Listen to this episode here.
The Experimental Role-Playing Laboratory, or ERPL, was a thrice a year mini convention put on by students at my college back in the 00s and 10s and onward to this day. It's how I got into indie games. I still think about it, and the people I met there, to this day. They still mean something to me. What might I still mean to them?
Written, edited, and performed by Sam Dunnewold
Tristan Zimmerman at the Molten Sulfur blog
Steven’s newsletter and novels. Try Black Velvet to start.
Transcript available at www.diceexploder.com
Music by Blue Dot Sessions: https://app.sessions.blue/
My games: sdunnewold.itch.io
Follow me on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/diceexploder.com
Transcript
Sam (narration): Dice Exploder after image number three. The letters.
Tristan: Okay, so, um, these games were usually run in study rooms in the student union. And, the winter term one shots always happened the same weekend as the annual winter ball and the winter ball was a, you know, a little bit of a bachanal.
And there were always students who would meet somebody at the ball and then go looking for a place to hook up, and the ball was in the adjacent building to the student union.
Sam: And they're they're connected by a tunnel, so you didn't have to go outside too crucially. Yeah.
Tristan: Which is important in Minnesota winter. Um, and so there were always, always, always students who thought that they were the first people in human history to have realized, oh, right, we could go hook up in one of the study rooms. Ah, genius.
And our characters were in this haunted house and like, oh no, this serial killers coming for us and one of the party has betrayed the rest of the party and has teamed up with a serial killer and the rest of the party has fled. And oh man, we've holed up. We're barricading the door like this is it, this is the climax. Like edge of our seats. Oh no, the bad guys are getting in.
And then the door swings open with a couple looking to hook up and like. Screams, right?
Sam (narration): From fall 2008 to spring 2012, I was a student at Carleton College, a small school in a small Minnesotan town, the same small town where I'd grown up. The admissions department liked to describe the student body as quirky, which felt to us cringe and mockable, imprecise, and probably entirely accurate.
Carleton was on a quirky trimester schedule. Three 10 week terms per year. Each punctuated in the middle by midterm break a Monday off for everyone to rest a little, but the campus RPG scene did not rest. instead each midterm break three times a year. We put on a little mini convention called the Experimental Role-Playing Laboratory, or ERPL for short, and we ran quirky little one shots all weekend long.
This is where I met my friend Tristan Zimmerman, now of the Molten Sulfur website and blog.
Tristan: It was this really remarkable scene because. You know, it's, it's once every 10 weeks. It's, this is happening a lot and people are bringing lots of different stuff, lots of different emotional experiences to the table.
And of course we're all, to some extent, new at this, right? Even the folks who've been playing since they were children, you know, okay, so you've been playing for 10 years. There's nobody.
Sam: but now you're playing as an adult for the
Tristan: Yeah. Yeah. and so there's, there's all this, this, real new emotional experiences that we're all having as, as, you know, young adults. and that was wild.
Sam (narration): At the experimental role-playing laboratory, We experimented. I played fiasco for the first time, a game that put me on the path to where I am today, to making the audio you're listening to right now. I ran my first original game, a hack of fate where players started as amnesia and gradually filled in their abilities as they played.
And I experimented socially. What did it mean to be a freshman learning from your peers? What did it mean to have a crush on someone you were playing pretend with? What did it mean to be an upperclassman teaching freshmen how to play these games?
Sam: So what do you remember about Steven Henry?
Tristan: So, Steven, was and remains an alumnus of Carlton College who was, I don't know, I wanna say Steven is, is five, 10 years older than we are. so, Enough of an age difference that at the time, when you were 19 years old, like, oh my God, we're still in the, you know, figuring out what adulthood is, phase of adulthood. And like Steven is married and he has a nine to five job. Like, wow, he's a real grownup.
But Steven would come back to campus for these one shots for ERPL, and he would run these, uh, these games.
And when we were there, Stephen had a reputation as being an excellent gm. And that reputation was well deserved. The man was, and I assume remains an excellent gm, like really top notch. and so you know, our, the, the games in Ural, they would have waiting lists and Steven's games always had waiting lists and, you know, you would show up even if you didn't get in. And the, the desperate hope that somebody wouldn't show up and you could take their seat. And, you know, these were phenomenal games. .
