A Nugget from Lord Kilgore

h/t Lord Kilgore

Only 161,000 Tons of Gold

Was flipping through the January issue of National Geographic when I noticed this:

In all of history, only 161,000 tons of gold have been mined, barely enough to fill two Olympic pools.

On the one hand, 161 thousand tons is quite a bit. That’s 3,220,000,000 gold pieces at 10 per pound. Gonna need at least several Tenser’s Floating Discs to get all that back to town…

On the other hand, though, given the piles of treasure, golden statues, and gilded whatnot present in the typical fantasy adventure game, the amount doesn’t seem quite so big. Particularly if you consider this:

More than half has been extracted in the past 50 years.

So without the conveniences of modern excavating equipment, transportation and logistics, and advanced prospecting technology (not to mention the skyrocketing demand due to rich and wealthy societies) only one Olympic pool of gold existed in use in our world in 1960. This seems to me to indicate that gold is far more common and accessible in RPG land than in our world.

And that all those dwarves have been busy.

On Sleestaks
While other American families were having backyard barbecues and the like, my family was enjoying the Land of The Lost marathon on the Sci-Fi channel. My son described the Sleestak as "half-leaf, half-dinosaur, half-man."

New Additions to the Blog Roll:

Permission to Kill, a site dedicated to spy-fi in all of its many incarnations.

Spy-Fi Channel, another spy-fi site.

Johnny LaRue's Crane Shot, with one of the coolest names for a blog I've ever heard, JLCS is devoted to "trashy movies, trashy paperbacks, trashy old TV shows, trashy...well, you get the picture."

The Paris Market & Brocante, a purveyor of fine exotica in Savannah

Blackmoor Trivia

h/t Sham aka Dave

Notable players in those first Blackmoor sessions included Greg “Svenny” Svenson, Stephen “Rocky” Rocheford, Mike “von Ricthofen” Carr and future professional golfer “Fairway” Freddy Funk. The earliest participants in Blackmoor actually took on the role of their real life personae, except for role-playing pioneer Bill “Three-Dollar” Hastings, who insisted on playing as Annette Funicello's Dee Dee from the uproarious 1965 film, Beach Blanket Bingo.

Tom Swift and His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
Sci-Fi Wire reports that a Tom Swift movie is in the works via Columbia Pictures and Barry Sonnenfeld. I won't get my hopes up as the original source, Variety uses the term "reimagining" to describe the project. I've come to find that the word "reimagining" is Hollywoodese for "blasphemy" (see Tim Burton's Planet of The Apes).