Here Be Nerdiness

I started playing Dungeons & Dragons at the end of 1983. I’d heard a few kids talking about it at school, and begged my parents to buy it for me for the upcoming Christmas. I spent hours reading those books, immersing myself in characters, rules and ideas.

I’d always loved movies featuring knights, Robin Hood, anything with swords and magic. I’d seen Conan the Barbarian at the drive-in the year before, and one of my all-time favourite movies was Hawk the Slayer (1980). We’d read The Hobbit in school, and from memory fantastic looking ads for the movie Hearts and Armour were being shown on TV.

Full-Blown Fantasy…

I was, at the grand old age of 13, a full-blown fantasy nerd and this new game, Dungeons & Dragons, was everything I could have ever imagined – in the most literal way…

After spending the holidays playing “D&D” with my brother, when school started again, I managed to form a small circle of friends who were also curious about the game, and began to play in earnest. It was all there; the adventure, the dice rolling, characters being slaughtered en mass, and of course all the drama, in-fighting and plotting that went along with it; each of us taking a turn at being “Dungeon Master” did our best to waste the player-characters with our “Killer Dungeons” and to have our vengeance on whichever “DM” had done us in previously.

At the time Dungeons & Dragons was quite notorious and controversial. The movie Mazes and Monsters, starring Tom Hanks, was made in 1981. This was based on the story of James Dallas Egbert III, whose tragic suicide was linked to D&D. I remember the rumours at the time, that the game was evil, Satanic and people went mad playing it. I remember thinking it was all very strange and sadly amusing.

Then there was BADD, or “Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons”, an American group that also claimed the game had ties with occultism and suicide… and that was only the beginning; there was much more to follow in years to come.

Inspired…

Of course, I never saw any of that in those days of rolling dice and “looting Goblin caves.” I only ever had positive experiences with the game. A quiet, loner kid now interacted with new friends, and it helped me with maths too. Rolling dice, reading tables, calculating outcomes… not to mention the massive amounts of research and reading and what that did for my English skills, my love of history and mythology, and my imagination in general.

I think that the first step taken with that old Red Box and the two slim booklets inside it, and the roads it led me down, not only had a lot to do with who I am today, but also inspired my dream to write. I think most gamers have that dream. We roam worlds of imagination, especially back then, when we had no 3D graphics and computer games to paint the picture for us. We create characters, invent stories, and build worlds to adventure in.

It can only be a matter of time before the desire to write our own stories, comes to life… we read JRR Tolkien and Michael Moorcock, Jack Vance and Robert E Howard… and want to try to make our own worlds and heroes live and breathe… like those fantastic authors did.

It was the love of this game that truly inspired my interest in so many subjects: history, geography, cartography, mythology, theology, cultures, languages, cryptozoology and monsters, palaeontology, ancient worlds, aliens, the list goes on…

I still remember that hot, summer February day of 19 84, my first day of year 9, in my first ever computer class – monochrome screens, a sort of rusty amber on black, Apple machines that made absolutely no sense to me at all, but sure were fun for playing Choplifter. I was sitting next to new kid, and he was drawing a series of lines and squares on graph paper…. I knew what it was, but for all my excitement, I had to “play it cool,” as they say.

I asked “What are you doing?”

“Drawing a dungeon.” Head bent, pen following the ruler line down the squared off pattern.

“You play too?”

“Yeah, this is the lair of ‘Rurik, the Red Dragon. You wanna play at lunch? You probably won’t survive.” And with that, to partially borrow from Mr Tolkien, the road went ever on…