Sam (narration): I knew Steven was a phenomenal GM because I had known him since I was in the third grade. That's when I learned to play Magic the Gathering, and I started spending all my afterschool hours at the Zone. the local game store. I'd hang out with the cool older nerds.
And none were cooler than Steven Henry with his gorgeously painted Warhammer chaos space Marines, his cleverly themed magic decks, and his absolutely dominating skill at Raiden two, one of the store's, few precious arcade machines.
So when I got to Carleton and I learned about the chance to play in a Steven Henry one shot, I was shot through with adrenaline. It had been years since the Zone had closed, years since I'd seen him. Who was he now? What was he doing coming back and gracing us with his presence? Would he even remember who I was?
Somehow I snuck off a waiting list and I got into the game.
I remember walking into the study room that night and realizing how perfect a space it was for roleplaying games. A big round table and comfortable chairs with just enough room to fit six or seven people cozily. A big blackboard that a GM could easily draw notes on. And essentially nothing else - no distractions.
I walked in, and there was Steven, and there was Tristan.
Tristan: He would write these scenarios and then he would create highly bespoke characters for them. Right. Steven would say, okay, I'm going to create these characters that all have secrets and their secrets interact with one another like you would find in a good parlor larp.
and, you would get your character sheet and you'd get a sealed envelope. And the sealed envelope had the character's real bio in it, and often there would be a little piece of in universe fiction written in that character's voice, you know, from a first person perspective or, you know, something along those lines to, to really help you inhabit the character.
Sam (narration): Steven would run these scenarios using Death's Gray Land, his own home brew horror system. In Death's Gray Land. Getting hurt was fucking scary. You didn't have hit points to hide behind. Instead, any injury meant it was time to roll on the injury table, a massive percentile thing that indicated where you'd been hurt a second table for how bad it was.
Tristan: So it could be like, oh no, I got hit in the pelvis. Like, Ooh. And everybody winces because they know that the pelvis injury table is one of the nastier ones. It's like, oh. Oh no, you know, you rolled the result where like this particular artery wasn't just severed, it was destroyed, and you will bleed out in this many minutes and, and the medic cannot save you.
Sam (narration): And with the threat of terrible violence hanging over her head, the dread of these scenarios built and it built. It was intense. It fucking ruled.
Tristan: The one that I remember the best, was one where we were playing as urban explorers, and there was this abandoned hotel that was going to be destroyed like the next day or whatever, right? Like scheduled demolition is almost upon us. And we said, okay, we've all wanted, all of our characters have always wanted to explore this hotel. This is our last opportunity, one last op, uh, chance to get in. So we're all gonna go 📍 in together.
And you know, of course. Of course there was a serial killer hold up in the hotel. And of course we all had secrets that were somehow tied to what was going on with the serial killer. And of course, none of us knew that the others were related to this.
And you know, of course, you know, one character was like, oh, you know, my great motivation is my son disappeared last year. And golly, it would be nice to know. Of course, her son was murdered by the serial killer. And of course, you know, his skin, his, his, his face was, was, you know, hanging in the room of faces and,
Sam: The room of faces. (laughter)
Sam: I remember playing the first or second one of these that I did and like going home and trying to like, reproduce it with, you know, I'm doing like a fate system, trying to do horror one shot. I don't know if that's gonna work out. Like writing, writing these letters, trying to do a thing and it went. Okay.
But the thing that I think worked, even when I, you know, relatively untalented 19-year-old, like put together was like, it feels so special to have a secret, you know? Like it, and it feels so much like someone cared enough about me to like, write this for me. You know, like this, this letter is just for me, it really is something that like, like,
and you know, Steven hasn't published these, as far as I know, he wasn't repeating them either. And so it is just like you and him are the only people who ever read this letter. You know,, like the secrets came out, but the letter itself was like, just is like for your eyes only. Anything could be in there.
I just, I just loved that so much.
Sam: yeah, so, uh, I remember doing two and, the second one that I remember doing, took place at a World War. I like, uh, hospital, for wounded troops.
