I don't know why, but the last few days I have been suffering intermittent bouts of severe dizziness. I'm off the meds the doctors tried because they weren't doing anything good for me (big surprise--hah, typical) and have been for a week, so I don't think it is an issue of withdrawal.

The dizziness is not fun, though; makes it very tough to do anything and especially get any work done. Worse, it suddenly spikes and dips, so I'll be sitting here feeling just a little woozy, and then suddenly, BAM! I'll nearly fall over, as though someone just tweaked all the cilia of my inner ear.

Seriously, WTF?!

I have, however, also been having the most freakingly in-cred-ible dreams lately.

On the artwork front, I've finished two more illos for Duncan. I've been holding off on putting any of them up in my gallery because we're/I'm still tweaking a couple of them, so the current finals for a couple earlier attempts may not be the finals at all (though they aren't far from it).

I'm also concerned I've lost one of the finals, as the low-res final I sent to Duncan does not seem to have a corresponding high-res copy on my drive. PANIC! CHEW NAILS! GIANT WATERING EYES OF VULNERABILITY! Eh. I can recreate the final easily enough from the earlier versions and guidance from the low-res copy, but WTF?! Clearly I had it at one point, and then it...walked off my hard drive?...hid in some electro-magnetic crevice?..or what?

Finally, I found this amusing: I Googled into a copy of Dragon #10 (circa 1977) and therein immediately saw an article entitled D&D Options: Orgies, Inc., which I discovered was all about how to get characters to want to part with their vast adventuring wealth. Ok. The title is shock-value, right?

Nuh! There is an option that reads as follows:

5) Orgies. Fighting Men (excluding Rangers and Paladins), Bards, Thieves, and all Chaotics (excluding Monks). Lusty indulgence in wine, women, and song. Maximum expenditure is 500 GP per level per night (250 GP if recuperating and under 50%). A player may orgy continuously as many days as he has constitution points, but then must rest for as many days as he orgied. (For effects on Psionic Powers, see Appendix II.)

Which is followed at the end of the article by said appendix, the idea of which just makes me giggle:

APPENDIX II:EFFECTS OF AN ORGY ON PSIONIC POWERS

Each 20 GP spent on an orgy will reduce psionic point level by one. Every 100 GP spent will have a 10% cumulative change of eliminating one special ability secretly determined by the referee. The psionic points are regenerated normally, while a special ability is returned with each 100 psionic points regained (or all lost points are re-generated, whichever is least).

EXAMPLE: A 4th Level could spend 2000 GP in one day, gaining 500 experience points and losing 100 psi points and two special abilities. For convenience, start regeneration the next day at 6:00 AM. Assuming only one day was spent orgying, the character must spend the next day resting quietly. With a regeneration rate of 12/hour, the character will be completely recovered psionically in just under nine hours, though his hangover won’t disappear completely until the next morning.

Seriously, right? Plus there's a big, raunchy, 70's high-school notebook-style cartoon illustration of orcs and elves and whatnot going at it in a giant fit of debauchery, including showcasing bared elf boobies.

I daresay you wouldn't find any of that in today's weeniefamily-oriented corporate-gaming culture terrified of offending anyone in the least with even the very idea of imaginary people doing things with their naughty bits.

(But somehow, in comparison, talk of chopping things into bloody bits with sharp objects is A-OK!? One would think sex would be more family-friendly, since sex creates families and violence destroys them...oh you crazy witch-burning Puritans, still influencing our modern culture with your wacky social mores from beyond the grave! Get outta here! No, seriously. Get out.)

How I pine for the lost innocence of yester-year's gamer geek, who was free to look at badly drawn elf boobies and create rules detailing the effects of debauchery on character stats and have both published in an official game magazine.

Oh, for the days of yore when we actually wrote serious, complex, convoluted rules for every possible event that could ever, no matter how remotely plausible or uncommon in play, take place in a game and put them into a monthly subscription format that people paid real money to await like Christmas-in-their-mailbox and read!