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Table Talk: Chessex Stories
Prologue: Well? How did I Get Here?
The mid-90s were a heady time in the gaming sphere; the Internet was brand-new, there was this little indy game called Magic: The Gathering, and some nobodies from a company called White Wolf were producing a series of role-playing games set in the World of Darkness, with Vampire: The Masquerade being the top seller in that line.
I’d stopped playing rpgs in the early 90s, deciding instead that my time was better spent writing stories that I didn’t have to share with four other people at the table. It was fun for them, but it was no longer fun for me. Also: I needed a job. In 1994, I’d been working in the comics industry since 1988 as a retailer, first in Waco, and then in Austin. That’s not the greatest time period in history to be working in comics, and it’s no surprise that I was burned out (the “Death of Superman” storyline in 1993 was kinda the straw that broke the camel’s back).
Chessex was a company formed by Don Reents, who was something of a fixture in the Northern California gaming spaces. He was an avid chess and backgammon player who originally sold products out of the back of a van that he drove all around the Bay Area, selling to individual hobby shops. His original product line included imported chess sets (duh!), battlemats, and the big one, dice. Chessex was the first company to source and procure European-style dice, the ones with the rounded corners and edges. They were made out of urea, a plastic that becomes very hard under heat and pressure (they make toilet seats out of it). There were several manufacturers in Europe who were already set up to make dice, and so that’s where Don went to get them.
I don’t want to get into the weird history of game distribution, but there were a few regional outfits that provided for states (like Berkeley Game Distributors, who supplied all of California) and Wargames West and the Armory, who were technically national distributors, but were based out of one or two locations only. When Don decided to go big with Chessex, he opened warehouses across the country, strategically located to cover large areas and also back up each other.
Chessex Manufacturing (who made battlements and imported chess sets and dice) had two locations; Berkeley, Ca, and Longmont, Co. The first retail distribution warehouse that opened was (I believe) Chessex Midwest, in Indiana (the Midwest is lousy with game and hobby stores, most of which are run by a portly guy with a bad mustache named “Bob,” pronounced with a long, nasal-A sound, like “Baab.” If you heard Elwood Blues in your head saying, “We’ll talk to Baab,” then that’s the correct way to say it) and the Midwest Warehouse was followed by Chessex East, in Pennsylvania.
Don got to the market just in time to be a major distributor of Magic: The Gathering. It’s not possible to overstate the fervor and intensity that surrounded the game when it premiered. Mostly this was due to how the cards were produced (overseas, in small batches, at a card printer called Carta Mundi, which all but guaranteed that a supply and demand problem would arise). By 1995, Don opened a third warehouse, Chessex Southwest, in Austin, Texas. That warehouse took care of the whole state of Texas, Louisana and Arkansas, ensuring that anything shipped out of Austin was no more than 2 days away from its destination. Had that same store ordered from Wargames West, the ship time would have been a minimum of 2 days and possibly 3 or 4. Chessex was faster, well-stocked, and reliable.
It’s around this point in time that I left comics for gaming. I got my start at Chessex Southwest in sales; I got the job because my roommate Weldon had already made the jump from comics to gaming and was the sales manager. He was busily hiring people he knew he could trust to be personable on the phone and also knowledgeable about the product.
Chessex had quickly become the largest game distributor in the United States. Don built the company up, seemingly overnight, and Chessex had the reach, both in terms of shipping and handling, and also in terms of money. In addition to all of the other games and accessories they were moving through three warehouses, Chessex Manufacturing was doing gangbusters with their dice, their battlemats, and their other varied accessories. They had other ambitions out there in Berkeley, as well. Weldon made a lateral move from Chessex Southwest as the sales manager, moving all the way out to Berkeley to become their new head of research and development, a title he fought for and used honorably. I was still in Austin, selling Magic cards and more or less enjoying it. The work was easy.
Then one day, I got a call from Weldon, out in Berkeley.
“I need you out here,” he said.
“I miss you, too, buddy,” I replied.“No, not that,” he said, speaking quietly into the phone. “I need you out here with me. I’m surrounded out here. I have no idea how… you don’t understand… these people…” I could hear him struggling to be understood and I knew what was going on. He was having trouble coming up with words he could say very quietly that weren’t outright profanity.
“Is it that bad?” I asked.
“I just came out of a meeting where I was told by someone here, ‘You know, Weldon, you’re not the only one here who can think up things.’”
“Is this person in R&D with you?”
“No!” he said it at normal volume, but it sounded much louder. “She’s our proofreader,” he said. “You know, the one who let all of those errors go through on the book we just printed?”
“Oh, that’s fun,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said, “I told her that I was the only person here with ‘R&D’ in front of my name, and not ‘proofreader.”
“How did that go over?”
“Not well. I was told I was being ‘difficult.’”
“Would you be less difficult if I were out there?”
“Well, for one, I wouldn’t have to remind you what your job was. What we need out here is an editor-in-chief,” he said.
“I could do that,” I said.
“Yes, you could,” said Weldon. “I need an ally.”
Three months later, I was driving to Berkeley, California in a 17-feet long U-Haul crammed with 21-feet worth of stuff.
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Dungeon Mastering: Art or Science?
TSR line editor Mike Carr asks in the 1979 introduction to the Dungeon Master’s Guide: “Is dungeon mastering an art or a science? An interesting question!” It’s also an eternal question. How do you run a game? How do you do it well? How do you keep your players from flipping the table in abject frustration at your crippling ineptitude? YouTube, evidently, has all the answers. All of them. So many, in fact, that after a while, it all becomes white-hot noise and that’s not helpful to anyone. You can watch five videos on the subject of GMing, and they will all have different takes, different advice, and sometimes contradictory advice.
I’ve been running games for most of my life. I started back when the only advice we got for running the game was the various house organ magazines that came out monthly. And we scoured them, from cover to cover, reading the letters, the ads…anything could be useful, we thought. Someone’s question asked in the letter column might be the very question we hadn’t articulated. Who knew?
Conversely, modern players have a vast array of helpful advice, tips and tricks, playthrough videos, starter sets, blog posts (the OSR blogs are a treasure trove of insightful thinking) and conventions that are driving distance from one’s hometown. If you want to get into D&D, you’ve got no excuse. Target is selling the D&D boxed starter set, for crying out loud. And dice! It’s a brand-new world, I tell you what.
But the problem is an evergreen one; how do you run a game? Start a campaign? Manage difficult players? I’m not sure my personal take on this is useful to you, and here’s why: my game is my game, and your game is your game, and ne’er the twain shall meet. Two points I want to make before you dive back into YouTube and start dutifully smashing “likes” and “subscribes.”
Game Mastery is Alchemy
It’s not the greatest metaphor for ‘alchemy’ ever, but it does have dragons and tentacles, so… This is my metaphor for how people learn to run games. Advice is no good if you don’t like it and refuse to follow it. You’ll pick out things you like and things you don’t like, and it may be based on how your DM ran the first game you ever played in, or something you saw in a video or read on a blog.
You’re going to mix and match, combine and weave together, and homebrew the shit out of whatever ruleset you’re playing—and this goes for running any role-playing game, not just D&D. And here’s what’s worse: I can’t advise you on this! You’re on your own, but it’s not as daunting as it sounds. Your gamemastering style will likely be related to your playing style. Do you like crunchy combat rules? Are you stoked when you get to describe your critical hit that kills the monster? Would you rather explore the capital city and talk to NPCS instead of pillaging every abandoned castle you come across?
Those answers and many others will imprint on how you run a game, and you don’t even have to consciously do it; it’ll happen all by itself, whether you want it to or not. You may have a GM style that is based on what NOT to do in a game, such as maybe the first one you ever played where the DM was fixated on some part of the session that you really dislike. “I’m never doing that when I run a game,” you might say. Good! Now we’re getting somewhere.
Your Utility Belt
No, not like that…well, on the other hand…yeah, exactly like that. Most signs are created because there’s a need for them. When people cut across the courthouse lawn, they put a sign up that says “Keep off the grass.” You wouldn’t hang that on your garage door, but you might put “Beware of Dog” up, instead. Much like the sign over the urinal that reads, “Please do not eat the big, white mint,” you’ll encounter some very specific tools and tips and tricks for dealing with all kinds of situations—but here’s the thing: that advice about railroading? It doesn’t transfer to other problems. It’s specific to railroading.
And yet, YouTube would have you follow any given channel’s advice to the letter and call it a day. Well, not quite. Many YouTubers will also throw out caveats and conditions on their hard-won wisdom, and they’ll say, “you may not need to do this every time,” or whatever the deal is. But the people watching these vids and subsequently interacting with one another on forums and hangouts tend to have an either/or approach. In other words, you should NEVER do anything ever that smells of “railroading” or you’re a terrible person and lightning will probably rain down on your pointy little head for trying such an underhanded trick.
As someone who’s been running games since 1980, that person is doing it wrong. Of course you can railroad your players! You can do anything! You’re the goddamn dungeon master! With that great power, though, comes great responsibility. I’ve railroaded my group before, and I will railroad them again. I just won’t always railroad them, because they don’t always need railroading.
It depends on the group, of course. Your players may have no trouble making a decision and following through on a plan. You have never had to scramble because the players suddenly wanted to go North rather than East, and you’ve got nothing planned for the mountains, but you do have this ruined temple they were supposed to find on the Eastern Trade Route. Whoops!
I’ve helped my groups make decisions by putting the bad guys who are chasing them on the same road. I’ve moved my ruined eastern temple to the Silverback Mountain Road at the foothills in the north. I’ve helped limit some of their infinite choices by placing sudden obstacles on some or most of their paths. As a GM, that’s my prerogative. Also, most of the time, the players don’t know they are being “railroaded,” because you can be very subtle about it (and should).
Keep all of your useful tools in your utility belt, and always play your cards close to your vest. This is good advice but it’s not helpful for new GMs. Most of us are reluctant to discuss HOW we actually run the games, because it’s akin to learning how a magic trick works. Also, it’s alchemy, and my formula for running a game is different from yours. I have never in all my years encountered another single person who runs games the way I do.
By the way: still holds up. The real answer as to how to develop your GM style is to not rely on any one style. Your tools and techniques will come as a reaction to what your players are doing. This “style of no style” is what Bruce Lee was working on when he died. Jeet Kune Do uses what it needs for the situation at hand. If someone is throwing a waist high kick at you, your training may want you to step into it and catch it on your hip bone, or it may want you to move back, or who knows what else? I’m not a Karate-Man. Figure it out yourself.
