Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and The People Who (24 page)

F
or a long time, Morgan had been talking up something called Otherworld, an “adventure weekend” held every fall at a 4-H camp in Connecticut. Attendees dress up like wizards and warriors and spend three days trying to complete a heroic quest; Morgan discovered the event through a friend and loved it so much he joined the staff.

I begged off. While I’d become less self-conscious about my geeky pursuits, I wasn’t ready to put on a costume and run around in the woods. I could justify spending one night a week pretending to be a cleric, since it’s not that different from attending a poker game or bowling night. But nobody dresses up like ten-pin legend Walter “Deadeye” Williams before they head down to Barney’s Bowlarama.

Besides, Otherworld sounded awfully like something I’d grown to fear and revile: a live-action role-playing game, or LARP.
The very first LARP may have been Dagorhir, a medieval battle first organized in Maryland in 1977 by a Tolkien fan named Bryan Weise. Flying high on fantasy after reading
The Lord of the Rings
and watching the Sean
Connery film
Robin and Marian,
he placed an ad on a local radio station soliciting anyone who wanted “to fight in Hobbit Wars with padded weapons.”

It sounds harmless enough, but to many geeks, LARPs represent the obsessive, delusional side of fantasy role-playing—the actual freaks who make the rest of us look like freaks. There’s an infamous video on YouTube of a LARPer running around in the woods, dressed up as a wizard, and shouting “Lightning bolt! Lightning bolt!” Each one of its 3.6 million views has added to the perception that D&D is weird and that I spend my Tuesdays letting grown men whack me with foam swords.

Since I’d never actually tried a LARP, this bias against LARPing was completely hypocritical and uninformed. And Morgan insisted Otherworld wasn’t a LARP, anyway—the emphasis, he said, is on storytelling, not rules. He argued that many of the attendees were “normal” people, role-playing naïfs approaching the experience like some sort of Outward Bound self-improvement weekend. And he made it sound like it could be fun.

I knew I was going to have to try a LARP—or something like it—if I was truly going to understand the world of fantasy role-playing. So with the convenient excuse of “reporting” wrapped around me like a Cloak of Resistance,
¹
I signed up.

And I started getting into it. A few weeks before Otherworld, a packet arrived in the mail containing the participant handbook and a letter printed in a faux-medieval font on parchment paper. It explained that I’d be playing a mage from Keer, “a medium-sized island in the Talian sea . . . the most wonderful and most terrible place in the whole of the kingdom.” The author, the Duchess of
Keer, explained that the island was under attack from a sea monster, a leviathan that was sinking ships and proving beyond her means to defeat. I was to travel to the mainland, to the town of World’s Edge, in order to locate the legendary “Knights of the Golden Circle” and beg them for help.

To do that, the handbook explained, I’d join five other participants in an adventuring party; we’d face a series of challenges that would be resolved through role-playing, puzzle solving, and yes, foam-sword combat. Aside from a short briefing on Friday night, we’d inhabit a fantasy world until Sunday evening; for just under forty-eight hours, I’d stop being ordinary Dave and become “a heroic version” of myself. In other words: I’d be running around in the woods, dressed up as a wizard, and shouting, “Lightning bolt! Lightning bolt!”

As self-loathing began to rise, I constructed my character. Otherworld participants aren’t assigned a PC; they rely on their own attributes and skills, not numbers on a character sheet. But they are expected to integrate into the story, and that requires a costume, a character name, and a background for your heroic self.

I decided my mage was a scholar of magic, detached and intellectual—a character choice clearly driven by psychological defense mechanisms. I named my wizard Dewey, after the library classification system. The fact that I thought this indicated winking ironic detachment—instead of providing proof I was already the world’s biggest nerd—shows my level of delusion.

For a costume, I’d wear brown cargo pants and a dark blue henley shirt, topped by a dramatic ankle-length black fleece cloak. At $200, the handmade item (ordered from a costume shop specializing in LARPs and historical reenactments) represented a level of financial commitment that might signify I was taking this seriously. So I told Kara and the few friends who knew where I was going that the purchase was a dodge, allowing me to wear normal clothes under
neath. (Secretly, I was pretty damn stoked: I challenge any even slightly geeky person to put on a real, high-quality cloak and not imagine they’re Gandalf, Dumbledore, and/or Luke Skywalker.) A hand-bound leather journal completed the ensemble—my “spell book,” doubling as reporter’s notebook.

