Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and The People Who

by Ewalt, David M.

  Non-nerds may find this attention to detail confounding. Calculating the correct geometries for a piece of set decoration is unlikely to affect the player’s enjoyment of the game, so why bother?

  I got the pendulum right for one of the same reasons I play D&D in the first place. The prime mover in a nerd brain is the need to understand how things are put together. My mood-regulating neurotransmitters do the tango when I find a way to impose order on chaos. Biochemically, it’s no different than the pleasure a jock gets sinking a free throw.

  Every rule, every chart, every geeky statistic in a game book or module feeds into this impulse. All those details allow us to take apart existence, look at the individual parts, figure out how they work, and put them back together. Some people relieve stress by getting drunk or high and losing control; nerds find comfort by taking control and applying structure. Logic is like a warm blanket.

  This is also the reason why I started designing a world by making maps, instead of addressing the story. Most folks would come up with a plot before they worried about where the bad guy eats his dinner. But I find the structure of hallways and rooms inspiring, as well as reassuring. The parts speak to the function of the whole: By creating Marv’s physical world, I illuminate his character and, in turn, how he will move the story. It had already told me one important detail. Even in madness, Marv’s the kind of guy who remembers to multiply the length of a pendulum’s cable by the tangent of its maximum angle of swing before he takes an axe to his floor. His intellect will be dangerous.

  I pushed ahead with the campaign design in this manner—like painting a landscape starting with the leaves, intending to fill in the trees and the sky later. The sixth floor of Marv’s tower was a library. I jotted down a few names of books, in case any of the players looked closely—Principia Mathemagica, The Voyage of the Bullywug, Goblins in the Mist—and made a note to come up with more later. The seventh floor became an alchemical laboratory, then the eighth a blacksmith’s forge—no, a machine shop. Why not make Marv an inventor? In addition to being a wizard, he’s an accomplished engineer, combining steam-powered mechanics with magical items. Intruders in his tower will face clockwork guardians and traps far more complex than pits full of spikes. I can also populate the tower with lots of strange inventions . . . how about a sphere of annihilation (like the one Graeme jumped into in the Tomb of Horrors) inside a wooden box with a hole in it? D&D commode!

  On the ninth and top floor, I sketched a giant telescope. It fit in with the pendulum, and I liked the image of a tower topped by an observatory dome. It also suggested something about Marv’s motivations. Maybe he was obsessed with astronomy because he was looking for something—a sign from the gods, or a distant source of power?

  Before I could answer, I needed to understand the world Marv lived in. Was this a traditional D&D campaign based in Greyhawk, or a unique homebrew setting, like Morgan’s postapocalyptic Earth? Set your game in Gygax’s world, and you can draw on decades of work by D&D’s most talented designers. Go homebrew and you’re on your own—but without limits and preconceptions.

  It was not a hard choice. Sitting on a couch in a hotel in Fort Wayne, Indiana, I realized that a year of playing and studying and thinking nonstop about D&D hadn’t gotten it out of my system, as intended—instead, it had intensified my desire to slip into fantasy, to make it and shape it. After a quarter of a century spent wandering other people’s landscapes, I wanted to explore my own.

  I flipped to a clean page in the notebook.

  Ardhi is an ancient continent. For countless millennia, nomadic tribes of elves and orcs lived in harmony with the land. Clans crossed swords and great chiefs snatched power, but all that rose soon fell and was forgotten. Ardhi’s rich mountains and fertile valleys were enough for all her children to share. It was an epoch of peace.

  Then came the age of empires. The two great races, human and dwarf, overran their homelands and spilled onto Ardhi’s shores. They saw her riches and waged war to consume them, trading blood and land in a hundred years of war.

  When the great war ended, the empires drew maps and divided Ardhi between them. War machines gave way to mechanized industry; mercenaries turned merchants.