Lee wanted practitioners of Jeet Kune Do to do the most efficient counter to the kick, regardless of whether or not it’s a block from your particular discipline. Jeet Kune Do eschews formal style, allowing for innovation in the moment, which keeps your opponent off balance and gives you an advantage when attacking because they can’t anticipate your next move.Do this with your game mastering. Watch and listen to your players during the game and after, to better anticipate what they want out of the game session. The majority of actual game mastering that goes on during a session is a reaction to what the players say or do. You can keep your own council on what tools you’ll use to keep the game moving. You have to show up to play with an array of tools rather than just a hammer.
Rip the Band-Aid Off
Just start your game, already. Your players, presumably your three or four running buddies, know you’re just figuring this out as you go. Ask them to help you. Start the game, play it out, and at the end of the session, ask them for feedback. What worked and what didn’t? Use their notes to hone your skills. Add to your repertoire anything that seems like it would be helpful, and try it out. Did it work? Cool, keep it. Or chuck it if it didn’t. Rigidity of thought will not serve you well in this instance.
You know that old axiom that says it takes 10,000 bad drawing before you can make a good drawing? That’s a bit of a misnomer, but the gist of it is accurate: the best way to get better at something is to do it a lot. Run your game, and be prepared for it not to be a transcendent experience. Let the players know up front that you’re trying to figure it out, and to keep the game moving, if you get stuck, you’re going to make a ruling and keep going, and you’ll talk about it after the session is over.
My only real advice, other than “just do it,” is this: start thinking about how you run the game, and be ready to mix and match on the fly. If you don’t want to call it alchemy then pick another metaphor and guard your process jealously. You’ll get better with every session, I promise. -
All Gaming is Pastiche
Playing games in the 1980s, we were largely left to our own devices. Sure, AD&D was out, and TSR was publishing official AD&D modules, and Judges Guild was publishing “approved for use with” modules, and other small press and independent game publishers were putting out unapproved but still very cool adventures and other content, if you knew where to seek them out. There was even a small press publisher in Abilene, Texas called Dragon Tree Press that produced several digest-sized booklets that were full of their weird house rules additions and also some Arduin supplements (I grew up with those books integrated into my AD&D game!) Dragon Magazine was on a monthly publishing schedule, and each issue was good for something interesting, whether it was a new set of monsters or a small one-shot adventure or just a great article discussing how many gold coins could fit in a standard coffer.
And, for the most part, that was pretty much it. New releases were few and far between, but the need to play D&D was a daily occurrence. Thus, we were on our own when it came to creating stuff in the game for the players to bash. I’m using the royal “We” here because as soon as I was able to wrap my head around the game, I took up the DM’s mantle and never looked back. Playing weekly, like we all did, we ran through the published material quickly and ended up on our own for creating new challenges for our players.
What did we use for inspiration? A better question is, what didn’t we use? Thundarr’s Sun Sword? Yep. In Barrier Peaks. The Kaepa from Beastmaster? Of course. The Wood Beast from the terrible Flash Gordon movie? Done and done. The entirety of popular culture was grist for our particular gaming mill. I drew the line at ‘porting over a snowspeeder from The Empire Strikes Back, but I know a guy who did put them in his D&D game. Any book we read, any movie we saw, comic books, rock and rolls songs…it was all fair game. And why not?
From the January 1983 issue, featuring Phil Foglio’s What’s New? This strip was all about making the best of your holiday loot by making it into gaming supplies. This particular set of panels is funny because it’s true. We did exactly that which is pictured above. We were told to make D&D our own, in their own books, in print, tacitly and implicitly. There was no league play, no central source for new gaming material. Modules weren’t published with any kind of reliable frequency, and even then, you weren’t guaranteed to have it be an adventure you wanted to run. We were gaming way more than they could produce content for, so we had to make do with what we had. I know that’s what led to the Monty Haul problem, which was so widespread that it was discussed at length in Dragon for several months and then periodically thereafter. Dragon was as close to a common ground space we could all utilize as an “official” source.
Conan’s Atlantean sword. That stupid three-bladed thing from The Sword and the Sorcerer. Creepy bat-bird-men that dissolved people when they hugged them. Vermithrax from Dragonslayer. A mass of bouncing and chittering skulls from the Dragon’s Lair video game. We had no shame. Also, we had no boundaries. We swiped whatever caught our fancy and shoe-horned it into our games. No one told us we were doing it wrong, because we weren’t. It was all one big pastiche as we tried to create something with tabletop gaming that was supposed to feel like how a good book reads.
There was a list of books published with D&D, designed to be a point of reference for running the game. In addition to Appendix N, there was a slew of fantasy fiction being published from 1977-1984; not quite a renaissance but certainly a trend, borne out by the uptick in fantasy films such as Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings, Conan the Barbarian, Heavy Metal, and The Beastmaster, just to name a handful. Dragon Magazine used to include book reviews which were ideal for finding out about new and interesting novels to swipe things from. And it was in the early issues of Dragon that we were treated to stats for Conan, Jirel of Joiry, Shadowjack, even the Elfquest characters. Side note: I don’t think a historical view of the role-playing game industry is possible without considering the first 100+ issues of Dragon Magazine (and by extension, early White Wolf, Different Worlds, and Sorcerer’s Apprentice, as they were the glue that helped bind the nascent industry together).
An example of pastiche, from the era, no less. Notice that Conan, Robert E. Howard, and Bran Mak Morn all come before the author himself. Note the size differences between the top and the bottom. The notion of pastichery extends to the game itself. People love to talk about “the story” of the adventure, the “narrative” of the game, but it’s not that, not really. As much as we want to call role-playing games “storytelling,” what we’re really trying to do when we sit down is give the feeling of storytelling, and if it’s a style of storytelling we all like and agree on (like sword and sorcery, for instance), then everything we say and do in-game ideally should be in support of that. We want our games to have that epic feel of a cool TV show, a movie spectacular, an epic book series.
Conversely, a game doesn’t have to resolve itself, doesn’t have to answer every question, account for every hanging plot thread. Mind you, neither does anything else, but the vast majority of books and movies make the effort to tie themselves up in that manner, so we’ll take that as a given. If you read a novel and it swung focus around like a typical D&D game, you’d throw the book across the room within a few chapters.
It’s a shame that we use so many extant terms from places like creative writing and theatrical improvisation in order to describe the act of table-top role-playing games. We do have our own jargon, but most of it is fun, whimsical, and more than somewhat esoteric. Or, to my chagrin, it’s borrowed from the video game industry—which wouldn’t exist in its current form without D&D in the first place. I still chafe at the idea of calling Skyrim and Fallout “role-playing games.”
What we do at the gaming table is neither fish nor fowl. There’s a call and response, some elements of oral storytelling and narration, and an arbitrary decision-making element (the dice) that all combine to create a kind of shared scene that is both liminal and ethereal at the same time. I can describe a dragon in a ruined temple, and even with some very precise language, the four players would mentally envision very different scenes. We create, amongst all of us, a shared or communal scene or situation, and then we use our characters to interact within that created, imaginary space. If we’re doing it right, where everyone is embracing the tone of the game, and we’re all on the same page in terms of creating a group narrative that feels like a Robert E. Howard Conan story, that act itself is a pastiche.
From the DM’s side of the table, when gaming works best, I’m using my brain, thrown wide open to better access all of my stored files of movie scenes, great dialogue, celebrity impressions, and more, to quickly react to the player’s reactions and hopefully combine all of my pieces and parts into something that is in no way new, but feels new within the confines of our shared scene. Having a sense of tone, of common storytelling beats, and reading my interest level from the players on the fly all combine to create a kind of ephemeral construct that feels a lot like a story, but really, it isn’t. There are too many cooks in the kitchen for that. At best, I’m trying to get you, the players, to a play where you all agree that the scenario has come to a satisfying conclusion and yeah, it can generate the same feeling as having seen and even participated in this communal, shared experience that is completely unique, but also incredibly familiar. I have more thoughts about this. More later. Back to pastiche.
I don’t think you can consider it creative writing, not when you sit down at the table with other players. Here’s how I know this; over the years, I’ve written a lot of adventures with beginnings, middles and ends, none of which ever played out like I thought they would. Even writing an adventure to suit the needs of my players, I still was left feeling frustrated that they didn’t get to all of my “good stuff,” which often amounted to little more than the crux of the idea, or the grain of sand that became the pearl—but then, my players could have cared less about the pearl, right? They opened the oyster and shucked it, and swallowed it whole. No thought was given to the pearl, no matter how cool a pearl it might have been.
I think it was Professor Dungeon Master who remarked on one of his YouTube videos that he’s not a creative writer; rather, he’s a conflict designer (I’m paraphrasing, here). His job as a game master is to design puzzles, invent challenges, and float hypothetical scenarios that the players will then try to overcome. Getting tied into a single, preferable ending to the adventure always results in you, the GM, being vaguely dissatisfied with the game, even if the players loved it.
That used to be how we all played the game (I’m talking thirty-five years ago). If you came up in the 1990s, your gaming experience was very different, especially if you were one of the zillions of folks who played any of White Wolf’s World of Darkness Storyteller games. In fact, I think TTRPGs have continually evolved to the point that they have come full circle, back to using prompts and random tables to quickly generate content, and come on, it never really left, did it? No, it was just relegated to OSR spaces. The popularity and success of Mork Borg, et.al., has helped bring that style of play back out into the mainstream of the industry, even if it’s still mostly at its edges.
If you haven’t read Karl Edward Wagner, and you love Sword and Sorcery, you must address that oversight immediately. Appendix N and the rest of the fantasy and science fiction section at B.Dalton’s made it tacitly acceptable to swipe whatever we could from books in order to make our games more enjoyable. Not more original, mind you; more enjoyable. Frank Frazetta’s Kane was an NPC in my D&D game.
GM: “You see him-” *points to poster hanging on the bedroom wall* “-walking into the campsite.”
Players: (together) Oh, shit.You damn right, “oh shit.” That guy? In anyone’s game? He’s pulling all of the focus right away. That’s what Kane does in his stories. Why wouldn’t I try to impart that to my players? Dungeons & Dragons was built out of a burning need to replay the Battle of Helm’s Deep, and of course, it quickly pivoted away from that, but the Lord of the Rings novels, the lore, the monsters, and the tone or aesthetic, that remained, well into AD&D second edition. Everything was fair game; the whole of the world’s mythologies, every fantasy movie ever (up to 1974), some comic books, even knock-off Chinese dinosaur/kaiju toys. There was no wrong answer. If we could stat it, we could game it.
