As noted last week, this week’s session of the Dungeons & Dragons game I am running for middle-school-age students at the public library had to start with resetting expectations for player behavior at the table. I solicited players’ opinions and understandings, made my position on the matter clear, and reminded those at the table that participation is both entirely voluntary and predicated on helping to make things a good experience for everyone at the table, both in-character and our of character. It went reasonably well; the prospect of being removed from the table had something of a sobering effect on all in attendance, myself included.
Add some dice and voila! Photo by RDNE Stock project on Pexels.com
There was another event worth noting, and more important to me: the session coincided with Ms. 8’s twelfth birthday. I was, as might be expected, pleased to be there for it (and not in the hospital with her, as happened on her first birthday). My wife had made arrangements for a number of nice things to happen for our girl, and it was gratifying to see them occur. Of particular note was the addition to her gaming setup; she received dice and a dice mat for use in my game and, it may be hoped, in others. The delivery of cupcakes (complete with dragons and fire) on a fancy stand was another highlight; that the cupcakes themselves were tasty was an added bonus.
I do look forward to the continuing program. There is a waitlist for it, now, and some discussion about mentoring others to run their own games. I welcome the opportunity, and I hope that I will be equal to it.
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To continue from last week, the group of middle-school-aged kids for whom I’m running a Dungeons & Dragons game at my local library left off between rounds of an ongoing fight, being in the process of rescuing a child about to be sacrificed by cultists for some clearly nefarious end. They seemed initially to have taken the discussion of ponerology to heart, which gratified, and play proceeded from that point to go…sideways. Some of that is to be expected in any TTRPG, of course; things move in ways not expected. Some of it, however, is going to require some redirection and resetting; the group as a whole is aware of it, so when next week’s session begins, I do not think it will be a surprise that things will start as they will have to start.
Yeah, this’ll do. Photo by Fariborz MP on Pexels.com
For the overtly educational portion of the session, I brought in an idea I’ve meant to talk about for a while: the tension between plot- and character-focused narrative. To gloss, in the former, the story is largely about outside events and reactions, while in the latter, the story is largely about internal events and how they shape the outside world. I don’t think any narrative is exclusively one or the other, although each is primarily one or the other; that is, there is always some outside event prompting response, and there is always some internality on display, although there will definitely be an emphasis of one over the other.
Within the setting of a TTRPG, the narrative will actually straddle such line as exists between the two fairly evenly. Because the story being told is a collaborative one, with the audience being the group doing the storytelling, the overall presentation is plot-driven. The collective creating audience will respond to the outside events presented to them. Each collaborator, however, will have access to the internality of the character they portray, so for each audience member, the narrative will be emphatically character driven.
This is, of course, a very surface-level treatment; more has been said about the topic, as I am already aware, Mackay having treated it, as well as Gary Alan Fine, and I know there have been other works about it that I do not have on my shelves from long ago. (One of my regrets from the attempted academic life is that I was not more honest with myself and so did not pursue such ludic concerns; I needed the formal “legit” grounding I got, but I really ought to have leaned more into my “side” interests. That the latter have stuck with me even absent institutional affiliation is telling.) But, while the kids at my table are bright, they’ve got other concerns–and so, admittedly, do I, among which are a great many other scholarly somedays.
My calendar is full. I suppose it’s a good thing; I’ve always got something to look forward to doing.
Even on spooky days such as this, I am happy to write to order, and with no AI slop!
The materials presented to my group of gaming middle-schoolers last week were a response to emergent situations I hoped to redirect and deflect before they could become problems. (I am still somewhat taken aback by one player’s stated expectations of being in opposition to me as the DM; I’m put in mind of comments from The Munchkin’s Guide to Power Gaming, which has long had a spot on my bookshelves.) This week, I returned to more or less the kind of thing that I had intended to discuss with them, one of the central questions that I had included in my pitch for the program back in 2024: what is the nature of evil?
No, we’re not monkeying around… Photo by George Becker on Pexels.com
That nature, as might well be thought, has been extensively studied and theorized about. There is, in fact, a whole discipline of inquiry about it: ponerology. (I admit that part of the reason I brought it up under that name to the middle schoolers in the context of being overtly educational is because it’s a fun word to say, especially for my overly online Millennial self recalling pwning n00bs). It can be used as a loose rubric in many kinds of humanistic analysis; while it has most notable factored into theology and political science, it can be applied in a great many other contexts, as well. Dungeons & Dragons addresses such topics fairly explicitly with its alignment system (that has shifted across more than five decades of production and play), so it does invite use as a means of exploring ponerological topics.
