Quitetly, Quiggly stepped into the darkness as he stealthily approached and steeled himself for the gruesome task ahead. As he got within 5ft of the target, Quiggly raised his club with both hands above his head, brought it down and brought it directly down on top of the target's head, smashing it. The target went limp. Quiggly went back, picked up his cloak and hood and left the scene. The body was reported missing two days later. *If you don't know what the hell the title of this one means, then you probably don't really deserve to know about it. I think that this one is too awesome for its own good. We here at DnD Grognard are very excited to bring you the latest offering of Quiggly Quagmire's 'Quagmire's Quest for Grammar'. In this issue, we have a couple of adventures by the famous, and to this day still living, Jack Vance. One of those adventures was his first in the genre of "sword and sorcery". Published in 1948 and written during his earliest days of what would become a prolific writing career, "The Dying Earth" tells the tale of a soldier, Karth, as he wanders through a land where the sun will set forever and a mysterious castle will begin to fall into rubble. The whole thing, in fact, has a very Lovecraftian feel to it. I have read one short story by Jack Vance before this one. In this one, the author wrote a short story with his brother, George. The story is written as a fictional news article that's supposedly from one of the fictional science fiction magazines in the future and tells the story of two explorers on a fantastic, dangerous, "fourth world" planet. The story is called "The Star Dwellers" and it's just too damn fun. In the third adventure, Quiggly met his old friend, Quiggli Demonslayer, for some d-d-d-d-d-drinking fun. Quiggli is a drunken bard that makes his living singing songs of battle for extra payment. Unfortunately, his drinking makes him fall off his horse much more frequently than he would prefer. Of course, Quiggly has no problem with it, because he's drinking wine at the same time. But, when their drinking buddy, Rann, the dwarven sage who is a little obsessed with getting drunk and/or falling over and/or tripping over things, shows up, Quiggly decides to make his life more difficult by telling Rann he's not allowed to take his horse into the inn and then proceeding to walk with the party inside. After getting the whole group in the inn, Rann, being the drunk that he is, decides to tip over a keg of beer that's on the counter, the entire keg of beer, and all of its contents. This leaves Quiggly to run outside and come up with some plan to get everyone into the hall so that they can continue their drinking and making a fool of themselves. We get to see Quiggly, Rann, and the group get drunk as a...well, as a group of drunken dummies and it's great. The fourth adventure that Quiggly Quagmire encountered had to be pretty damn great for him to be able to remember it so clearly. While at a local tavern, the story-teller in the inn tells the story of a great warrior, Vandris, the "Vindicator", and the king of the land, Barbarath the Orm, a man who was rumored to have been on a crusade to kill a dragon that was terrorizing the country. As Quiggly tells it, a new land army, the Orgish Legion, was being trained and the story tells how the king of this new army, Vandris, won a fight with the king of the kingdom of Org, a man named Randal, in a duel at sword fighting, and brought about the end of his life. It was one of the many great battles of the time and many people died. Quiggly said that he loved this story so much he made sure to bring a copy of it to his cell in prison. I remember reading this story and being completely amazed at how epic it was. Lastly, we have a bit of a silly one. This one was written as a parody of Sherlock Holmes with a little Lovecraftian twist to it. Written in 1910 and published in 1913, "Watson's The Black Mamba" is the tale of a brilliant detective that solves a case for a private detective agency, which is managed by his friend, Dr. John Watson. It starts with Watson telling the story of a mysterious fellow that, a few months before, showed up in a certain town in the south and rented a room in an inn for several weeks. He brought with him a mummified corpse that he had bought from the local "bone-picker", as they call these people in this story. The "mummy" had a message on his corpse that said, in an unknown language, "I came from the tomb of M. Ammemm. We have come again to the grave. He has followed me. Why?" Watson goes on to explain that this M. Ammemm wrote strange things on his deathbed, things that Watson translated and published in his newspaper. People started dying in the area and this guy, M. Ammemm, would then follow them and try to kill them. In the end, he is chased into a place by a mummified corpse, where he must find a way out. Watson, along with his assistant (a certain Dr. Quiggly Quagmire who has become obsessed with the case) finally discover the man's motives for wanting revenge. For those that have seen me play, you would know the story isn't totally true. This whole thing was actually from a game of Dungeons & Dragons. In this game, Vance went with the idea of "mummified corpses" being the main villains in the game. As we all know, this game can be a little crazy and weird. While this particular adventure was more so than the rest of the game, the author still had to come up with some idea for a story. He said that he just decided to make this one up and "just go with it". So, that's what I'm going to talk about today. As I went over, it was my first experience playing a game of D&D, but one that was also inspired by the imagination of Jack Vance. While I don't remember as many details of that game as I can of the rest of the games I have played over the years, there was one thing I did notice that stood out about that game. This was the fact that, unlike other campaigns that I have been in, none of the players tried to get the characters into any fights with those they thought were the bad guys. I guess the other players didn't remember me mentioning how I thought I would be a bad guy when we were in that game. I guess the others didn't really want to have to look at me while we were inside a fight, too. But it was good fun and a different experience in that game, in my opinion. While none of the games I have played were written by Jack Vance, there are definitely some interesting games out there. Some that I'm still looking forward to playing sometime in the future. *Okay, as an honorable mention, I have to say that some of you may or may not have heard of an author called J.R.R. Tolkien. His epic tale, "The Hobbit", was a fantasy book about hobbits, or, in the terms of this book, "The Big" (for lack of a better name, because it makes no sense if you're talking about "The Big") and his follow-up to that, "The Lord of the Rings", which was set in a fictional world that, in itself, has similarities to Tolkien's world. The two books combine to make a very awesome work and they both have the ability to suck you into a world that's amazing, both scientifically and logically. So, that's something I could have mentioned in this article too, but I didn't. No reason other than I didn't think people would know what that was without reading it, so it seemed a little redundant to talk about it here. Maybe someday I'll get back to those books if I ever do another blog about Dungeons & Dragons. They're a lot of fun and very creative to play through, too. In the end, Quiggly Quagmire and I had a great time searching through old books and having some laughs. No matter what we find, it's still going to be great. *Also, as a sidenote, I recently decided to try and get back to playing Dungeons & Dragons again. I love how awesome it was and I was going to try and get back into it, but then my back hurt and I ended up playing something else that I really didn't like. Still, I do hope to get back into that universe. I miss it so much. I haven't played it since the end of college. Just don't count on it happening soon. So, that's what I did during my downtime between starting the "Big Board", as they call it on Twitter. I just talked about random things that happened while I played. It's an honor to be an honorably mentioned in this article. Maybe I