HBM101: Much Corruption

Here Be Monsters

Here Be Monsters Podcast

Science, Society & Culture, Social Sciences, Personal Journals, Documentary

4.6 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 12 September 2018

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Growing up, Jeff Emtman had a hard time balancing his piety for the One God with his piety for the Gnomish lord Berwyn. Generally, he deferred to the latter, though he lost favor eventually with both.

Jeff’s scoutmaster, a retired surgeon with a habit of collecting unusual boats, was always trying to get Jeff outside, away from the computer where he spent most of his free time playing a game where he tried to save the world from corruption and evil.

Ancient Domains of Mystery (more commonly called “ADOM”) is an massive roguelike game that’s inspired heavily by Dungeons and Dragons. Developer Thomas Biskup released the first version of it in 1994.

Jeff, a gnomish wizard of status, is susceptible to corruptive background radiation. Once pure, his breath became ever more sulphurous, thorns that sprouted from his hands, etc. And he failed in his quest to save the world.

The Surgeon invited Jeff to join him for kayaking on the Naches River of Washington State. The river holds a small irrigation dam that the two must navigate--the Surgeon with ease, and Jeff with no small amount of existential, religious struggle.

The “burning hands” spell in this episode comes from a Esperanto-language reading of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, released as public domain audiobook by Librivox. The excerpt used can be translated to “...and the chain was bound around the arm.”

Producer: Jeff Emtman
Editor: Jeff Emtman
Music: Serocell, The Black Spot, AHEE, Circling Lights ← New music!

Transcript

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0:00.0	From KCRW, this is here be monsters.
0:07.0	From KCRW, this is here be monsters.
0:19.0	I want to tell you a little bit about the hairiest person I've ever known, a retired surgeon in my hometown, an old scout master of mine.
0:24.1	He had a reputation for eating butter.
0:26.7	He was very tall, good looking, more big glasses that covered half of his face. He owned a big silver canoe named Sue. He was obsessed with the stories that his scars told.
0:38.0	His mental laser was strong, and around the campfire he plagiarized the great American cowboy poets.
0:44.8	Now most of these traits are irrelevant to the story I want to tell you, except for the
0:49.7	fact that he remains the hairiest person I've ever known.
0:53.0	And I never quite figured out what kind of corruption caused it.
0:56.0	Whether it was some kind of direct encounter with a corrupt wizard,
0:59.0	or whether he just head and neck and back and chest, just forests of hair, wiry and gray and growing out at all
1:16.1	angles. The same was true for his wrists and ankles. He simply lacked buffer zones between his patches of hair.
1:24.0	It was all part of the same forest.
1:26.0	It used to really bother me, but now, as I age,
1:30.0	I know what causes such corruptions.
1:33.0	Because I was born on a cloudless night,
1:36.0	underneath the constellation of the great wolf.
1:39.0	They say it gave me perception and willpower.
1:41.0	My mother was in the prime of her life 147 years old and my father was nearly 200.
1:47.7	He was a guild master, wealthy and respected and in my youth I tried hard to become as rich and famous as him. But we quarreled and after a bitter fight one night I ran away quietly in the dark.
2:00.0	I ran to a cave near my hometown. It was a spot that I found by accident one day back when I was a young gnome.
2:08.0	Back then I'd poked my head in there, but I got scared because the tunnel seemed endless and it felt inhabited. But this time I had no choice. I made it my home.
	...

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