Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

CARL: This is Carl Drake, play-by-play commentator for NBS Broadcasting, coming at you live from the Action Weather Center for The Barometric Network.

TOM: That’s right, Carl. This is Tom Hicks, color commentator for NBS Broadcasting, and for those who are just joining us, Carl and I are filling in for the usual The Barometric Network anchors, Hank Swolemann and Bettina Karenagle, as Winter Storm Omega bears down upon the unsuspecting American south.

CARL: Hank is snowed in; on the last call I had with him he was trying to melt his way out of his garage with a blowtorch that his wife uses for flambeau.

TOM: That’s right, Carl, and Bettina does a mega-commute from her second home in Pasadena, which she is currently in the process of defending from a wildfire. Our latest update from Fire Storm Sigma will come after the break, but for those of you looking for a taste, Bettina tells us that the fire has been stopped at the first line of trenches but that reinforcements are desperately needed to prevent a breakthrough.

CARL: Here’s hoping those reserves can be located before the fire attempts a flanking maneuver. Now, it was my understanding that Pasadena had recently cut its firefighting budget in order to increase its police budget, in order to provide badly needed assault vehicles and high-capacity magazines for automatic weapons.

TOM: That’s right, Carl. Bettina tells me that the police have been summoned into the fight against Fire Storm Sigma and that they are currently shooting at it from multiple angles while using water hoses to disperse suspected looters.

CARL: Fighting fire with fire. Only time will tell if the strategy is successful.

TOM: That’s right, Carl. But onto Winter Storm Omega: current predictions are for half an inch of sleet followed by 4-8 inches of snowfall across the American South, leading to martial law, a collapse of civil society, and the regression of those in the affected area to feral or “wolflike” states of behavior.

CARL: Authorities are scrambling to prepare for the onslaught by spreading sand on roads, repurposing heavy construction equipment as ersatz plows, and closing all non-essential facilities, non-essential in this case being defined as places where state legislators or their close family and friends work.

TOM: That’s right, Carl. It has long been a known fact that the American South can’t deal with cold and snow anymore than the American North can deal with heat. The infrastructure just isn’t there.

CARL: Though considering the onslaught of Winter Storm Iota this time last year, one could be forgiven for wondering why road salt and plow trucks hadn’t been purchased anyplace, especially in light of Winter Storm Qoppa two years ago this week.

TOM: That’s right, Carl, one would think that the third year in a row would form a pattern, but apparently not. Perhaps it’s simpler and cheaper to simply throw every man, woman, and child in the state under the bus for climate change?

CARL: Easy, Tom, you know we can’t say the CC-words on this network. They’re going to have to bleep that.

TOM: That’s right, Carl, forgive me. What I meant was perhaps it’s simpler and cheaper to simply throw every man, woman, and child in the state under the bus for completely unprecedented rogue weather patterns that can be neither predicted nor combated.

CARL: That’s more like it, Tom. And now a word from our sponsors, FossilCo Fuels, before we go into your FossilCo Presents Local Weather on the 7s, here on The Barometric Channel.

Monkeys on the interstate
Iguanas in your home
All my patients kick and bite
Wild animals have I known
They said my life as a freelance vet
Was going to be wild and free
But anyone who tells you that
Has never seen my fee

Dire news borne on ill winds
Glued to the weather station with dread
Watching lines move on dark maps
Bracing for what is ahead

They say it’s unprecedented
It couldn’t be prepared for, no
But it happened before just last year
Isn’t that how precedents go?

The Knavesmire was so named because, as a thick and patchy bog, it was difficult to traverse on horseback or on foot and therefore a welcome refuge to fugitives, petty criminals, and their ilk. While some were locals, and therefore knew the few shifting safe paths well, others sought it out in an attempt to evade pursuit or escape justice. Locals, who may or may not have been on the lam themselves, would hire out their services as Knavesmire Runners, guiding paying customers through the bog. Some would transit it fully, while others would alight on one of the small “islands” in the swamp, the largest and most notorious of which was Mirehollow, which occasionally reached the size of a small village.

