My mom and step-dad have owned a small restaurant for over 12 years. The original owner died in 1995, and his wife and daughters were not interested in keeping the business. So they sold it to my folks.

Since my step-dad died back in August, my mom has been keeping the business going on her own. Things have gotten complicated in the past few months. My brother, who’s been living in another state, has decided to come home and help her out, directly. He is unmarried, with no children, so he has the flexibility to pull up his stakes and go home for an indefinite period of time. I will be helping out, too, but with my ties to my current location, my help will be only indirect. He’ll be helping with his hands in the business, and I’ll be helping mostly with just ideas.

I went with my mom to a business attorney the other day, to get the restaurant name and logo trademarked (actually: wordmarked and servicemarked). She wants, (and my brother wants, and I support), to expand the business brand. The restaurant, though small, is a strong brand in my home town, and we all think we can leverage that brand recognition into something more.

This experience is going to be fun. I’m looking forward to seeing what we can do.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com

I took our mini van to Walmart for an oil change. The power steering fluid level was just below the minimum level mark, so I chose the service package that included checking and filling all fluids. I left the van with at the service bay, and went into the store to pick up some toys on our boys’ Christmas list.

Forty minutes later, I went back to the car service department and found that my van was ready for pick up. I paid for the service and the toys at the service desk, and headed out to my van. The receipt for the service had a list of all the items checked and serviced, and the power steering fluid showed as “checked.”

After loading the Christmas toys into the back of the van, I popped the hood and checked the power steering fluid level. Son of a . . . . The fluid was below the minimum level mark. They hadn’t filled it at all. I checked the receipt again, then walked back into the Walmart service department.

At the desk was the clerk and a technician, talking. From what I’ve seen in this department, the service desk clerk is some kind of manager type. I’ve seen them directing the technicians. I set my receipt on the desk and told the clerk/manager the situation. I wasn’t rude, or loud. I was calm and just straight to the point: whoever serviced my vehicle didn’t fill my power steering fluid.

The clerk/manager had the audacity to tell me, looking me right in the face, “Oh, they just check fluid levels, they don’t fill them.” I could see the sign listing the services on the wall right behind him, with the words, “We check and fill all fluids,” plainly visible right over his shoulder.

Before I could respond, the technician said, “Yeah, we fill fluids.” I appreciate him speaking up, but it was kind of a disappointment, too—I was looking forward to pointing out the clerk/manager’s “mistake.”

The clerk/manager told the technician to help me, and I got my power steering fluid container filled properly. Before leaving Walmart, I checked all the other fluids, too, just to make sure.

I’ve had other problems with the Walmart service department, (twice, “20 minutes” turned out to be two hours), so this was the third strike. The technicians have proven to be slack and/or lazy: they will completely ignore customers, even when I directly try to get their attention for a question, and they have proven now to not actually service a car like they are supposed to. And the clerk/managers are either ignorant of their services, or are willing to lie directly to a customer to cover for the slack technicians. I will never again take my vehicles to that store for any kind of car service.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com

Classic D&D adventure module review

Slave Pits of the Undercity, by David Cook – Advanced D&D, 1980

An adventure for character levels 4-7

24 pages plus the separate cover with maps on the inside faces. The adventure has over 40 numbered areas on two dungeon levels, and there are two new monsters: the aspis (humanoid insects) and the giant sundew (monster plant).

This module was originally written as a tournament adventure, and there are several pages of information on running it as a tournament adventure, including 2 pages for the tournament Player Characters, a page on tournament scoring, and 2 pages for the tournament versions of the maps. There are also notes in the first pages and throughout the main text on how to handle the encounters in a tournament game. Its origin as a tournament adventure is the biggest problem with this module.

The concept for the module works fine as a general campaign adventure, but there was no rewriting to make the overall setting work in a logical way for campaign play. The author added more rooms and encounters, between and around the limited tournament encounter areas, but they don’t work together in any logical way.

The adventure setting is a ruined temple being used as a slave depot in the middle of a monster-controlled city. The biggest omission is any information on the city itself. All the text gives a DM is:

Highport was once a human city, but the land and town have been overrun by humanoids — orcs, goblins, kobolds, ogres, and gnolls. Looted, burned, and ill-kept, the city has become a base for human outcasts wishing to deal with these unsavory creatures.

This description does serve to stir the imagination, but really, this setting needs more than just two sentences. This city sounds like a whole campaign setting for adventure, but the text only offers it as a vague backdrop for the dungeon adventure.

But even the dungeon setting, itself, is given only a vague description, with the maps showing only part of the ruined temple. The maps, and the room and encounter text, only show and describe the main temple proper and the underground passages around part of the city’s sewer system. The maps and text suggest much more beyond what is shown and explained, but it is up to the DM to figure out and detail.

