Re-Imagining (Origins, Part 2)

The older man turns to OSR. He doesn’t hold with those sorts of grognards who regard Gygax (or, less often, Arneson) as an infallible prophet, and that the creator’s words and tales of his actions should be put under hermeneutical scrutiny to suss out the “true” D&D, although sometimes he likes to read their investigations. (He was just making it up as he went along, guys, with some poor choices for gameability.) The older man doesn’t believe that 1E is the game perfected, or that B/X should be precisely cloned with its many nonsensical elements replicated into perpetuity (a soldier’s monthly wage pays for only a week’s-worth of food?!). He still thinks 5E got some things right. He prefers “Re-Imagining” for the ‘R’. 

His main group is treated to GLOG and LotFP and OSE Advanced rulesets, adventures that last half-a-dozen episodes or so, while the lawyer runs a short Traveler campaign and the best friend eventually delivers a Pirate Borg weekend. The inner city kids face the tables of DCC, and then an OSE Advanced (hack), that has Beyond the Wall-ish lifepaths. Child relatives get to play OSE, Beyond the Wall, and Cairn, and the old man gifts Mausritter to the younger niece (the older niece receives Ten Candles and Alice is Missing). The older man forms a broad collection of players from various online playing groups to run a DCC tour of new-ish praised OSR modules. Answering an online plea, he forms a local group (who so far only plays online) whose refereeing is eventually taken over by another player who runs Dragonbane. He treats co-workers to G.R.A.V.E. He lends one of his co-workers Neo-Classical Geek Revival and in return is loaned Swords and Wizardry White Box. The other teacher enthuses about the OD&D rules. The older man hosts a Mothership module for his spring break. In those couple years the older man purchases and downloads a psychotic number of systems, at least seventy by the last count. His financial situation is as comfortable as it has ever been, despite the post-pandemic instability. He buys way too many miniatures for a person who plays face-to-face fewer than twenty-five times per year. He pays for Kickstarters and Backerkits, and orders bourgeois OSR product from Spearwitch and Exalted Funeral.

The older man joins OSR Discord servers and plays (mostly one-shots) with people who write blogs and publish modules, and plenty of nobodies like himself. He gets to play an FKR and Maze Travellers of the Unknown and The Vanilla Game on the lighter end of the OSR spectrum; OD&Dish (run by Gus L., with Arnold K as a co-player), OSE, Shadowdark, and Conan: Hyborian Age in the middle; and the somewhat baroque Dragonbane and DCC. By pure happenstance, he answers a Roll20 advertisement to join a weekly open table Castle Xyntillan campaign (OSE Advanced), run by a delightful Swedish-Kiwi GM for strangers, and is the only player who is there at the first and final (forty-seventh) sessions. His “main” is a cleric that has 4 hp at level four. The game is so good, he even plays one session quietly from the lobby of a Seoul hotel, starting at 7:00 am local, since that only minorly disrupts his real-life travels. He knows that he must run Xyntillan from the other side of the screen, and does, having equaled his mentor in sessions as of this posting.   

The older man begins compiling a heartbreaker, alas.

Adolescence

In late 1985, a teen meets a fellow nerd in the hall near the library during lunch at his new school, in a quite rural part of the Appalachians. The fellow nerd has played Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and they talk about the game a lot, but never get a game going (neither can drive yet). The fellow nerd is a social pariah and drops out of school soon thereafter, and the teen is mocked for associating with him, and eventually foolishly turns down a date with the pariah’s sister because of that association. (It’s not like he’s being asked out often.) The teen finds two other not-quite-pariahs, a pair of artists in his biology class. They sketch superheroes and fantasy monsters on their class papers and have played D&D, too, and this meeting does actually lead to games being played in the teen’s stuffy bedroom and one of the other boy’s stuffy lofts. These games range far and wide, including a series of Avalon Hill wargames, Top Secret/S.I. and Gamma World, and Battletech, but AD&D is the mainstay. The three begin to collect miniatures and paint them, using Testors model paints with their exceedingly glossy finishes. By not eating school lunch the teen “earns” five dollars a week for these expenses. Two-hour round-trips are made to get to and from the hobby store, in a different state over a mountain inside the nauseating back of a car, or worse, lying down in a camper-top pickup. It is agreed among the three that Ral Partha possesses the superior sculptors in its stable. Irredeemable Grenadier minis are turned to silvery blobs by the teens with the press of a hot poker, a dollar-fifteen spent for a brief thrill.

