Many long time readers of this site know that my wife is recovering successfully from oral cancer and that I worked on the original Microlite74 as way to cope during her recovery from 6 weeks of radiation treatment last year (2008). What I’ve never talked about is the cost. Back then, we were some of the 40 to 50 million people in the US who do not have health insurance. (Thanks to the ACA, we do now) Worse, we did not qualify for government aid as we lived in Texas and had no children. The cancer treatments cost over $110,000. While most of this has been absorbed by hospital foundations and the like and we have been paying it off over the years (thanks, in part, you donations), we still owe some.

To complicate matters, my wife was diagnosed with MS (multiple sclerosis) in 2015. The MS was probably there for many years, just somewhat dormant. The head and neck radiation from her cancer treatmens may have pushed it along to the point it is now: almost totally disabling. As we are now in Ohio, which (unlike Texas) extended Medicaid under the ACA, most of her MS-related expenses are covered, but that still leaves us with $200-300 dollars a month in MS related expenses that are not covered by insurance. Worse, my income is limited by what I can earn at home as due to her MS-related balance issues, she falls and I have to be here when she does. This means that my time for designing games is limited. Extra money from your donations helps finish paying down the cancer costs and the uncovered MS expenses. The more donations we get, the less time I have top spend scrambling after extra income and therefore the more time I can devote to developing the mostly free games like the various versions of Microlite74, Microlite75, Microlite78, Microlite81, etc.

I know I’m not doing this well, but if you can afford to donate toward our expenses, I’d be very grateful. If you donate anything at all, you get a password giving you access to a number of special downloads. Some of the currently available downloads include:

• Pdf copies of the two issues of The Grimoire I published in the late 1970s (which I blogged about here: The Grimoire #1 and The Grimoire #2)
• pdf copy of The Second Grimoire of Pharesm the Bright-Eyed, a set of house rules for a BECMI campaign I ran at a game shop in the mid-1980s.
• Microlite74 2.0 Special Edition — a 60-page PDF designed to be printed in booklet format from Adobe Acrobat. Like the digest-sized version of Microlite74 1.1, the artwork is by Håkan Ackegård. (Visit Håkan Ackegård’s Fantasy Gallery to see more of Håkan Ackegård’s fantastic art.) Unlike that first attempt at a digest-sized edition, the pages in this edition are numbered and there is a table of contents. This Special Edition incorporates the rules from the first supplement, giving you all the rules currently available for Microlite74 in one booklet. The text has been reformatted into a single column in a large enough font to easily read.
• Microlite74 3.0 Extended Special Edition — two PDFs designed printed in booklet format from Adobe Acrobat. Like the digest-sized version of Microlite74 2.0 Special Edition , the artwork is by Håkan Ackegård. (Visit Håkan Ackegård’s Fantasy Gallery to see more of Håkan Ackegård’s fantastic art.). The text has been reformatted into a single column in a large enough font to easily read and divided into two booklets so they can be easily bound with a long reach stapler.
• Hidden Valley House Rules 2 — a PDF of the Basic/Expert house rules I wrote for a campaign set in my Hidden Valley homebrew world in the mid-1980s. The PDF is created from a scan of the original booklet.
• Arn4 Player Info — The player info booklet for the 4th campaign set in my Empire of Arn homebrew. Background and history mainly. The PDF is created from a scan of the original booklet.

To get access to these downloads, send a donation in any amount — small or large — to me via Paypal. My apologies for having to ask for donations and my heartfelt thanks to everyone who donates. If you cannot donate but wish to help, please spread the word about my request and offer. Thank you very much in advance.