T-shirt #272 - The Unknown T-shirt
Presented here for the first time anywhere are pictures of my best friend Tom Meyers (better known as the Lord of Chaos) and me at one of his apartments in Bloomington, Indiana while he was in Law School. As you can see, I am wearing a t-shirt of some kind. I have no idea what this T-shirt is and if I still own it. But I owned it at one time, and I thought it would be fun, as a change of pace, to present the t-shirt here as the "Unknown T-shirt."I cannot identify the t-shirt. There seems to be an insignia on the left breast but I cannot make it out.
I have no idea what we are doing except pretending to feed each other. We would never have actually fed each other because to do so would compromise our masculinity. But we were being campy (can one say "camping it up"?) for the camera, helmed by one of Tom's law school cohorts, Renee whose last name escapes me.
I am also presenting this photo and the ones of dice and D&D books because my friend, the Lord of Chaos, will be visiting soon, after the holidays, and we have planned a festival of gaming. Normally, we have played D&D 2.0. A few years ago, we were going to try D&D 3.5 and I bought tons of books and then we did not end up playing. Now, since I have been playing Pathfinder, which is essentially D&D 3.5 with modifications, we are going to play Pathfinder while he is here. He is right now (and I mean right now as he just emailed me) in the process of creating two characters.
I met Tom Meyers at Kalamazoo College. I actually met him before we became friends. He was the grouchy roommate of a friend of mine, hobbling around on crutches because he had broken a leg or some such. It was a year later before we would become friends as we were both theatre majors. Though we lived together in the dorms, though never as actual roommates of which he reminds me often, and though we hung out quite a bit during some quarters (and not others), we became closer friends after we graduated, which is also when we started playing D&D together. Tom discovered D&D during summer theatre with some performers visiting from New York and then managed to hook up with the same ultra-geeky friends that I had made in my first year at K and with whom I roomed most often: Jack Lee, Dave Reusch, Hilding Holcomb, and others. Once Tom and I started gaming together it became our favorite past time.
We have two epic adventures in our history. The first is with his character, Thomar, a half-orc priest, who had a grand adventure as a priest of Thor, God of Thunder. In the ultimate climax of the adventure, Thomar, played by Tom, defeated this enormous troll (a troll of the realms eternal and not of the world of Midgard, so like a God but a troll). Tom rolled two natural 20s in a row, which was the only way he could have defeated the troll and won out in the end. We still talk about it today as one of the greatest gaming experiences of our lives.
The other adventure featured two characters, adventurers close like brothers. My character, Keebler, is an elven ranger/priest. His comrade, Ostess Cak, is a thief. They arrived at their names in an interesting way, or at least Cak did. Keebler, as a name for an elf, is blatantly and obviously stolen from the Keebler company, which has its headquarters in Battle Creek. But Ostess Cak is a name with more interesting origins. Tom and I were embarking on a gaming fest in 1995 in Detroit, which combined two things we loved: gaming and going to Detroit Tigers games. On the drive back from the ball park to the hotel, we spotted a sign for Hostess Cakes, but some of the letters were burned out, so that all we could read was OSTESS CAK. We thought that it would make an excellent name for a character and a legend was born. Thomar also has an intriguing origin. Can you guess? It's a typo of Thomas. Tom would receive mail addressed to Thomar Meyes and realized that Thomar would make a great character name.
Tom game mastered (Dungeon Mastering or DMing) a great series of adventures in a world of how own creation in which magic is being sucked into some kind of vortex, where Keebler and Cak work to help people and collect wealth. They have a secret tree fort, which they built. Also, they cleaned out a huge castle, which they then came to own and manage. But the greatest feat of all was when Cak bit off one of his own fingers and fashioned a set of thieving tools and lockpicks from the bones to escape from a cell in what we think was some kind of space ship. Keebler and Cak do not think of it as a space ship, but Chris Tower the player does.
Perhaps soon I can report more fantastic and epic adventures.
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- chris tower - 1312.18 - 20:22
