Bad Guy Zapper!

So one of my less exciting courses this semester is on requirements engineering and planning… the professor gave us an assignment to design an automated teller system, with the directive to “be creative”… I decided to have some fun with it and designed the “BGZ 9000 ATM”…. BGZ being short for “Bad Guy Zapper”. Yes, you guessed it, right alongside descriptions of Sarbanes-Oxley compliance and CEN/XFS financial frameworks there is overly formal verbage about ray guns (to zap would be ATM robbers) and pit traps (to keep the villains in durance vile until they can be arrested)…

Makes me wonder if I am the first doctoral student to write a spec for a finance system that includes references to the infamous D&D module “S1: Tomb of Horrors” and “Grimtooth’s Traps Volumes I-III” in the annotated bibliography, hee hee.

So a few people asked me what S1: Tomb of Horrors is…. it’s the most diabolical infamous player killing Dungeon & Dragons module of time, penned by Gary Gygax himself…. Anyone claiming to have survived S1 is largely dismissed as a shameless liar. For a good laugh, I suggest reading: http://www.somethingawful.com/d/dungeons-and-dragons/wtf-tomb-horrors.php?page=1 or for a more serious write-up, there is always wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomb_of_Horrors.

Grimtooth’s traps was a series of books that gained fame after S1…. Grimtooth the Troll wrote 7 volumes, each with hundreds of diabolical traps that could easily be used in any Fantasy roll playing game. The original volume provides traps wondrous, deadly and bizarre mostly designed for a classic dungeon-type setting, in a different era of adventure gaming, when dungeon crawling was nearly a competitive sport between players and GMs.