  In the region called Tanz, near the foothills of Ardhi’s highest peak, the human empire built an outpost, Simon’s Town, a home for the mining guilds. It prospered and grew. Dwarven laborers lived alongside human bureaucrats, elven servants, and fortune seekers from lands beyond even imperial reach—halflings, tieflings, and gnomes. A royal charter even established a wizard’s college and attracted students from around the known world.

  In the fifty years following the great war, Ardhi saw more change than in the ten thousand years that preceded it. But all that would pale compared to what followed—the chaos caused by just two men.

  The campaigns I admire the most take place in unique worlds. Greyhawk’s great, but it’s cool to see a DM put together his own universe. I think they’re more invested in the material and passionate about its development, so the game is more interesting. This is not to say that a detailed world requires a detailed plot: Good games often allow the players to start exploring, go anywhere and do anything. I find that openness hugely appealing, and I’m excited that the new edition of D&D seems to encourage those sprawling, epic campaigns.

  But I’m intimidated by a completely open world—it seems awfully hard to DM. For my freshman excursion, I decided to create antagonists, rising conflict, and all the plot elements that keep a party within certain bounds. Making an interesting story has its own difficulties, but they’re more familiar to me than total improvisation.

  Marv and Harry were raised in Agon, the heart of the human imperium.

  They were boys when they met, at one of the royal schools of magic. Singled out for their gifts and torn from their families, they found like souls in each other. Both possessed great arcane power, were fascinated by science, were entranced by the arts of blacksmithing and engineering—and were full of disdain for the academic life of an imperial mage.

  When the two young wizards came of age, they took their required residencies together, in the most distant place imaginable: the first college on the dark continent of Ardhi, in a place on the edge of civilization.

  Marv and Harry came to Tanz with noble intentions. It’s true that they hoped to escape imperial control, study forbidden disciplines, and learn the magic of Ardhi’s natives. But their pursuit was for the sake of knowledge, not power, and they bore no ill will toward others.

  While most wizards rarely left the college, Marv and Harry explored the wilderness. They made friends among a small tribe of elves in the west, in a village called Forest Edge, and won their trust with supplies from the college’s stores. The grateful elves shared their magic and their secrets—including the location of their holiest site, the Fracture, a cave in the heart of the ancient Kigeni crater.

  Kigeni was wild then, a deep valley that took a day to cross, dense with jungle and home to dangerous animals. The elves of Forest Edge believed the crater was formed when a dying god fell from the sky and that the Fracture led to the deity’s final resting place.

  Marv and Harry didn’t believe the legend, but they knew the place was special. It radiated strange energy and was full of rare ores. Creatures like they’d never seen before haunted its depths. Exploration was hazardous, but the lure of discovery was too great to resist: The two mages swore to learn the Fracture’s secrets. They would combine their imperial science with local magic, use all their knowledge and every resource available, and penetrate deep into the earth.

  Marv remained in the crater and, working with the people of Forest Edge, constructed a tower—a place to study and protect the site. Harry returned to the college and applied his wiles to gain influence. As he climbed through its ranks, he secretly diverted resources to the project.

  Together, they dug deep. But they weren’t ready for what they would find.

  Marv and Harry will provide enough struc
ture to keep my game moving—each time we sit down at the table, I’ll have a good idea what’s going to happen, so I can plan ahead and prepare myself. It will require more prep work but make the job of running a game much easier.

  Besides, I think I’ve come up with a plot that will allow greater freedom and increased improvisation as the game goes on. What Marv and Harry discovered deep inside the Fracture is that the Kigeni crater was created by something falling out of the sky—not a god, but a spacecraft. Ardhi doesn’t exist in an alternate fictional reality; it’s a planet in our universe, and the game takes place thousands of years from now, in what would be our future. A long time from now in a galaxy far, far away.

  After the people of Earth first stepped on their moon, they hesitated. Humans didn’t return to colonize Luna until sixty years later. But from there, they moved quickly. By the dawn of the twenty-second century, Homo sapiens lived on Mars, Venus, and the moons of Titan and Europa . . . and began setting their sights on the stars.