A problem for any outsider attempting to cross the Knavesmire, regardless of their destination, was that not all Knavesmire Runners were honest. It was illicit work, so there was no guild to police the conduct as there was for the Most Noble Association of Bricklayers; while many claimed to be a member of the Sacred & True Old Runners brotherhood, it was unclear if such an organization actually existed, or ever had.

That left travelers with a classic dilemma. Sir Brenswick de Sutsom described it as “a three-headed serpent,” describing it as a choice between “the Honest Runner, who will take a Fare with noble Intent; the Highwayman, who will, once out of Sight of Civilization, will rob their poor Charge and possibly Murder them; and the Humbug, who, having Exaggerated their Knowledge of the Mire, will lead both themselves and their Fare to an unwitting Death.”

The dilemma was therefore known as Honest-Highwayman-Humbug or 3H, and became a popular game and logic puzzle. It was imagined that a Highwayman (represented by a fist clutching an imaginary dagger) would defeat a Humbug (represented by a pair of outstretched fingers to ‘point the way’), while a Humbug would defeat an Honest (represented by a flat palm, for the smooth and straight course they would lay), who would in turn defeat a Highwayman.

Unease lingers
In the corners of mind
A will is paralyzed
To urgency blind

The way forward is clear
What must be done is set
Such simple, small things
Seem enormous yet

The weight of the earth
And the weight of a pen
Seem both the same
When they’re lifted again

Time drains away
No urgency grows
So much left undone
And lined up in rows

SRQ Inc. had seen a significant amount of success with its TTRPGs Ruins & Rogues and Sorcerers & Sabers and spent the next few years in search of additional areas for expansion. Computer games, which were just coming into their own as an art form, seemed a natural fit, and SRQ created an in-house development team, SRQGames, in 1984.

Their first product, Ruins & Rogues: Castle of the Mad Wizard, was released in late 1984. Using parser technology licensed from Infocom, the game was a text adventure that featured a robust combat system, dialogue trees with skill checks, and other advanced features. However, with the rise of graphical adventure games, it was only a modest success at retail, and many of those profits went to Infocom as part of the license.

SRQGames next worked on an in-house sequel using their own parser and CGA graphics, released as Ruins & Rogues: Fortress of the Tyrant Princess in 1985. While graphically impressive for the time, the gameplay was relatively basic and lacked many of the nuances of the TTRPG on which it was based. The text parser was also notoriously bad, famously reacting to the command “ATTACK ENEMY” with the response “What enemy? The enemy attacks you!” Sales were, once again, modest.

Losing patience with its in-house team, SRQGames next licensed the Sorcerers & Sabers property to Yosemite Software which produced a series of very successful graphical role playing games from 1987-1995, bringing in a significant amount of money through royalties. The in-house team, left to their own devices, worked on a third Ruins & Rogues game, a sequel to Fortress of the Tyrant Princess called Lair of the Scheming Dragon.

Eventually, and belatedly, released in 1990, Ruins & Rogues: Lair of the Scheming Dragon was an ambitious role-playing game with full-color VGA graphics, animated sprites, a full GUI interface, and a near-complete version of the 2nd Edition Ruins & Rogues ruleset at its core. It was, in many ways, comparable to a home computer version of the wildly successful JRPGs taking Japan by storm at the time. It was also, however, very buggy. One game-breaking bug, the infamous Dead-end Dungeon, was so prevalent that SRQ had to resort to mailing patched floppies to irate customers. One of the most popular features of the first SRQ website, which debuted in 1994 just prior to the company’s liquidation, was a savegame file that began immediately after the problematic section.

The internal development team was disbanded after this fiasco, with SRQGames remaining only as a brand applied to the licensed Yosemite games made before 1994.

Having been founded, in part, by former employees of wargame manufacturer Arthurian Games, SRQ Inc. had a strong desire to enter that space as well. To that end, the company partnered with Ryland X. Ragascasa to resurrect his Cassandra Galaxy tabletop science fiction/fantasy game, which had previously been in print from 1980-1985 by Works Gameshop before the former fell out with Ragascasa over licensing and royalties.

