Strongest Heroes On The Planet? Time For Aliens!

0:00 Sometimes talking with friends feels like role playing. Sometimes it feels like comeback, join us at the round table and roll an isha too. This is Curmudgeons and Dragons. Hello adventurers, Welcome to Curmudgeons the Dragons, Moneys Jason Portizo as always, I enjoy me. Mister Jim Crocker, I think you mean Curmudgeons and Dragons live. Have you had that joke last episode? I'm gonna make it because I am so happy that we are all together in the same room here. It's totally cool. Josie's the one that's not live. You don't mean it's it's it's like three quarters live today. All right, Yeah, we're doing right. One day I'll be live too. Jim Crocker is here. I am here, Yes, Josie Daz is here. Hello, coming to us live via satellite. Is that anything anymore? Uh M?

0:58 Jim and I are are live in person at the Keep in Brick, New Jersey. Josie coming to us online from from England, and we are here once again with Tony Bogan, owner operator of the Keep in Brick, New Jersey. My favorite FLGS. Oh yeah, that would be me. Uh. We we had a nice launch at with Tony for last week's episode, and we did not get into Tony's favorite game story. So, uh, is this is this like a is this more of a horror story a wholesome story? What kind of direction are we getting into? It's not a horror story. It actually starts off as a the DM as an antagonist. Isn't an object lesson maybe or a or a parable or more two teenage boys that decided they were pissy with each other for about a week and then have fun with it. That's really what it. Let's fix the story in details, but I can already see it playing out. Oh yeah, let's get into the story and we'll decide how horrific it is. So little background for Josie or anybody that had that didn't see the story episode or got bored with me talking so long for both the episode about the store. Go listen to last week's episode. Yeah, also one on nine. Don't quote me on that.

2:06 Believe it's episode one on nine. You cannot imagine how much of my shitty rambling Jason cuts out of the episodes. It's a lot. I was wondering why she doesn't talk that much. I try to cut her entirely out of the show. We can listen say the word I'll will do my homework, babe. No, she threatened to leave the show and I literally begged her so to please sure. So, amongst other things, I've been friends with my one friend Rich since we were years old, and we've been playing D and D all that time. We started in nineteen seventy six playing D and D and have played to this very day. So he's been my forever DM and we were would have been junior year in high school, so I would have been seventeen. Just got my driver's license in November, so we had already been playing for almost a decade together. And two of my characters Zan Darzan and gleepwer which anybody that's the D D fan that goes to old school knows that Gleepworp came from the module against the Giants, and after we were done playing that module, we like the character so much that we kept it because he's actually a good wizard that becomes a bad wizard. Actually, they weren't cold wizards back then. Wizard was a title when you reached a certain level. They were user. Yeah, general magic user. That was all there is. The only class was magic user. Every other level every other illusionist, wizard, arch mage, mage, et cetera. Were all a title that you got as you reached a certain level, just like going from corporal to sergeant to lieutenant to that's all they were. That's kind of cool. Actually, I don't ran an arms champion hero superhero. That was

3:40 one of the things you could be as a fighter. So yeah, but you were a fighter, yeah, that was that was your actual class was fighter or magic user or thief or dwarf or right, that is okay, all right. So when we started first with the original you know, the white box edition in nineteen seventy six, and then eventually we moved to Advanced Dungeons and Dragons when it first came out, which now referred to his first edition, but at the time it was just a D and D and we stuck with it ever since. So, like I said, we had been playing for almost a decade by this time, and two of my original character were two the only characters that survived. If you look at my one character sheet for zan dar Zani's my half healf fighter, magic user, thief.

