Back in the ba-de-ya month of September, I went on a fact-finding mission to Minnesota and nearby states. The event yielded 237 photos of a Roads Scholaring interest.
Because Flickr recently disabled remote linking, I'm revamping my road photo site so the pages on my personal site link to Flickr albums where my photos are all captioned the crazy cool people way. So read 'em and bip...
http://bunkerblast.info/roadpics/mn24a.html
Hockey isn't just the local sport in Eveleth, the US Hockey Hall of Fame is there.
QuoteI remember Hiawatha being included in the Deities & Demigods book for Dungeons & Dragons. The book had a big spiel discouraging players from trying to slay the demigods and deities in the book, because they were revered by many. Yet each entry had the description and stats, as if to encourage it.
Any first-time DM quickly learns that you need a stat block for everything, because players delight in attacking all sorts of things they're not supposed to. I learned this lesson in my first game, which took place in 1880s America, when I put Ulysses S. Grant in there thinking the players would consult him for advice. Cue me having to scribble down stats on a post-it when they started planning to kill him because they had totally misread the situation. (They ended up not going through with it, which was fortunate for them, since I figured a Civil War general probably wouldn't go down too easily.)
There's also the fact that the stat block is sometimes needed to resolve other kinds of interaction besides combat. If someone lied to Hiawatha, the DM would need his Wisdom score to roll an Insight check to see if he could tell the player was lying to him. Likewise, if Hiawatha was the one lying, his Charisma score would be needed to see what the outcome of a Deception check would be. (This is using the 5e terminology; I'm guessing you were looking at something from 2e or 3e, but the same principles apply.)