The Otherworld Adventure was held that year on the first weekend in October at the Windham-Tolland 4-H Camp in Pomfret, Connecticut. It’s a lovely spot in the rolling hills about 150 miles northeast of Manhattan, a three-hour drive unless you’re dumb enough to leave your Fifth Avenue office right before rush hour, in which case it takes six hours. When I finally arrived, the only light in the camp came from a two-story lodge, built into a hill so its basement opened onto the parking lot.

As I entered, I realized I was the last one there. Seven groups of six people perched on wooden benches turned, laughed, and gave me an ovation. I smiled gamely, grabbed the nearest open seat, and tried to score a 20 on my Hide roll.

Kristi Hayes, one of Otherworld’s founders and its current writer and director, stood at the front of the room, giving final directions. Only rogues may disarm traps, she warned us. Stay hydrated. Don’t hit people on the head with your sword.

The demographic breakdown of the participants was my first surprise of the weekend. Nearly half of them were women, and while twenty- and thirty-year-olds did constitute the single largest group, there was a decent number of adults outside that age range.

The six adventurers from Keer were no exception. Three of them, young women from Austin, Texas, had come to Otherworld as part of a thirtieth-birthday celebration. Jen, the birthday girl, would play our bard, “Kinkaid.” She wore fashionable large-frame glasses, a stud in her lip, and sparkly tights under a knee-length green cloak. Summer (a rogue called “Pearl”) bore a resemblance to Ally Sheedy in
The Breakfast Club
; her costume included a blue and gold jacket that looked like it was designed by John Galliano for a pirate-themed fashion show, lost at the Milan airport, and rediscovered years later in a Texarkana thrift store. She got compliments on it all weekend long. Elaine (a ranger, “Merrick”) was tall and thin and slightly boyish—or at least that was the effect of the overalls and flannel she wore for a costume. Charron was also female, but older, probably north of sixty. She was local and, like me, had a friend on the Otherworld staff. She’d play “Willow,” our cleric. The final member of the party was comfortably familiar: Phil, from Boston, a tall thirtyish white guy, quiet and a little nerdy. He told me he’d be playing a paladin named “Sure, Swift Justice” . . . but I could call him “Justice.”

There was also a fifth member of our party. Chris, a six-year veteran of the Otherworld staff, would be our companion for the weekend. A combination of a camp counselor and a fixer, a companion is charged with keeping their team from breaking anything important—including bones, the rules, and the story line. Chris grew up on Long Island and seemed familiar to me, perhaps because he fell into a common Suffolk County archetype: an upper-middle-class joe, fond of boating or lacrosse, inevitably described as “a good guy.” He was slightly short, with an athletic build, a healthy tan, and hair cut close to hide where it was thinning and receding.

Chris’s first duty was to lead us outside, and to our combat training. Since the ultimate goal of an event like Otherworld is to immerse yourself in fantasy, these games eschew dice-rolling in favor of actual—though carefully mediated—physical confrontation. LARP battle rules can get quite complex; at Otherworld they keep things simple. Each character gets a set number of “free hits” (hit points, basically) and each time you get touched with a sword, you lose one. When you’re down to zero, a hit on a limb means you must stop using that limb; a hit to the torso knocks you unconscious. When that
happens, you fall down and quietly count to fifty; if no one comes to your aid before you finish, you’re dead.

As a mage, I had just one free hit, making me the weakest member of the party. I could get hit at most three times (anywhere, limb, anywhere) or as little as two times (anywhere, then torso) and be killed stone dead. Fortunately, as Ganubi has demonstrated, death is rarely permanent in fantasy role-playing games. At Otherworld, getting killed means you become a ghost, and you take a piece of cheesecloth out of your pocket and drape it over your head like a Scooby-Doo villain. You’re not allowed to speak or physically interact with people, and you must remain that way until resurrected by a cleric’s spell or magic potion.

