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. We are some of the 40 to 50 million people in the US who do not have health insurance. Worse, we do not qualify for government aid as we live in Texas and have no children. The cancer treatments have cost over $110,000 so far. While some of this has been absorbed by hospital foundations and the like, we still owe a lot of it.

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.

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.