Peaches Beltempo’s summer job- assisting with LARP quests for children, in the sunny outdoors- takes a lot of imagination, love of life, humor, games, and always, water. The element of surprise has led to laughter and curiosity, ideas from the young co-creators of the adventure. Bad surprises, you can watch for. The mobile dungeon master learns all the rules of safe fun, dealing with scuffle of guiding kids of various personalities, their safety versus the freedom of the outdoors. But no matter how much you believe in the pretend play...it’s never too dark, and never too real… Or...it wasn’t. Yet, here they are. The darling group of children carry illusions of dazzling credibility about their person, a malicious air and uncanny power. Their forms break into distorted smiles, like hungry things, bent on satiation. The occult force that brings these six, fragile beings closer, with energy-consuming, inhuman aspects around Beltempo, grasping for a coherent response here ...

Here’s a story inspired by seeing a vintage pinball machine, during an annual camping trip with my family .- Cecil A man with a certain maniacal glee in his eyes leads another man into People’s Crossing, pictured here: The other fellow’s dressed in a Hawaiian shirt. He’s putting out a cigar as they travel over the bridge. He coughs, then says: Blamed walk to the top of this mountain best be worth it. Mr. Anthony, you are considering turning back? Not on your life, Sandu! We’ve got five grand riding on your proof that you can demonstrate what I will agree is Extra Sensory Perception. If you hadn’t walked up from nowhwere, told me my name, that I go by ‘R.A.’- that I’m a gambling addict, that I’ve seen it all but you can go one better, money guaranteed- and my blamed social security number! Why aren’t you selling lottery numbers? Sandu: Power made of belief- beyond every day levels, in this cynical world- can move that entire mountain top, RA. My sense of a tremendous ...

Writing interactive story-telling for my games, such as The Curse of Allautou on itch.io games, was a fun new branch, as I tried to move away from spending so much time on my long-time hobby of reading, and reading about, the classic Marvel Universe- that is, up to the point where I was collecting as many comics as possible each month, and copious back issues as I could afford them. This blog tells you a lot about my relationship with Marvel Comics Group, though every cartoon or adventure show or book played part, truly. So over in our sister blog, Be Chill, Cease ill, today, I tell the saga of my First Quest in the parks here in Boulder, with my group of kid Questers. My first five kids were not, overall, certain of the choices before them. Are you mostly a Warrior? Explorer? Wizard? Mystic? Bard or Artisan? ‘Shape-shifter’ became the watch word. Upon review, that was an ability Path, but what they wanted were Totemic Races. Once they got into Character, almost no one w...