The teen has purchased Battlesystem and convinces his parents to allow him to build a sandbox (not table) in the attic for the “miniatures” (i.e., cardboard counters) game. The attic is either far too hot or cold to play in at any time of the year, and the sand is a coarse grade purchased from a nearby mine, painful on hands and knees. The adventures with the high school friends include a number of the classic main-line AD&D modules: The I series, the “Ghost Tower of Inverness,” and “White Plume Mountain.” The teen develops an Oriental Adventures campaign that gets played once. (The teen has no premonition that his father-in-law will eventually be a man who describes himself as an "Oriental.")

Many fun hours on maps, though!

The series that takes over play, however, is Dragonlance, using the Heroes of the Lance as characters. The teen appreciates that the PCs have depth (however shallow one might think the Dragonlance characters) and personalities, compared to how the kids used to play, with PCs that had been mostly treated just as murder-effective statblocks with no personality. In retrospect, the teen also appreciated the compactness of the index-sized character “sheets.” The three play into senior year of high school, reaching the beginning of D12 (the tenth playable module), when one of them becomes popular, just a year after he’d been devoted to almost endlessly replaying the Dragonlance strategy game (D11) and raving about Test of the Twins. The teen himself flirts with popularity that last year of high school. This Dragonlance campaign ends. 

The best friend’s visits are only occasional, but Dragonlance becomes the mainstay for their RPG activity, too, even though the best friend is controlling six or more PCs. The teen even arranges a joint Dragonlance session bringing together his new friends and the best friend. Still, the best friend version of the campaign stalls out after DL9. The best friend writes of his D&D he gets to play in his new world, and his nervousness about making blunders in front of the other nerds, some of whom are kind of cool, for nerds. The best friend keeps a pornographic magazine beneath the gameboard in Outdoor Survival’s box. The teen teases that they should play this game in the presence of the best friend’s mom and sister while he is visiting. 

The teen evangelizes D&D to his other three boy maternal cousins, and then eventually the fifth, youngest boy cousin, after the teen becomes an adult. They play once a year every year at the reunion, almost every day for a week. This is a tradition that almost didn't happen. The grandfather and two uncles are ministers, and the Satanic Panic is in the air. There is an adult-only meeting about whether to allow Dungeons & Dragons & Demons & Spells to be permitted at the vacation. Surprisingly, in retrospect, the RPG is allowed. (The male cousins grow up to be professor & teacher, lawyer, scientist, accountant x2, and preacher, so only 50% emerge as evil from the evangelical perspective.) The teen re-arranges furniture in the vacation cottages, finds odd, smelly rooms that barely fit the six boys, and runs games on the porch when there’s no other space. He writes some of his own adventures, but mostly just patches together materials from different sources, including “The Secret of Bone Hill,” but no others from Greyhawk, as the teen bought the gazetteer and found it tedious and ungameable. The cousins’ PCs have names like “Fire Ball,” “Ningle,” and “Duke Ironface.” Their party is constantly bailed out of trouble by a halfling DMPC called “Frow-Dough Nickens.” Eventually the teen becomes tired of this procedure, and literally pulls a “rocks fall, everyone dies” at the end of the last session one summer. Via this DM fiat, the cousins begin playing Dragonlance during the next family reunion.

Origins

The year is probably late 1981. In a small town, a boy’s friend says, “Let’s play this game my brother got.” The red booklet has a pretty cool cover, with a sorceress and a warrior facing off with a luminescent green dragon underground. The boy rolls a fighter, pencils in his stats, and names the character “Beorn,” after Bjorn Borg who was on the television earlier in the day. The friend, who likely has never run the game before, chooses the adventure in the rulebook, which the boy will learn later is unfinished. The boy rolls dice when told to, but flips absent-mindedly through a comic book–the boy mostly hates comics, so this is unusual–and the friend chastises him to pay attention. The fate of Beorn and the end of the session are lost to time.

From this inauspicious beginning flows an almost lifetime obsession.

