about traps and detecting slopes and all the rest. She also gets to live much longer. Biggest drawback appears to be that, over time, she will begin to resemble a dwarf more and more.

You what I say: who cares? If you live until 120 and are still wandering around Greyhawk, no one is going to care what you look like. More likely they will be impressed that you are still alive.

To semi-quote Lenny from The Simpsons, “I don’t know what is so great about this greater basilisk.” Perverse Osmosis did an entire album around the old fashioned regular basilisk, so why do we need to have a greater one?

Apparently they are very good at guarding treasure; they can see both into the Astral and the Ethereal Plane, so that is worth something if you are a neutral evil magic-user looking for something to patrol your keep. They aren’t particularly smart, which means most combat with them is going to the bitterest of ends. They have the usual gaze the turns adventurers into stone, poison in their claws, and really stinky breath. So stinky in fact that it doesn’t even need to be directed at anyone to be potent; it just needs to come out of their mouth and everyone has to save vs. poison or take the permanent dirt nap.

See, not that great.

Although zombies may be a bit overplayed here in the prime material plane, the actual idea of fighting a zombie must be terrifying.

Let’s imagine we are the standard 1st-level party playing themselves AD&D: we have a cleric with a mace, a fighter with scale mail and a battle axe, a ranger with a bow and 15 arrows, a thief who isn’t good yet, and a magic-user with feather fall he can use once a day. We are stumbling through a local tomb and run into 3-24 zombies. Our very by-the-book DM rolls his eight-sided die and there we go: 19 zombies.

Yes, we always get initiative. Yes, our cleric might have a chance to turn 1-4 of them, and the thief can hide in shadow and backstab for double damage, and the ranger can shoot arrows into three of them, and the fighter can chop up a couple, but that leaves somewhere between nine and ten of them left. Our fighter is only two hits away from being dead, and once he goes down, it is all over.