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September 15, 2020
Andrew Ervin's Playlist for His RPG Module "Lost Tomb of the Bitchin' Chimera"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Andrew Ervin is one of my favorite authors. When I heard he was crowdfunding an RPG module inspired by the Dead Milkmen, I immediately reached out and requested a playlist to soundtrack the adventure.
In his own words, here is Andrew Ervin's Book Notes music playlist for his RPG campaign Lost Tomb of the Bitchin' Chimera:
Just about every summer, Philly’s legendary punk band the Dead Milkmen play a show at Laurel Hill Cemetery, a magnificent and historic graveyard up on a hill overlooking the Schuylkill River. A few of us would always bring blankets out, maybe a cooler; it’s always a highlight of my year. For their 2019 performance, I got the idea of playing a game of Dungeons & Dragons beforehand. I texted some friends, who agreed to do it perhaps a bit too readily. What I didn’t explain was that I planned to write a one-hitter adventure based on the band’s songs, set in a similar cemetery, and timed to correspond with sundown. It was called “Into the Burrow of the Owlbear.”
I have a long history with the Dead Milkmen. I bought their debut Big Lizard in My Backyard when it came out in 1985 and pretty much wore out the cassette tape in a matter of months. Since then, I’ve become friends with the drummer Dean Clean and the band performed at the release party for my novel Burning Down George Orwell’s House. The “Making of” video I created for this adventure fills in a bit more of the story. As it happens, I’ve been playing D&D even longer than I’ve been listening to the Dead Milkmen.
My friends and I had a great time that night at Laurel Hill, which I’ve renamed here as the Life-Is-Shit Boneyard, and I figured that was the end of it. But I’ve always loved the work Justin Sirois does at Severed Books, a rad indie publisher of RPG goodies in Baltimore. We got to chatting and decided to collaborate. Rodney Anonymous of the Dead Milkmen is a longtime D&D player too and the band agreed to let us expand upon and publish my module, which is now titled “Lost Tomb of the Bitchin’ Chimera.” It contains a ton of references to the band and even more terrible jokes. I don’t want to give anything away, but for the sake of this playlist I’ve focused on songs that feature more prominently in the adventure.
Please visit the Kickstarter page for more information. In addition to the adventure module, Severed Books is making custom Dead Milkmen gaming dice and lots of other epic loot to go along with this.
Bitchin’ Camaro
(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thing
Big Deal
Swampland of Desire
My Many Smells
Badger Song
Tiny Town
Do the Brown Nose
Tacoland
Laundromat Song
Where the Tarantula Lives
The Woman Who Was Also A Mongoose
Big Lizard
Stuart
Crystalline
Punk Rock Girl
Life Is Shit
Andrew Ervin is the author of the novels Burning Down George Orwell’s House and Extraordinary Renditions and a work of nonfiction, Bit By Bit: How Video Games Transformed Our World. He lives in Philadelphia, where his weekly game, set in Mystara, has been going steady for over six years.
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