We were on the hook to make our own fun, supplying the raw material for our conflict prompts, and here’s the funny part: what most people remember as my best games ever, all of them were built out of my sandbox style of game play, which is where I let the players tell me what they want to do, and I come up with challenges and obstacles along the way. All of the planned stuff, no one remembers so much. And how weird is it that, after all these years, they can still recall things that happened in games we played twenty or thirty years ago?
The tradition of pastiche is alive and well today, what with all of the licensed intellectual properties that have their own ttrpg now. What’s compelling about those games is that they embrace their oeuvre, and use tone and mechanics to better simulate the thing you’re trying to pastiche at the table. Alien’s stress mechanic comes to mind, as does the sanity rules and Cthulhu Mythos skill in the redoubtable Call of Cthulhu, arguably the first game to fully embrace its pastiche mission. Whether it’s simulation or imitation, the games we create in our head are just as real to us as the books we read and the movies we watch. Sometimes, the games are way better.
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Table Talk: Dude, Where’s My Campaign Book?
What the current version of D&D does, it does very well. Character classes, backgrounds, feats and features, spells, monsters, treasure…these things are only as complicated as you want to make them, and the simple mechanics of 5e ensure that DMs can arbitrate on the fly with things like Advantage and Disadvantage to keep the game flowing and the dice rolling.
If there’s another edition of D&D that has more settings and reskinned environments than fifth edition, I don’t know what it is. It’s a good game system; a nearly perfect balance of crunch and DM fait accompli. I don’t think it’s a universal system, and there are some suppositions baked into the game (like armor class and to a lesser extent, alignment) which is hard to square up in certain genres, like science fiction. Why people keep wanting to do space opera with d20 is a mystery to me in a world where we have Star Wars and Traveller, but I digress.
Both historically and currently, there’s been a morbid fascination with new worlds, new settings, new environments, and 5e has enjoyed robust success at playing host to nearly every stripe of fantasy, its sub-genres, and their sub-genres. Once you figure out how the sausage is made, making a stat block for a flying monkey or a hookah smoking caterpillar is a snap. Heck, Second Edition even published a series of historical campaign books for things like Vikings for players who wanted a more authentic historical adventure. They were called “splat books.” Dumb name.
These days there’s no shortage of differently flavored D&D to be had, from great games in the OSR (DCC’s Lankhmar and Dying Earth sets stand out here) to licensed properties like Hellboy and the BPRD, to original worlds and settings of nearly every genre. What few Intellectual Properties not currently shoved into the shape of a 5e stat block are readily available elsewhere (Conan, John Carter, Aliens, Blade Runner, The Walking Dead, etc.) And yet, there remains a few book-related properties that have never enjoyed a conversion into D&D, for reasons which probably sound great but that I would reject out of hand because, come on, it’s 2024.
The Chronicles of Narnia
C.S. Lewis’ classic fantasy series has never enjoyed the universal success of his buddy J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings saga, but that’s not to say that Narnia hasn’t had an outsized impact on modern fantasy. Considering how many of the creatures in Lewis’ alternate world look a lot like creatures from British, Celtic, and Greek and Roman myth and history, you wouldn’t even need to reskin any monster blocks—minotaurs are already statted out. Ditto pirates, witches, and fauns. And what few new stat blocks you would need aren’t even worth mentioning. Aslan is a talking lion. Boom. Done.
My first Narnia book. The world itself would need a good map, a gazetteer that was keyed with the original stories, and a timeline of events. The only “new” parts of the game might be found in a way to first roll up a modern-day character and then pull them into Narnia, but honestly, I think you’d do much better making modern day Backgrounds and leaving the character classes largely untouched.
I can only guess that the reason why this hasn’t happened is because of the Lewis Estate, but think about it…how baller would it have been to hold up a boxed set back in the 1980s and say, “This is a game by a Christian author! We’re going to a dreamland of magic! Aslan is Jesus! How is THIS Satanic, Mother?!” Now we have Alice in Wonderland converted to 5e and not one but two Oz 5e conversions. Where the hell was this stuff in the 1980s?
The World of Jehreg by Steven Brust
Several omnibuses exist! While not exactly in the same “classic” category as the Chronicles of Narnia, Brust’s adventures of Vlad Taltos, a witchcraft-practicing assassin in a world of long-lived sorcerers, was an Appendix N-Adjacent series, being published initially back in the 1980s as part of the influx of fantasy novels riding the wave of sword and sorcery. Brust’s World of Dragarea was unlike anything else back then; a mix of wry, hard-boiled, sarcastic writing, near-heist and caper-based adventures, and a unique set up for characters. The Dragaeran calendar was similar to the Chinese Zodiac, with seventeen houses based on animals (and whose characteristics spilled over into people born of that house—Dzur were stocky and strong, etc, like looking up your sign at the Chinese take-out.
Vlad, however, is from the East, where humans only live about 80 years instead of hundreds. And he’s a member of House Jhereg, the only house that actually sells its house name and status to whomever can afford it. Jhereg is the “thieves’ guild” house, you see, and it’s a motley assortment. Everyone in Dragarea practices sorcery. Witchcraft is outlawed. Guess what magic Vlad uses? Oh, and every swordman from the various houses uses a long sword, which seems rather like a katana. Only Vlad uses a rapier, which is also against the law.
Also recommended! These books are like popcorn; you can’t read just one. They are well-plotted with interesting and fun characters who grow and change. From a gaming standpoint, again, this writes its own supplement. Seventeen Dragaeran castes, with new heritage features and traits, new weapons, new spells, new monsters and deep history and lore…it’s the thing we all look for in a D&D splat book; stuff to crib for your own game.
I know Brust wouldn’t say no to someone wanting to make his books into a game; in fact, he is a gamer from back in the day and the series was based on an AD&D campaign he played was in with fellow author Robert Sloan. I’m just surprised that it hasn’t happened after all this time, especially with so compelling a setting. As close at we ever got was a stretch goal add-on for Blades in the Dark…and that’s not going to cut it for me.
The Maradaine Saga by Marshall Ryan Maresca
The first Maradaine book. The city of Maradaine is a cosmopolitan gem, the center of Druth politics and society. However, such prosperity comes with an underside; drugs are destroying lives, a conspiracy to take over the government is underway, and poor neighborhoods are threatened with eviction by unscrupulous developers. It’s just another day in Maradaine, but some people are standing up against the corruption; people like the mysterious Thorn, who plagues the drug dealers with his enchanted cloak and rope; the inspectors, Satrine and Minox, who are each on the outs with the rest of the constabulary; the Rynax brothers, former ne’er-do-wells who are trying to go straight, but find themselves planning one final heist, and Dane, the knight errant member of the Order who lives with the results of his decision in combat.
These (and many other) characters are each part of their own series of novels, each highlighting a different aspect of the underside of Maradaine. The four series, The Thorn of Dentonhill, The Maradaine Elite, the Streets of Maradaine, and the Maradaine Constabulary are written piecemeal, one a timeline that has characters crossing over from one series to the next, with the final book in the saga, People of the City, being an Avengers-style tale where everyone comes together to fight off a grand threat. It’s a lot less complicated than it sounds.
Maradaine is a perfect city setting for a low- to medium-level magic campaign. It’s strength lies in the excellent world building and lays out, piece by piece, the relationship between cops and robbers, mages and the military, the people and the government, and us versus them. I can’t think of a more interesting place to set city campaigns, and here’s the deal—I know Marshall, and I know what a big ol’ geek he is, and I am surprised no one has asked him for the license to do this.
There’s a lot of gameable elements in Maresca’s world, my favorite one being that all mages must belong to a circle after they graduate from Wizard School. The circles provide legal protection from undue persecution and also assume responsibility for mages who act badly. This keeps spellcasters on a short leash, unless, of course, the whole circle wants to break bad. The tech level in Maradaine is clockwork in practice, but not over the top; it’s steampunk-lite (so light it’s nearly translucent).
I’m sure there are other books and series that have not gotten a game-ification and even a few that once did but no longer exist (looking right at you, Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion). Fans generally won’t be deterred in converting their favorites to 5e, which is how we ended up with a 5e Fallout and a 5e Star Wars, whether we needed or wanted them, or not. Again, I prefer my 5e all fantasy or mostly fantasy, so I wouldn’t use that system to play in those worlds, even as I fully appreciate the amount of work it took to get those square pegs into those round holes. Here’s hoping that some small publisher with a little dough picks up the baton and does a splat book for the series I mentioned, as I think they would all be welcome in the marketplace of rpg ideas.
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Table Talk: Get Outta Town
Starting today I am going to strive to produce and post at least one rpg gaming entry a week. I’m going to try to brand them with this nifty graphic I tricked up, for those of you who want to tell at a glance if this is something you want to read or not.
Get Outta Town
I didn’t take my first International (meaning, away from North America—Mexico and Canada don’t quite count for this) trip until I was in my fifties. I went to Greece on a family Spring Break vacation/educational tour and it was, frankly, epic. Greece was the birthplace of most of my favorite first edition AD&D monsters, along with some of the best myths, great food, and a 2000-year-old culture on display for everyone to look at. Getting to walk around in places I’d read about in books all my life was nothing short of incredible. I even got engaged on the trip—at the Temple of Poseidon, atop a cliff, overlooking the sea.
Not Poseidon’s temple, but a temple, nonetheless. I recently got back from a trip to Spain (same circumstances as above, minus the engagement), and it was differently epic and equally awesome. In lieu of 2000-year-old ruins, they have 1000 year old castles, and yeah, you can walk around in them, too. As a Texan, we are inordinately proud of our colorful and violent state’s history, but the few ruins that we have, of old forts and farm houses, do not compare in the least to the castles and ancient sites that are damn near everywhere.
Europe in general is lousy with stuff like that, along with cities that are thousands of years old and still built around narrow streets, cobblestone walkways, narrow alleys, bits of wall and other fortifications, and so much more. We encountered it everywhere we went in both Spain and Greece.
Palace walls at Alhambra, Spain. Note the levels of living space below the castle walls. I told you that to tell you this: if you’re a game master of any stripe, you need to go see that stuff for yourself. Travel is good for you in so many different ways that have nothing to do with tabletop gaming, and there’s plenty to check out for yourself in that vein, but let me tell you what it will do for your TTRPG game.
Walk a Mile in Their Shoes
Being present in the physical space of a narrow street intended for the serfs to get to work so that the wealthy people don’t have to look at them? Priceless. Standing in the doorway of a room in a castle and realizing that, at 5’ 11,” you would have been a giant to these people? Looking out from the wall of King Agamemnon’s castle and realizing that you can see the cliffs in the distance that were part of the city of Argos—and that would have been looking out across a vast shallow sea? Now, let’s have a conversation about the optimal size of a travel hex.