And, I have that letter here, uh, and I thought I might read it out. Um,
Tristan: It’s even in the original envelope. It's still got the, the, like Steven would print them out at his day job!
Sam: Delta Dental.
Tristan: And, and he would, you know, use the, the company letterhead because it was free.
Sam: Alex Campbell. Scott Scottish Rifleman. Uh, I remember Steven being disappointed that I couldn't do a Scottish accent. okay, so the first thing I see in here is I've got a character sheet, um, with stats. So as archetype soldier, reputation corporal, uh, I have fortitude, strength, toughness, agility, perception, superstition, attractiveness, sanity, blood and life damage. I'm missing a leg. I've got a concussion I'm 230 pounds minus whatever a leg weighs.
Uh, and then I have the letter.
You can't believe those filthy Bosch knocked your leg off Bastards. At least you got eight of them first. Damn. But that wound hurts. And your ears feel like they're stuffed full of cotton. At least they've got a decent hospital bed with actual white clean sheets and your partial deafness, it's really been rather relaxing after the unending cacophony of the guns on the front.
Well, the deafness was relaxing until you started hearing other things, distant, faint things. The scratching of claws or maybe fingernails under your bed during the night.
and the whispering, You hear it whenever someone walks by your bed. The nurses each have their own quiet voice that mutts and whispers in an undertone as they pass. So to the other wounded and the doctor.
Nurse Skillings voice constantly repeats lists of tasks in a cool clinical tone. Nurse staffer on the other hand, her voice likes to talk about children. Sweet, dear little children playing, running, and drowning in their own blood.
And Dr. Weston, the surgeon, You distinctly heard. Hmm. Good materials. Missing a piece, but that can be remedied, perhaps. Tissue grafts. Yes. Yes. You don't know where these voices are coming from or if you're imagining them, no one else seems to hear them.
Great shit. I mean, come on. It's just like great. It's great
Tristan: Uh, uh, fingernails scratching, under your bed, phenomenal little detail right there, like sets the mood so well.
Sam: and I remember immediately like my recollection of playing that game is this feeling of like, I should have, like, I remember asking like, so do I believe in ghosts? Like, what's going on here? And Steven being like, yeah, you're probably not, you're probably not. Like the voices are weird, but it's probably just after, after the concussion thing, like you probably don't believe in ghosts. And me being like. I'm gonna believe a ghost anyway 'cause that seems more fun and like really just like leaning into it and feeling like I'd let the character down somehow because like, oh, like that wasn't what the character was supposed to be.
But reading it back, that's totally what the character's supposed to be. You're feeling here, fucking ghosts everywhere, man. Like, uh, it makes me feel good to go back and read it and be like, oh, I didn't fuck this up. Like I did the right thing.
Tristan: Unfortunately in the years after we graduated, people stopped signing up for his games. I don't know anybody from the, the relevant years, so I'm not able to say if there was any particular reason or just people's interests changed or it was, you know, a low period of membership in the club.
after a couple of of sessions where I believe he had few enough people show up to the table that he just couldn't run. He said, you know what? This phase of my life is over and stopped running these, these games at, at ERPL.
And you know, I do think the experience is poorer for it, but I, you know, I recognize that that life has changed. So
Sam: Well, anyone who's not a student or regularly on campus is gonna get lost to institutional memory, right? Like, uh, you know, my partner has been, going back to direct the, like Winter Theater show several times in the past decade. And, after the COVID lockdown in particular, ETB, the like student run theater thing just didn't exist anymore because there weren't people on campus who remembered how to do it.
Tristan: Everything on campus is always four years away from being lost forever.
Sam (narration): When I left Carleton, I left ERPL. But it had opened something new in me, about how I thought about these games, how big a world there was to explore out there.
I left Steven, too. For the second time, just like in middle school when our old game store had closed down.
But I remembered ERPL, Steven, my college friends, and the games we played. Sometimes I wondered if they remembered me, too.
===
Sam: can I ask how old you are? I actually don't know how old you
Steven: yeah, I, I graduated Carleton in, uh, 2004. Um, and so I am gonna be 44 this fall. So yeah, I'm, I'm an old man.
