1.

Basements & Dragons

I stared at the table, mulling my options. “Um…” I

began, and then stopped as if I were about to make a chess
move, but had no idea what I was doing and was making sure
to not lift my hand from the piece quite yet. No answers came
to mind. Fuck it. Time to be bold. “I grab one of the boxes
and throw it at the centaur guy. At his head.”
My uncle gestured towards the die. I hesitated. His
expression betrayed nothing. I rolled.
Twelve. I looked up hopefully.
He made a quick throwing gesture. “You grab the box
and throw it. The centaur swats it away and then comes over
and grabs you and tears your arms off. He throws what’s left
of you to the ground.”
“So… I’m dead?”

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“Yep.”
I turned to my brother. “I guess it’s up to you, then.”
He looked at the die in general confusion. The correct
thing to do in this centaur vs. half-elf situation wasn’t clear,
but we understood that rolling a high number—a 20 ideally,
but a 19 or 18 would suffice—meant victory and the ability to
claim the golden orb we had entered the dungeon in search of.
“I grab a different box and throw it,” he said �nally,
�inging the die.
Eight.
“You step over his body,” my uncle said, motioning at me,
“and try to grab a box, but the centaur gets to you before you
can and knifes you in the gut. You die, too.”
“That’s it?”
“Yep. I’m going to bed,” he said as he boxed up the dice
and manuals.
And so began my Dungeons and Dragons career. Despite
our pitiful deaths, the premise intrigued me and I was excited
when my uncle bought us a D&D set of our own. It was not
the more thorough and respected “Advanced Dungeons and
Dragons,” and I think was sneered at by the real gamers—
much as an NFL player might snicker at the Arena League—
but we were only seven and nine years old, so it made sense
to start slowly.
By default, I was the Dungeon Master for most of the
games we played. This entailed devising the “campaign” and
basic plot outlines, mapping out dungeons and continents,
judging whether a hal�ing could drag the body of a

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Hippogriff, and so on. We recruited neighborhood kids,

made up a crew of six or seven characters, and soon enough
bona �de D&D games were taking place regularly in our
suburban basement. It was pretty fun.
Now, a common charge leveled at Dungeons and
Dragons enthusiasts is that they tend to be pimpled social
rejects who huddle around pretending to slay make-believe
monsters while their more socially apt peers lead normal
childhoods outside in the sunlight. This was startlingly
accurate; at one point I was sitting in our dank basement,
creating a map for an upcoming game, going back and
forth on whether I should name an island Meghlarman or
Meghlathan, when I suddenly put down my pen and thought,
“Wow am I a fucking loser.” No matter; I plowed onward,
and days later led a campaign in which a pair of elven thieves
slaughtered a bunch of Carnivorous Apes on the island of
Meghlathan.
We continued for as long as we could with the standard
game of “kill monsters, score rubies, walk around, repeat,”
but by the time we reached the age of eleven we became more
comfortable—or maybe bored—with the system, and the
games descended into ridiculousness.
This slide began during a game where my friend Jim’s
character, a Neutral Good Fighter named Mancatcher, was
trying to track down two orcs so he could kill them and
collect a sizable reward from a local orc-hating mayor.
It was getting dark out, reducing navigation abilities
on the winding gravel roads, and I informed Jim that his

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character was going to have to �nd a place to sleep.

“But I don’t want to sleep! I keep pushing on.”
“Nope, you have to. Remember, Mancatcher got woken
up early when that Giant Toad jumped on him? And now
you’ve been running after these orcs for like 16 hours.
You’re exhausted.”
“But if I stop to sleep I’m going lose the orcs. I’ll sleep later.”
“You have to, now,” I insisted.
“Can’t I cast a spell or something? Can I shoot myself
with a �reball to wake myself up?”
“Nope.”
He �nally agreed to sleep, but “only for three hours.” At
the next town he approached the �rst lit building, a church,
and headed inside for shelter.
“The preacher says you can sleep there, but you have to
pay him ten gold to stay for the night.”
Jim looked personally insulted. “What?”
I shrugged. “He doesn’t trust you. You stink, and you still
have toad guts all over your armor.”
Jim frowned and looked down at the sheets in front of
him. “Okay then, I…” He let out a half chuckle. “I burn down
the church. I hit the preacher,” he paused and rolled the die,
getting a 17, “and then I use one of my Flaming Arrows to set
the building on �re. I make sure the preacher is stuck under
a table and can’t move before I run out of there.” He rolled
again, getting a 19. “Yes!” he exclaimed.
I paused at this twist. The game was suddenly revealing
a new, unexplored angle. It was intriguing. The campaigns

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had gotten dull and predictable, partly due to my laziness.

My planned twist with Mancatcher’s orcs was that one of
them had a key to a hidden dungeon. A hidden dungeon
with… more orcs in it. Yeow! Still, I had certain duties to
uphold as Dungeon Master. “Well, wait… that goes against
your alignment,” I said after digesting the move. “Remember?
You’re Neutral Good. You wouldn’t do that.”
“I thought I could change my alignment?”
“Well…”
He leaned over to snatch the Dungeon Master’s Guide.
“Okay! Okay!” I yelped. “You’re right; you can do that, it’s just
that—”
“Okay, I’m Chaotic Evil now,” he said �atly, grabbing a
pencil and erasing the relevant info on his character sheet.
And so it was that Mancatcher the Fighter became an
impulsive, power-hungry lunatic in the middle of a church
because a preacher irritated him. This didn’t seem like the
kind of thing Gary Gygax had in mind when he created the
game, but we rolled with it.
The games became more interesting after that, while at
the same time deteriorating into absurdity. The freshly Evil
Mancatcher soon became the most powerful person in the
entire country by stealing and then operating a series of glue
factories. Why was glue such a hot item? No one knew. But
soon enough he would take over entire villages and force
the citizens to work at his factories, a management style that
made him no friends but sent the gold count on his character
sheet soaring.

