Gone.
Gary Gygax failed his saving throw against mortality today.
Someone had to say it, right? I’m sure I’m not the first.
I didn’t know Gary Gygax, but from 4th grade on through high school the sun rose and set by his megalithic creation, Dungeons & Dragons. If I had to point to two childhood incidents that made me into the person I am today: the first would be getting Batman #278 (“THE WRINGER has struck again! Who will be his NEXT victim?) for my 7th birthday and the second would be buying the Basic Edition of Dungeons and Dragons (the blue one).** I have no recollection of how this happened – why I picked it out, how much it cost, or, indeed, how I got the money for it – but I do remember reading the rulebook and trying to convince my best friend at that time, Joey San Pietro, how much fun it would be to play if we could only decipher the text. I was in 4th grade, for crying out loud; what did I know about fantasy role-playing? I mean the cerebral, pen-and-paper kind, not that kind that had me running around the backyard with a yellow rope at my waist, chasing down bad guys and forcing them to tell the truth. My imagination didn’t need any encouragement, but my reading did.
At the time, I had a vague understanding that some people thought that D&D was a product of the Devil, but no one ever tried to “save” me. At worst, classmates like Mike Vickey would say things like, “McGrath’s reading his Dungeon Dice book again. Dungeon Dice! Dungeon Dice!” I tried once to explain it wasn’t the same game, but, you know, fourth-graders aren’t known for their amazing powers of discrimination. Nevertheless, my reputation as a nerd was pretty much cemented by then.
I wish I still had that book, but it disappeared years ago, which is strange, because knowing my compulsion to collect things and keep them together, I can’t believe I would have lost track of it. Although, my brother Scott and I still have most of our D&D stuff still – all First Edition, not that Third Edition crap that the kids these days have to put up with – there are some missing items, most importantly our Permanent Character Folder & Adventure Records. Scott’s was much more an archive of how we bent and twisted the rules than mine. I DM’ed most of the games while those who adventured under me advanced to ridiculous levels of ability. I think when we finally called it a day on our dungeon-trolling, Scott was a 115th level paladin with infinite hit points. I mean, come on! But every time I go home, we pull out the suitcase and peruse the goods. Part of me hopes that one day we’ll find those lost treasures, even as I add to the collection still. A package should arrive at my brother’s house tomorrow containing, among other things, Grimtooth’s Traps Too, a first-edition Judge’s Guild Dark Tower, Role Aids’ Apocalypse and To Hell and Back, and The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth (one of the two dungeons Scott ever DM’ed).
I hope he doesn’t read this before the package arrives. I’d hate to spoil the surprise.
Oh! And something else that disappeared a while back that I’d like to re-get: the Dungeon board game, 1981 edition. I bought that on our 12th birthday. Mom and Dad left us money for lunch (we had Cassano’s pizza) and a “getcherself sumpthin’ pretty” gift. We biked to the mall, and I made a beeline for Kay-Bee Toy n’ Hobby to get Dungeon.
By the time we were allowed to bike to the mall on our own, rounds of Dungeons and Dragons had become an every day occurrence. It started when Scott’s friend, Jay Jackson, mention at lunch one day that he played D&D with some of the kids in his neighborhood. My ears pricked up. This must have been 6th or 7th grade, and I still didn’t know how to really play D&D, nor did I have anyone to play with. Jay was much more Scott’s friend than mine, but I begged them to let me come with them after school for a tutorial. It was then I met Alex Trevana. He was the neighborhood DM and hosted a round of The Ghost Tower of Inverness that afternoon. Surprisingly, another classmate came over to play that afternoon: Marc Bouchard. Poor Marc! Red hair, fair skin, freckles, too-big front teeth that propped his mouth open to strafe spittle when he got excited, which was always because the kid was seriously ADHD. He should have just kicked himself in the ass every day to save everyone else’s time. During a later campaign (Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl), an ice cave collapsed on the party and, by design, Marc got crushed when those who could “ran out of time” to teleport him out. He tried to drink a healing potion, but another player – Dave? Justin? I forget who – had previously switched it with snake venom. Marc howled when his character died, threw the worst tantrum I’ve ever seen and ran for home crying for his mom.
I wish I could say that was uncommon, but we were pre-adolescent boys and merciless. Part of me wants to find him and apologize because we really were that cruel.