The situation in which the players’ characters found themselves at the beginning of the week’s session was something of a blunt presentation of the topic. They began the session where they left off the previous: fighting child-sacrificing cultists. Killing helpless children scans as a Bad Thing for most people (that there are exceptions is unfortunately clear). So is the obvious plot movement that suggests itself: the children being killed are themselves Bad Things. (Indeed, this is something that has been at the core of many Dungeons & Dragons games, that members of particular species are necessarily and inherently evil. While there are species that are representations of philosophical concepts, manifestations of other realities, applying such a rubric to physical beings is…problematic at best. Recent efforts to move the game’s official materials away from such framing have met with resistance from many players and groups. It’s not a happy thing.) I decided not to take that approach, in part because most of those at the table are still new to gaming, and I do think there is some value in presenting tropes straight on for such audiences–again, overt education is a thing in the program. I also have other plans for developing the story further, and it serves my purposes to have a clear framing for my antagonists in enacting those plans.
As I continue on in this program, I find myself reminded of earlier comments I made about how useful TTRPG materials could well be as technical writing course materials. I think I could well do more with such things at this point in my life, even so far removed from the classroom as I have become (and correctly). I perhaps flatter myself that someone might find that kind of thing useful to have me do for them; I’d certainly like to give it a try sometime…among all of the somedays already waiting for me.
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Following on last week’s activites, I returned to my local library to once again preside over a session of Dungeons & Dragons for a group of middle-school-aged children. When the game had left off last week, there was a fight over a fish brewing within the party, which made for an interesting place to break off for the evening; cliffhangers work to prompt ongoing engagement, after all. When actual play resumed, that fight got addressed; afterwards, the narrative resumed pretty much as expected. Gamers are gamers, after all, and kids are kids–and middle schoolers are still very much kids.
Somewhat ominous in context… Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.com
Owing to the need to be more explicitly educational, however, I did not resume play immediately on starting the session. Instead, I addressed a narrative and ludological concern: metagaming. That I would need to do so was prompted by one of the players making a comment in the previous session about trying to read my mind…by pulling out a copy of the source text I was (and still am) using for the current narrative arc. It was clear to me from the remark and the action that the player is trying somehow to “win” the game. I’ve been guilty of doing such things, myself, so I can certainly understand the impulse. While there is some sense to some kinds of metagaming (there’s no way not to do it, to some extent; that there is a game going on is always clear within it, and the tension between the real and the game drives some of the humor that invariably creeps into play), I do find myself somewhat concerned to confront it.
As I play, and as I worked to clarify to the players way back at the beginning of the program, TTRPGs should generally be collaborative endeavors. That is, those at the table should work together to tell a story that is about all of them. The kind of metagaming that seemed to me to be brewing moves more towards things being competitive, with one player trying to make the game about their one character rather than about the group. Some of this will happen naturally, of course, dice being what they are, but there seems to me to be a difference between an organic emergence of such a thing and the calculated contrivance towards the same–and the former is, in my mind, better.
I’m glad that the player in question is actually reading. I’m glad, too, that the player in question is trying to think around things. Both of those are good actions to undertake, and I could stand to see more people doing both of them. And it is the case that the player in question, being one of the more experienced at the table (mine was not the first game in which that player participated, as was the case for several others at my library table), will necessarily know more about how the game works as a game and cannot reasonably be expected not to know it. (Indeed, I’m looking at said player as a candidate to run future games, one of the goals towards which I and the program generally are working.) But I am concerned about the player–and, to be fair, others, if for different reasons–making the game about themself rather than about the group…and I admit to concern about being caught out railroading my players, which is not a good thing to do.
What I’m doing, moving forward, is making a few changes to the text I’d originally thought to use; sticky notes are my friend in this. Some of the material was designed to be dice-determined; I rolled for that previously, making notes of results. I have adjusted a few points of narrative, as well, and redone progression through the major puzzle that presents itself in the published text. The player will still have something of a leg up on the others, which is okay, but the ability to simply read ahead and know all of what is coming…that has been removed, now, which should make the playing field just a little bit more level. The others at the table deserve their chances to shine, after all…which is a useful reminder for more people than just them.
