HöL by Night

I had a dream last night
And she looked just like a dream.
She was on fire last night
And I was breathing gasoline

Butthole Surfers
Whatever (I Had A Dream)

Strange thing happened to me on the morning of the first of December, 1997; I had a dream. Not so strange, you may think, but this dream had HöL in it. Hmmm. You may be thinking that I am a sad, strange, little man to be dreaming of that perverse monstrosity known and feared as HöL, but it's worse than that. This is roughly the excerpt of the dream that was pertinent to the aforementioned gaming revolution...

Let there be a company. Let this company's name be Whiplash and Barrel. A curious name for a company, but a name nonetheless. Let this company's workforce consist of a scant handful of lunatics who sleep all day and drool nightly into cups of stale coffee, whilst poring over reams of meaningless scrawl. Let this company produce role-playing games. A good enough start, I feel.

I dreamt that Whiplash and Barrel had decided that their designers should simply write down every thought that came to them, and keep them all. I think you can all appreciate quite what a foolish notion this may be. But this was their world, and they set to. My vision was an article describing some of their work. Only ten or so games were pictured. They produced well over fifty. To give you an example of one of them, I shall endeavour to describe the third in this series of miscarriages:

The blurb was along the lines of: "Sci-fi adventure in a universe of guns, madness, and cows." Imagine a universe in which every single denizen has either got BSE, CJD, or both. Pleasant. Now add to the mixing pot a high-octane conglomeration of heavy artillery and battle cruisers. We're talking major geek territory, but the geeks are fucked up twerps who torture cats. Oh dear.

Of the ten games described, I can only remember the details for this one. That, and the fact that the fifth or so game described was HöL. This makes me feel uneasy. My subconscious mind comes up with these things? Mein Gott in Himmel - what kind of a fiend am I? I leave that question for you to answer. Perhaps somewhere, hidden in these pages, lies the truth.

Help!