I believe, foolishly I suppose, in old fashioned rules of gamesmanship, in obeying rules, in following agreements, in keeping promises. I made an agreement with people who I know from experience do not believe the same things, who see agreements and promises as barely worth the air used to voice them. I knew they might not follow through with their promises, so I practiced gamesmanship, in order to protect myself. I followed every single item in our agreement exactly and to the letter, out of respect to myself, not for the sake of my opponent. I was ready to publish the note below at the moment I saw that my opponents had published theirs. I didn’t care what was in their missive, and I certainly did not have any intention of choosing a different dungeon after viewing theirs. This is self respect. They did not publish or show up at the arranged meeting place, but I did, at the arranged time. They did not ever publish their dungeon, so I held off on publishing mine. This is self protection. Now I do not know if the aborted match will ever occur, but I see they have finally published their dungeon. Here therefore, is what I had prepared and ready well before the date and time of the scheduled match:
The Parkland
My brain has received an infusion of sleep for two and a half weeks, and I have slowly regained full mental functioning, enough to conduct a sober evaluation of my battle plan for the upcoming duel with the Flounder, scheduled for Halloween night. As a part of our agreement, hammered out over diet cokes and cookies at the gas station on 32nd and 19th, sitting at the curb without the distraction of seconds, we will present our competing dungeons on our blogs before then. The dungeon secrets have already been vetted by our attorneys to conform to agreed upon monster specs and room stats. Troy Paulson, a local crossword master, has been selected to referee the match. He will actually perform every dice roll in the game with his own cup, examined by both parties very carefully I assure you, as we both happened to have been members of scout troop 619, and our senior patrol leader, Alex Peterson, was an amateur magician. I had a deep respect for Alex as a scout and leader, so much so that I could not ever bring myself to ask him for an explanation of the absurd nickname; “Mr Cunningham” by which the scouts in the troop casually addressed him. I know all about the idiotic sitcom, I should immediately assure the reader, and am sadly familiar with the character by that name. My befuddlement arises more from the nickname’s total lack of any accuracy or aptness for Alex in appearance or demeanor. I despise nicknames myself, but I feel I understand the social rules of their generation, in most cases. Alex was an intelligent and insightful leader, far superior to any manager I have since worked with in the so-called “business world”, and on his way to earning over 100 merit badges by his 14th birthday, had attained full mastery of every facet of the camping experience, including knots, cooking on a campfire (I still remember his breakfast hash with a wistful nostalgia) forest navigation with or without a compass, and especially wilderness survival techniques (his conducted nature walks contained more useful information than has ever been crammed into the grotesque travesty we call a university level course). And this superior individual, who I am quite sure can be counted on to carry his family and a large portion of whatever survives of our culture past the coming collapse in comfort and ease, was referred to by the collected ingrate ignoramuses in his charge, who unless they are lucky enough to know his current address at the time of the Great Fall-Apart and have the wits to flee with their loved ones and cast themselves at his feet, surrendering their wasted and much-abused freedom to his wisdom as their liegelord, will most certainly meet their ultimate fate in the bellies of radioactive rodents crawling over the wasteland of their neighborhoods, these same numbskulls knew him by the cogomen “Mr Cunningham”. I would say I have no words for the mysterious eddies and vagaries of the vast oceanic waters of idiocy, but I of course I do, you’ve just read them. I just don’t have enough of them.
I lost track of my thread for a moment to rage against the darkness, but as I mentioned, Alex was an amateur magician, and showed me several clever ways in which a seemingly innocuous dice roll cup can be altered by an expert illusionist or con man (they are often very similar in expertise, Alex assured us) in order to produce non-random, influenced results. The flounder undeservedly benefitted by the same lessons as I, so I would assume he gave the cup a comparable scrutiny. However, since he has known me for as long as he has had years of benefits from Alex’s wisdom, he would also know that there is not the slightest possibility that I would ever desecrate a dice cup for any reason, and certainly not to interfere with a fair roll.
I had originally intended to call my dungeon; “The Parkland as it Should Have Been”, but that title, it seems to me, contains some fatalistic thinking that may subtly hinder my competitive performance Tuesday, so I’ve chosen to call it “The True Parkland.” It is the world I originally created, freed of the contamination of the gross superhero storyline inserted by the flounder with callous disregard for the complex assessment of ramification and probabilistic unpacking so intrinsic to the hallowed principles of world-building. These terms may overwhelm the neophyte; picture it in this way; in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, cartoon people interact with the real world in a zany manner, we do not mind because we accept the zany quality of this world. Toward the end of the movie, the villain’s language in the climactic scenes violate the zany rules previously established, and the movie falters. In Return of the Jedi, the Ewoks, awkwardly moving Teddy bears, quite obviously people in stuffed animal suits, suddenly appear in a universe of special effects driven realism, and a franchise that had drawn its special thrill and magic from the otherworldly quality of its visuals suddenly looked and felt like a hundred other silly b movies.
And now that I have, with painfully real world comparisons, clarified the ineptness of the superhero intrusion (called “Camperstan,” with unintentional self-mockery), I present the living world that will resist and reject and outlast the abominable ‘Camperstan’ crew; my dungeon for the coming challenge; The True Parkland.
The Parkland stretches out from the road, sometimes for a few miles, sometimes only a few yards. The road winds through wilderness and fields of cut grass, parking lots and houses may appear, a derelict amusement park, a busy shopping mall. This is the world of the future…what year is it? It doesn’t matter, they don’t keep track of years in the Parkland. There are no weekdays, only weekends and holidays, and the holidays are places, not calendar events. There are parks and campgrounds. There are campers and RVs in abundance, but there is mystery as well. You are Dallas Longtree, master detective, hired by your invalid friend Daveed Newsome, to find his cousin, Parker. We begin the game at your office, in one of the shorter towers in the Bouncy City on Antelope Island. You go there everyday on a bus from your home campground. You have your sack lunch and mail, and you open the only parcel, a black envelope with a spooky Halloween card inside, inviting you to lunch, and a murder! The word “murder” has a rainbow marker question mark drawn after it.
Sperberspeak 