Agamemnon’s Palace, in Mycanae, Greece. Note the watch tower in the distance. Seeing the actual buildings and homes and castles and towers that serve as perennial inspiration for fantasy games and books—really seeing them, standing on the cobblestones, and noting how the walls are made—it’s all fodder for your games. You don’t have have to do massive info dumps on every single detail you’ve uncovered in your journey, but having players notice as they walk through the streets that there’s a shallow gutter on all of the footpaths, right down the center of them, with regular grates for the runoff of rain water, sounds very high tech and sophisticated to a group of people who were pig farmers from the North just a couple of weeks ago—but that’s a real thing. And pointing it out to your players tells them there’s sewers under the city, something they might need to know in order to break into the Temple of Dagon.
That tower was originally a guardhouse. It’s now the Pablo Picasso museum in Malaga, Spain. Inspiration is Everywhere
Who knows what’s going to inspire you? It might be a dish you try at some out of the way restaurant. A lot of the cathedrals in Spain had plazas with fountains right next to them. How interesting would it be to have players walking into a new city and seeing, just off the main gate, a huge crowd gathered in front of a prominently placed temple, and they are all listening to the edicts of the priest (who will turn out to be the bad guy?) Instead of picking up rumors at the tavern, let them hear what’s up from the horse’s mouth. And having people in the crowd grousing about the increase in taxes is a more dynamic way to drop a plot seed.
Spain had a lot of open air markets, courtyards and plazas in every city. The architecture of both Greece and Spain was really interesting to me. For instance, there’s a lot of greenspace on rooftops that you can see from the streets; palm trees and other large shrubs act as a natural windbreak and people spend time on the roofs, drinking and socializing. In a massive city-state, the major shipping point, a marvel of civilization and culture, why wouldn’t there be some rooftop lounge situations? Nice views of the ocean, the surrounding countryside, and sometimes, your neighbor’s domestic squabbles. Another plot seed.
If you want to let players know what the city values, show them rather than tell them. This is one of the many devotional bas-reliefs in the Cathedral at Cordoba. The Devil is in the Details
Let me stress here, that not traveling will not ruin your game. You can write some kick ass adventures without ever leaving the suburbs, especially in a 21st century world full of documentaries, Internets, blog posts, and more media than we’ll ever be able to consume. There’s no end to the accounts you can read, the movies you can watch, and the history channel specials you can binge that will inform and influence your whole game. Lord knows I got by just fine without travel in the 1980s and 1990s. No complaints at my table.
The ruins of Delphi, in Greece. The fog was so low it was obscuring the tops of the mountains. BUT…traveling to the city of Seville and walking through the Jewish quarter outside of the giant combination mosque-cathedral, and walking up a cobblestone path meant for foot traffic, with a shallow gutter in the middle of the street for water run-off, and actually feeling the narrow space; two steps to your left or right and you’re scraping the wall. That kind of detail is something you can sprinkle into your next city campaign with ease. It’s easier to describe these narrow walkways and imagine them crowded during Trades Day or some Harvest Festival if you’ve walked them yourself.
Walking paths and gardens outside the old city walls in Cordoba, Spain. In general, it’s just a good thing to write all of this stuff down as you’re experiencing it, or take lots of pictures that you can use later as reference, to annotate, as you see fit. Take Toledo, Spain, for instance…
This storied city, the origin place of “Toledo Steel” if you’re a swashbuckler of any stripe, has a fascinating history, owing much to its physical location. The city is half-surrounded by a river, sitting atop a massive hill, with walled fortifications to further protect it (for it used to be the capital of Spain, you see). It’s one thing to see it on a map, where it has been necessarily rendered abstractly in order for us to understand the space.
As a tourist map goes, this is perfectly serviceable, if a tad bit dry and boring. Like most maps. It’s quite another to look at the city from across the river and note the changes in elevation, the height of the bridges leading to the city (one of the tourist-y things you could do was ride a zipline from the city to the outer walls, flying majestically over the river, some hundred feet or more below), and note what kind of hilly terrain is piled up across from the city itself. There’s a small community there, living with nearly vertical climbs up cobblestone streets. I watched someone on a bike pedal, zigzagging from one side of the road to the other, all the way up to the top of a hill with shops and homes on it.
Toledo, from across the river. Even with “modern” buildings in the picture, you can see the gaming potential of a city such as this, right? There’s a wealth of detail and little flourishes that you can only experience if you’re in the actual space. Photos do not do the real world justice, especially not from the camera on our phones. There’s just no depth of field, no sense of scale, and no tactile sensation of place. Seriously. Not even the high-definition letterboxed formats that movies and TV are shot in will really give you an accurate sense of place. Turning up those narrow foot paths finds the wind narrowed and moving faster through the confined space, dropping the temperature about twenty degrees. I would never have thought to include that in a fantasy city, and I’ve run fantasy cities for most of my DM career. I’ve even lived in big cities and visited other places like Chicago, where the wind tears through the wide modern streets and is bite-ass cold. Why the hell haven’t I put that in a game? Even in passing?
From Hydra, a Greek Island. The hills are so steep they still use donkeys to make the ascent. DONKEYS! Why isn’t that in your game, right now? And can you imagine showing this to a player and saying, “You can see the pickpocket running up the stairs with no loss of speed. What do you do?” Other Considerations
Travel is expensive, as previously mentioned, and the farther away you go, the more expensive it gets. There are ways to offset this and make it cheaper (but not necessarily cheap) to fly. Group travel brings the per person cost down, and it solves a lot of logistical considerations, like where to sleep. If you don’t mind living out of a backpack, there’s a lot of options for students who are doing the whole “walking across Great Britain” thing and lots of websites to help student travelers out with food and lodging.
An exterior wall on the streets of Athens. Their patron was Athena (Get it?) and her symbol was the owl (get it?) and there were owl motifs all over the city. Lift this idea for your next game. If money is an issue, and it’s not possible or feasible to save several thousand dollars up just to take a trip, then look around you and see if you can find any historical sites, particularly houses that are more than a hundred years old, battle sites, old forts, and if you’re lucky, some place in the Northeast that’s part of the original 13 colonies that does historical reenactments on historical sites. Lots of those places are now part of the National Park Service and are cheap or outright free to tour.
A view of Athens from the Parthenon. Looks a lot like Lankhmar from up here… Granted, it’s not a 9th century Moorish castle, but there’s still plenty of value to visiting historical colonial sites and just taking note of the houses and buildings—and the streets! Some of these cities who have been around for 200+ years have long, narrow, winding cobblestone streets that modern cars grudgingly drive on, but it’s obvious that the road was meant for foot traffic and/ horses and wagons. Any place you can get to that’s not like where you are from is all grist for the mill. You’ll find something you can use in a game, guaranteed.
Most of Greece is just one big mountain range, so every town and city is built into the side of a mountain. I’d make players check endurance if they were going to chase someone up these steps. -
NTAB FIELD REPORT: Spain and Andalusia, 2024 – Day 7
Day 6 found us in Malaga, watching parrots fight at the Picasso museum.
Day 7
Our final day in Spain. We’d spend most of the day in Malaga, and then board a train that would whisk us back to Madrid and from there, the airport, and back home. Lots of ground to cover.
One of the sub-groups in our larger group was taking a day trip to Morocco, and they were already gone, along with Al, our primary guide. Their pull-out from the hotel was something like 4 AM, in order to get on the ferry, have time to clear customs (2 hours), do the tour, and then back to Spain again, whereupon they’d catch a flight from Malaga.
We tried to get on that excursion (how cool would an authentic Moroccan fez be?!) but our travel itinerary and flight made the side-trek impossible. We were given a “beach day” instead, and you know, a few people even did that. My family had other plans.
This was the park next to the bus stop. I could have spent the day right here. Just lovely. Janice found another museum for us to explore, the alternative being more day drinking. This modern art edifice was called the Centre Pompidou Malaga and it was very near the marina anyway. It’s noteworthy for the El Cubo art installation outside of its building. Inside, we were treated to three exhibits of modern art, and for the record, none of them were “echoes” of anything, all right? They were their own curated collections, which was immensely more satisfying.
My favorite was called “Place-Ness” and it was about the antagonistic relationship between urban and rural spaces and how one encroaches on the other and back again. Lots of commentary on the Industrial Revolution and how the 1920s and 1930s saw the erosion of rural for urban, but now in the 21st century, the rural is reclaiming the abandoned urban. It’s the kind of modern art collection that I think most people can understand; a mixed media presentation of photography (a couple of pieces by Wim Wenders!), sculpture, fine art, graphic and commercial art (movie posters!) and even film footage. They even had a couple of Picassos.
One of the sculptures. It reminded me of Superman’s Fortress of Solitude. Going through the museum completely took the sting of betrayal away from yesterday’s disappointment with the Picasso Museum. For one, I was prepped for what I was about to see, and this was contextualized throughout the exhibit. Everything spoke to and pointed back to the purpose of the collection, like a really good essay or research paper. No wasted space. Heh. That was not on purpose.
Okay, now, FINALLY, here’s some art I can speak about with some authority… Our visit was a leisurely hour and a half, including the obligatory cruising of the gift shop. When we came out, we were famished, but the problem with the Malaga Marina is, evidently, this is where the tourists all hang out. Authentic cuisine was not in sight, which is how I ended up at the Hard Rock Café: Malaga, staring at a mediocre plate of what I presumed to be nachos and wondering if I’d done something wrong with my life.
I’m not sure which chain restaurant establishment I detest more: Hard Rock Café or Planet Hollywood. They are both just the worst kind of thing, more than a restaurant, less than a theme park, with signed objects in glass cases and other trappings of grim idolatry, dedicated to the people least deserving of sainthood ever. Look, I like James Taylor’s music just fine, okay? “Fire and Rain” is an unarguable classic. No doubt. But his signed acoustic guitar over the greeter’s station is, first of all, not hard rock, and second, who cares? I hate that these two places are, for many people, their first and only exposure to American culture.
I didn’t say anything, because the rest of the family and our tagalong, a woman with the last name of Guiterrez, whose nickname was “Goots,” which delighted me to no end—they seemed okay with the choice. It turned out later that this was ironic on the part of my family; there was a story I won’t retell about how they ended up there on another trip and it became a “thing,” if you know what I mean. This lessened the sting, somewhat, but the nachos were still shitty.
