Sunday, April 2, 2017

Dear Julia,

I got your note yesterday requesting access to the PDF for The Fall of Cahokiantep.  There's nothing I can do to help you, unfortunately.  The PDF is already shared publicly at this link.  I put that link in my initial response to your email & then attached a copy of the PDF for good measure, and that was going to be that.  However, my response bounced.  The email administrators at your school have disabled all emails from outside or "unapproved" sources.


I should probably have stopped there, but I am highly sympathetic to the cause of school kids trying to play D&D in direct contravention of their administrators' wishes.  You may not know this, but D&D set off a hysterical moral panic back in the 1980s, leading eventually to one of the funniest webcomics in American history.  I remember well trying to explain D&D to my own parents.  To say the least, it wasn't an easy sell.  However, the game is an excellent teacher of both basic statistics and story theory, and both have served me well in later life.

I also thought that maybe sharing the--already public--link to your personal email account might bypass the firewall.  It did not.  Instead, I got another error telling me that your administrator has specifically prohibited shareable links from ANYONE who's not on their approved list.

Bottom line: to get access to "The Fall of Cahokiantep," you're going to have to either ask for an exception from your firewall administrators, OR get a gmail account and download it at your local (public) library.  It sounds like you might be up against a little Old School Moral Panic.

Good luck!

--Dan

No comments:

Post a Comment