The first RPG friend will later dogmatically state that “halflings are the best ‘class’,” and the boy listens, and rolls up “Sidi Rezegh,” named after a North African World War II battle, which the boy has read about in his war card collection. The first friend shares a photo-copied homemade character sheet and the boy will imitate and refine this practice for years. Sometime later, the friend’s brother, a few grades older, and his friend, double-DM a game for the boy and his friend, and the session is designed to kill their PCs. In the split-level basement room, “I Am the Walrus” drones. The session ends in anger and recriminations and maybe tattling to a mother. Months afterward the friend will show the boy the pencil map of the brother’s characters’ “trophy room,” where the brother’s adventurers have stuffed and mounted Demogorgon, Orcus, and some others from planes other than the prime material. Obviously the older brother had purchased the Monster Manual by this point. Somewhen in 1983, the boy and the friend plan to both create a planet–each of which will orbit the other–that will be the site of untold numbers of adventures, but this project is never realized. The first RPG friend has acquired a girlfriend. In a related realm, the boy brags to another boy he doesn’t know very well–the nephew of one of his mom’s co-workers–that he just finished Lord of the Rings (big swaths completed during church sermons), and the nephew scoffs, “Just once?” The boy does not tell the nephew that his mom read the whole of The Hobbit to him over months of bedtimes a couple years earlier.

The boy gets the game for himself, the red box. The dice lottery provides him five puke-colored polyhedrals (orange and yellow swirls in the green, even), yet an unpleasant pale blue d12. These will eventually lose their corners and roll forever. The boy is glad to replace them with fancier and prettier models, including an amber “gem” d12 and an amethyst d8, but the old man later regrets the loss of these original hideous bits of late-twentieth-century industrial ephemera. The boy will never buy the blue box, though he does have access to it through the first friend. The boy introduces the game to his best friend, repeating the halfling dogma, so the best friend rolls up a halfling himself. The boy DMs the ‘Caves of Chaos’ (which is what they will always call “Keep on the Borderlands”) and the boy fudges a few dice rolls, but the individual invader is quickly and inevitably killed by the many monsters of the Caves, as fighting seemed the only option to the kids (they never conceive of adventuring at the “base” fortress). Another character is rolled on the spot, and maybe a DMPC or two added to the party; the old man’s memory is now hazy on this point.

Some other lucky recipient of the vomit dice

The boy and the best friend play only as a duo, nearly always, as those others who are introduced to the game do not care for it, or those that already play only talk about getting together, and never do. The boy and the best friend’s game switches to homemade encounters. The best friend has rolled up a thief and somehow won a cloak or ring of invisibility. The best friend’s thief makes his way through backstabbing each of the chromatic dragons, gaining levels in excess of the red box’s rules, but they extrapolate. The white dragon was murdered while the boys hunched in a muggy tent in the best friend’s backyard, dice landing on the uneven vinyl. Treasure is rolled from the tables as each dragon falls, and the thief reaches near invincibility with his magic items. Contemptuously, the best friend recalls, “And you said halflings were the best class!”

The boy and the best friend eventually become shamed by the fact that they are playing the “Basic” version of the game, the child’s variant, and the boy soon buys or receives the hardbacks for the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Players’ Handbook and Dungeon Masters’ Guide. It took a long time to save for the Monster Manual on his dollar-a-week allowance, and he originally played AD&D with the stat blocks from Appendix E of the DMG. (The old man will do something similar with the fifth edition, although his weekly income had improved somewhat.) The boy goes on a family trip and plays all four of the boys’ new “advanced” characters in a randomly-generated back-of-the DMG dungeon, running “their” game alone in a closet in the tiny vacation cottage, leveling the characters. The boy has rolled a ranger (“Aragorn”) and a magic-user (“Freya”), and the best friend a new thief, named “Stalin,” alongside “Darriff” his fighter-mage. The best friend comes back from his own trip with the Against the Giants triple module, and assumes the role of the DM. Somewhen during the first session, after some awkward bumbling, the boy and the best friend switch which side of the screen they are on. With the exception of “Tomb of Horrors” played in the best friend's long bedroom hall with pre-gens–and the best friend asked the boy how to rule on the demi-lich at the end–they will not switch sides of the screen again for decades. The old man remembers the boy not knowing how to properly adjudicate a fireball’s impact on the steading giants’ celebration, and fudging the numbers a bit to make it more effective. The four heroes, along with pre-gens with names more embarrassing than the boys’ PCs–“Gleep Wurp,” “Flerd Trantle,” and “Roaky Swerked”–will defeat each giant monarch, countless drow and kuo-toa, and eventually the surprisingly unsturdy goddess Lolth. This is the last campaign that will be fully completed for almost forty years. Deep in the vault of the drow, after a day of gorging on Easter candy, the boy will give the best friend’s PCs 10,000 xp each, if the best friend will only finish this one last chocolate rabbit. All of the chocolate rabbit. Tears leak from the best friend’s eyes as he chokes down the candy, nauseated. They play other games, too, especially Car Wars and Axis & Allies, and even Outdoor Survival, which they mock mercilessly for its ridiculously unrealistic wilderness map and lackluster gameplay, not knowing its historical link to the game they love.

