Paper dreams

The other evening found me reading online the module blurbs for a role-playing convention taking place this weekend that I can't attend. No huge deal. I've been to many of the things and will undoubtedly catch more in the future.

That wasn't always the case, though. I didn't have the resources to make it to a big-city con until the 1990s. Before then, the closest I got was avidly collecting the flyers from my local hobby store.

I used to keep them in a display book, poring over the descriptions and trying to imagine the secrets that lay behind the words. Occasionally, I'd even write blurbs for modules that didn't exist (but which might if I was a game designer for a big-city con).

One such was based on a curious quote from Chapter 3 of Charlotte Bronte's novel "Jane Eyre":

"For as to the elves, having sought them in vain among foxglove leaves and bells, under mushrooms and beneath the ground-ivy mantling old wall-nooks, I had at length made up my mind to the sad truth, that they were all gone out of England to some savage country where the woods were wilder and thicker."

I believe my idea was that not all of the elves had left England, with some hanging around to cause strife - as the player characters, five Georgian Era orphans, would discover.

Perhaps I envisaged a trump-or-be-trapped-forever showdown in the perilous forests of the faerie realm. I was a fan of that sorta world-hopping scenario. Still am, really.