Sam: yeah, yeah.
Sam (narration): This, of course, is Steven Henry. I got his email from my dad, who knows his dad. then I procrastinated emailing him for three months until Tristan independently found his email and put us in touch.
He's a novelist now, writes about two books a year, mostly detective stories in his Erin O'Reilly series. They're loosely based on an old RPG campaign he ran and his wife's character from it
I asked Steven if he was open to talking about ERPL, and in his reply He told me yes he was.
He also quoted an entire Ogden Nash poem, seemingly from memory, and he followed it up with a quip from Gloin the dwarf. We set a time to record.
Steven: ERPL was founded, I wanna say in 2003, And it was founded by a very close friend of mine named Kira. And she was very active in the sci-fi fantasy community at Carlton. And she knew that role-playing games were an important social interaction for her and for me and for a lot of other people, like our whole group of people. That was pretty much what we did when we were doing schoolwork.
Sam (narration): So it was Kira who thought up the idea of once a term all getting together and trying out something new of playing together. She did the legwork of putting it together and so it was until Steven graduated and left, He was gone from Minnesota for a year, but when he came back, herbal was still going. If perhaps limping along, maybe you could run a game or two and inject a little bit of life back into it.
Steven: Like I still knew a couple of people who had been freshmen, uh, who are now like juniors and seniors. And, um, so I just plugged myself back in and ran some games and I liked discovered, I liked it a lot and I just kept doing it. And uh, my games were pretty popular. I, I think that they were pretty enjoyable for people and For me, you know, as a writer, as a job, also telling stories is something that fulfills me on a pretty deep personal level, and it, it is what I was put on earth to do. I can't put it any better way than that. And I just, I loved just sitting down to a session and say, you know, you hand out the character sheets and then you sit, you set the stage and you just get right into it
Sam (narration): I asked Steven to walk me through his process. What was it like to prepare one of these sessions? What was it like to write those letters?
Steven: This was something that I did whenever I ran a horror game after I first thought of it.
Because first off, giving people sealed envelopes feels all mysterious and paranoid. Be like, I have information nobody else has. And I would occasionally forbid people from actually showing the papers to each other. I would say you could, you could tell people things, but you can't show them the writing cause I didn't want people to know for sure that the other guys were telling the truth, you know? and so part of it was to encourage that spirit of, being in the know of something for you yourself, which gives you a nice little thrill, right? And I'm that guy who, when I show up for the first session of a role playing campaign as a player i've got four or five pages of backstory written up. and I get confused if other people don't do that. This is becomes of being a writer.
and so I wanted people to have like a real sense of of the character. That's not just a collection of stats. And, as an aspiring writer, I took it as an opportunity to flex my creative side a little bit and have fun with it too. I, I really, I thought that really added to things always.
Sam: What was it like to show up on the night of a session? Like how were you preparing, what was it like to walk into the room?
Steven: Well, I'll tell you one thing, which is that every single time I went into an ERPL session, I always showed up early to make sure that I had everything laid out ahead of time, you know, erase the chalkboard, put up a diagram if I'm gonna need one, lay things out, and then I would spend about five or 10 minutes terrified that nobody was gonna show up. I always worried about that.
So I was always eventually relieved by when the third person would show up, because with three players, three players, you got a game.
So that, that's the main feeling that I had waiting for session to start, was fear
Sam: Do you have any particularly like favorite or like memorable ERPL stories?”
Steven: one of the first deaths gray land ERPLs I ran was set on a ghost ship. And it was a ship that collected souls. And so if you died on the ship, your soul was trapped there. And the fun of this was that if a player character got killed, they did, they weren't out of the game. They became a ghost and they could manifest in minor ways.
And one of the players was actually the bad guy. I had set it up with him ahead of time But, one of them who was killed, he was wandering as a tormented spirit.
And then there's reanimated dead sailors trying to drag down the remaining survivors, they're fighting a desperate defense. And it's really starting to look like a last stand.
And Joe, the dead guy who should be outta the game, right? He ha he has passes me a note that says I pick up one of the dropped lanterns and carry it into the powder magazine. And I just look at him and like, oh, okay, this was not in the script. and so he carries this lit lantern and just drops it in the middle of the gunpowder.