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As noted a few weeks back, my local library opted to bring me back on board to run its after-school TTRPG program. One weekly session is confirmed, with its first meeting happening on 22 January 2026; the possibility of a second starting up remains, although interest and enrollment have yet to be determined at this point. For now, sessions are scheduled through the end of April; I can hope that things will extend past that point, but I cannot count on them doing so. Whether they do or not, however, I am grateful for the continued opportunity to live the dream: earning money for running a game. Being able to legitimately claim to be a professional DM is a nice thing, indeed.
Gonna be more of this… Photo by Stephen Hardy on Pexels.com
There are some things to note about the renewed gaming. One is that I am working to do as has been requested of me and integrate more overtly educational materials. The 22 January meeting, in addition to taking care of some required bookkeeping (leveling up a character takes a little bit, especially for still-new players), attended to some discussion of narrative structures. For the sake of convenience and ease, I worked largely from Freytag; experience suggests that his narrative arc structure is likely to be presented to students in middle and high school, and students at that age are the participants in the game I’m running at the library. We did talk a bit about how the pilot program and its short adventure fit into it, and the shift from a fundamentally one-off adventure into a longer campaign received some attention. I think we’ll revisit the topic at intervals across sessions; I think, too, that we’ll talk a bit about character- versus plot-driven stories and the continuum or spectrum between them.
Another thing to note about the renewed gaming is that it is the first time in a long time that I am working from published adventure materials. One of the holiday traditions my family observes is that of Jólabókaflóð, giving each other books and sitting around reading them; my wife bought me a gaming supplement, having heard me talk about the need to come up with materials for the game I am running for the library. The current plot works from a selection out of that book; I have done a bit of massaging on the front end of it to offer a way into that story that makes sense against the previous games, but after the added prelude, the game will more or less follow the printed materials. Such materials are meant for such use, so I do not feel badly for making such use of those with which I have been provided. But it is an unusual thing for me to do; most of the game-running I have done, I have done a lot more work to generate. How it will work out in the longer term, I do not know, but I look forward to finding out.
So much said, the pre-printed materials have led me to an idea (something else to note about the renewed gaming, in the event). Working from what is on the page, I find that there are some fairly obvious hooks for further development. Without going into too much detail, because it is possible that my players might take a look at what I have here (hi, kids!), I can note that there are references to things in the pre-printed materials that are not developed elsewhere that I know about. This means that there are things for me to develop, using not only the springboard of the pre-printed materials to get started, but also feedback from players, to flesh out the milieu in which we, together, will tell the lies our rolled dice suggest.
One other thing, and related: I mean to start to develop my players as game-runners, themselves. I will not always be on hand for them, alas, and I might well want to play as a player, myself. Both require that there be someone else ready to run a game, and getting someone or some people ready to do so takes some time. Best to start early, right?
As matters progress, I will, of course, be making more comments here. I might well also read those that get left by my readers along the way…
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Not much less than a week ago, I noted wrapping up my local library’s pilot program of running a game of Dungeons & Dragons for middle schoolers. I continue to think it was a good experience for them and for me, and I continue to think that what the game taught us is worth having learned or having been brought back to mind.
I’m particularly pleased, therefore, that the program looks like it will resume next month. That is, I will continue to run Dungeons & Dragons games for middle schoolers at my local library. I rather expect, based on the feedback I got from participants, that those who have already been at my table will return to it, and that will be good; I have things to do with them (including walking them through character advancement / improvement, which I had meant to do at the end of the last session but which events and time constraints prohibited), and there is value in having stories continue.
There is some talk, too, of the program expanding, whether to a second session of middle schoolers or to a session of high school students is not yet clear. Either would work well, although each presents different challenges. With middle schoolers, there are more concerns of maturity than with high schoolers, although the ones with whom I’ve worked thus far did decently well being redirected when they needed it; really, the issue was all of them wanting to talk at once, most of them wanting to be the focus of attention. It’s not bad in itself, but taking turns being the star is still something they’re working on; they’ll get there, I’m sure. High schoolers will, in some ways, be easier; there’s more they can do and can be expected to do. But there’s also more concern about their needs; middle schoolers are still largely children, while high schoolers are more nearly adult and will have more things going on that are potentially problematic for me to address.
