 High-rising, delicate rock formations are part of the proof that a portion of southwestern Wisconsin known as the Driftless Area escaped bulldozing by the ice sheets coming south from Canada. Driving the back roads of Vernon County this winter, we sighted the Three Chimneys formation standing above private farm fields.
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In the Midwest's coldest week so far this winter, we headed underground - to the Mark Twain Cave show cave in Hannibal, Missouri! It's a fantastic network maze cave, full of narrow, lofty fissure passages crisscrossing at odd angles. Nature's sculpture of the bedded limestone walls is really interesting here, with high ledges, odd hanging rock formations, and rare flowstone cascades. With four of us on the tour in this low-visitation time, we had lots of chance to explore and converse with our excellent tour guide, Max.
We had a great WindyCon in Oak Brook, Illinois this November, with the wonderful plus of Laser Webber being music/comedy Guest of Honor. Scott participated in a D&D panel, and Scott and Jenn together offered a first-time type of presentation: a whirlwind travelogue, highlighting amazing natural scenes in Ohio and northern Indiana that could be visited in a week's vacation eastward from Chicago. We've now posted the talk's detailed contents and photos here on the website, linked directly here and permanently on the FOR TRAVELERS page.
 Through years of field work, dreaming and writing, our posted collection of fully documented landscape scenes has continued to grow, with its particular focus on storytelling and active engagement with memorable places. As of our recent posting of the Red Bluff Shore scene, there are now 40 landscape features available here to virtually explore and consider dropping into your RPG session, fiction, artwork, teaching or travel plan. We have more new scene descriptions in the works to further nourish all our 'scope for the imagination' (remembering L.M. Montgomery), but it's great to reach this milestone!
 We're happy to note that Landscapes for Writers and Game Masters was the best-selling title at the McFarland Press booth #142 this year. Thanks, everyone! We (Scott and Jenn) also enjoyed so much the lively conversations we had with a number of you after the Deserts and Rivers talks, at the signing, and at game demo tables. We hope you all had a great con as well!
 We're getting ready for a busy Gen Con this year, and hope to see many of you there!
We're looking forward to attending Origins Game Fair in Columbus, Ohio for a second year! Scott's giving two GM/author enrichment talks, Friday June 23 2-4 pm in Convention Center Mtg. Room A-215:
As 2022 draws to an end, we look back on a variety of new field sites visited in the summer and fall. Look for some of these in our 2023 scene description postings! (If anything looks particularly familiar, feel free to send along your own impressions of that place and its landscape.)
We'll be at WindyCon near Chicago next weekend, looking forward to face-to-face (safely masked!) time with writing / game / SFF folks. If you'll be there and want to meet up, it would be best to contact us before the Con, [email protected]. My talks there are Caves 2.0 (Sunday, 11/13 at 10 am) and Karst Landscapes 2.0 (right afterward, 11 am).
This spring I retired from college teaching, research, and administration at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. It's my plan to continue building this website, offering game/writing convention seminars, and otherwise providing earth science insights for game masters, authors and storytellers of all types. We've already begun taking advantage of retirement's looser schedule to visit some new sites, make return visits in varying seasons, and attend more conventions. Thank you for visiting ground4inspiration.net, and I'm continuing to be always reachable via [email protected] .
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