Okay, so the powder magazines goes and the people on the bow were just far enough that I ruled they had a chance to save themselves by like a dexterity check to like dive over the side and swim for it.
but then Marina says, is there anything I could do to stop this? And I said, well, I think the traditional villain thing to do right now is scream no and then explode. And she was like, okay, cool. I'll do that.
Sam: Yeah.
Sam: What was it like running games for college kids? You know like people who are so much younger than you? Did you feel that age gap?
Steven: It was sort of like being, I don't know, a college basketball coach or something, you know? I've always got the freshmen coming in and joining the squad and the seniors graduating off.
I was definitely viewed as an adult by the, the students and you know, it was never that much of an issue. Something my mom told me about dealing with young people, she said that she liked how I talked to little kids, like five or six year olds.
She said that it was the same thing she did. you just, you don't talk to them like little kids. You talk to 'em like they're people
Sam: Yeah.
And kids like that. They respect it. And so really you just, it's good advice to never talk down to people honestly. You, you don't even wanna think that way. You just think, okay, here's my players. We're gonna have us an adventure. Let's go.
Um, you are in a position of authority as the game master of course, And I think that's, I think that's part of what made it work so well, honestly.
but, and this is important as a Game Master, the story is never about you. The story is about the heroes. You can never let yourself forget that.
And this is something that I think made me a better writer. Also, understanding the importance of characters. Characters have to drive the plot rather than the plot driving the characters. I really believe that I will die on that hill. Um, and that means that, you know, I can't get too attached to my non-player characters. I can't get too attached to the story I wanted to tell. The dice will, will not always agree with that. The players will definitely not always agree with that, because the players will have their own ideas of how things are gonna go and it's going to affect things. And it should, because if you don't let it, then, I mean, what are you doing? Then you might as well just be sitting at home, uh, typing it out
Sam: Yeah.
Sam (narration): I played in two ERPL sessions with Steven, and a third I tried to crash only to find it already over capacity. The second was the world war two hospital one I told you about earlier. But the first, my first ERPL session...
We were Canadian Mounties. We'd lost contact with an outpost, a few days journey into the north, and once we reached it, we found it abandoned. I remember Steven describing the icicles tinged with pink, when you looked closely blood frozen into them.
I played an Algonquin collaborator with the Mounties. Tristan shared my background, but distrusted the Canadians.
Tristan disappeared first, a scream in the empty forest and then a howl as night fell. We barricaded ourselves inside the outpost, but it wasn't enough. Tristan came back to us, banging at the door, then the windows, then climbing straight down the chimney. We fought his new clause against our one shotgun and four unarmed civilians. We drove him off, but not before he'd bitten me. And over the next couple of hours, I began to feel the hunger. And I thought to myself: if I'm going to turn into a monstrous hunger ghost, if that loser Tristan's character is gonna turn out to be right about all these superstitions, I am at least not going to let him survive to laugh at me. I'm gonna find him and I'm gonna end him. one last bit of good of justice before I lose myself.
I saw this story laid out in front of me. A good story karmic just, and one in which I clung to some sense of victory.
But when I chased Tristan into the trees, the dice had another story in mind. He easily snapped my neck, and that was the end of it.
I thought first, fuck that. I was so mad. I’d had a temper going back to middle school, and I was still growing up, still learning how to keep it under control.
I thought second, what would Steven think if I got outwardly mad about this? Is that the version of me I wanted him to see?
I thought third, whatever the dice say, who cares? They can’t take my perfect story away from me. I’ll remember this forever the way I want to, the way I think it should’ve gone.
And only much later would I think fourth, what’s so bad about the story we got? Doesn’t it have just as much a right to live as mine? A fool destroying himself in the pursuit of vengeance, consumed by his own rage... that’s a better story to me now. It feels more relevant to me now, and to me then.
I let it go. I experimented with letting it go, and my experiment was successful, at least in part because I had someone in the room I looked up to, and who I didn’t want to be a dick in front of.
