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.