After that, there was an explosion of people who were playing D&D in Jay’s neighborhood, but in ours, too – Greg and Rich Cropp, Shelley McKeele, Russell McCoy (to whom is credited the founding of “The Istari II of the New World” and the need for intellectual righteousness) and Nate Garhart. Scott, Nate and I kept a jar of change and assorted dollars in common in case we came across a module or book we couldn’t live without. I think ultimately we all bought candy with it. But Scott and I found something we thought Nate couldn’t live without for his birthday gift one year (his birthday was just a few days before ours): Deities & Demigods, the one with the Cthulhu and Melniboné mythos, which was quite a find back then. Hell, it’s still quite a find! For our birthday that year, Russell, and God love him for doing this because he really didn’t get the whole RPG thing, got us the ultimate player-killer dungeon module: The Tomb of Horrors. It was such an insightful gift and one that brought me, as DM, several mean-spirited laughs as I kept re-starting the adventure “just to give everyone a second (third, fourth, fifth) to get past the first room.” It didn’t help that I kept changing the traps around just so no one thought I was giving them a pass. Of course, the big news at the time was the Dungeons & Dragons Saturday morning cartoon! We would usually watch it the morning after a sleepover at someone’s house, before or after The Smurfs I forget which. Sleepovers happened almost every weekend and guess what we did? Yeah, we played D&D. I remember one time not doing that: we slept over Jay’s house and he suggested we play strip poker. I didn’t get it. Why were we deviating from the plan? Years later, Jay came out and then I got it!
I mean, “I understood”. I didn’t “get it” like that. Well, not until a few years later.
Even before the cartoon, D&D had been on our televisions in the form of home video game systems! Though less-known than the Atari 2600 (or 5200, for that matter), our Odyssey² provided hours of entertainment that, if I totaled them, would probably equal the amount of time I spent I high school (to say nothing of the stand-up arcades and how many quarters we invested in “developing out hand-eye coordination”). Of course, when sleepovers happened (though we really didn’t need an occasion nor an excuse to play a video game) we fired up the home console and played Quest for the Rings a 4-byte Master Strategy Series game that kept us going ’til sunrise more than once. Yeah, the Atari had Adventure, but that didn’t have a board game and tokens included. Nor did it cost… I want to say $100. Scott and I split on it with our Christmas money. I find it hard to believe we pitched in $50 each ($25 seems more believable, but that doesn’t ring true to me (ha! pun!)), though the resigned sigh we got from Mom when she took us to Kaufmann’s department store to “blow our Christmas money” leads me to believe it really was that expensive. And by “expensive”, I mean “better than anyone else on the block’s game”.
The last module I ever really played with my whole heart was Lich Lords. Scott DM’ed for us. It happened after we did “The Music Man” one summer and, perhaps rather foolishly, our Mom let us host a cast party/D&D campaign at the apartment. While it was a great time (I’ll never forget Liz Vogel incessantly claiming, “The pig is evil. Kill the pig!”), the lack of supervision almost got us kicked out of the complex. That’s neither here nor there, but it was part-and-parcel with the end of an era. Yeah, I played again once or twice in college, but by then I had discovered sex, so RPGing fell to the wayside.
In my adult life, I’ve had a few brief, but happy, affairs with D&D look-alike video games: Diablo and Diablo II (and where is Diablo III????), Baldur’s Gate, and Sacred, and I’ve actually enjoyed playing them. “Enjoyed” is probably a bit of understatement; it should say “played to the exclusion of all else” (except “Sacred”; I never got into it). Some board games I’ve played have an RPG element to them: Arkham Horror, Fury of Dracula and Munchkin, to name a few. I even got an original, complete (and working) Milton Bradley Dark Tower on eBay a few years ago (may it live forever!), though I didn’t grow up having one. But I never went back to the original pen-and-paper RPG of my formative years. I didn’t outgrow it per se, but I think Dungeons and Dragons has been safely enshrined in my childhood where it belongs, unspoiled.
So, thanks, Gary. I’d be someone else had you been someone else.
** If I were honest with myself I’d say there were two more – having Sister Leonarda for a teacher and seeing my Dad break knock a candle off the TV – but those are beyond the scope of this entry.