The Cassandra Galaxy was made up of two interrelated properties: the fantasy Garden World, and the self-titled Cassandra Galaxy, often called Cassandra Galaxy Future to distinguish it (players sometimes refer to Garden World as Cassandra Galaxy Past in a tongue-in-cheek way as a result). Both used essentially the same systems of play, being distinguished only by the era in which they occurred. Ragascasa conceived Garden World as a planet on which humans, elves, dwarves, halflings, orcs, goblins, and the ratlike muroids had all co-evolved and over which they warred. Cassandra Galaxy Future, in contrast, was set in the far future, when the various people of the Garden World had abandoned it for the wider galaxy, coming back into conflict as they attempted to expand their empires and search for their lost homeworld.

Cassandra Galaxy was a strong seller on the back of Ragascasa’s reputation as a tabletop auteur but it was a financial failure for SRQ for a number of reasons. For one, the deal inked with Ragascasa allowed him to keep a significant percentage of the proceeds as royalties. For another, the sourcebooks, sets, and miniatures were very expensive to produce, and left SRQ with very thin profit margins after Ragascasa took his cut. Works Gameshop did not take the change lying down, either, and quickly pivoted to their in-house Starhammer and Earthhammer system, which was compatible with Cassandra Galaxy and incorporated modified versions of popular older miniatures.

Ragascasa became involved in a messy lawsuit with Works Gameshop in 1985, with the result that both SRQ and Works Gameshop were served with judicial notices to cease production; sensing weakness, WG reached a settlement with Ragascasa that included regaining a license to publish Cassandra Galaxy at a higher royalty rate than before. The sudden switch left SRQ with mountains of product that they could not, legally, sell; the 1985 vintage sets would languish in warehouses until they were bought by WG during SRQ’s liquidation and released with a date of 1994 (so-called “overstamp” or “sticker date” sets).

Strategic Roleplaying Quests (SRQ) Inc was founded in 1983 by disaffected former employees of Arthurian Games and Tactician Strategy Roles, as well as the former assistant editor of The Dragoness magazine, an early hobbyist publication that had supported tabletop roleplaying games as well as wargaming. SRQ’s first products, which debuted that same year, were the Ruins & Rogues and Sorcerers & Sabers roleplaying systems, each of which received a series of guidebooks that first year:

Ruins & Rogues Adventurer’s Guidebook
Ruins & Rogues Creature Compendium
Ruins & Rogues Interverse Guide
Sorcerers & Sabers Adventurer’s Guidebook
Sorcerers & Sabers Creature Compendium
Sorcerers & Sabers Interverse Guide

Ruins & Rogues was designed as a serious fantasy TTRPG in the same space as other major players at the time including Dungeons & Dragons and Powers & Perils. Sorcerers & Sabers,, on the other hand, was designed to be simpler and more picaresque, with an emphasis on capers and some subtle comedy. Both used the same underlying mechanics, the in-house MAW system in which characters had only three vital statistics (Might, Acumen, and Wits) and all other statistics were either derived from them or modified by skills.

While both Ruins & Rogues and Sorcerers & Sabers proved popular and maintain a niche following to this day, a variety of disastrous side ventures marked by poor sales led to SRQ declaring Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 1994, causing its various assets to be sold off piecemeal.

Add “having fun” to the list of chores
Right between the dishes and trash day
Scribble “doing what you love” on the to-do pad
Right between the laundry and the groceries
Pencil in “relaxation” in an empty calendar slot
In between two other obligations you might forget
Clip a coupon for “doing nothing,” valid this week only
No time to make it up if it isn’t done in time
Set aside an hour each day for “watching TV”
No matter how busy you otherwise are
And remember to feel guilty about it all
If you do too much, or not enough, or none at all

I don’t want to live in fear
Of a garden overgrown and dead
I don’t want to despair
At the thought of the work ahead
I want to plant the seeds deep
So their roots can grow and spread
And if the shoots should wither
If the cabbage never comes to a head
I’ll still be the better for trying
And refusing surrender to dread