4:21 Because we were big into multi classic um. His list of fallen comrades is like half a page long of la paper and because yet nobody survived. Also side note, all of our original characters were named interestingly enough, Oh, I don't know, Boromere canned off and know, yeah, we had gim Les and all those. Yeah, because that was our lot, that was our world at that stage of the game nine ten years, so it wasn't a lot of properties to borrow stuff there was there wasn't. And then we made up and I look at some of the names of some like Hobar Mallow was a name that I came up with for another. Yeah, I don't know, there was a h O B A R. I just got so excited for us. I can so fast forward from when we started to junior year in high school, and for whatever reason, I got a phone call from Rich saying, Hey, you know what, I'm kind of tired of zandar Zan and gleep or if they're way too powerful now, you know, I'm just tired of them and I don't want to I don't want to play them, and I don't want you to play them anymore. I'm like, well, those are my two main characters. And as I had mentioned in the last episode, you know nobody played just one character at a time, because it was really more than three or four of us max that would play at any one time. And you weren't getting out of the door of the keep in the village of Hamlet without killing yourself tripping over the doorsill with just three players and three player characters, it just wasn't happening. You know, your four hit point magic user was powerful. He had one magic missile spell.

5:53 It just wasn't a thing. So we typically played at least two characters, so three of us could would have an adventuring party of six play characters. I'm like, yeah, but like that was the whole point was. We wanted them to literally go on forever to the point where sooner or later, our other player characters and other people that would come and we would play with would adventure in our world that our player characters created. You know, all of a sudden, it was our castle, it was our keep, it was our dungeon, it was our village. Whatever. So I was kind of annoyed, and I was like, you know, why are you be in such a jerk about this? Well, you know, I want to blah blah blah. And it went back and forth. So we spent a week of almost not talking to each other where the battle in D and D translated into a battle in real life, and it took about a week or two at the most, and eventually we kind of realized this was really stupid to be getting pissy with each other in real life over our player characters from D and D, but not completely because it was my PC that had survived all of these trials and tribulations over the last almost decade. So eventually we said, well, how are we going to get past this? Because he wanted to adventure, have adventure and run adventures with new player characters or some of our lower level characters that we had created, and for no other reason I found out because the two main characters are so powerful that they could take the low level characters with them and help them along. It's like, well, yeah, but that's that's what would happen. You know, when you get a new job, they don't throw you in with another rookie and oh, just figure out how to do the work. Yeah, you'll figure

7:23 it out sooner or later. You know, our business can survive with you guys putting the wrong parts in the wrong places and no you get somebody that's experienced and you know you're under their tutelage, and they bring you along and they show So that was, you know, my thinking of it, and I had thought was rich As at the time. So eventually we decided, you know what, we'll make a challenge out of it instead, because we're not going to let this get an interfere with our friendship. It was stupid. We realized it was stupid, and so we decided to make a competition a contest. You can me meaning me rich As, like you can do anything that your characters can do. But just remember one of the rules, the thumb that we always had was if it wasn't written down, it didn't happen. So because we were so fucked the point being that, you know, there was times where we might not get to play for two or three weeks, but our characters, we wanted to still have their lives go on, so you know, I couldn't just make stuff up. I would go to rich and say, hey, you know, for the last six months, you know so and so has been doing this, and so and so has been doing that, and this is what they are, and here's the list of supplies that I bought, you know, because eventually we got to the point of castles and strongholds and ships in the whole nine yards. So rich was one of those while we're not gonna I'm not gonna do encumbrance down to the single GP weight of everything you're carrying. General encumbrance was an issue.

8:39 You know, I can't go out with no bags of holding in ten thousand pounds of gold pieces just not going to happen. So that was about the level that we did it too. But anything that happened out of the play when we were together, it had to be written down. Did it also need to be um sorry, did it also need to be proofread by your DM to be like, yes, that's acceptable that you did. Oh, absolutely no. I had to bring everything to them because, like I said, I couldn't just make shit up and say, oh, yeah, by the way, you know, well we have forty foot solid gold statue. Now you know they know that kind of stuff couldn't happen. I love that this story is so back when we invented downtime in DNA close that's fantastic. Yeah, that would have been nineteen eighty six when we had this this fight and we've been doing it for a long time. That's a parallel development thing where everybody was like, well, the rules don't do this, but we want to do this, yeah, and so everybody kind of figured out their own way to do it. That's I love that story in that vein too. People don't realize the first edition, first printing of The Dungeon Master Guy had tables in it that were wrong. The math actually did up.

