QuasitQuasit's Daily Book Recommendations: "The Binder of Shame" (2011) by Al Bruno III
This is something new and rare. Many years ago a guy known as AB3 wrote a series of incredibly funny "rants" about roleplaying games (mostly) with terrible players in the 1980s. Eventually he collected them as "The Binder of Shame" and posted them to Smashwords.
And then, for some reason, they were deleted. But they were INCREDIBLY funny. If you're a tabletop roleplayer or geek, you WILL laugh your ass off, repeatedly. Don't eat or drink anything while you're reading these; I'm not responsible if anything flies out of your nose or mouth and onto your screen. This is the kind of stuff that will have you laughing uncontrollably while you try to read it aloud to your friends.
NOTE: It's not really edited. The formatting is rough...REAL rough. These were internet posts, not articles in The New Yorker. Got me?
[Weasly Crusher: "What about me? When do I get my barfight?"
Psycho Dave: "Well you do see this scrawny nervous looking kid at the bar."
Weasly Crusher: "I walk up to the kid and give him a shove."
Cheating Bastard: "I follow him."
Psycho Dave: "The kid is at the bar nursing a Shirley Temple."
Me: "I don't think that a medieval tavern would serve Shirley Temples."
Psycho Dave: "Fine. He is drinking an Ye Ole Shirley Temple."
Weasly Crusher: "I shove him."
Psycho Dave: "Roll to hit."
(roll)
Cheating Bastard: "I tell the kid- 'He doesn't like you.'."
Psycho Dave: "The kid cringes and says 'I'm sorry.'."
Weasly Crusher: "I shove him again!"
Cheating Bastard: "I say 'I don't like you either. You just watch yourself. We're wanted men. I have the death sentence in twelve kingdoms...'"
I knew where this was going, I think Weasly Crusher was the only one who didn't realize. The only thing really surprising about the whole thing was that thanks to Psycho Dave's homebrewed Crits and Fumbles tables his Samurai somehow managed to behead himself. Eventually my character regained some degree of sobriety and retreated to his room to wait for the morning and the dread wizard Shickelgruber but the night at the Inn had no end in sight.]
Most of the rants feature different games and genres. There's Star Wars, superheroes, Call of Cthulhu, TORG, Star Trek, and others.
Oh, I should also note that this is by no means for children; there's pretty much everything gross you can imagine, and lots of implied/outright sex.
[Me: "OK you walk into the room and see a group of Hobgoblins sharpening their weapons."
Psycho Dave: "I flash my talisman of the Dark Gods and order them to bow down to the might of Azathoth."
Me: "They bow before you."
Psycho Dave: "Then I behead them."]
You will never find this in a book shop (although Al Bruno III does have some other books available on Kindle, I believe; I've read some of them, and they're good). Nor is it on Smashwords any more, for some reason. But the original rants are available to read online here:
https://albruno3.blogspot.com/p/the-binder-of-shame-rpg-rants.html
And someone converted them to a single RTF file and posted it openly to Google Docs, here:
Happy reading! 🤓📖
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