<em>There is a saying common among Sorcerers, the most common version of which goes something like this: the gods do not play dice with the universe: they play chess...and they like to change the rules between moves.  It is typical of the motley assembly of lucid dreamers that whenever this joke is brought up, some fool will start arguing about the precise sort of chess set being used, or whether they play shogi, or parcheesi, or a variant of poker called H-bomb.  Almost as certain is the probability that someone else will leap into the fray and start arguing back, with varying degrees of alcohol and rancor involved.  Sometimes it gets out of hand and someone ends up dead, and when that happens anyone who wasn't there nods sagely and mutters about the folly of sorcerous socialization.<br/><br/>That, in a nutshell, is what happened at the Prague Conclave when a nobody named Elmore Splindt had one shot too many of schnapps and tried to argue chess with a room full of fellow Sorcerers...or so the story goes, as told by those who weren't there.<br/><br/>The fate of Elmore Splindt came up again the next year when someone proposed another conclave via e-mail.  And the next year.  And the two years following that.<br/><br/>This year, someone has decided to bite the bullet: Rocky Montag, one of the last people to have seen Elmore Splindt alive, has announced that a new Conclave will be held in Pasadena.  That's bad enough, of course, but then word also gets out that he's chosen a Pentacostal convention as the 'cover'...<br/><br/>And hot on the heels of <em>that</em> little tidbit, word came that the Librarian has decided to attend...and he's bringing something special with him.<br/><br/>Pentacostals.  A handful of Sorcerers.  The Librarian and his collection of rare books.  This is going to be explosive even without anyone cracking wise about the gods and their chess games.<br/><br/>Why do I get the feeling that someone in the shadowy courts on the far side of Leng just moved a knight to Queen's Bishop's Three?</em><br/><br/>--excerpt from Murdoch's journal<br/>dated three weeks before the Con at Pasadena