  In the year 2134, the government of Earth launched a fleet of “arks,” spacecraft designed to make the long journey to worlds around faraway stars and prepare them for human colonization. Each unmanned ark was piloted by an artificial intelligence and equipped with a terraforming system. When it arrived at a new planet, the AI would land the ship and release billions of microscopic robots into the alien environment; each nanobot would start disassembling matter into its component atoms and reassembling it into something else. Over time, the alien atmosphere would turn to breathable air and its land to water and soil. When the job was done, the AI would send a message back to humankind: Your new home is ready.

  Of course, something went wrong. The arks were only supposed to transform barren planets—if they found evidence of life, they were programmed to send the news back to Earth and shut down. But for all their scientific advances, humans had no understanding of magic. When an ark entered Ardhi’s atmosphere, the planet’s strange magical energies disrupted its systems, and the spacecraft crashed.

  The crash created the Kigeni crater, and the ark embedded itself far below the surface—damaged, but not completely destroyed. Terraforming nanobots leaked out into the caves and tried to begin work, but magical energy continued to disrupt their computer brains. They behaved erratically, and shut down entirely if they moved too far from the ship.

  For thousands of years, the nanobots wrote and rewrote the matter around them. They created a huge network of caverns, a subterranean world full of breathable air and drinkable water, but also full of hazards; when the crippled nanobots encountered life, they rewrote that too, giving birth to strange half-alien monsters.

  When Marv and his elven laborers dug into the Fracture, they disturbed this bizarre ecosystem. For the first time, the nanobots had direct exposure to surface life. They tore into it, warping its DNA in unpredictable ways. Marv lost most of his crew—and much of his sanity—before he found a way to protect himself with magic.

  Marv came to understand he had discovered a technology of nearly immeasurable power. But he knew it was dangerous to push farther into the caves, to find the ark itself. So he sent a message to his partner Harry—now dean of the College of Magic—to find some adventurers to do the job for them.

  I’ll introduce Alex, Morgan, R. C., and Phil to Ardhi with simple, classic D&D adventures. The mage college will hire them to clear a tribe of kobolds out of the forest or recover stolen supplies from a gang of bandits. They won’t realize that they’re being auditioned for a bigger job . . . and when the dean of the college asks them to investigate a crazed wizard in the wilderness, they won’t know he’s part of a secret plan to send them into the Fracture.

  It’s a long-term plot, designed around a new game system, with potential for an epic campaign. The players will start out tentatively, with familiar goals, so they can learn their way around the rules. As they level-up their characters and become more comfortable, they’ll find out about Marv and the Fracture. And as exploring the caves becomes the main focus of the game, they’ll grow in power as the threats become greater—until they reach the ark itself.

  There’s one more twist. Humanity launched its ark fleet in the year 2134—the year of scientist Carl Sagan’s two hundredth birthday. He’s one of my heroes, so I decided the ark should carry something like the “golden records” Sagan helped install on the Voyager probes NASA sent into space in 1977. Included as a symbolic gesture, the records were a statement of who we were and how we lived: They bore digitized photographs of Earth, audio recordings of greetings in fifty-five human languages, and music including Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.” Each ark carries a small computer memory bank, a complete archive of all human media. Nonfiction and fiction, art and camp . . . every bit of music, literature, and film preserved in digital form. So when the terraforming nanobots went rogue, they found the data bank and processed its information. It became part of their collective memory and will influence the world they build around them—sometimes subtly, sometimes not.

  When the adventurers penetrate deep into the caves, they might find strange cities carved out of the bedrock or weird runes in unknown Earth languages. Or since the nanobots can also take apart and rebuild living matter, they might twist it in interesting ways. Maybe the party will encounter monsters from human legend—the Sphinx, Grendel’s mother, or, for that matter, Optimus Prime. They could even find themselves thrust into the plot of a novel, its characters played by genetically engineered mutants or robot automatons. Imagine our heroes spending one week fighting cave trolls and the next tackling the mystery of the Maltese Falcon.