Barely surviving

The boy introduces the game to his very young Indiana cousin, during a family reunion when the other boy cousins do not attend. The very young cousin has actually brought along a few fantasy miniatures which his mom almost forbade him to bring, and enjoys the game, but wishes it were a head-to-head, and wants his characters to fight the DMPCs, arena-style. Because one of the DM’s PCs has sleep, the conflict is a foregone conclusion. From this inauspicious beginning flows another almost lifetime obsession. 

There are attempts at the game with others, but none are long-lived. The boy plays with his Georgia cousin on the other side, who insists on calling his PCs “Yoda” and “Han Solo,” and this infidelity to genre irks the boy mightily. The Georgia cousin gets them invited to a neighborhood game–the boy gets to be a player again, for once–but the Georgia DM tells the boy his magic-user must roll for his magic missile to hit. When the boy says, “That’s not what the rules are in the Player’s Handbook,” and opens the book to the proper page, the Georgia DM slams the boy’s book shut without reading the rule. (The old man later will learn that this was probably an interpretation from the Holmes Basic set, which, to be honest, is the worst spell selection possible: sacrifice an entire spell for an unreliable +2 damage?!) The boy even tried to pull into the game his sister and the girl who lived next door to the best friend, but the girls had nothing but mockery for the Wand of Wonder’s “thousands and thousands of butterflies.” The boys down the street don’t want to sit still for that long while playing pretend; they’d rather hurl a nerf football or melt plastic cars and spaceships in the woods, not that those aren't great fun. Slightly older boys at the library play Traveller, but the boy is not invited to join, and the second-best-friend gets Toon and they roll characters, create zines, and make plans to play and never do. Modules are loaned around the junior high, the UK series and "Expedition to the Barrier Peaks," but nothing comes of those exchanges for the boy, either. The boy has lonely fun by rolling himself dozens of characters, filling out the xanthous AD&D sheets on the floor of his room amidst Lego ships and Star Wars figures, following the (terrible) naming conventions suggested or trying out the supplemental classes from the latest Dragon Magazine.

Was someone cheating at language acquisition, or did cavaliers get extra?
(Not looking it up even if Unearthed Arcana is only a flight of stairs away.)

A couple moves in next door to the boy, the wife coincidentally a different co-worker of the boy’s mom, and the husband the coolest adult the boy has ever met, even if other adults don’t think so. This man owns actual swords, bears scars across his body from an electrical accident that nearly killed him, and tries to teach the boy trigonometry in the street with surveyors’ tools and trees. He shares his Thieves’ World short story anthologies, which the boy’s mom says she will check out, to see if they are appropriate for a seventh-grader, but never does. The boy finishes the first four in the series; the old man finds out in the next century that one of the authors also wrote erotica to actually make a decent living. The coolest adult ever also plays Dungeons & Dragons. The couple eventually invites the boy–and somehow, the best friend–and they explore the "Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh," and play with adult theater performers, including a man who actually wears a kilt to a session (with nothing underneath!), eat guacamole for the first time, and get to run the scenes with painted minis–with eyes! The old man will never forget opening the flat box as a boy and seeing two dozen tiny irises staring back from the inch-tall dwarfs and fighting-men laying on their backs. He will steal a character idea from that minis guy forty years hence. The coolest adult even raves about the conceptualization of Sprechenhaltenstelle, the introductory adventure in the original edition of Top Secret; the boy has acquired that game, too, and shows the neighbor his character, “Adolph Baines,” and the adult remarks that that’s an interesting choice of names. Dragonlance is introduced to the theater group–the boy is given Sturm to play, and a girl controls Flint–and the party of mostly adults make it to Xak Tsaroth, where the husband has hand-illustrated the maps in colored pencil on poster-sized graph paper. Before the dungeon is delved, the couple moves away. They will divorce not long after.

The boy moves away, too, the next year, an hour by car. His parents will separate not long after.

And then the best friend moves in the opposite direction, now four hours by car. His parents will divorce not long after.