Stormtrooperback Saturday

Readers who followed the link from the Bergetoons Facebook page the other day might have noticed that the graphic on the FB post wasn't actually from this week's cartoon. Actually, it was a portion of this:

Back in my college days and well into my 20s, I was a Dungeons & Dragons player, and even attended a couple of GenCons back when they were hosted at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside. I wrote a running narrative of one of the campaigns I played in, and this was an illustration for the cover of Volume IV.

Our dungeon master (the person who devises the setting for the other players to role play in) wanted to switch us over from a medieval game to a futuristic one, to which end he placed one suit of storm trooper armor in a dungeon. My fighter character tried it on, found that it was much lighter yet more effective than the chain mail he was wearing before, and happily took it as his own.

It had the drawback of being radioactive, but my character wasn't smart enough to make the connection between the suit and his hair falling out.

In more traditional garb

I also remember a Star Wars-themed game I played in at one of those GenCons in which all us players were Sky-Walk-R clones trapped in a filming of Episode IV -- the only episode to have come out at that point.  The slightest deviation from the plot could prove fatal to a character; and when time came for the game to be over, the surviving Sky-Walk-R clones were still trapped in the trash compactor of the Death Star as we players were struggling to remember how that particular problem was overcome in the movie.

It is quite possible that we had neglected to instruct R2D2 to tap into the Death Star's main computer.