9:43 Now they were fixed in later printings and Urata sheets. But you know, the DMS Guy came out in seventy eight, I was ten years old. We just figured we didn't understand it, so we just made shit up. Fast forward like five years later. We look at it and and be like, oh, you mean that's how we were Ye had no idea Wolfs So mind you now at this stage of the game, my magic user Gleepework, which I did not make that name up. He comes from the module against the Giants Um and we had played that module and we liked the character so much that my DM let me keep him as my magic User. And zandar Zan, who was my main character who's the half out fighter magic user thief. They are now powerful enough to the point where there's no monster in the monster manual statted as printed that they couldn't defeat. We had kicked ass when Deities and demiods demigods came out, Oh good, which is called what the heck? Was the reprint of that Legends and Lore the reprint, but originally it was Deities and Demigods. Uh. When I saw Elric was statted in, there was a victim of the seat tanny panic. Do you think probably that? Yeah? And there was also I mean they also got sued because they included two actual pantheons they didn't have permitted. Actually didn't quite happened that way. It wasn't so much a lawsuit as it was a there was stern the same ip had been both Michael Morcox, who's in by the way, Michael Morcock group that I belonged to him on Facebook that he's active in.

11:09 Yeah. Um, which is why I brought up Elric because when I saw they stated Elric in the Dds and Debither, one of my favorite fantasy series of books. Um, and I love the character. Yeah, run around with storm Ringer. Yeah, that was why all our characters were a chaotic alignment of some form or another. So at any rate. Um. What happened with that was was that both Michael Moorecock and I forget the name of the originator of the Cthulhut, thank you, suff Yeah right, all the Chaosium stuff they had ended up that Morcocks stuff had been he agreed to allow both TSR and someone else which I think it was Chaosium yea, to use it at the same time, and either legal teams realized that the others had been the same thing. Yeah, so that's where that came from. I knew there was some kind of freakis that like it wasn't in subsequent editions, and that it was not. Yeah, there's only two printings of DDS and Demigods, the first and second, that are one hundred and forty four pages and have all of the pantheons in them than every printing after that was only one hundred and twenty eight pages, and missus is missing those two that have Cthulhu stat it out right. Yeah. Yeah, So again uber powerful characters, especially for advanced dungeons and dragons in the first edition at that stage of the game, mind you, over the next thirty years since then, they've become even more powerful. So we still kept it interesting because it was like, all right, throw ten dragons at us, let's see what happens, you know, because if we're gonna lose. We learned long ago that I always anytime we would what's your next move going to be, we would quote

12:43 Monty Python and the Holy Grail run away. We learned a long time ago that that was like the best move that any adventuring group can have in their repertoire was runaway. Yeah, not be afraid to flee when it's the right kind of It took about a dozen player character deaths before we finally got through our thick heads, but we did realize it. So as long as it was written down, any of the stuff that I had, you know, whether it was strongholds we had made or you know, stockpiles of stores and things like that, and the same thing, you know, we could do it, We could use it. It would be accessible to us. And the same thing was true with Rich. He could do anything to us, to the group, to the player characters, as long as it wasn't a how did we say it before? You can't kill the party by blowing up the planet, Yeah, like you have you have to give us a fighting chance. Okay, so no meteor shower that. Oh yeah, there's a meteor storm and the one rock hits the bigger twice the size of what wiped out the dinosaurs. So you're all dead. Interglathic rocks fall everyone. Yeah.

