The Empty Chair

[Cameron Goble]

A few weeks ago, my friend Pendar died. We had a memorial -- a couple memorials, actually -- and this is going to be a strange post because I'm going to try not to eulogize him. At the same time, this post *is* about one way that his presence enriched my life, and I don't want to ignore that.

The immediate problem is this: there's an empty chair at my group's gaming table.

Now, that obviously doesn't sum up the life of my friend and the love we all held for him. But on the other hand, it is an Empty Chair of Mythic Significance now, which is one of the artifacts a gamer really doesn't ever want to encounter in his career.

It's the chair nobody wants to sit in and the chair nobody wants to admit to being there: the chair everyone wants to fill with someone else, but to never forget who sat there for years laughing along with us as we had our ritual fun. It's a white elephant, an albatross hung on the neck of our gaming sessions. Whoever sits there is cursed for a time.

(I'm getting weird ideas now for a new cursed major artifact: the Ass of Vecna. Hmm.)

So the group met last weekend to talk about alternatives and ways to continue on. (I wish Dice Make Bonk were still going. Not to be an opportunist, but my gosh. What a great set of episodes this would make.) We had issues to work out. Not psychological issues so much -- that's what the memorials were for, and that's all getting dealt with in other contexts.

Issue number one: the last game we'd played before Pendar died, Tripp had left us in a wonderful cliffhanger at a crucial moment in the campaign we've been playing for the past three years: the legendary monster of the lake had risen out of the depths while the local volcano upheaved the town all around us. It was a wonderful setup for everyone involved, particularly for the character that Pendar played.

So now we're on the verge of an action scene that would highlight our dead friend. Do we kill his character off heroically? Do we play him on and hope to do justice to him? Or do we all abandon our characters to an unfinished campaign?

Issue number two: We're short another player anyway -- that's two in all. As it was before, if one player couldn't make it to a session, somebody else could pick up the slack. We can't do that for two missing people -- and another of our ranks just changed jobs and won't be able to make it to our game most days.

So our game is effectively over anyway until we find *two* more people. And that means we'll have two new faces resolving the cliffhanger. It's sort of as if for the ST:TNG two-parter "Best of Both Worlds," Patrick Stewart had been replaced with somebody else -- say, Don Knotts -- as Locutus just after Riker gave the order to fire on the Borg ship.

Anyway, the group got together. We resolved our new course. And I'll say this for Tripp: not many DM's have a quality wine collection to break out when it's time to discuss the heavy matters of memorializing our friend's memory while rolling up new characters. The guy's a class act.

Resolution one: We're going to put the established campaign on indecisive hold, breaking it out only when all the (remaining) original players are available. We may end up playing once a month this way.

Resolution two: We're going to recruit a new guy in. Tripp has some college gaming buddies who have yet to sit at his table, and I have a candidate or two of my own.

Resolution three: We're going to start a new set of characters and go back to module-style gaming. Tripp has run the same campaign solidly for the last three years, and a quick jaunt through Swampmarsh has a certain disposable appeal.

All of this dances around the core of the empty chair: we miss our friend, and we'll think about him a lot I'm sure while we game. It's not as if the game itself will be a towering tribute to the man. Still, it's part of the life we shared, and it deserves good closure -- even the closure by proxy for the loss of our friend.

[Charlie]

We (the wife and I) recently watched the "Lost Tales" Babylon 5 DVD. There was a memorial section that contained reminiscences of both Andreas Katsulas (G'Kar) and Richard Biggs (Dr. Stephen Franklin), a section that was both touching and amusing and left me with the wish that I had gotten to meet both men.

In the stories presented on the DVD, the characters of G'Kar and Franklin were referred to as both being off on a journey together, exploring "beyond the Rim" -- a phrase that both explained the absence of the characters and offered a euphemism for the passing of the actors who played them.

You could do worse than to do the same for your friend and his character(s).