A friendly staffer handed us each our “boffers”—three-foot-long swords built on a rigid core, but padded all over with thick black foam. They’re light and easy to wield, and when you’re hit with one, it hurts about as much as getting tagged in a pillow fight. My compatriots were all issued swords that were about three feet long; as the mage, I received a dirk, about a foot shorter but otherwise identical. I couldn’t help myself: “It’s not the size of the sword, but how you use it,” I told them.

We then squared off against six staffers for a brief bit of sparring. I’m no fencing expert—my knowledge doesn’t extend much beyond en garde and touché—but I think our performance would be classified as
manger la merde
. Sword fighting is complicated even when your health isn’t on the line, and when you’re in actual group combat, with enemies coming at you from all sides, it’s incredibly difficult.

Once we were trained and equipped, Chris wished us good luck and pointed toward a man standing near the corner of the lodge, where a path wound uphill and around the building to its as-yet-unseen main entrance. “The Storyteller will walk you up to the tav
ern,” he told us. “I’ll see you later.” He turned and walked back into the basement.

I glanced over to Jen, looking for someone to take charge, but her eyes reflected my own sudden panic. I was hoping that Chris would provide a buffer between me and
them,
that he’d be my ambassador to Otherworld and allow me to maintain emotional and intellectual distance. But now he was gone, and the members of my party seemed no more ready to commit to the fantasy than I was. I took a breath, successfully rolled an internal Will save, and walked forward.

Fortunately, the Storyteller didn’t cut an imposing figure. His round body was wrapped in a professorial tweed jacket, complete with leather patches; at his neck, a faded yellow scarf was tied in an ascot knot. His thick head of brown curly hair made me think of Bilbo Baggins.

The Storyteller held a leather-bound book in front of him, and as we approached, he looked down and began to read.

“Once upon a time, in the kingdom of Lyria, six travelers embarked on a dangerous expedition,” he said. “They were asked to leave their homes and families to travel all the way to World’s Edge, a tiny village situated at the far border of the civilized lands. It would be a perilous journey, they knew, but the need in their homeland was very great, and so the travelers shouldered their packs and began the trip.

“They marched for days and days, not daring to tarry in any given place for very long. Every day they delayed increased the chances they would be unable to complete their mission in time, and though they spoke little of this, the knowledge weighed heavy upon them all.”

He turned and began leading us up the path, still reading from his book. We left the training area behind us and stepped into the unknown.

“Upon reaching the border of Moreth, the westernmost duchy in Lyria, all the travelers looked around themselves in anticipation. Moreth was renowned as a land of strange magical energies, and inexplicable phenomena were said to be commonplace there.

“The danger they encountered on their first night in Moreth, however, was of the nonmagical variety: While the group slept, their camp was set upon by a gang of bandits. The party of travelers escaped with their lives, but the bandits absconded with most of the coins they had carried.

“Still, the adventurers’ spirits were raised as they neared their destination. The autumn days were pleasant for walking, and the countryside and woodlands of Moreth were very beautiful.”

At the top of the hill, all was wildness and moonlight. A lake appeared at our right, shimmering and tranquil, undisturbed but for a few wisps of fog. Beyond it, hills and forest extended to the horizon, no lights, no cars, the trees interrupted only by a few indistinct dark shadows. Cabins, probably, but perhaps something stranger.

“Night had fallen dark and silent around them by the time they reached their goal. Coming down the wooded trail, they saw lights shining from a building.” To our left, the lodge had been transformed: Flickering candlelight spilled out of the windows, and the faint sounds of tavern life: a low hum of voices, clinking glasses, indecipherable fragments of conversation. The Storyteller stopped at the threshold.

“They had reached their destination at last. The six stepped up to the door and entered the Inn at World’s Edge.”

I recall those last few steps to the tavern in vivid detail. Self-conscious, nervous, and worried about what lay ahead, I’d been an easy target for simple theatrics and gently hypnotized by the Storyteller’s tale. The other members of my party seemed similarly affected. We pushed open the doors and walked inside.

The Inn at World’s Edge was a welcome sight after a long journey from Keer, warm, cozy, and safe. Small groups of strangers huddled in the dim light, dressed in simple tunics, vests, hose, and cloaks. They leaned forward and talked in low voices, as if a word spoken too loudly might wake them from a dream.