We took our sweet time getting back on the bus. Our trip was essentially over, in that we would be retracing steps to get home. I found myself exhausted, out of gas, and this made me go quiet, which concerned my fellow travelers, as I had not shut up for most of the trip. After assuring everyone that I was okay and probably just needed a nap, we stopped for a quick café con leche and some cookies that seemed innocent enough but were contextually very inappropriate. Let me ‘splain:
You may have gleaned onto the fact that Catholicism is alive and well in Spain. They go old school with it, and why shouldn’t they? All of those freaking cathedrals aren’t good for much else. During holy week, there’s this thing called the Semana Santa or the processions of the brotherhoods and it’s part of their tradition and culture for the acolytes to dress in long white robes with white pointed hoods that cover their faces completely. If that sounds like something else that is terribly vile in American history, you aren’t the only one to reach that conclusion.
BUT…to Catholics in Spain, the sight of a group of people in white hoods and robes, carrying crosses, and marching down the street, is reverent and spiritually moving. A perfect example of context and situational experience. These images adorn tourist bric-a-brac, such as coffee mugs, postcards, and, well, evidently, cookies. The shape is somewhat abstract; I had one of the sailboat cookies and thought they were nice enough. It was weird that the sail had eyes, though. That’s when it hit me; those weren’t sails, they were hoods. Sweet Baby Jesus! It was funny in a horrific kind of way. There were, incidentally, also Easter Egg cookies in a far less triggering shape. They were decorated with pastel icing, as one would expect, and so were the acolyte hoods. Cue up all of the Gay Klansman jokes—we did. Shades of Dave Chappell’s blind Klansman bit and also inappropriate scenes from Zorro, the Gay Blade. Just to be clear: we were not mocking the Catholic church. Rather, we were throwing the KKK under the bus…the brightly colored rainbow bus.
The train station was immense. There was a whole mall bracketing it. Ginormous. All of the remaining travelers reassembled at the bus and made our way to the AVE train, a high speed (not bullet) affair that was long, sleek, completely crowded, but still managed to be quite comfortable. It went from the coast of Southern Spain all the way back up to Madrid in 3 hours, leaving all of us who were on it to wonder, aloud, what the hell was wrong with Texas and the rest of America that we can’t have things like this. It makes no sense, and never will. There’s not an argument you can offer up that I can’t bat it back down again. Someone is lining their pockets to make sure that it doesn’t happen. I can’t imagine who that could possibly be *COUGH*big oil*COUGH*auto industry*COUGH*…sorry. Got some sarcasm in my throat.
Getting a good pic of the moving train was harder than you think. We got into Madrid late, around 9 pm, and ended up back at the first hotel we’d stayed at. I cracked the window in the room.
The Spanish version of turning the A/C up full blast. We woke up the next morning and had a leisurely breakfast before heading back to the airport. One last round of ham and that lovely Spanish tortilla, and then we simply had to endure the plane ride home again.
If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading all of the entries. I hope you found something entertaining about my adventure, and hopefully it’s inspired you to do your own traveling. I’m really grateful for my wife’s family and their willingness to bring me along on these trips. Salud!
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NTAB FIELD REPORT: Spain and Andalusia, 2024 – Day 6
Day 5 found us in Granada and the palace of Alhambra.
Day 6
Back on the bus, everyone. We’re headed to Malaga!
This bus ride was to our last destination, the coastal city of Malaga. By this point in the tour, we were both used to the schedule and a little sick of it. It’s perhaps in this spirit that we were treated to an easy day, with a drive out to Gibralfaro Castle on the coastline. We did not tour the place, and I know I’ve been complaining about the similarity of the cathedrals, but I would have enjoyed this place.
Malaga from the castle site. Not pictured: the castle we didn’t get to tour. Instead, we went to one of the lookout points for a top-down view of Malaga, and everyone had a blast taking photos and admiring the view. Janice and her family took lots of pictures of our little group throughout the trip, but this was one of the few times we all got into the massive group photos. I’m still very indolent when it comes to stuff like that. More and more I find myself taking pictures of the things I want to remember and photo reference for my burgeoning digital morgue, but I don’t do a lot of what I think of as “tourist photos” which is where you have several people standing in front of the much cooler thing that I’d rather be looking at.
Our guide for the excursion, Al, doing his best Gene Kelly impression. I say this with no acrimony whatsoever. I’m happy to be in those photos, but as we all spend a portion of our lives online and cultivating our digital presence, the number of tourist photos and selfies in front of National Treasures has exponentially multiplied throughout social media. I find that the more continuous and repetitive exposure we have to media, any media, it has a numbing effect on us. How many times have you been idly trawling through Zuckerville and hit someone’s vacation photos and just skimmed right over them because this person always takes selfies with the Grand Canyon over their shoulder and if you’ve seen one of those, you’ve seen them all?
I really have to stop complaining about social media on social media. It’s an intellectual ouroboros that comes off as disingenuous at best and tone-deaf at worst. Let’s get back to Malaga, shall we?
The excavated amphitheater. We could have climbed it, but we decided to day drink instead. After the view of the city from the observation point, we drove into the city center, parked the bus, and hoofed it up to this incredible Roman amphitheater that had been excavated—and it was really something else, y’all—and then the group went on a walking tour to visit (wait for it)…a cathedral. There was something else on the itinerary and we decided that we would not partake of the cathedral, preferring instead to hold out for the Pablo Picasso museum.
One of the plazas we hung out in. There were a lot of colorful birds about. We had an additional wrinkle to contend with: Janice’s niece got some sort of bump or rash on her leg that was itchy and weird, and out of an abundance of caution (it was thought to be an insect bite or sting), she and her father went to the local emergency room. It turned out to be some sort of virus, like a cold sore, that just showed up on her leg instead of her face, so they gave her a topical antibiotic and an oral antibiotic and sent her on her merry way. Crisis averted.
The cathedral we weren’t touring was down this charming side street. That took a bit of time, during which, we found a café that served great food (no, really?) and enjoyed the sun, the sea air, and did a bit of people watching. Antonio Banderas has a home here, in the very area where we were, and I kept my eyes peeled for him.
The Picasso Museum was in the other direction. That’s it, the tall tower, there. We knew the rest of the tour would end up at the Picasso Museum so one the two stragglers rejoined the group, we moseyed over to it, taking our time and enjoying the sights, eventually ending up at another café, where I indulged in a sweet crepe and a café con leche. We enjoyed a brief exchange with a young Scottish couple on holiday; Zane commented on the man’s Seattle Seahawk cap, him being a Forty-Niners fan, and we had to explain the rivalry to him. He’d just bought the cap because he liked it. Me, I was thrilled that I didn’t code-switch while talking to them.
Eventually the others caught up to us, and they looked beat up. It turns out that the guide for the cathedral tour was the opposite of Marta from Alhambra. He was a semi-retired art history teacher, which should have been a good thing, but evidently he kept trying to engage with the group and get them to engage back, rather than just coughing up with the dates and proper names. That same guy was to be our guide through the Picasso museum.
The courtyard inside the Picasso Museum. This was once an army barracks. As we cued up in the line outside of the museum, the lady at the front tapped the sign by the entrance and said, “Be sure you read that,” so I did. As it turned out, our timing for touring the Picasso museum couldn’t have been any worse; they were in the process of redoing the entire museum, changing out exhibits and so forth, and so, while we wait on that to finish sometime after Easter, please feel free to enjoy this OTHER exhibit in its place, “Echoes of Picasso.”
What is “Echoes of Picasso,” you may be asking yourself? It’s a brilliantly conceived and curated collection of works of art that were inspired by Picasso’s genius and vision. So, like, anyone who painted something or sculpted something in the cubist style was fair game. Crom give me strength.
This is going in my next D&D game. “You turn the corner and there, right in front of you, is the clockwork minotaur! Somehow he got in front of you. Roll for initiative…” Look, it wasn’t a bad exhibit, okay? But when you’re all set for a deep dive into Picasso’s works, from the family private collection, no less, and you get a bunch of stuff that is most emphatically not Picasso, it’s a letdown. It was a bummer for me, as I am an art-guy, but even the disinterested homeschool family felt cheated. Especially when they were exposed to some of these works of art, a lot of which was in the realm of what could be described as, um, transgressive.
The guide didn’t help matters much. He kept trying to get us to “try and visualize” and “try to imagine seeing this art for the first time,” over and over again. Kinda hard for some of us, who have known about Picasso and have had him contextualized and explained to us for as long as we’ve been looking at art seriously. It’s that knowledge and understanding that made me want to see the museum in the first place! I’m right there with you, Jack!
I did my best to follow him, but most of the others scattered as soon as we got inside the converted guard house. The structure itself was beautiful and simple, all the better to showcase the artwork, of course. We dutifully walked the circuit, and I was happy to find there were two Picassos still on display, in and amongst his many, um, admirers’ works. They stuck out like a sore thumb, you could spot them instantly. I could, at least. Everyone else just walked around in a kind of daze, and you could see they were trying to make sense of it all.
I was hoping to at least get a book from the museum to enjoy vicariously, but there were no English versions of the tour book. Moreover, the staff was kinda snotty about it. I wasn’t being a dick or anything; I just asked.
We bought some art supplies for people we know. As we were leaving, the guide called us over and took us to a side door that we’d not seen earlier. It was a courtyard, fenced in and private, with tables and chairs for people to presumably sit and contemplate their lives. It was lovely, but what drew our eye was the proliferation of birds in the fountain.
You tell me: giant parakeets or runt parrots? I never got a straight answer. They were either mutant feral parakeets or mutant pygmy parrots, but either way, there were a lot of them and they were making all kinds of noise. Not about us, but the other birds who had the temerity to attempt a drink and splash in their fountain. It was the bird version of West Side Story. We stayed until someone came looking for us, and then we rejoined the group at the bus.
Janice got a pic of them in flight, and I got a pic of Janice getting a pic of them in flight. As we were heading back, our guide pointed out to us where Antonio Banderas lived, overlooking the amphitheater and literally right where we’d spent the day. My chances of seeing him were great, but it didn’t happen.
ANTONIO! HEY! ANTONIO! He can’t hear me. Weird. That’s his place, up top, there. At the hotel, we were treated to a grove of trees with blooming orange blossoms that smelled amazing and almost made up for the fact that the stairs were designed for a race of giants. Getting up them with suitcases may have taken years off of my soul.
Malaga was great; it has a wonderful, casual energy about it that reminded me of San Diego when ComiCon wasn’t in town. Only with less bras. I have never seen a people so statuesque and beautiful and so lacking in support underwear in my life. One of our group mentioned that when she was shopping, she brought a lot of bras and underwear. She seemed embarrassed, but, she pointed out, “They were so cheap!”