I know who and what I am, after all, and I am aware that my addressing particular issues is fraught.
That said, I am looking forward to resuming play in and around Hanlon. I’m looking forward to deepening my understanding and insights, as well as to seeing what else from my past experiences still holds up in current play, when I am so many years older and my players do not have the shared experience and cultural immersion–including the (internalized?) shame at pursuing a hobby that used to earn scorn, derision, and an uncomfortable amount of suspicion from religious leaders and law enforcement officials–I shared with my earlier play-groups. Also, to be sure, I’m looking forward to passing on some of the more “academic” parts of what I know about all this; there is scholarship on the matter, in addition to the ways in which tabletop roleplaying games do have educational value. After all, to play, players have to read, they have to navigate rules sets and so learn index use, they have to do quick arithmetic, and they learn quite well that random chance isn’t always, but that no roll depends on the last one made. Narrative theories can be explored, as can philosophies, and it might be that I include some short reflections on why characters take the actions they do or somesuch thing.
There’s a lot to do, and it will be good to do it.
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Yesterday, as this piece makes its way into the world, I presided over the final session of the initial Dungeons & Dragons for middle schoolers program at my local library. (It’s discussed here, here, here, and here.) In it, the party sought to make its way back to Hanlon, its objective achieved; they were sidetracked by player actions and the will of the dice into an unexpected, ultimately successful encounter. I also, in fact, put into practice my player-commendation bit that I remarked upon last week. Even if things do not resume–much as I hope they will, I cannot rely upon it–I’m glad to have done it; I like to set good expectations with my players, even when they are not so young as the kids with whom I worked these past weeks, and I think it’s important to ground children well.
Not bad looking… Photo by Stephen Hardy on Pexels.com
There are, of course, things I would do differently if I had them to do again. With a bunch of newer players–and most of those at the table were, in fact, brand new to tabletop roleplaying games–I think it might be good to have a more overt authority in the game with them, something of a mentor figure who can, within the context of the game, offer some guidance. I am aware of the perils of the GMPC, to be sure; I’ve seen it go badly and have been guilty of making such a thing happen. But with a markedly novice group, I think it might be a good idea to have, nonetheless.
I think, also, I would try to work in more non-combat encounters and mechanics. I know, with a bunch of kids, that “getting to the good stuff” is a concern. I also know that combat can drag easily, especially if one or more of the opponents actually thinks through the fight (and if one or more of the PCs gets annoyed at the antics of another and vents their spleen). Perhaps a puzzle or two, going back to the old dungeon-delving model, might work.
Some things went well, though. Having the new players address the non-mechanical stuff is almost always to the good, and my players leaned into it even without much in the way of overt background knowledge; I’ll be doing that again, to be sure. Too, going ahead and rolling with them for (most of) their shenanigans resulted in laughter around the table, and since a large part of the reason to play any game is to have fun, things that promote such laughter are to be encouraged. And, finally, I think bringing together people from different experiences was good for everybody involved; if I can, I’ll do that much again.
In all, it was a good experience. I needed the practice in running a game at a table, and I’m glad to have helped some new gamers begin to get grounded in the hobby. After all, the children are the future, and I’d like to keep having one of rolling dice and telling lies…
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In a piece last week, I make the comment that “At my tables, XP also result from making things better for the other people at the table, something I’ll talk about in more detail later on (but probably not today).” This, being a different day (although today on whatever day you read it), seems a good one for talking about one of the “making things better for other people at the table” I have tended to reward with additional XP; I have often had players vote for the player other than themselves whom they felt did the best job of roleplaying at the table that session, and I’ve awarded that player premium XP for the commendation of their fellows (usually something like one-fifth to one-third of the “regular” reward for the session).
I’ve seen messier tables. Photo by Will Wright on Pexels.com
In practice, it was a small thing, just a collection from those at the table of slips of paper with someone else’s name on them and counting up who got how many votes. In effect, however, it proved a powerful motivator. As I remark in the earlier piece and as is clear to most who have sat to table, the promise of a reward spurs quite a bit of effort and action; most any time XP are up for grabs, players pay attention and go out of their way to get the reward. As is also clear from experience, in many if not most cases, people are motivated by the acclaim of their peers; having evidence that those in a person’s acquaintance value the contributions made does a lot to spur more such contributions. Since in this case the “contributions” being rewarded were particular at-table behaviors, those at the table largely regulated themselves to that end, pushing further into character development and narrative engagement, even if occasionally at the expense of mechanical effectiveness. That is, they would go further into role-play as opposed to the roll-play that I have seen take over tables and towards which many who come to the older tabletop roleplaying game from the more ubiquitous and younger massively multiplayer online roleplaying game or from similarly structured single- or limited-multiplayer games tend.