Most tournament modules were designed for a party to just be at the first encounter area and to work their way through the dungeon in a set time limit, and this is acceptable for a tournament game. But for campaign play, most Player Character parties don’t just magically appear in front of the dungeon, and they don’t complete the whole thing in one day of adventure. Campaign parties have to get to the location, and probably will have to pull out of the dungeon to rest and recuperate at least once during the adventure. This module gives no information or guidance on the greater setting of the dungeon. This gives details on just two parts of a larger location in the middle of a monster city. It’s like the module author said, “Here’s two levels of a bigger location set in the middle of a monster town. You can create the rest of the location and the town.”

The dungeon levels and rooms and encounters just fail in overall unity. Some of the individual areas and encounters are quite interesting and challenging, but when looked at as parts of the greater whole they are supposed to be, they have no logic or sense. The overall structure is supposed to be a slaver fort, where slave buyers come to look at and purchase slaves. But when you look at the layout, you see that there are no safe routes through the fortress. There are monsters and traps everywhere, such that it is impossible for the inhabitants (guard patrols, slave chain gangs, and legitimate [evil] visitors) to actually get around the place.

Wild ghouls, wights, and even basilisks wander the same halls (as wandering monsters) as orc guards and slavers. (There’s a 4th-level cleric and a 6th-level cleric in the fortress, but there’s no information or indication that they control the undead.)

Ruin Encounter Table (roll d6)
Encounter occurs 1 in 6 (d6), check each turn.
1.-2. Orcs (special); see below
3. 1-2 Basilisks
4. 2-8 Ghouls
5. Wight
6. Slavers (special); see below

And then some of the area encounters, though interestingly set up, make no sense as a part of the overall fortress. Taken as separate, set piece challenges, some of the encounters are fun and clever, but they just boggle the mind when you consider them in total.

I’m sure that tournament players don’t have time or the inclination to think about the fortress as a whole, because they are just playing to see how far they can get through the challenges faster than other teams. But in a normal game, campaign experience, players will notice the stupidity of having encounters grouped in illogical ways.

I ran this adventure twice, a few years apart, and both times, with different groups, the players started noticing the wonkiness of the dungeon setting. They started asking questions of the fortress denizens, and since the module text gives no help in this regard, I was at a loss to have the NPCs answer the questions. I mean, questions to orc guards as simple as, “How did you get into this room?” and “How do we get to the slave pens?” left me looking at the map and text with a dumb look on my face.

As a whole, this adventure module is bad. The various room encounters read like they were written by different people with no concept of what the next room was, or what the overall environment was. A pure hack-and-slash group of players, who don’t think of the adventure beyond the room they are currently attacking may not cause any problems for a DM. But a group of players who put any thought into their infiltration plans, or try to conceptualize the overall layout of the fortress, or try to question the denizens of the place will cause a DM a bunch of headaches.

You could probably mine this module for cool individual encounters to pull out and drop into other adventures, but don’t try to run this as a logical, unified setting. It’s like a bunch of random room encounters thrown together and connected with five-feet-wide corridors.

Bullgrit

I was in my hometown yesterday, visiting my mom, to help her with an aspect of the her business. She has a DSL connection to the Internet, and a wireless router on which I can use my laptop computer, but I still missed another blog post.

Her wireless network went down, and I spent over two hours trying to get it back up. I was on the phone to India twice for tech help. The first person I spoke with spoke English very well, but she was of no real help at all. Everything she told me to do, I had already done in my own attempts to get the network running, and finally she had me download (on the desktop computer, wired bypassing the router) some troubleshooting software that supposedly would help me get the network up.

Unfortunately, the software she had me download was basically just a setup program. It walked me through all the steps of plugging everything in (which I already knew how to do, and had already done multiple times before calling for tech help), and then failed to finish because it told me my wireless router was not reaching the Internet. No duh! I cussed and screamed in frustration.

Fortunately, when I called the tech help back, I got a different person, but this guy had a very thick Indian accent. He did end up helping me get everything up again. Basically, he just had me change the IP address for the router.

Once I could, at last, get on the Internet with my laptop, I started writing my November 27 blog post. But when I saved the post, it disappeared. I don’t know what happened, or how, or why, but instead of having this page like you see, here, I got just a blank, white page with only the number 1 showing as text. Nothing I did restored or found the lost information, so I gave up and went to bed.

The next morning, I got up early enough to rewrite the blog post. I wrote it all again, and saved it. I opened it from my desktop to make sure it didn’t pull the erasing trick again, and all looked good. But when I uploaded it to the server, it was lost again—just a blank, white page with the number 1. I checked the file on my desktop, and sure enough, it was also just a blank, white page with the number 1. I cussed and cussed and cussed. What the hell was happening?

So, that’s why there was no post for November 27. I got the laptop primarily so I can post when away from home, and it has served that purpose well in the past few months that I’ve had it and been away from home. But then this week, I’ve twice been unable to post while away from home.

Anyway, I apologize for missing two days this week. Maybe I need to set up some kind of automated system that will post for me at the appropriate time. All I’d need to do is have the post written and ready, and the system would upload for me. But then again, if I had that kind of programming skill, I’d have a better Web site—using a real blogging program instead of this crappy, basic HTML layout.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com