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“This glue stuff is really cool,” Jim remarked at one point

as he �ung the die and successfully destroyed another town.

A bizarre juxtaposition emerged. Rejecting the game’s

norms and embracing goofy mayhem left us strangely more
con�dent; Jim developed a layer of cockiness, and given that
the games were now much more fun, I felt that I had grown
as a Dungeon Master. But these new identities collapsed
when removed from the basement and subjected to 5th grade
classrooms and hallways.
I mean, what could I even do with my new skills there?
Walk up to a girl and interrupt the preppie she was talking
to by saying, “Check out this map I made?” Maybe ease the
silence that would follow by adding, “That room there? A
wizard named Netherblar lives there?” It would have been
insane; it’s not as if she would inhale sharply and gasp, “I
LOVE that corridor! Do you want to go steady?” Similarly,
Jim’s Mancatcher alter-ego would have no problem verbally
lacerating and then physically beheading a small town mayor
in order to intimidate a town’s citizens, but he remained
mute and anonymous in the dodgeball games at school as the
teachers barked orders and the other kids trash talked.
It felt as if I were signi�cant while playing D&D: I made
decisions, I knew what I was doing, I was even sort of an
expert. Of course, by any kind of objective criteria I was a
fairly bad Dungeon Master. But it still contrasted to life at
school, where I felt more like a spectator than a participant.

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I followed instructions and drifted along in the background,

piping up rarely and certainly never taking charge. None of
this would change for a couple years, not until I met Rick
Denton. But for now, the games in the basement were the
closest I got—we progressed very little during the day, but
after school, Mancatcher’s exploits roared onward. Nothing
stood in the way for long.
“Do you think Mancatcher would be able to force a
wizard to drain a lake and then drop the water on the King?”
Jim asked, rubbing the die in his hand, thinking intently.
Con�dent in my command of the game, I gave a little
shrug.
“Depends on what you roll,” I said.

Jed was the nerdiest kid I knew. He had the look down pat,
but inadvertently—thick black glasses and a bowl cut, and he
usually talked about things like laser beams and supernovas.
He was also very smart, and was the only other person I was
still playing D&D with. He took it seriously, and insisted on
having our games reside closer to reality; when I told him
that Jim had beaten up a wizard so badly the wizard created
a personal airplane for him to make the beatings stop, Jed
shook his head. “That… that’s just ridiculous.” I tried to
explain that it was created by mixing herbs—previously we
had agreed this was much more plausible in a real world
sense than “casting a spell”—but he correctly concluded that
we were just being goofy.

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Jed’s character existed in the same “realm” as

Mancatcher’s, but they never crossed paths—the only
similarity between their two games arose from my
lazy refusal to draw a separate world map for Jed. But
Mancatcher’s imperialism eventually spilled over into Jed’s
campaign. As we set up for a game, he sipped on a Coke
and looked at the updated world map. “Jim’s guy controls
a country now?!” he exclaimed, pointing at the recently
penciled-in “MancatcherLand.”
“Yeah,” I shrugged. “He used that airplane the wizard
made for him to drop boulders on the King’s castle, and it
destroyed it. Then he took over as the ruler.”
“He destroyed a castle with a boulder?”
“Well, he rolled a 20.”
Jed’s irritation with Jim’s playing style (and my role in
permitting it) led him to hire a band of orcs to burn down
one of Mancatcher’s glue factories. It was probably the most
impressive thing Jed’s character had pulled off—usually he
just wandered villages and killed Giant Spiders and stuff.
When Jim showed up the following weekend to continue his
campaign, I informed him of this act of terrorism.
He paused for a beat. “So? Nate, I have like thirty of
those.” He gestured at all the “G’s” marked on the map. He
was right; Jed had craftily snuck around the factory, bribed a
guard, and expertly cast a Flaming Sphere spell in the main
boiler room to set the whole place ablaze—but the glue
empire would barely feel a blip. I stared at the map. “Yeah,
well… I guess you’ll have to build a new one.”

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“Okay, I send my slaves from this town and make them

build it,” he said with a shrug, �inging a die onto the table
and nodding contently at the 16 that looked back up at us. I
added another “G” to the map.

My Dungeons and Dragons days ended soon after that. The

handful of neighborhood kids who had tried it out had lost
interest long before, Jed and I hung out less and less until
he was just another face in the halls at school, and Jim’s
character had gotten so powerful the games were pointless.
When he blew up a rival Australia-like country by the roll of
a die, I knew we were running on fumes.
The games were fun at the time, and I’d like to say that
they honed our creative and improvisational skills, but that’s
probably pushing it. I think there was just a small window of
time in which pretending to be wizards and killing orcs and
running the brutal glue trade was the best way to spend our
free time, and we made the most of it. And there’s nothing
wrong with that. If I had been ten years old in 1890 rather
than 1990 I probably would have been blowing out a lung
in a coal mine rather than arguing about the strength of an
Aquatic Elf ’s arm in a Mountain Dew-fueled rage. So in that
sense, in retrospect it was a pretty awesome time. Maybe I
should have stuck with it.

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