Last week, I saw Bat Boy: The Musical with some friends.
This coming Friday the 13th, I’m going to the opening night of Evil Dead: The Musical with some friends.
Tomorrow night (Sunday October 8th at 7:00pm EST) I’ll be a guest on the debut episode of The Meaning of Fandom, where we’ll all talk about our hobbies: costumes, games, comics, artwork, theater, and who knows what else…
Stop by and join us all in the comments. We’d love to hear from you.
I’ll be presenting at Imaginarium again this year.
Imaginarium is a conference writers and storytellers of all genres, including filmmakers, game developers, artists, musicians, poets, cosplayers, and many other creatives. It’s in Louisville, KY from July 14th to 16th, at the Holiday Inn East.
The full schedule is here, but you can find me at:
I went to Origins Game Fair again this year, and ran some games for the Lurking Fears group.
| Day | System | Title | Description |
| Wed | Savage Worlds | Dust Bunnies | The Big Sweep: The dust bunnies under the couch try to escape the vacuum cleaner, while collecting baubles and helping their friends. |
| Wed | HERO System | Demon Hunter FBI | The special task force investigates strange goings-on at the museum. Played in the style of a television pilot: with players choosing actors to play their roles as characters, opening credits montage, and bloopers. |
| Sun | Dresden Files / FATE | Cereal Team Six | Cereal mascots have merged with the Avengers, and fight to save the world against invaders from beyond the stars in search of the Infinity Shapes. |
| Sun | Marvel Multiverse RPG | Young Avengers | Iron Heart, Kate Bishop, Miles Morales, Ms. Marvel and others take on wild animal-men in the park. |
On Saturday, March 18 2023, I joined the hosts of The Back of the Cereal Box podcast.
We covered the usual topics such as What’s in the Bowl?, New Loot!, and What’s on the Tube?
We also discussed classic television shows from Sid & Marty Krofft!
Thanks to the Christian Nerds Unite podcast for interviewing me about the Christian Gamers Guild and how we’ve been setting up church services at gaming conferences for the past 20 years.
Here’s the news featurette from a few years back when I preached an “Infinity War” sermon at Lexington Comic Con.
Here’s a peek at our most recent in-person church service at Gen Con.
From time to time, I go from place to place.
You can keep up with me on my tour page.
Usually, this is in person, but lately a lot of it has been online.
Today (Saturday), I’ll be speaking at the Layer 8 Conference about Impostor Syndrome. (Update: This has been recorded, the slides are here, and the video should be available in a couple of weeks.)
Monday 6/8/20, I’ll be speaking at the Open Security Conference about improv comedy and security. (Update: The slides and video are available.)
In two weeks, I’ll be preaching at the Origins Online game convention. (Update: The entire conference was canceled)
Gen Con lists us as a Featured Event.
I was away at another conference during most of Gen Con, and only drove up for the Sunday church service.
This year, Tom Vasel (of The Dice Tower) once again preached for us. Bubba Stallcup (of Love Thy Nerd) led our music.
I first started holding Christian Gamers Guild church services at Gen Con back in 2002 (or maybe 2001). Several years ago, we got too big for the Convention Center (the biggest room they could give us there had a capacity of 200), so they moved us to a nearby hotel. Our current space is great, but it’s mildly inconvenient for Exhibit Hall vendors who need to get there by 10:00, since it’s a good 10-minute walk.
Click for a video clip of our worship service.
These days our services generally get around 250 people, which is our largest church service of the year. At smaller conventions, we might get 50 to 100.
You can see four video clips of the service here:
Here’s our program for the event.
I co-wrote the comedy skit stage show Company OutCast‘s Best Bits, a Monty Pythonesque revue and tribute.
They wanted to have a hymn parody, along the lines of the Python’s “All Things Dull and Ugly.” I put together this tour de farce based on “Amazing Grace,” but we ended up not using it in the show.
So here, for your amusement, is a Special Feature — a deleted scene from the show.