But it’s funny, when I asked Tristan and Steven about this moment, neither of them remembered it at all. It felt so important to me, and for them it evaporated into the years.
Sam: I just had like one last thing. Uh, I just wanted to like be a little personal for a second if that's all right with you.
Steven: Sure.
Sam: Um, I just, I remember, I remember like knowing you at The Zone, right? And
Steven: Yeah. You used, used, used your orcs a lot, as I recall. I, I killed, I killed a lot of your orcs over the years.
Sam: In, in retrospect, I didn't even like Warhammer. I just wanted to be playing the game that people were play. I wanted to be socializing. Right. And like, that's what you had to do to be
Steven: You weren't, you weren't half bad as I, as I recall.
Sam: uh, yeah. I mean, like, I could play it
but, but I remember, I just remember you, um, I mean, you were talking about this earlier. You just treated me with so much respect and treated me like an adult, and that that meant, it meant a lot to me. And, um, I remember in particular one time, um, being in middle school and just I, I don't know what was going on in my life. Or whatever, but like yeah, I was in middle school, so you know,
Steven: Middle school was going on in your life. No one has an easy middle school.
Sam: Yeah. And I remember, I remember like some role or game of war hammer going really poorly for me and just like breaking down in tears in the game store and like being really upset in the way that you can be in sixth grade and um, and saying out loud, nobody likes me and probably. That was what was going on in my life. Right. Like probably, um, I, I was having a fight with a friend or something.
But I remember the whole store going terribly quiet. And, uh, and me like, knowing, knowing why I was like a, an adult enough to know, like this was a very like, difficult, embarrassing thing that was like happening. And I remember you just saying very softly, well, that's not true.
And that. That just meant so much to me and I really appreciate that
Steven: thank you. I, I appreciate hearing that,
um, you know. Something that I've noticed as I get a bit older. Um, Ingrid for several years worked with Kids in Kinship, which was a mentoring organization like Big Brothers, big Sisters, and she mentored this little girl from a very troubled home, like the girl's dad was in prison for murder. the sort of kid that gets into a mentoring program because mom thinks that she needs some positive attention and role modeling and whatever.
And Ingrid, you know, did her best with that for a bit. But it kinda petered out after a couple of years and didn't hear from her. She moved off and we would every now then think about it. I wonder what happened to her. Like, is she okay? Hoped so.
And then all of a sudden, out of the blue, one day Ingrid gets a call from her. And at this point she's 22 now at that point, uh, she'd been nine when I would've met her. And she wanted to see Ingrid and get together and we all got together and she was doing great and she just, it turned out that Ingrid had been like this great force for like good in her life and Ingrid hadn't realized it at the time, and it really touched her to realize that sometimes you can have, you never know what effect you're having on the people around you.
Sam: Yeah.
Steven: I mean, I, I'm, I didn't expect to hear that, uh, from you. And that's, that's a, that's a heck of a thing to hear. It's kind of great. Um, just, just knowing that, that you mattered in a positive way to somebody, especially at a difficult point is, is extremely rewarding.
um, yeah, I think, you know, I don't actually remember that specific moment. Um, that's the thing.
It doesn't surprise me because I think that is something I like unless I was having a really rough time, I would try to. to be the person that somebody needs when they're in a difficult spot. But, you know, nobody's ever the, nobody's always their best self.
Sam: yeah, yeah.
Steven: but I'm, I'm glad I was able to be there for what you needed in that moment
Sam: it's something I've thought a lot about as I've grown older. You know, like I, I mean, frankly, like it was very strange for me to then like come to ERPL and see the guy who'd done that for me is just like, here running a game and he is happy to see me. You know, and like it, like it made the whole session like strange in that way. Right.
Steven: That was a little surreal running into you again, I gotta say, because I was like, Hey, la, last time I saw you was like years and years ago.
Sam: yeah, yeah. You were like two feet shorter and, yeah. Yeah, yeah,
Steven: yeah. You, you did not look the same. I did a massive double take.
Sam: yeah, yeah, yeah. But I, you know, now I'm 35 and at some point along the way, I like realized that I was the person that Steven Henry had been for me, or that Willie had been for me, that I was like this mentor figure for other people and that like I was doing and saying things that were being very meaningful to them that I was not really putting a lot of stock into.