“Of course they were,” I said. “They have a surplus because no one who lives here is buying them, apparently.”
Up Next: More Malaga!
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NTAB FIELD REPORT: Spain and Andalusia, 2024 – Day 5
Day 4 wrapped up our time in Seville with dinner and a show, minus the dinner.
Day 5
Another day, another loading of giant, increasingly ungainly suitcases, and now, we’re schlepping bags of groceries with us. Today’s destination: Granada!
Those of you over a certain age probably have the Allen Sherman novelty song cuing up in your head after reading that city’s name. I know I did, and it took real effort to tamp down the urge to sing it aloud from memory, a feat that would be incredibly impressive to the other fifty- and sixty-something year olds on the bus, were the song not so cloyingly annoying. We don’t get a lot of novelty tunes anymore, Weird Al notwithstanding, as he has transcended that narrow lane and gone fully mainstream. Also: Do not sing “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah” to the Spanish. They not only don’t get the reference, but they will give you the stink eye. Granada is not a city to mock, even in jest. They are fiercely proud of it, especially the Granadians. Granada is to the rest of Spain as Texas is to the rest of the United States; proud to a fault, but not without good historical reason.
ANYWAY…
Breakfast found us having to strategically decide our meal planning again, owing to the long day and late dinner. The bread from yesterday’s emergency pre-dinner sandwiches was all gone, and we were worried as a group how we were going to best utilize the rest of our groceries, which included lunchmeat, peanut butter, honey, mayonnaise, and two different kinds of chips. As we sat in the dining room, eating our European breakfast, enjoying the seventy-nine varieties of Special Ham and eating delicious marmalade on toast, we all had the same idea at once.
With Lalo Schifrin’s theme from “Mission: Impossible” playing in my head, we formed an impromptu crew and hatched a daring caper on the fly. Our target was the stack of untoasted white bread on the buffet, with secondary objectives being the pre-packaged condiments, napkins, and, if we could manage it, more ham, because, you know, when in Spain…
NOTE: I didn’t really need to link to the Mission: Impossible theme, did I? But for those of you who still have “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah” stuck in your head, this should clear it out. You’re welcome.
Now, I’m glancing about, watching the hotel staff for them to look the other way so my wife can stuff a double handful of pilfered bread into our traveling bag, and a sobering thought occurred to me. I tried for both of my trips to Europe to identify the Ugly Americans. In Greece, it was easy. I spotted them on day one and they carried through to the end of the trip. I’ve got stories galore, let me tell you. But I noticed there weren’t any Ugly Americans on this trip, at least, not insofar as our initial group was concerned. Sure, the other groups were keeping to themselves, but they weren’t really being ugly about it. As I said to Janice, “Okay, go now, go, go, gogogogogo!” and watched her stow the ill-gotten bread, it hit me like a ton of bricks: It’s us. WE are the Ugly Americans. Stealing bread from a buffet? Who DOES that? And ham? What, in case there’s no ham at the place we’re going to next? Fat chance; the country is practically made out of ham. They stack it up to make their houses, like salty Lego’s. And yet, here we are, squirreling food away like Syrian refugees.
It took a while for me to regain my perspective on this situation. If we were the Ugly Americans, we were at least a lesser form of American embarrassment. It never spilled out into the streets, nor caused a public scene of any kind. On the next trip, it’ll be someone else’s turn to draw the heat for the rest of us.
These thoughts kept me entertained as we made our way to Alhambra, the fabled Moorish castle, a storied edifice, made famous by Washington Irving, among others. Alhambra! Yeah, okay, it was yet another castle, but this one was different. The Moorish architecture and styling was unlike anything I’d seen before, and it was still mostly intact and very accessible, once you got up the damn hill.
Zane’s photo of the front of the castle. It was nigh impossible to get a pic of the whole place. Our guide was Marta, and she was universally declared our favorite guide on the trip, hands down. You know when you tour these sites, they give you a receiver and earphones so that the guide can speak in a normal tone of voice and you hear them clearly. This was very necessary for us, as the place was crowded to bursting with large groups of people, mostly students from Italy, France and Spain, along with a decent amount of elderly Germans, all of whom were on holiday and touring the castle with varying degrees of interest.
Janice’s pic of the same place, with me and Zane for scale. I have a weird-shaped head. This was not Marta’s first rodeo, and in between some lively commentary about the architecture of the castle and great interactive stories that really helped the kids understand just how different it was back then, she would drop these little asides into the mic: “I hate the students. They are the worst, you don’t even know.” Oh yes, we know, but it was really nice to have our irritation validated.
The groups of students would walk through the rooms of the castle, almost at a forced march, talking and shoving and hitting each other on the arm, and there was some adult with them, talking, but we couldn’t hear them and I’m certain they couldn’t either. They’d simply flow around us like stinky salmon, all jacked up on hormones and energy drinks, and it was always in the middle of something interesting we were hearing about. We were duly fascinated by the place. They could not have cared any less. “Just look at them,” Marta said as they streamed by, “do you think they gonna learn ANYTHING about this place? No!”
Water and fountains were nearly everywhere, and still running. Truly beautiful to behold. She tried to keep us ahead of the group. At one point, in one of the many courtyards, she looked up and said, “Uh oh, the enemy is here. Hurry, let’s go,” as the group came into the space from the opposite side.
Alhambra was my favorite place we visited. Finally, I got to see some stuff that mattered to me. Marta showed us where the wives and concubines slept, and then showed us the queen’s chamber with the alcove that was acoustically designed to let the queen listen to what the other wives and mistresses were saying about her. She showed us the escape tunnel where the king could bug out if the Christians breached the walls. Stuff like that. Cool castle stuff.
The escape tunnel, to thwart invaders. We weren’t allowed in. As the castle is located at the top of a smallish mountain, there were some stunning views of Granada. I was interested in the ruins of the living quarters, because you could really see how this place was its own self-contained fortress. I could have stayed there a little longer, but we had to get to our hotel to check in. There was some free time for the group, but I had other plans.
Anyone else want to play Dungeons and Dragons? I have a map… You see, I took my laptop with me on this trip (like an idiot) and my intention was to do some updating from the road, but a combination of tiredness and a lack of space in some of the hotels made this difficult. I’ve been writing my trip notes by hand, which isn’t anything new, but I was missing the ol’ clicketyclack of the keys, so I elected to stay behind and get a little writing done while everyone else went to the city center and shopped for a couple of hours.
That was my plan.
We got into our room and were baffled by our accommodations; there was a smaller bedroom off of the main bedroom, with two extra beds in it. Our room could sleep four. It was a weird and also terrible use of space. But there was at least a desk, with convenient plugs so I could power up. Cool.
Janice left me to my machinations. And that’s when I noticed it. See if you can spot what’s wrong here.
Welcome to my nightmare. If you’re asking yourself how I’m going to get into that chair, you are bang on.
Really, Spain? Not even skinny people could use this desk. There was simply no way to access the desk, not without going full Keith Moon on the hotel room. I mean, I tried to move the bed, but it only shifted over a few inches. Ditto the desk itself, which might have been attached to wall in the back. The only person who could have sat in that desk chair was Janice’s niece, who is five feet tall and waifish—and even THEN, I know for a fact she would have had to climb up and over and lower herself down into the chair like it was the cockpit of an F-16.
Oh, come on…! At one point, I was sitting on the edge of the bed, looking into the room with two bonus beds, a closet, a safe, and a nightstand, and wondering why oh why, Granada Hotel, you had all of this space and decided to wedge the desk into the one part of the room that created a chokepoint.
Maybe if I just…nope. My moving things around and using my brain to think was causing me to heat up, and the room’s temperature wasn’t helping. There was a thermostat, but no matter what you set it on, the numbers kept going up.
What about if I maybe just…well, shit. Well aware that I was currently playing the role of Ugly American, I ventured downstairs and took great pains to politely and apologetically explain what was going on in my room with the thermostat. I was told that’s just for heat, and this time of year, I was better off opening a window. Awesome. Sensational. Not for the first time in two separate European countries, I wondered to myself why they even bothered to put a little control unit in the room if it’s functionally useless. That’s a nail that could be holding hotel art on the wall. Sweet Baby Jesus.
Upstairs. Thermostat off. Window wide open. Outside compressor noises filling the room. I’m in my underwear, drinking agua con gas, trying to form a coherent thought, and attempting to navigate onto the 3G network via a stupid human trick that no one knew about. Janice returned and managed to get my blood pressure down. I decided to take a shower to cool off and unfunk myself from all of the walking and the sweating.
This bathroom…I wish I’d gotten a picture of it. There was a toilet and sink, and then a second, larger room, with a bidet (I never got the hang of it, and a shower). This big ass room, at first glance, looked like a sex-bathroom, right? It’s a shower in a giant open floorplan? Acrobatics commence!
Only, no. Once you turn the corner and look inside, you can see there’s a clear glass shower booth, walled off, into the corner of the room. Not the quarter, or the quadrant, but the corner. The clearance in this shower? Roughly equivalent to an American phone booth, circa 1975. I had to shower sideways, okay? I turned to the right, wet and soaped the left side of my body, and then shuffled to the left, and soaped and rinsed the right side of my body. I never faced the shower head. It was impossible.
Stepping out of the shower booth, I put my foot down on the marble slab that lined the whole room, and my foot shot out from under me, and all that kept me from describing a one and a half gainer onto my head was the fact that I was still half-inside the booth and was able to grab hold of the walls and railings. Scared the hell out of me. I adopted a wide stance, much like a sumo wrestler about to fight, and carefully shuffled across the black ice-slick bathroom floor, like the world’s worst hermit crab. When I finally emerged from the bathroom, all of the stress Janice had banished was back, living at the base of my skull. This hotel was trying to kill me. I understood now exactly what happened to Jack Torrance.
Janice took a shower, but only after I laid spare towels down on the floor and in the shower stall. It was strictly for friction so that she could stand on the floor without skiing across it.
The rest of the night was a blur. We ate from an expansive hotel buffet that thankfully included paella, and then I took my happy ass to the bar and did my writing there, like a true poseur, drinking wine and ignoring the football match on the big screen.
Up next, Day 6!
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NTAB FIELD REPORT: Spain and Andalusia, 2024 – Day 4
Day 3 was a lengthy bus ride to Seville, with stops along the way. Today we tour Seville, and tonight, we indulge in a Flamenco show!