13:39 So after about we typically did at least twice a month. We tried to adventure work together, but we played at least twice a month at that stage of the game, because by then we had sports and girlfriends and cars and that kind of stuff coming into the play. What happened was was Rich realized that there was basically almost no amount of d means Gods, you name it, like we could. We couldn't necessarily defeat God on their plane of existence. No amount of playing fair that would, right, Yeah, exactly right. That you guys couldn't handle so or run away from Yes, exactly know. When you've got a lot that's handling it. When you've got a fashion a thirty plus level magic user, yeah, he's really tough to be. It doesn't matter that it was a human and doesn't have a whole lot of hit points. Um and teleport is a great, great way to get away from stuff, especially when your character has been around a lot long enough that he can move large quantities of whether it be humans or pack mules or whatever with the snap of a thumb, your high level cleric with word of recall. Yeah, that's also very handy put it, yeah cleric as a dwarf um so at any rate, so rich decided, right, well, how am I going to do this? Well. One of the things that we never realized when we first started playing is as eight nine year olds, was we only did high fantasy. There was no gunpowder, There were no know, nothing mechanic goal or machinery beyond it typical um, you know, medieval style stuff. There was no guns, nothing like that. But when we when the module Expedition to the Barrier, peaks came out, which we

15:13 looked at it in one of in the picture of these adventures, and one of them is holding what looks like a ray gun shooting a laser at something like you can do that, right, you know? That was like twelve year old us going, wow, we didn't know you could. So we can do star Wars with with dungeons and dragons. So then nothing was off the table for us, even though we didn't typically integrate those things into our campaigns on a regular basis. They were there for us. So Rich decided, how am I going to beat these guys? Aliens? Aliens was the great solution so at this stage of the game, and he went the dragon ball z route. Yep, well see and for me, unfortunately for me or fortunately for me, depending on which way you look at it. I was never big anime style cartoons. So one of the only ones that existed when I was a child was speed Racer, and I was not a fan of speed Racer. And then I saw and then I saw Starblazers when it came out. And if you don't know what Starblazers is a thirty seconds or less, I'm a huge World War two World War two buff. So picture Aliens bomb planet Earth with meteors make the surface uninhabitable, so humans are below the surface. But we've got to get off our planet and get to a friendly planet in order to get the cure to fix our planet. So there's the battleship Yamato sitting on the bottom of the now empty and dry Pacific Ocean.

16:29 They rebuild it from the bottom up, so the old rusted shell is on the outside of it, and then it breaks through when it comes out and they've got a World War two battleship that's now a spaceship and shoots lasers out of the turrets and everything. And I loved it as a child. So that was kind of where Rich got the idea from, was well, you know your biggest so you know, we'll they'll just be lasers and they'll be bombs and they'll be like, now what do I do? So what happened was was and we were also big into Battlestar Galactica the original with you know, Lauren Green and the whole nine yards, so all of that tied into what he planned. So what happened was was they the Aliens came and they landed on my island, because my guys had an island that we had taken over and that was where we built our stronghold and had our ships in the whole nine yards. So when push came to shove, the only alternative was get the hell out of there, because there was we just could not compete with the aliens technology because even the most powerful flames and the most powerful management shields sorry, just not going to happen. So my characters had to high tail it. Out of there, so while we were still alive, it'd be like you and me being picked up and dropped off onto a you know, a desert island with no resources, just your wits about you.

17:45 Because all of our resources were in our stronghold, or so my dungeon mastered. Rich thought, because if it's not written down, it didn't happen. So out came the book and the pages with the lists of all of the stashes that we had, which, for those of you who are not working on the YouTube right now, the actual book is here and intact, which is this binder. Will there's Tony's twelve year old hands writing one of the characters. Oh yeah, oh that's really cool. That's so cool. I can't keep notes between So there's the stronghold. That's crazy. Yeah, so I if if it's cool with you, I'd love to get a have scans of it. Oh yeah, okay, it's all we'll find. We'll find a way of including that in the show notes. Go go check the show notes and on that to see what we're seeing right now. So we had enough that we could, at least as far as Richard was concerned, we have had enough resources accessible within a reasonable distance to get to to you know, rearm ourselves things like that. Well, because the flip side of if you didn't write it down, it didn't happen, is if you did write it down, it did. It did happen absolutely, whether rich remembered that you had written it down or not. So, yeah, it was all there. So one of the things that had happened in five or six years earlier was I don't know if any of you're familiar with the from the Monster Manual Mites m I T S movie. I'm familiar with the real world mites right there you go. The best way I can describe it is, um,

