The Bloodstone Disaster, Part 1: Return to the Ashes

Okay, so.

Let us return to the summer of 2013. It was a warm and mild summer, as I recall, but fires can start even in these conditions.

My Meetup feed had informed me that one such fire was brewing.

You  may recall that Yoni is the only person I ever did my Player Profiles on, some five years ago now. My review of him back then was sardonic but ultimately positive.

Believe me, that’s only because I was trying to ignore an otherwise inescapable fact: That Yoni was That Guy, and I was trying to hold on to an era where we were just having fun, where we were all friends, and the adventure would never end.

I think many of us have made that error…

I don’t want to go into too much  detail, as it would involve revealing personal information, and I’m not sure how much of that I want to divulge. I hope what I write next will reveal enough, honestly.

About a year or so after I wrote the Player Profile for him, Yoni… Well let’s just say he did something that pissed me off. I reacted disproportionately, and declared him persona non grata from the group- I need not have really bothered, since he was out of the state and could only bother us through text, making my actions political in nature.

It was a mistake. Yes, I should have acted, but not in the way that I did… So I told myself at the time, anyway.

That was probably why, when Yoni sent out a blast on numerous D&D-related Meetup groups, that a new 4th Edition D&D group was starting at Clarkson’s Corner- Ironically, the exact physical location where all this began, in 2008, back when that space was called The Phoenix of Westchester- That I felt compelled to attend.

You can imagine Yoni’s shock when he saw me in the room, waiting for him, especially considering how our previous communications had gone.

“I wasn’t expecting you here…” He said with a stammer, the mark of a man who’d opened a box without checking its contents first, and now wondering if there were some way to close it again.

“You weren’t?” My voice was flat, trying to reflect the usual vague disinterest that I have when entering unknown territory, as if I’ve seen it all, and it just bores me now, “If that’s the case, why did you invite me?”

“I didn’t invite you. I alerted the internet.”

It turns out that Yoni had, in fact, invited damn near everyone from at least two groups on Meetup. I say “at least two” because I got two invitations, one for each group. There may have been others.

Already I was flashing back to 2008, to that faithful day when Yoni gathered us all together, and with a monarch’s voice, cried “We need a Dungeon Master; I nominate ‘not me.'” And I had to take the fucking job.

While I don’t regret that one bit, as I made friends due to it, and had many adventures I will hopefully someday share… Heavy hangs the head that wears the crown.

However, I need not have worried about that. It seems that Yoni had a DM this time.

Himself.

And he even had an adventure he sought to run: Modules H1 through H4, known to veterans of the game as “The Bloodstone Series.” He was planning to run these under 4th Edition D&D.

No, I need not have worried about what happened in 2008, for it was now 2013: Five years had passed, and much had changed.

No, it turns out, I should have been worried for a plethora of other reasons, for you know what they say:

The more things change, the more they stay the same…