I Know I'm A Geek 'Cuz...

Somewhat related to BoG, there are just things that make the inner geek tingle. Like knowing that a two handed sword does 3d6 damage in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. And that such an item costs 30 g.p. (at least that was the going price back in 1978). Lots and lots of games geeks can spout out much more on the damage and cost of items, but I'm more surface level. I just know what appealed to me when I was introduced to the game. I have no clue why my brain has deemed that info important enough to retain...

As hinted in the earlier BoG posts, the inspiration for the Badge of Geekness material came from a little gem of knowledge from my travels with Tolkien. That's why those prior posts had the Hobbit and FotR depicted. It is simply this:

Chapter 1 of The Hobbit is titled: An Unexpected Party

Chapter 1 of The Fellowship of the Ring is titled: A Long-Expected Party

Tolkien begins both books with a party, of sorts. The unexpected party is the Dwarves who show up at Bilbo's doorstep thanks to Gandalf. The long-expected party is Bilbo's self-planned 111th birthday bash. Both mark points of departure from the Shire for Bilbo.

I just think that's cool JRR trivia.

And it only took me three posts to get that brain nugget out...

Badges of Geekness, Part 2 or 3

Based on the last post(s), I'm guessing that there's going to be a need to define the different Badges of Geekness that one can acquire. Off the top of my head, there's got to be one for "The Order of the Ring" (Tolkien) and "The Society of the Elder Things" (Lovecraft). These are two authors who have been embraced by gaming geeks en masse thanks to the various incarnations of their works/themes in role-playing games. We can also add "The Pittsburgh Assemblage" for Romero and his monstrous zombie efforts. There's plenty of other badge categories, but these are the ones that I personally would have a shot at wearing.

Now my knowledge of those topics above isn't very broad. The shards of information I possess on those topics were gained from my casual exposure to that particular genre. I have not spent hours memorizing every nameless horror introduced to this world by H.P., or tried to understand the Elven language of J.R.R. In fact, I've only read the Hobbit once and LOTR twice. I base my badge credentials on this one fact alone:

I can sit around a gaming table with a group of complete strangers and mutually enjoy the banter that flows forth from any one of the topics above.

A Badge of Geekness is like wearing a t-shirt from a place you've visited. You've been there, done that and want to share the excitement of the experience with other folks. Problem is that there aren't too many folks who have been to Middle Earth, Miskatonic U, or even to shopping mall chock full of zombies.

Geeks go to places that don't exist.

And all we get are these little badges...

Badges of Geekness

As noted in the earlier BoG post, there's just some things that game geeks know. I'm not talking about the stuff that floats freely about the spheres, but that which bubbles below the crust of the Geek world. The stuff that's above the crust tends to be non-worthy of a BoG (like knowing the names of the secret identities of the most popular superheroes). This is the stuff that even the non-geek surface dwellers find out, thanks to summer superhero blockbusters, etc. That kind of pop culture stuff is all above crust. No more badges handed out for that info!

Anything of "ours" that has been jammed into a digestable movie format or tv series just ain't that special anymore. When most of the residents of a retirement community know that Bruce Wayne is Batman, it's over for that super. Ask them who Hawkman is though, and you'll get the normal glazed over stare...

But this post isn't supposed to be about supers. That's not the angle of my geek. It's just that supers have probably made the most cross-over to the surface, and so provide the easiest examples. There's not a whole bunch of sword-n-sorcery stuff that has made this journey. I'm hazarding a guess that if it has, it has gone from novella to comic to movie (like Conan), the exception being The Lord of the Rings. Surface dwellers were exposed to Hobbits, Middle Earth, the Ring and the Fellowship, thanks to P. Jackson and Co. This knowledge will be reinforced when The Hobbit is released as a blockbuster, too. So, some of the special warmth of our coveted secret knowledge will be sent to the ether for mass consumption.

This just means we have to dig deeper for our sword-n-sorcery badges of geekness. Now, this post went nowhere to the point I was trying to make, which was about my BoG for my limited Tolkien knowledge. And, as this post is on the brink of blather, I'll bail out pronto, quoting some Gandalf...

Keep it secret!

Keep it safe!

(And I have no clue who Hawkman is...)

Badges of Geekness

There are certain things that gaming geeks know; like that GenCon is one of the biggest geek conventions held in the United States. True geeks know that the convention's title is short for "Geneva Convention", so titled for the fact that the first GenCon was held in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin (1968). As a miniature wargame convention, the title also paid homage to those same historical conventions of Geneva, Switzerland. I wonder how obscure this reference is to the folks who now attend GenCon, as it no longer has strong ties to its historical miniatures foundations? Sure there are still tried and true wargamers heading to GenCon, but these are only a small fraction of the attendee population. The con's primary purpose is not wargames.

And so it was that from those hex-based wargames of yore came Chainmail, the small booklet that was one of the first to outline sword-n-sorcery wargaming. Then Chainmail begot Dungeons & Dragons. And D&D begot the whole pen-n-paper rpg craze. And then all this morphed into online rpgs and tactical warfare games. Now, this is a big, bruising summary of the industry and history of GenCon, which has not been held in any town called Geneva for many, many years.

My initial point was that there are badges of geekness.

Knowing that GenCon is short for Geneva Convention is one of them.

Wisconsin, not Switzerland.