My mom, probably concerned about the house caving in, has been cleaning out the attic. She has found all manner of items from my personal golden age, including boxes full of empty LEGO boxes. And my sticker book from elementary school. It was the '80s. We all had sticker books. I've been dutifully taking most of it home and putting it in our basement since we do not have an attic.

This week she presented me with a small box full of miscellaneous trinkets and weapons. It's the Toon Field Day box.

Back before we all got driver's licenses, we were into role-playing games. While my core group of pals was originally into D&D, I kept getting the (then) new wave of modern RPGs with bizarre themes and tie-ins. GURPS, Ninja Turtles, etc. Although Ninja Turtles was probably the coolest one, the one I kept pushing on everybody was Steve Jackson Games' Toon. I had very indulgent friends.

It was 1988. Or so. The Looney Tunes revival was in full swing. Who Framed Roger Rabbit was a huge box office hit. Even the Disney Channel ran cartoons. That whole 1940s-era wacky, random, prankster smartass cartoons was back in, and in big. (And if memory serves, it would last until Warner Bros flogged it to death by the mid-90s.) The Toon Role-Playing Game let players act as these sort of indestructible cartoon characters, assisted by the usual RPG trappings of dice and charts and enemy NPCs to fight.

So I put together the "Toon Field Day." I planned out a complex outdoor scavenger hunt, with props and clues hidden all over my parent's acre yard. There were locations with pre-described enemy attacks, and we had to use our character skills and weapons to get through them. I drafted my sister to ride her bike in on cue and deliver a message to the group. I even mailed out invitations to the guys' home addresses. In effect, this was a LARP, some fifteen years before I ever heard the term.

I don't remember what the point was. Or if we even finished the game. I do recall my Dad later chuckling about watching us run all over the yard. This may have been one of the times when enthusiasm waned and after an hour everybody just wanted to head inside and play Odyssey. I'm sure I had a great time planning it all, at any rate. That was kind of where my head was at most of the time.

Anyway, the Field Day props went into a box shortly afterward and that box has been in my parent's attic for twenty years. And I mean ALL the props. Even the pencils we used are still in there, like it's some kind of shrine to a passel of dead role-playing children.

Toy gun, toy knife, keychain, a compass (the architectural kind, I'm sure that was a delicious pun), Magic 8-Ball, an empty soda bottle, even a stick I labelled as a divining rod. Oh yeah, everything has a label on it (since most of these were to be found during the course of the adventure) with some cartoony description. Several have "WAIT" written on them, meaning that the party was to make sure I was around to explain an event or attack, since I was the Game Master of the shebang.

But here's why I'm even bringing this up... the box had a smell to it. A smell more concerning than the usual mustiness you get with a box that has spent twenty years in an attic.

I think the culprit is the "Instant Water Pills - Just Add Water," which, once upon a time, were Tic-Tacs in a vending machine capsule. If you ate them, you'd get a buff to your Smarts skill. I guess nobody ate them since they were probably half-buried in a sandpile or something.

Good lord. I suppose it is interesting that Tic-Tacs can hold their color after two decades.

It's possible that I put the Tic-Tacs in Slime (boy, remember THAT junk), but I really do not remember mixing Tic-Tacs and Slime.

I have GOT to throw that away. Seriously.

Happy 21st anniversary, Toon Field Day.