I’ve not implemented it with my Hanlon players yet. I think I’ve remarked before that the program that has given rise to Hanlon is something of a pilot; there’s one more session to play that I know of, and I do not know if matters will continue afterward. I hope they do, and if they do, I think I will put the practice back into practice at my table. It’s a good one, and with such young players as I currently have, I think it will do much to help them learn to do more than come up on the rules (which is not a bad thing to do, in itself, but the game is more than the rules, really). I think it will help them get better at finding and filling their roles, and it will make them better players at the next tables they join.
I try to be helpful. Sometimes, it even works.
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I‘ve mentioned, most recently at about this time last week, that I’m running a Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) game for middle schoolers at my local public library–for pay. The game is progressing well enough; the third 90-minute session was yesterday, with six players in attendance. The party continued along the path I’d laid before them, making headway towards their assigned objective (some social structures within the game have emerged from play and improvisation, which makes some things easier than others). Fun seemed to have been had all around, so I count it as a good evening of play.
This ain’t too far off… Photo by Stephen Hardy on Pexels.com
One of the things that I’ve used to keep the party moving while allowing them both agency and a means to work around failure is something I’ve taken from my experience participating in play-by-post forum games, something about which I’ve written before (for example, the piece referenced here, as well as this piece, referenced here). That thing is employing levels of overall success based on racking up a certain amount of individual success before incurring a certain amount of individual failure.
To explain a bit: in D&D and many other tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs), tasks that characters face are often adjudicated by a single roll of dice. In D&D rules current to this writing, the player whose character must face a task with an uncertain outcome rolls one twenty-sided die and adds (or subtracts!) modifiers, comparing the result to a set difficulty, a minimum number that must be arrived at for the character to get the task done. In other games I’ve played, things generally work similarly; the player rolls once for the character’s attempt at a task, success or failure results, and the story moves on.
The method has the advantages of being simple and quick. The die roll is what it is, the result is what it is, and consequences can flow from it with relatively little interruption of the narrative flow around which the game centers. It has the disadvantage, however, of being more or less entirely up to chance; players can build characters to stack modifiers and roll scads of dice, but there are times when the dice simply fail to deliver a success, and staking a whole story on one such shot can leave players feeling unsatisfied. In some cases, those administering the games will “fudge” numbers a bit, altering things where the other players cannot see so that they succeed at pivotal tasks, but in such cases, one might well ask what the point was of rolling dice.
The issue, for me and for more than a few others I’ve known, is that some things admit of reattempts, and some things are better represented as progressions than one-off events. In such cases, what I and some of my acquaintances and friends do is set up tasks for players that ask them to make a series of rolls in which they have to accumulate a certain number of successes before incurring a certain number of failures, say three successes before three failures. (Threes work well for reasons that others expound upon at great length across quite a few years.) Getting that done allows a superior overall outcome, while failing before succeeding still allows progression, if with some additional challenges thrown in. And it mitigates the feeling of frustration that comes from one thing going against a character, even when it flatly doesn’t make sense that that character would falter at the test in question.
Admittedly, such a setup necessarily takes longer than the traditional one-off model; there are more die rolls involved, and more things to do take longer than fewer things to do when the same number of people address them. Too, there are some tasks that probably should be one-off events: much of the combat in which characters engage in games hinges on single actions, and rightly so. But for a number of tasks, spreading out success helps to mitigate failure in ways that help keep players engaged (checking out after one failed roll is sometimes an issue, and not only for less experienced players; it happens to most or all of us), and it is something that allows for more players to be engaged in keeping things moving along, since more die rolls necessarily offer more opportunities for each player to roll, to have their character contribute to the overall success of the party in which they find themselves.
