Memories of Dungeons & Dragons: first edition

I always loved this illustration. There's so many cool details...

The first time I ever heard of Dungeons & Dragons I was in the hospital. I was ten. A friend of mine, Peter, came by to visit, and brought some of the game manuals to show me. He was maybe a year or two older than I was, and more on the cutting edge of culture than I.

He tried to explain the whole concept of Role Playing Games (RPGs) and put forward a sample scenario: You are in a dungeon and open a door, which unleashes a crossbow bolt trap. A dice is then rolled to determine if it hit you. 

But... what if I ducked? What if I was to the left of the trap, or to the right? What if I tripped, or dodged, or it hit my shield? How could all that complexity be reduced to a single dice throw? It didn’t make sense!

Of course, I was overthinking it. I’m not sure why. I'd played things like Risk. Somehow, the whole idea of a role playing game was kind of mind blowing to my morphine addled brain.

The bestest calendar evah

I’d already read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (you may have heard of it) in quick succession (my grandfather even had the Hidlebrandts LOTR calendar, which was pure awesomeness), so I was primed for fantasy. 

The AD&D books (Advanced Dungeons & Dragons) were dense, full of charts and tables and obscurantist statistics, like a physics text for fantasy. They were far denser than anything I was getting in school, and more akin to the vast appendices at the back of a Tolkien book. (As I understand it, AD&D exists mostly because one creator of the game tried to screw another creator of the game out of rights and royalties they’d have gotten for basic D&D material. Sad, if true. AD&D no longer exists. it's all just D&D now.)

It's that guy from Stranger Things!

It was all the more magical because I didn't understand it. The books promised a magical escape from reality into another world, of noble quests and indescribable danger, if I just read all the 300 page long manuals.

Peter kindly left some of the manuals behind for me to look at, and I poured over them... without really understanding it all. I remember being struck by the complexity, and didn’t know where to start. 

Fortunately, there were plenty of illustrations. The quality varied a bit, but even the more 'amateurish' pictures had idiosyncratic charm. Some even had more character than the polished ones. All were evocative and intriguing, pure brain candy for the imaginative mind of a child. 

I was very concerned when I looked at the Monster Manual that there were good creatures in this fantasy universe, as well as evil ones. I need to know some magical beings stood up for good. There were plenty of evil monsters, such as beholders (floating eyeballs with eyestalks atop), chromatic dragons, demons, devils (apparently they are different), trolls, ooze, wights, vampires, and worse. Fortunately, Ki-rin and metallic dragons were powerful beings on the side of good. 

He's cute, yes... but he's evil.

Characters were not alone in the fight against evil. 

Unless, that is, you decided to BE evil, of course, which was an option.

Being virtually bad can be a lot of wicked fun, too.

Actually playing AD&D rarely lived up to my initial wondrous impression of it. Much of the time, it was little more than open the door, kill the monster, and take their stuff. To be fair, we were kids, and it can take a lot of work to create a believable fantasy environment. 

Ooo... let's take their stuff!

Endless dungeons filled with powerful predators doesn’t make a lot of sense. What do they eat? Most cave creatures live off of detritus that falls down from the surface. What do they breathe? Heck, ancient workers decorating Christian crypts beneath Rome had to take frequent breaks because their candles and torches were consuming all the oxygen. There are all kinds of logistical issues to consider, and when I did, it didn't always make for a more interesting gameplay experience. 

It was a fantasy game, not a realistic simulation. You need just enough reality to suspend disbelief, and not much more. 

Wrap around of the Player Handbook; illo by D.A. Trampier

There was one Dungeon Master, Ross, that I only played with once or twice, who was superb. He took the game beyond Advanced Dice & Statistics, and fired imagination with atmospheric description and a sense of magic. I’m sure my overactive imagination did a lot of heavy lifting, too, but he was far ahead of other DMs in the small pond in which I swam. 

The only real thing I remember from that is a corner archway of an underground temple, from which hung seaweed like drapery. And there was something behind it, waiting… For some reason, that memory has stuck with me. I can't remember what was there, or if that was where the session ended.

