Sean Kelly has started playing the original Dungeons & Dragons again (pen & paper version) and he recently sent out his list of 10 Awesome Things About D&D:

1 - Rolling a Natural Twenty when the fight is on the line
2 - Leveling up
3 - 0 hit points, unconscious, possibly dead
4 - The 10‘ pole
5 - The druid spell Shillelagh
6 - Being a 1st level Halfling mage with 1 hit point and a dart
7 - Drinking ale in the tavern
8 - The planar asymmetric synergy of polyhedrons and lead figures
9 - Scimitars
10 - Treasure Type Q, the best Treasure Type

My list would have fighting a Beholder, those things were so badass.

What kind of things would make your D&D top ten list?

UPDATE 1: A bunch of great comments coming in. The nostalgia spell I cast worked!

UPDATE 2: For those of you thinking about getting back into D&D and trying out the new 3.5 ruleset, here’s the Wizards of the Coast official website for Dungeons & Dragons. TSR, company formed by Gary Gygax that originally published D&D, was bought by Wizards of the Coast in 1997. D&D 4th Edition is scheduled for this May.

UPDATE 3: All of this talk of D&D made me think of Dungeon Majesty, a hilarious public access TV show from 2004 where four women play D&D and act out the various battle scenes with ridiculous green screen effects.

UPDATE 4: Remember the awesome Dragon magazine? Well I just read the sad news that after 30 years it stopped being published back in September, however back issues are still available through its publisher Paizo. It’s great to go through there and just look at the covers of the issues I used to own.

Wade Rockett let us know that Dragon magazine editor Wolfgang Baur recently started the Kobold Quarterly to fill the void left by the end of Dragon.

Disney designer Eric Tan, who created artwork for The Incredibles, made an fantastic poster for the X-Men inspired by old German film posters.

via Coudal Partners

Dave Schumaker tipped us off to some really amazing photos that Tristan Savatier shot in 2005 of the graffiti covered Public Health Service Hospital (PHSH) in Presidio of San Francisco which has been abandoned since 1988. Here’s the full gallery of photos, including background info on the hospital.

Here are some more photos of the hospital by Cassidy Curtis.

According to The Presidio Trust website, the current plans for the hospital are to rehabilitate and reuse buildings within the 42-acre PHSH district, including adding residential uses to some of the property.

Warm and Fuzzy is a wonderful project started by Ellen Watkins, a high school student in San Francisco, who is encouraging people to knit scarves for charity between now and Valentine’s Day. The scarves can be dropped off at Imagiknit, Greenwich Yarn, Atelier Yarns, Mendels/Far-Out Fabrics, The Gables and Wishbone, who will then donate them to Bay Area Rescue Mission, a Richmond-based organization that provides assistance to the Bay Area’s homeless and impoverished.

Warm and Fuzzy is a San Francisco organization of friendly teenage knitters looking to make a difference. From now until Valentine’s Day, we invite you to knit a scarf for someone in need in the Bay Area. Any yarn, any size, so long as it was made by you.

Seattle developer Damon Cortesi has written a great little perl script that will generate your Twitter Stats which you can be make into some cool graphs of using the Numbers app. Here are my current Twitter Stats.

You will need to know how to access a terminal and navigate the OS X filesystem, but after that it just takes one command to run. Mine took a couple of minutes to finnish since it needed to parse 93 pages of Twitter data, which I then just cut-and-past into the Numbers template that Damon provided.

The 7th Annual No Pants! Subway Ride organized by Improv Everywhere takes place in NYC on Saturday, January 12th. This year they are encouraging people to organize No Pants 2k8 events in their own city. So far events are being planned for Boston, Washington DC, Portland OR, Chicago and now San Francisco.

REQUIREMENTS FOR PARTICIPATION

1) Willing to take pants off on subway
2) Able to keep a straight face about it

For more planning information, visit the Improv Everywhere Facebook group.

Here’s a video of No Pants 2k6 which was broken up by the cops.

See Previously: 6th Annual No Pants! Subway Ride