And, and simultaneously I have like vivid memories of like growing up and, um, I mentioned Willie was this
Steven: I remember Willie.
Sam: Yeah, so he was three years older than me, so we overlapped one year, freshman year, and then like, we ended up in the same like two weekly role playing games for like three years together. And like I'm, I'm very close to him now, and at some point in those three years I was like. He, like, he went from this guy I like, really looked up to, to my weird friend, you know, like just some guy
Steven: Just one of the guys.
Sam: I love him, but like, yeah, what a weirdo. And like, like that, that, that shift of, Oh, all these people I looked up to were just like great weirdos who like, now I'm peers with. It's just been, it's such an interesting part of aging and like even reaching out to you here has felt like I knew I was getting into, like I've, I'm excited to find out what weird peer of mine Steven Henry has grown up into, like after being this mentor for me.
Steven: well, do you wanna know what my reputation is in my neighborhood right
Sam: Absolutely.
Steven: Okay. so I have a, uh, big bouncy golden retriever named Poppy. And since I'm the one who works out of a house, I take her for most of her walks. And one of the things that I've have taken to doing is I read while I walk the dog, you know, some people look at their phones,
Sam: You look at a book?
Steven: I'm like, I'm reading a book. And I read about a book a week that way.
Sam: Yeah. Wow.
Steve: So anyways, last Halloween, I'm giving out candy and the, so, uh, a couple little adorable little girls, like 10 year olds come up to the door dressed as witches because witches are always popular. And I got the, the bowl of candy here and I'm like, I say happy Halloween. And what of the girls looks at me and her face just lights up and she says, I know you, you're the guy with the book and the dog. So that that's, that's my weird reputation in the neighborhood. I'm the guy with the book of the dog.
She's not the only one to have noticed it.
===
Sam: Do you know, is midterm one shots something? I mean, it's clearly still a thing. Is it something that, uh, is well attended outside of, uh, crotchety old alumnis that no one knows?
Tristan: Uh, so I can answer the question as of a few years ago, uh, they switched over to a new mailing service and they didn't migrate over all the email. I suspect they left out any email addresses that they didn't recognize. which is a shame because it was. even when I was living, you know, 10 states away, even when I was deployed to the Middle East and you know, just getting these emails like, well obviously I'm not playing here.
It was a really useful window into what the kids are up to, um, as like, Hey, what are they playing? And boy, for a while the answer was exclusively five E, like 30,005 e games. Like there were at the time still kids who were like, Ooh, I just. Heard of this, this, this game. It's called Fate, right? Like let's try it. Isn't this wild? Like, uh oh. This is, this game comes from, from something called Powered by the Apocalypse? Man I don't know what this is, but the internet says it's really cool, so like, let's try it out.
And like, honestly, it's just really heartwarming to, to see folks, you know, on their journey.
I've been there, you know?
Sam: Yeah. That was us.
Tristan: That was us.
Sam: Yeah.
Steven: I did mention to my friend Kira that I was gonna be doing this podcast talking about ple, and she was just so thrilled that this, that, that her little brainchild had grown on and was still going. And all those years later. She had known that I was still running games at it. But just that, that people still remembered it and it meant something to them. And, that that was kind of her legacy to the college.
Sam: Well, Tristan says it's still going.
Steven: Yeah. Yeah. It is. I still got the emails. I don't, I don't run the game still. Um, but, um. It'd be funny to go back sometime. Just be like, haha, I’m here, surprise!
Sam (narration): Thanks again to Tristan Zimmerman and Steven Henry. Check out Steven's novels and particularly the Erin O'Reilly Detective Mystery series at a link to his newsletter in the show notes.
Check out Tristan's games work and blog at moltensulfur.com. His game Ballad Hunters about amateur folkloreists in 1813 Britain, where folktales are coming to life, coming to Kickstarter this spring.
Dice Exploder Afterimage is produced, performed and edited by me. Sam Dunnewold. Music by Blue Dot Sessions support more episodes like this at the Dice exploder Patreon.