A grazing mace twas but a scratch
that struck a knight like me
No man may pass upon this path
for I will smiteth he
A logging place where I could leap
from tree to mighty tree
I like to dress in women’s clothes
and go to the lavat’ry
A squawking face could speak and sing
if he had life like me
Norwegian blue could fly so free
but he has ceased to be
A fighting space lets me behave
as contradictory
I argue with our customers
if they have paid the fee
A walking pace takes me to work
for public ministry
of silly walks and strolls and struts
that are cockamamie
(c) Dave Mattingly, 2019
At a convention a few years back, I was the Gaming Guest of Honor and Jim Butcher was the Author Guest of Honor. Since I love his Dresden Files novel series, and the game based on it, I ran a game based on all the famous monster hunters in movies in television (at the time).
I did my best to supply a balance of characters who specialize in muscle and fighting, investigating and science, and magic and supernatural. I hoped that every player would know at least one of the characters well enough to jump right in.
The are many ways to bring everyone together, varying a lot based on which characters are playing.
The rest of the plot is vague and fluid, and should be played by ear. Introduce villains one by one, perhaps disguised by a glamour spell or in an alternate identity, until a battle explodes on the scene.
The all-star villains that I generally use are:
I’ve supplied the character sheets in standard Dresden Files RPG format, and in a “dossier” format that I designed.
You can download the character sheets here, and character nameplates here.
Years ago, my friend Joe Linehan ran a roleplaying game based on cereal mascots as the player characters. To ramp up the strangeness, he kept it grim and gritty by running them through the plot of Watchmen.
I loved the idea so much that I spun off a scenario based on Independence Day and Aliens. In my game Plan Q from Outer Space, Quisp invaded Earth with giant cereal bowl spaceships poised to shoot giant beams of milk to destroy major cities. On board the ships were alien Soggies, with lactic acid for blood.
Joe and I have run several games in the cereal-verse since then. My favorite title was Joe’s wartime epic A Box o’ Trix Now (“I love the smell of cereal in the morning.”).
In the zombie horror game “Cereal Killers: Night of the Living Crunch,” the dead rise and want to eat your grains.
The Breakfast Club is…
We start with the groups in pairs on separate adventures. Cap’n Crunch and Toucan Sam start out on the Crunchberry Islands, being chased by Cocoa Krispie pygmies. Tony is coaching Sugar Bear out of his hibernation. Lucky has been asked to deliver the eulogy for Dig’em Frog. Chocula is sponsoring Sonny at his first chocoholics anonymous meeting. Quisp is trying to teach Trix the “basics” of nuclear physics.
Everyone gets back to headquarters, the Honeycomb Hideout, to compare notes, when the phone rings. It’s Fruit Brute, howling for help. “Cap’n, they’re all over me!” The crew heads to Bransylvania to investigate.
After exploring the moors, they find their werewolf friend dismembered, with stinky white goo at the “edges.” They find themselves surrounded by zombie soggies (around two per PC) that can turn others into zoggies by touch. Trix or Lucky can try to reverse the effect, or Tony could suppress the effect with effort in a pinch. Frankenberry probably has medical equipment that could help, as well.
A spell from Lucky or some super-smell from Sam could find a trail of weird residual energy leading up to Frankenberry’s castle.
To find out what’s really happening in the plot, select the text in the following box. (Triple-clicking inside the box will work for that.)
Frankenberry isn’t himself; Quisp’s brain is inside his head. When he had “cured” Quisp by cleaning his brain, he put the wrong brain in. FrankenQuisp has Booberry magically chained up in the basement to siphon off his ghostly energy to build a death ray. Booberry was leaking an “afterlife fog” that drained down to the moors and raised the zoggies. The team can rescue Booberry, freeing him to move on to the next world, and fight FrankenQuisp. Swapping Frank’s, Quisp’s, and the spare brain back into the right bodies is a relatively simple procedure for anyone with first aid training. The spare brain goes into a jar marked “Mattingly” who wasn’t using it, since he’s just a game designer and a preacher.
I was inspired by another friend’s game props. Karl Keesler ran a League of Extraordinary 1970’s Gentlemen game, with the character sheets designed as 8-track tapes. That inspired me to step up my character sheet presentation, and I found a way to print cereal box wrap-around designs. So I turned Joe’s original character sheets into boxes, and taped them onto actual mini-cereal boxes. These are written using the HERO System rules.
You can download the character boxes here and the printer-friendly black-and-white version here.
Dave Mattingly 