Day 4
Our buffet breakfast was a spread, and while we were tucked in, our guide informed us that we would be eating dinner late that night. In fact, if we didn’t eat something prior to 5:30 PM, we were going to have to wait until 9 PM to eat. The reason was because of our Flamenco show at 7 PM. “Plan accordingly,” he advised.
Half of the Plaza de España. That World’s Fair must have been something else. Two of our family stayed behind from some kind of mystery illness—not sure what it was, but it had cleared itself up by the afternoon. This left me, Janice, her brother and her cousin to explore Seville. We got a quick drive around, where the guide pointed out all of the buildings Seville had constructed for the 1929 World’s Fair, all of which were still in use as other things. Every building came from one of Spain’s allies or neighbors and was indicative of their culture and architecture. Spain itself had the largest, of course; their Plaza de España included a giant open square with frescoes detailing great moments in Spanish history and man-made canal and bridge. The site was used as a stand-in for Naboo in the Star Wars prequels.
I’m not gonna search for it, but I think the Plaza was used in Attack of the Clones. Sidebar: I would love a good book that is an overview of the various World’s Fairs, because those all seem like amazing hubs of culture and innovation that we don’t do anymore. Seville spend nearly two decades constructing the pavilions along the river and they intentionally designed them to be permanent. Now, nearly 100 years later, they’ve got this amazing set of parks and useful structures that they’ve maintained. Meanwhile, we build houses that aren’t designed to last 30 years. Huh.
This pedestrian street was wide enough for two people to walk side by side. At the Plaza de España we were treated to one of the buskers selling souvenirs and tchotchkes, loudly and forcibly throwing a couple of pickpockts out of the building. I reeeally wish I could have understood what they were saying. It didn’t look pretty. We got a lot of warnings from the guides about pickpockets and gypsy women who would give you a sprig of rosemary and then try to read your palm for 20 euros. None of us fell for it, and no incidents occurred, as far as I know. The few I noticed made a point of not trying to engage with anyone from the group, and that was pretty smart. We were all on high alert.
You can’t really tell from this photo, but there are three or four different levels for people to congregate, including several terraces and the roof. They were closed, or I would have stopped here for tapas. After the plaza, we split off from the group (who went on to visit…wait for it…another cathedral) and made a leisurely stroll of Seville, with the intention of meeting up with everyone after they walked through the church. This sent us meandering through narrow streets to emerge onto one of the larger thoroughfares lined with restaurants and shops on both sides. We beat the group to the cathedral because we weren’t getting a blow-by-blow of its history, so we tried to wait near the Fuente Farola (the fountain) at the back of the cathedral, which seemed like a logical place, since that’s where apparently every tour group in Seville was congregated.
The fountain, along with the back of the cathedral. I’d mentioned in an earlier post how I find it interesting that the Spanish/average European isn’t concerned with making space for other people. We noticed several benches that faced the fountain and the cathedral’s bell tower, so we decided to grab a seat and regroup, check maps, check time, plan our next stop of the day, etc. The benches we were on were near a curb and about five feet away from a no parking sign. I spotted one and headed for it, only to be cut off by an elderly couple who got there first. No problem, there’s plenty of benches around. I headed for the next closest bench that was free and another couple literally ran in front of us to sit down. Popular spot, this fountain.
Note the “Pope Window” where the Cardinal can address the poor without having to actually interact with them. Historical Catholics were very considerate. We eventually grabbed a bench near a curb and about five feet away from a no parking sign. I sat down with Janice on my left and the curb and the sign on my right. In the span of three seconds, a teacher/tour guide marched across the plaza, made a beeline for the sign, and turned around and gestured for his class of 7- and 8-year-olds to join him. They proceeded to crowd around the sign, and that meant us, whereupon they just stood there, taking up space, breathing, sneezing, coughing, and in a few cases, staring at us with the dead, reptilian gaze of a serial killer.
Janice’s brother Zane actually braved the bell tower and got a great view of the city. This is not that view, but you can get a sense of how big the third largest cathedral in the world is. It was impossible not to notice them, standing two feet away from us, picking their noses while their teacher spoke VERY LOUDLY SO AS TO BE HEARD, which meant our conversation in low tones was drowned completely out. I glanced at the students right in front of me, tried a smile, and got nothing back in return. Cute kids. Future of our planet, folks.
Needless to say, we got up and moved away, with me fuming and Janice snickering. No problem, right? We needed some postcards anyway. Let’s find a souvenir store and buy some shit. We found a few shops still within this open area, and there was one place that looked promising, but no sooner had I stepped into the building but that same tour group appeared from the other doorway and filled the area I was trying to get to. Janice pulled me away before I could start using my few Spanish words on the guide.
“I know the Matrix is telling me that it’s sweet and delicious.” We found a spot outside a restaurant that had a special going: four tapas and two adult beverages for 20 EU. Sold! Their tapas menu was comprehensive, so we ordered four things that we thought sounded good, including a selection of croquets and this amazing potato and shrimp salad that I am going to attempt to duplicate at some point. Janice tried the Spanish vermouth, a specialty of the region, and I had my first Spanish beer, which was not unlike a Negro Modelo. I had to be careful, as there were IPAs everywhere, although not as prolific as here in the states.
Food porn. Note the cathedral in the background. That’s how close we were. These were the tapas I had in my head when I was thinking about Spanish cuisine. We sat for a while, people watching and drinking our beverages as we waited for the group to catch up. We shared the dessert, a coco-tiramisu thing that was the size of a lasagna and waited for our family to show up as they were still on the tour.
Thus sated, we proceeded on our merry way to the Guadalquivir River to rendezvous with the bus. Our intention was to zip back to the hotel, check in on the sick members of the family, and grab a quick bite to eat at the hotel before we were supposed to get back on the bus for the Flamenco show. Janice kept her eye out for interesting souvenirs and I tried not to trip on the flagstone sidewalk. There was another restaurant that served seafood so we decided to get another drink there and wait for Janice’s brother and cousin to catch up to us.
These local firemen were removing the manhole cover while the lookout in the street kept gawkers away. This is exactly how heist movies start, y’all. This place was more of a neighborhood-like café called Bodega Díaz-Salazar and we were again dazzled by the tapas and the drinks—my wine and Janice’s old fashioned. Zane and Goldie finally found us and they ordered food, which included a sirloin cooked with garlic sauce. Yes, please!
Janice is not amused with my picture-taking timing. This sounds like a lot, but there was a method to the madness; we were grazing because we’d been told to “plan accordingly” for food. I mean, the walking was a slog, sure, but we probably didn’t need the alcohol along with the caloric intake. Mistakes were made, I’ll grant you, but we regret nothing.
We hopped an Uber to the riverside and enjoyed the Spanish galleon moored at the dock, along with the little history of the Torre del Oro, the Tower of Gold, where…ALLEGEDLY…Columbus stored all of the gold and treasure he looted from his various travels. Let me stop you right there and say I’m calling DIBS on the heist novel wherein a bunch of 17th century thieves pull a job cleaning out the tower of all the ill-gotten gains. Ye Olde Ocean’s Once?
The heist writes itself, really… The bus, and the rest of our group, finally showed back up and we hopped on and returned to the hotel where we found our missing family, well and fully recovered from whatever knocked them out last night, and the two restaurants in the hotel were closed. We’d forgotten about siestas. That’s a real thing.
Luckily, Janice’s intrepid mother walked to the nearby grocery store and returned with sustenance—a lot of food, three bags full. We all made sandwiches in the room and took a load off while we waited for the call to get back on the bus. By the way, what we call “Mexican Coke” in Texas is just “Coke” in Spain. Pure cane sugar. No corn syrup. Nice. I did eat some sweets while I was in Spain, but none of it fell heavy on my stomach or made me woozy or jittery or any of that, mostly because they cooked the food with a normal amount of sugar and none of the other chemical stuff we cram into food here. And I didn’t crave more of it when I was done, either. I drank a Coke and it didn’t make me thirsty.
Flamenco! Spain is very proud of its national dance, and with good reason; it’s pretty damn cool. We got a crash course in all of the different forms and a little of the dance’s historical origins, insofar as our guide could determine. As with most folk traditions, it’s difficult to discern exactly where and when and how stuff like this developed.
Our bus let us off at some sort of fun park, at this old movie theater (!) that had been refurbished and converted into a live theater venue, and we were deposited with about a dozen different groups of various sizes into the auditorium, thankfully in the same area. We got a complimentary adult beverage, too. The show was phenomenal; you could clearly follow the “story” of the dances, like a much noisier ballet. I found it very inspirational and wrote a lot of notes for an idea that I had after watching the performances.
A tip for anyone visiting Spain: You might be tempted to ask your guide if Flamenco dancing shares a common origin with Greek folk dancing, as the two seem to share a lot of commonalities, with minor deviations for shoe stomping or plate breaking, depending on where you are in the world. You must resist that temptation, because not only will your guide not be that well informed to speak to such matters, but he may well get a little snippy with you for suggesting, however obliquely, that the gypsies in Spain might not have invented the dance whole cloth, out of thin air, with no other contributions from anyone, anywhere, anytime. Next time, just keep your face hole shut and google your query like a good tourist.
Many of the kids seemed singularly unimpressed, but I was mesmerized. There was a clutch of girls in our extended group, all of whom seemed hell-bent on not doing anything except taking duck-lipped selfies for snapchat. They had to be shushed. Back at the hotel, they had prepared a huge buffet for us, and we were finally getting food that I didn’t recognize. I mean to say, I had saffron rice and chicken thighs and they were awesome and didn’t taste like food I could have made myself. We all stuffed our faces and tottered off to bed. Another travel day awaited us.
Up next: Day 5!
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NTAB FIELD REPORT: Spain and Andalusia, 2024 – Day 3
Day 2 found us covering a lot of ground, visiting the royal palace, day tripping out Toledo for a sword-making demonstration, and then back to Madrid. Today was an early morning, since we had a lot of ground to cover.
Day 3
The day began with a bang, or rather, a whoop. Someone…and we don’t know who, exactly, but SOMEone found a reason to open the fire exit door at 5 o’clock in the goddamn morning. Now, I don’t know for a fact that it was one or more of the kids from one of the other groups, sneaking into or out of another room at the ass-crack of dawn, but I do know for a fact that, had it been me in that hypothetical situation and I was in danger of getting caught out after curfew, I would not have opened the door that comes with its own hotel-wide alarm system. But no one ever accused modern teenagers of thinking anything through that didn’t originate on TikTok or Snapchat or Instagram.