  I’m cheating, of course. Including a crew of culture-savvy robots in my game lets me swap genres at a whim to keep things interesting.2 It’d be harder to make a good game that sticks religiously to the fantasy genre. But I like the idea of introducing these elements slowly, and only when the players start to tire of cave after cave. It will allow me to keep things interesting and to mix together different kinds of role-playing.

  * * *

  I filled nearly thirty pages of my graph-paper notebook that night in Fort Wayne. Maps gave birth to characters, which suggested plots and eventually worlds. By two or three in the morning, wired on caffeine, sticky with vending machine junk food, and damp with nerd sweat, I had outlined an entire campaign.

  But it wasn’t ready to play just yet. Over the last year, I had leveled myself to the prestige class of Expert Player, but I was still a Dungeon newbie, not a Master. Before I could walk that path, I needed to consult with my elders. I had to go to the place where the game was born and show my respect.

  I had to go to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.

  * * *

  1. Multiplying the height of the pendulum by the tangent of the angle of maximum swing, of course.

  2. It’s also admittedly similar to a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode called “The Royale,” where the crew of the Enterprise discovers a cheesy Earth casino in outer space, faithfully reconstructed by aliens based on a novel they found in a wrecked human spacecraft.

  16

  PILGRIMAGE

  When I studied anthropology in college, I developed a minor obsession with funerary customs, the rituals that allow the living to celebrate and say good-bye to the dead. They’re a constant in human society, present in every culture dating back to the birth of Homo sapiens, something shared by every person who has ever lived.

  Yet, despite their ubiquity, death rites vary wildly between cultures. Hindus practice cremation; Islam forbids it. Jews sit shiva; Irish Catholics pass the whiskey at wakes. Some Tibetan Buddhists practice jhator, or sky burial, where a body is left on a mountaintop to be consumed by birds. Others save the meat for themselves—until the 1950s, the Fore people of Papua New Guinea consumed the brains of their beloved deceased.

  When Gary Gygax died in 2008, gamers developed their own ritual. In the hours after Gygax’s funeral service, his friends and family headed over to the American
Legion Hall on Henry Street in Lake Geneva for an impromptu gaming session. Four decades’ worth of D&D designers and players crowded around tables to roll dice and tell stories. Afterward, a few referred to the event as “Gary Con.”

  A year later, Gary’s kids made the name official. Gary Con I (the postfuneral session is now known as “Gary Con 0”) returned to the American Legion Hall as a free two-day “mini-con,” a living memorial to Gygax’s legacy. About a hundred friends, family, and fans attended, some traveling there from around the world.

  The convention has kept growing. Gary Con IV was held in late March 2012, at the Lodge at Geneva Ridge, a hotel resort in Lake Geneva. It’s a paid event now, to support its size: five hundred fifty attendees playing more than two hundred organized games over four days, from D&D to Star Frontiers to Shadowrun to Call of Cthulhu.

  Obviously, I had to go. I was so excited about the chance to play D&D in Lake Geneva, I reserved a hotel room six months ahead of time—but as the date drew near, Gary Con came to mean more to me than just fun and games. My headlong leap into the deep end of D&D gave the trip an almost religious significance: I started to think of it as my version of the hajj, the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca. An expression of devotion; a chance to seek wisdom; a time to show unity with my brethren.

  The bard had walked for many moons and across many kingdoms. His pack was heavy on his back, and his feet ached, but he persisted. There wasn’t much farther to go.

  As he walked, the bard thought of what he’d left behind. He’d been raised in a village outside a great city. His parents loved him and worked hard so that he would want for nothing. When he came of age, he studied at an academy and apprenticed himself to kind masters. They worked hard so that he would want for nothing. He made a name for himself, found some success, and found a wife. She was loving and worked hard so that he would want for nothing.