Back in grade ten (my worst year of high school), I started playing Dungeons and Dragons with some fellow misfits from CS 12. During the very first session, and if I recall correctly during the very first battle, our dungeonmaster Graham saw fit to unleash a shambling mound upon us.

Those of you not familiar with the D&D Monster Manual will probably have the same reaction I did that day: “a what?” Letting google answer the question, you’ll then understand my followup reaction to the answer: “a giant animated pile of rotting vegetation is beating up on me? What kind of medieval fantasy game is this?”

In retrospect, I think it was less of an unleashing so much as a bad roll off a random encounter table. Graham definitely wasn’t a mean guy, but neither was he very imaginative.

I’m surprised now that I was still interested in the game after that afternoon, where a nine hit die pile of weeds quickly laid waste to our party. Graham was soft in some ways - he’d given us each “rings of reincarnation”, which we went through instantly - but hard in others. In particular, he grimly enforced the “lightning causes shambling mounds to grow bigger” rule. It was really a no-win situation from the start. Nonetheless I still continued to play after that, and it was the habitual truancy for these sessions which eventually led me to nearly fail Comp Sci 12.

Anyways, I was reminded of this incident because of yard work today. If looking outside isn’t enough of a reminder, the increased commentary on yard work among friends’ blogs is certainly a harbinger of spring. When Rosalind visited a couple of weekends ago she commented on the moss growing in the back yard. Moss had taken over a large portion of the area, a result of living in a wet climate with poor drainage and acidic soil. So we went a trip to Home Depot where we picked up a jug of iron sulfate moss killing compound. She liberally applied it to the yard and within half a day the moss turned black (and, I imagine, made a squeaking, shriveling dying noise). Today was the first day I could rake it all out, and soon discovered a six inch thick layer of moss taking over a third of a lawn makes for a lot of raking. By end of it I felt like I could animate my own shambling mound - two hit die’s worth, at least.

Normal people herald spring with evocative haikus. I herald it instead with the relationship between yard work and hack and slash role playing games:

A bolt of lightning
Blasts the moss in my back yard..
Help! A shambling mound!