The fire alarm only hastened our getting dressed. We were up, as in, awake, and trying to go back to sleep for another thirty minutes. No such luck. We’d just finished putting shoes on when the alarm stopped, and I realized that some of the Spanish profanity I’d picked up in my 50-something years of living in Texas came in handy, after all.
Downstairs, we were the only people from our group at breakfast, which suited us just fine. My recollections of all of the European breakfasts I ate were a variation on the SPAM sketch from Monty Python. “We’ve got eggs, eggs and potatoes, potatoes, toast, different toast, crusty toast, ham, other ham, smoked ham, cured ham, sausage made of ham, toast made out of ham, ham ham ham and ham, and sliced cheese with only a little ham in it.” Everyone assured me the Iberian ham was very different than what I was used to. Again, I have to say, Oh Really? You obviously don’t know the lengths to which I’ve gone to sample interesting and exotic hams and sausages. Don’t presume that their ham is going to change my religion.
And yes, it was good ham. Delicious. Very tasty. But it wasn’t some new and exotic preparation that left me breathless and reinvigorated. It was smoked ham, all right? I ate more of the Spanish tortilla (because I needed the eggs) than anything else, but I did indulge in a piece of toast so I could enjoy the marmalade.
Puerto Lápice had no allusions about its place in the world: Don Quixote central! Janice’s mom joined us as we were sipping our café con leches and picking at the remnants of ham. The only other person in sight was an older man carrying a small dog under one arm. He was doing something behind us, I don’t exactly know what, but it involved talking loudly to the desk clerk as he paced back and forth in the open area between the front desk and the door. Eventually, his wife, who looked a lot like him in size and shape, joined him and they were in the process of walking out when Janice’s mom stuck her hand up and said, “Good bye, I’m sorry again about last night, y’all have a good day!”
Before either of us could react, the couple had crossed the expanse between the lobby and the sitting area and were now standing over us at the table, speaking in heavily accented English, laughing with Janice’s mom and asking us all about ourselves. They, we learned, were from Malta: “a veddy small EYEland,” he said. They were also not particularly enthused about their time in Espana. “Thees place? It not so good.” Their accent was more Slavic than Latin-based, which made my subsequent impression of the man sound like Boris Badenov. But I digress. It seems his wife got arrested the previous evening at the local discotheque (yep, discotheque) for yelling across the room at Spanish people. I’m positive there was more to the story than that. For instance, what exactly was she yelling, and why? But those details weren’t volunteered, nor were we interested at that point in getting any clarification, because as he related the saga of their evening to us, his wife was absent-mindedly running her hands up and down the front of her torso, over her breasts and belly, in a seeming stupor, save for the loose, vacant smile on her face and her inability to stand still without swaying.
Janice and her mother could not look away, and yet, they were trying like hell to stare only at the man, who was now telling us he’d been to America once, in New York City, and that his wife? “She like Trump!”
Janice replied, “He’s certainly popular with some people. WELL, we mustn’t keep you…”
I tried to pet his little dog, but he never got close enough for me to reach out. The dog looked friendly enough, if a bit shell-shocked. We would later learn why this was so.
After several refrains of “Okay, well, y’all have a nice day,” they finally staggered off. By then, other people had begun to show up for breakfast and so it was impossible to fully unpack what we’d just witnessed. I wish—oh how I wish!—I’d gotten a picture of Mary with these two, so that you can properly contextualize this story.It took most of the day and conferring with several of our traveling companions, who’d been sitting on the first part of the story. Here’s what we were able to piece together during the bus ride:
The previous evening, Mary needed to talk to Janice’s brother for some reason or another, but could not remember what room he was in, so she started knocking on doors—including ours. I opened it to see her in the hall, talking to Zane, and waving me off. “Wrong door,” she said. No problem.
One of the other wrong doors, before she got to Zane’s, was this couple from Malta, who were confused by Mary’s knocking. They were dressed and apparently going out, or about to, so it wasn’t an imposition aside from having to explain the mistake and laugh about it. It was this incident that compelled Mary to speak up about it as they were leaving.
The other half of the story took place prior to the disco-arrest, when they were getting everything lined up to go out, which included walking the dog. Some of our group were in the lobby the previous evening, drinking wine and relaxing, when couple came into the common area, sober and loud, and the wife told Maltese Boris Badenov to walk the dog. He did so, and upon bringing the dog back into the lobby, pulled out a baby wipe and wiped the little dog’s ass (it made a loud, distressed yelp at this), and then he wadded the used wipe up and stuffed it into his jacket pocket. They then proceeded to the disco and their exclusive tour of the drunk tank in Madrid’s excellent police station. Most of our tour group—now a sub-group within the larger circus—thought this was wildly hysterical. I can only imagine what the rest of the bus was thinking.
These giant mosaics adorned the above building. Hey, if you’re gonna steal, then steal from Gustave Dore, am I right? Most of the day was spent getting to Seville, by way of Córdoba, with a brief stop in Puerto Lápice, a small town where they have leaned all the way into being a tourist attraction for Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, being that they are in the historical region of La Mancha. There were windmills, both functional and decorative, and no end of burnished metal effigies of the aged courtly knight and his rotund sidekick, riding and standing, and of course, jousting. We had some fun with that, but our visit was little more than a pit stop, so we snapped a few quick pics, grabbed some postcards, and then it was back on the bus.
We stopped shortly thereafter for lunch at this roadside travel center, what we lovingly referred to as “Spanish Buc’ees.” That’s a bit of a misnomer, because as a European institution, the place was mostly for food, and not for buying tourist-y crap. If you took out all of the merch at Buc-ee’s and replaced it with tables and chairs and a couple more islands for food, that’d be this place. My options were snack food, a cafeteria style set of options, or Spanish Burger King. Cafeteria food won out, and it was some kind of meat and gravy and not anything that I remember eating.
We ate a quick lunch here, and then Hans Zarkoff blasted Flash Gordon into space. I noticed there that many of the people in Europe, presumably also travelers, but not Americans, are completely disinterested in making space for other people. I stood behind a man my age, my tray in both hands, with food on it, waiting to get a fork from the place where the utensils and napkins were gathered together. He didn’t acknowledge me in the least. He got his tray, thoughtfully chose a plate to put on it, and was leisurely inspecting the silverware assortment when his wife came over with a bottle of water that she placed on the tray, and this was followed by a discussion over whether or not she should have her own tray. Spoiler alert: she did, and I watched this little passion play unfold as my food cooled and my temper rose. They knew I was there. She for sure saw me because I smiled and gave way when she walked over to start the fight with her husband. I eventually reached around and over the man, snagged a single fork, and retreated, and I heard him go “Ut!” to me as did so. Sorry, bud, but I’m on time limit here, and you’ve got nothing better to do than occupy space where crowds of people need to be.
Narrow streets in the Jewish quarter of Cordoba. Does this make me the asshole? I honestly don’t know. I tried very hard to not be in a hurry in Spain, and to not get in other people’s way in Spain, until I realized that they were singularly uninterested in not being in my way. If I didn’t move, they were gonna make the “tsch” sound at me as they were forced to break their gangly stride, swerve around me or otherwise re-engage with the world around them. Janice pointed out that the energy I was picking up on was present in any large city like Chicago or New York City, and I admit, it’s not something I’d considered. I don’t ascribe any malice to it, but it’s pretty obvious that we are all pretty self-absorbed these days.
Córdoba was on the way to Seville, and we didn’t get the chance to do the full city tour, so they gave us the highlight; a stop at the Mezquita-Catedral de Córdoba (Link included so you can appreciate the size of this place). This incredible landmark started out as a Moorish Mosque before they were kicked out of Spain, or optionally kept on as a labor force to turn the mosque into a (wait for it) Catholic Cathedral. Kind of the Old World version of when you see a Taco Bell and a Kentucky Fried Chicken in the same fast food restaurant.
I kid! I kid the Muslims and the Catholics! Especially when walking around in this place and finding myself breathlessly contemplating all of the giant forty feet tall marble pillars, row upon row, some of which boasted an intriguing legend and were roped off to prevent further damage by tourists’ fingers. Not for the first time on this trip, I gazed up at the massive structure, with intricate carvings and hand-hewn marble arches, erected in the building with ropes and pulleys and the sweat of various infidels, who had a lifespan of somewhere just north of 40, and thought about modern day Christians (those that can manage to find their way into church) who plop a dollar into the collection plate twice a year, at Easter and Christmas, and pat themselves on the back for their transactional piety. Get back to me when you spend half your life working on a building you won’t see the inside of when you die.
People still regularly worship here. Unbelievable. Our tour guide was an interesting fellow, very animated, with interesting tidbits to share and a verbal tic that got funnier and funnier as he went on. To get our attention, he’d stop and say, “Well…well…well…” sometimes holding that third one in and other times rushing through. It was the signal to listen up for his insights. Some folks tired of it quickly, but not me. I found it charming.
Our tour guide: avuncular, excited, and quirky. “Well…Well…Well…!” The other two groups were finally starting to loosen up and we were all talking amongst ourselves. Janice had to keep reminding me not to swear, and this was partially because it was supposed to be a student trip and partially because we were pretty sure we’d identified at least one clutch of homeschooled kids and their parents—and we could tell this by their staunch refusal to engage with anyone from the other groups. It was a little off-putting.
At one point, I was walking the narrow streets of the Jewish quarter in Córdoba and I tripped on a loose flagstone. I said, “son of a bitch!” and Janice gave me the stink eye again and gestured to one of the other teenagers from one of the other two groups. He and his brother had been sitting across from me on the bus, minding their own business and not causing a ruckus. He heard me, saw the exchange, and said to us, “I’m in public school, so it’s totally okay. I’m just hanging back here with you guys because I can’t handle the homeschool family.”
The cathedral was full of effigies scattered about, real subtle and understated…you had to really look for them… We slid into Seville, tired and beat up from the long drive on the bus. We ate late at the hotel, a buffet of something that started to look like Spanish food, including saffron rice and beautifully cooked chicken thighs. This I could get used to.
More photos of the Mosque-Cathedral of Cordoba
It’s the God-Line! Answer it, quick! 
So you can understand the scale of the place we were walking around in. That doorway is 10′ high. The wooden panels around it, who knows. And inside, it opens up to 40-feet high ceilings with hand carved inlay. Your church maybe nice, but compared to this place, it’s a squatter’s tent. 
Catholics. 
from one end of the mosque to the other. Up next? Day 4, of course!
The North Texas Apocalypse Bunker
Headquarters of Mark Finn, who writes, broadcasts and navigates pop culture as he waits out the entropic breakdown of our beloved institutions.