My imagination is still active, but it’s nowhere near as vivid and intense as when I was 10.

That was a real magical place. 

It's quirky but I love it.

Back to Dungeons & Dragons

Classic

I haven't played Dungeons & Dragons in decades, but after reading my new book, a friend recommended I give being a Dungeon Master a go. Why? Dragon Garage follows a group of RPG players who open up a portal into their fantasy game world. Fun, drinking, and adventure ensue. 

Seemed like a good fit.

The main focus for Dragon Garage, for me, was the contrast between the modern and the medieval. Thanks at least in part to fairy tales, the Middle Ages is viewed through an idealized lens. We tend to think of princesses and knights, rather than dysentery, famine and bed bugs. 

I wanted to mix up the focus and smash them all together: ideal and real, medieval and modern, the fantastical and the grounded. 

A generic fantasy role playing game was a device through which I could explore that. 

I remember (fondly) playing Dungeons & Dragons in public school, but wasn't particularly good at it (to be fair, I don't think very many of us were... there was much open the door, kill the monster, take their stuff). The rules are dense and extensive, so taking it up again could be a time consuming challenge which I might not be up to.

So I deferred and, at first, declined.

Ultimately, it was The Expanse that changed my mind: Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck created the book series based on role playing game sessions. It's a brilliant idea: run your plot through interactive sessions, and test the logic. A great way to spot holes in a fantasy or sci-fi series: test it! 

Soon as I mentioned this to a few other friends, they put me on to Critical Role, which features a phenomenally talented gang of voice actors running through Dungeons and Dragons adventures. There's an entire media empire around it now, including a TV show and comic books. 

The players and set up of Critical Role. Impressive, most impressive...

So I'm late to the party, but undeterred. Running a D&D (or other RPG) game could help work out scenarios for future books, as well as generate 'happy accident' material that was truly authentic. 

With that in mind, I set about building out the world of Dragon Garage for player characters. At first I thought I'd build everything, the whole world; very quickly I discovered this is a crap ton of work, far more than the amount of world building you'd need for a novel.

A Megadungeon was a necessity, because when I was a kid, it was all about the Megadungeon. Every DM had their own. Gary Gygax had the platonic ideal in Castle Greyhawk (not that I ever saw it), and so I resolved to have my own: Castle Druidun!

Seemed a good idea at the time. 

Of course, a megadungeon is a stupid amount of work. No one sane is going to try and do this right off the bat. Fortunately, I laugh at sanity: I've tackled full on prose novels, even screenplays! In fact, making a megadungeon is rather to writing a novel, just more compartmentalized and interactive, like an enhanced version of Choose Your Own Adventure. 

Childhood library classics!

Over the years, I've tried my hand at comic books, graphic novels, prose novels, short stories, comedy skits, joke strips, and improv, so why not this?

Intially, I filled the dungeon with my own creations, but before long I turned to decades worth of fantasy trope D&D material to flesh it out. It's just too big a job for one person, especially when you have hundreds of dungeon rooms to fill, and there's amazingly creative material to pull from. I can edit out stuff later, should this path prove fruitful and I have the opportunity to do a sequel to Dragon Garage. 

Fingers crossed; there's so much more to explore and play with in the world of Arthea.

I thought I'd put up the material here, for fun, as the experiment progresses. We'll see what happens, and how far I get with it.

One big change from the book: I had the players roll up characters native to the fantasy world, rather than playing their real selves. It'd be too complicated for me to pull off initially, not until I'm more seasoned at this. 

An awesome megadungeon example I found by Tim Hartin

A megadungeon is a nice, 'simple' realm for adventuring, with built in guard rails. Or training wheels, as the case may be. There are rooms and tunnels and all the choices reside within that framework. It's much harder to mess up than, say, an open world space opera mixed with horror (which is what I originally wanted to do). 

There's a reason why shooter video games occur within finite structures.

What is an imaginary world? Where is it? Same place as Santa Claus, the United States, and Narnia: in our minds. Think about it. Nations only exist through agreement in, and enforcement of, the collective imagination.

Welcome to the World of Arthea...!