The Lizard Thing, part 1

that new paid serial I mentioned

First things first, Game On Greensboro is happening on Saturday. This is a essentially a fundraiser for a church, which I find hilarious, given how the churches of my youth reacted to D&D.

Game On Greensboro is more than just a gaming event; it is a fundraiser for Unity in Greensboro’s youth initiatives. Unity in Greensboro is a 501c3 nonprofit offering free and low cost youth empowerment and leadership programs as well as large community events such as our annual Trunk or Treat.

Our goal for 2024 is to raise $6,000 to help support our 2025 budget, which will include:

Continued support for all pre-existing programs

Creating social-emotional curriculum for the young adult group

Development of online, self-paced skills courses

Expanding internship opportunities to offer more hours

Renovations and supplies needed for pending relocation

Professional development and continued education scholarship fund for teen leaders and dedicated volunteers

Subsidies for personal empowerment courses for young adults

I will be there with information about Rotary’s youth programs and scholarships, as well as my own literary offerings, while demo-ing a few board games from my personal collection. This will not be one of them.

The organizer, Miranda Koberg, tells me that they are especially looking for donations towards their board game library. If you have things you are not using, bring them by the church, or e-mail @ the link above.

Come on out and play some games!

Last week I mentioned an old book, one of the first fantasy novels, by a guy named George MacDonald. Then I stumbled across this documentary on Tubi, which talks about MacDonald’s work as an influence on both Tolkien and CS Lewis. According to that show, The Hobbit’s Goblins were basically MacDonald’s version, from books like The Princes and the Goblin, which is my next LibreVox hit.

All three of those writers were Christians. MacDonald was an actual preacher, until his congregation canned him for not being fundamentalist enough. He turned to writing and became a celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic. He was friends with Lewis Carroll and basically everyone else in the Victorian literary scene.

One of the moderns interviewed for the show was a guy who calls himself The Geek Preacher.

A person with a devotion to something in a way that places him or her outside the mainstream. Most geeks identify themselves among various categories such as comic book geeks, gamer geeks, sci-fi geeks, science geeks, philosophy geeks, history geeks or music and film geeks. These are just a few of the categories for geeks because they continue to grow every day!

I like that definition, because it encompasses our three writers. MacDonald’s congregation had a specific idea of what constituted piety, and he was too much for them. He didn’t want them to just go to church every Sunday and pay their tithes and pray. He wanted them to love each other.

MacDonald eventually became an Anglican, but he never had much patience with high theology or liturgy—he said it often stood in the way of people encountering Christ personally. Furthermore, it wasn't just the church but all of creation that revealed God: "With his divine alchemy, he [God] turns not only water into wine, but common things into radiant mysteries, yea, every meal into a Eucharist, and the jaws of death into an outgoing gate."

It’s an almost Buddhist way of approaching Christianity.

The doc also mentioned another influence, The Magic Ring, which doesn’t have a recorded version, but I liked this picture from the preface.

From the Internet Archive’s copy of The Magic Ring (1876), scanned from an original in Cornell’s library. I can’t tell if the leaves are supposed to be from grapes or ivy. Public domain.

Which seems a good intro to our first adventure with Goblin mage Pyrite.

The Lizard Thing

by Randall Hayes

“I need an amulet of true seeing,’ the woman said. “I think my husband is a Reptoid.”

Not another one, I thought, and rolled my eyes internally. I have got to start charging more. I have clearly not found a price that the market will not bear.

What the lay public doesn’t realize is that any true seeing is a relative truth. While my knock-off copies of the Amulet of Djed are actually magical, unlike the glass baubles for sale in the bazaars, they won’t find a doppelganger, or even pierce any illusion I would bother casting before brunch on a lazy Sunday morning. They’ll reveal weak spirits, if they’re mostly on this plane of reality, or scramble the camouflage of a chimeleon, which can be helpful if you’re especially flammable, or small enough to fit into one of its three mouths.

Chimeleon, with lizard, squirrel, and pigeon heads. Colored Sharpie on paper. Photo by Jennifer Reall.