19:18 if you know, if you remember, I'm looking at you guys, because you're closer to my age. Um the Gremlin from Bugs Bunny. Yeah, sure, right, Well, Gremlin's were a thing, especially during World War Two. Anytime someone must have been Gremlins. Gremlins must have done it. That was based on the Twilight Zone, right Greenlin. So also Gremlin's great movie gave me nightmares as a child. Love it. Oh yeah, Um, Gremlas too, not so much. But Mark why my family was still somebody will turn light and somebody will go right light bright light. I can my voice doesn't go that high, so I can't make it sound like that's closer to it, Josie, Josie starts that high. Yeah, I just know. We had come across a bunch of these, So they're nefarious little creatures and they're just brutal, and they're closer to gremlins, to be honest with you. They're in the Oney Monster many they're even drawn similar to that. So my one powerful magic user, gleap Orp, had been basically had we had come upon nests of these things that were being kept by some bad guy that was you know, you would use them and send them into towns to you know, rek Havoc, which we thought was a great idea, so we took it for ourselves once we defeated him, So we basically farmed them. So we had mass quantities of these things that we would sell to passing advent like, hey, got a problem at home? You know there used to be snake oil salesman lights, Hey, you got a problem at home. You know, I haven't trouble to come get a couple of these, pay us for him and let them loose and rec Havoc and then

20:48 you can you know, come in and be the big savior. And so long story short, the problem we were having was, even though we were off the island and we had our strong you know, our stashes of gear and money and things like that, everywhere we went didn't last very long because what could the aliens do? Fly in spaceships, so there was no place that was inaccessible to them, even though it might be inaccessible or difficult to get to for us. There was no hiding from them to any great degree because their scanning technology, you could you know, underground, the underground wasn't going to help us. It might give us enough time to get out before the bombs worked their way through, but there was no getting away from it. So now it was simply a matter of you know, it was a chase. It was a cop and Robert chase scene for the next few sessions of us always trying to stay one step ahead of the antagonists that were following us one way or the other. And of course we could tell Portle they could. They had beaming technology. So one minute it was a ship in the sky, the next minute it was one hundred troops on the ground with laser guns and shields. Are like damn. So we just couldn't figure a way to get around it. And finally, after probably like about six weeks of this and again we played six I should say six sessions of US six weeks, six six times that we met up playing typically four or five hours at a clip. I figured, you know what, I've got to get rid of these aliens before I can start to do anything. So we did a mass teleportation of thousands of mites onto the airfield that used to be my island to the spaceship. And my exact thinking was, that's what the Gremlin

22:19 did in Bugs Bunny when he comes in. When he comes when Bugs Bunny comes into frame, there's the Gremlin with a giant shell, you know, artillery shell, hit in the head of it with a hammer, trying to get it to explode. And that's exactly what my thoughts were. So we teleported them, not anywheres near where the islet, to the spaceships, to all their fighters and everything that were on my island. Unfortunately, fortunately for us, it did the job that it reached the kind of havoc that we were hoping for. But because of the roll of the die, there was a ten percent chance that there would be a catastrophic result. We agreed ten percent was it reasonable amount? And I didn't roll well tell a story.

22:59 So what happened next? We got rid of the aliens and the entire island as well, because he they basically set off a new in screwing with the spaceships. So now the entire island is gone, completely gone. It's a it's just a crater underneath the water now. So that was when the second where if it wasn't written down, it didn't happen, comes in so rich it was like, all right, well, now what are you going to do because a lot of those stashes that you had, as the aliens would catch up to us, they would take him out. And that was when the pad came out and said, remember this one with all the stocks and stores, because he would he would stick with, you know, certain spell components that were vital spell components. We had to have not every standard root and things like that, but if it was a rare gem, or if it was a rare root route, or it was a you know, a back wing of a certain thing, we had to have that stuff if we wanted to use it with any regularity. And the same thing went with other stores. Same thing with our ship. Like part of that map that I held up to the screen briefly in my stronghold, there's a whole section there that's nothing but farmland. Because if I'm going to have all these barracks with troops that go out on these ships, so how they're going to eat?