In the game I’m running at the library–which I’ve taken to calling Hanlon for ease of reference–the kids at my table found their characters in pursuit of a thief who went out into the countryside surrounding the characters’ home village. In some games, in many, there would have been a single roll or set of rolls: one to track the thief, one to pursue at speed, one to apprehend the thief. And that would work well were it time to wrap up a story arc, to conclude an episode…and if the thief escaping had no other effects on the story. None of that is the case in Hanlon, however, and so I opted to arrange matters to require a series of cycles of rolls. The characters who are best in the party at each stage–tracking, pursuit, apprehension, and foraging along the way–each get the chance to try their hand at things, contested by the thief whom they pursue. Their increasing numbers of successes bring them closer to the thief; their increasing numbers of failures leave them farther behind. If they fail enough times, they will find themselves obliged to retrace their steps, but they can still pursue the thief, if not as ably. And they can decide along the way what they do and how they do it, giving them more agency, giving the players more familiarity with the rules in which they are playing, and giving me more time with the materials I drafted to lead the players and their characters through.
There will be things for them to do that are one-and-done events. I know what’s waiting for the players’ characters, and I know what they’re capable of doing. But I also have a pretty good idea what it is the players’ characters can do, and I know well that the players, themselves, will think of things that never occurred to me…which is part of the fun I get to have running games.
It’s nice to enjoy the job.
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At around this time last week, I noted the start of my work as a contract programs teacher at my local library, running a Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) game for a group of middle-school-aged students. As reported, the first session went pretty well, so I spent some time in the following days developing materials for the next session, scheduled to take place yesterday afternoon into early evening as this reaches the internet. I’d planned on bringing in one more player, signed up for the program but absent on the day of the first meeting, and I’d planned on moving the whole group ahead from the introductory session into the main plot, and so I wrote with all that in mind.
There are arts I do decently, and there are others. Image is mine.
One of the things I did, because I am often helped by doing so, was to sketch out a map of the local area. I am well aware that my pen-hand leaves a lot to be desired, and I am more than a little out of practice as a cartographer; it had been a while since I’d put together materials for a tabletop game, after all. But it was helpful for me, nonetheless, to begin to gesture towards a wider world into which Hanlon Village falls, to have a visual idea of what area is dependent on Hanlon and what Hanlon, in turn, depends upon. And it was helpful for me to have some idea of where shenanigans could take place, as well; hills and woods offer many opportunities for that kind of thing, and having some variety, some options, is a good thing.
I’ll admit to being influenced in what might be called map-making by the maps present in a lot of fantasy novels, mostly following the Tolkienian tradition; Lord of the Rings does it, but then, so do the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant and its successor series, the Wheel of Time novels, the Song of Ice and Fire novels that have managed to make it into the world, and (near and dear to my heart) Robin Hobb’s works. I’m also marked by having grown up in the Texas Hill Country; there have been times I have directly taken from maps of towns and cities in my part of the world to make towns and cities in other worlds, entirely, although I did not directly do so for Hanlon (although there were definitely local features in my mind as I did my sketch.) I’ve also benefited from reading Karen Wynn Fonstad’s works of fantasy cartography, although I’m not in any way claiming the talent or expertise she deployed. I do think it’s important to acknowledge my influences, though, even if I do not live up to their inspiration.
I’ll note, too, that I deliberately did not “fill in all the blanks,” that I left things open and did so on purpose. While I do tend to plan a lot for the games I run, I also know from experience playing and running games that the narrative does not always go as planned. There always needs to be room for players to take their stories in their own direction, and if there is a direction to go, there has to be something in that direction for them to uncover. Admittedly, there is a fair bit of manipulation that can go on; an opponent who had been hiding in a tree or behind a rock can be concealed in tall grass or in a shallow depression. But even aside from that, if the intended plot would move players east and they go west, it’s good to have a west for them to explore–and taking notes can make what is extemporized (again, I make a lot of use of Mackay’s The Fantasy Role-playing Game) more permanent, giving players some agency in creating the world in which their characters exist.
The map was not the only thing I did, of course, and could not be for me to do a decent job running the game. If I was going to send them off chasing something or other, I had to figure out who was doing the sending and what that something or other is…as well as where it ended up being. That much, at least, the map made easier; I had my idea, if one that player actions influenced somewhat. And in my earlier notes, I’d jotted down some ideas about what the something would be: a horn, passed down across generations. As to how it got from where it should be to where it was…I can’t give everything away, you know, at least not all at once.
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Elliott RWI 