24:03 So we had far you know, we would do that. We would only do it once though once it was done, it was assumed that it would continue to be done. Once we came up with a general cost of what it would cost to maintain something per week or per month, not with the regularity that would be required in real life, but every once in a while where should be like, it's probably time to chock off another five thousand GP for keeping your stuff in so enough to make it where you didn't just get everything you wanted for free, and you couldn't have like I said, you couldn't carry ten thousand GP with no bags of holding things like that. Sure, So that's when the list came out and it was now here's the real list of stock in stores that we had hidden away because we had accumulated so many magic items, for example, over the course of almost a decade of adventuring that we never needed most of them because we realized once you got to a certain level, you could you could get away with not having to have all of that stuff all the time. So we had massive and of course what did we do, Well, you know, we rolled the dice.

24:59 We rolled the percentage. Die was both our friend and our enemy. Um, what are the chances that of these twenty different you know stashes that you have scattered about, how many of them haven't been looted in then since you put them in there years ago. Well, we tried to account for that as best we could, because what we would do is again, and this was only because we had high level characters that could do it. You dig a hole, get rid of a huge area, you know, clear out a room. You could tell you we learned you could teleport dirt out of your way to it, which were great, and then seal it back up. And it was forty feet below the dungeon that you built above it, and there was only one way to get there, it was the teleport there. So we would we did stuff like that. So we would put five hundred gp worth of stuff where it was readily accessible, put a monster or two there to guard it. And then now it was done, nobody was going to dig down forty feet to try and look for you know, the no NPC was going to do it. So that was where that came from.

25:53 The classic Tomb of Horror's fake tomb. Yeah so yeah, I told you earlier. We didn't play a lot of the models, but we pulled from all yea, yeah, sure, yeah, that's good tech. Yeah. You know. One of the funny thing is is that later in life, one of my favorite TV series, Babble on five, there's the Evil Shadows, and one of the ways that they get rid of the presence of the Shadows on one of the planets where they're you know, have taken over is secretly, overnight, they have citizens that while they're evacuating most of the population from this one island that they were on that their ships were on, they secretly brought nukes in and left some people there who sacrificed themselves so the Shadows didn't notice that there were people missing and nuked the island. I was like, wow, Jay Michael Straczinsky must have looked at our damn adventure wrote that, But it was, like I said, it started off as a fight, it turned into a challenge, and by the time it was done, it was like, we really are almost starting over campaign. Yeah.

26:56 Yeah, and we had a blast with that. But so that was my I guess I couldn't really come up with a horror story. Yeah, it was there, the building that fell on top of one of my I've got to show into those because especially like I said in the early editions, and it was one step above I mentioned, oh, you couldn't survive tripping over the door still as you walked out of the original keep, you know, And yeah, I had a couple of characters that literally died that way off their horse. Only had four hit points to begin with, and guess what the way we played it was when you hit zero, you were unconscious. Anything less than zero was dead. Oh okay, um we did there and well, and there were no rules really that were at that stage show. We were kind of rules heavy when we started, because again we were eight, nine, ten years old, so there was a lot of imagination, but it didn't always make sense. So we would fall back to the rood, like how do we do that? Well, let's look up the book and see what it tells us. To do. But yeah, I had more than one character that did this. So but those horror stories were Yes, I had a character that was riding on his horse and when he fell off the horse, he had four hit points and he hit his head on a rock and he died. Here's my horror story. It's a true story, but it wasn't very interesting. So the best thing I could think and I guess it. But the fun part was I'll take a harrd story.

28:04 That's five seconds. Well today, Ye, that's it, Thanks for watching. I hope you enjoyed yourself today. Uh. And again, those two characters are still alive to this day. In that bind a binder, I got to somehow spin that out into half a dozen notes though, So we're gonna figure out what's going on, right, uh Tony, I mean so yeah, not really a horror story, more else like fun. This is just something you story. Yeah, but if you can imagine this more stories old, right, two seventeen year old friends that have known each other for as long as they've been playing DD together. Actually, it would never get to fisticuffs because Rich is five foot tall, Like, hey and I became friends. I'm with you, yeah, but you can't tell. I'm six four to twenty back then, so more than two twenty non. Um.

28:57 That's how Rich and I became friends was he was the new kid in school and this one kid, Mark, who was my size, was picking on him in gym class and you didn't pick on the little kids because there was no challenge, and I got pissed. Yeah, so I, you know, got in a fight with Mark and got in trouble for the fight, but didn't care. And then Rich and I were friends ever since. Thanks Mark. Yeah right, the story Mark, Seriously, I didn't say Mark's less, but that's great. And yeah, that was part of the game, you know, was was us doing stuff together because we had we found out. The best part is Rich that same day in school. The reason we were in the gym was because it was raining, so no recess outside.

29:40 And remember those days, Remember the old brown paper bag style book covers that you had to put on your books back then you might remember, yeah, actual paper bags. Yeah right, well it was just brown paper on it. So Rich had been sitting in class reading a book aggressively customized those paper covers. And this was one of my friends who Mark, I had not been front but this again. This was wall what led to us become a DM AND player, et cetera. Um, one of my friends Joey and one of my other friends Jason. Um, No, no offense, but uh it's the name. Well let me let me let me hear the rest of the story of form offended. Okay. They decided, you know Rich again, new kid quiet, doesn't know anybody. Um, And of course I had gotten in a fight with the kid mark while we were in the gym, and when we're back in there, so they they wrote on their brown paper bag textbook book covers and walked around pretending to be nerdy.

30:29 And what did they write on They wrote what Rich was reading? And he was reading Dune, which I had just finished reading about six months earlier. And now it's cool. Well sure, I'm like wait a minute, you know, like, what do you guys like that? That's that's good, that's like. So we had all of these things in common, you know, we like, do we start playing DM D together? We did. So he was one of two I had two best men when I got married, because Rich I knew from grammar school. My friend Dave I met in freshman year in high school. Again, still friends to this day, and I wasn't going to pick between the two of them, so I took them both. So the best man in a pretty pretty pretty good guy, pretty good guy and the almost excellent guy. So yeah, D and D stories I could give you a billion of but that was the one that was not only the biggest challenge for us, but one that, like I said, it started as a why are you being a dick? Yeah too, well, you know what we could do with this? Where can we go from here with that? And we turned it into its own adventure. That was that that started as like just a solid game story and then turn into a wholesome story. So yeah, I think I think I'm satisfied with this um once again. Uh Tony owner of the Keep in Brick, New Jersey, that that's my friendly local game store, So you should go check that out.

31:33 It's it's the keypobby dot com, which I don't think we said in the last episode we did, but it's gonna be in the show notes anyway, so they'll find it. But the keyhobby dot com check out their events schedule because you can find one shot games run by me and a couple other dms as well. But but but find mine and come come fill my table up. Um, if you would just stop working for a living, you could do a whole lot more one work. I work in an industry that eats up all my weekends. I'm so sorry, but Tony, thanks for joining us again. Thanks you find other stories. We'd love to have you back. And of course, Jim Josie, thank you so much for always being a part of this. Oh yeah, that's gonna wrap it up for today, all right. Thank you adventurers. Thank you for listening to con Mudgeons and Jagons. Please share us with your favorite adventures, leave a review on Apple, and follow us on social media. All links can be found at con Mudgeons and Dragons dot com. Practice Safe Adventuring my Friends,