Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and The People Who (28 page)

So we hightailed it home. Our first mission in fifth-edition D&D was officially a failure, but nobody seemed to mind.

The following day, I returned to the conference hall for a seminar discussing fifth-edition rules and character design. Several Wizards of the Coast designers sat on a flimsy stage and answered questions from a few dozen fans about paladins and warlords and rogues.

I was only half listening when I noticed Mike Mearls sitting alone at a table in the play-test area. He was reading a piece of paper, and I watched as he studied it. After a few minutes, he put it aside, reached into a cardboard box on the table, and pulled out another paper. He was reading play-test documents, short surveys each player completed after their trip to the Caves of Chaos. He looked fascinated.

After a decade writing about businesses for a living, I’m fairly cyn
ical. When Wizards of the Coast announced the fifth edition, they put “listening to the needs of the D&D community” up front and center—and I knew it was hype. Disaffected players had become a market liability, so Wizards needed to make them feel engaged. Play tests and customer surveys were, at some level, set decoration.

But watching Mike Mearls pore over those surveys, I knew they mattered to him—and even though the play tests may solve a marketing problem, they’ll also help shape the game. Guys like Mearls are part of the tribe; they grew up playing D&D, and the game means more to them than just some job. They want to do right by the community.

The first time I met Mearls, he talked about the responsibility he feels as a steward of D&D’s direction. “When you are in this position, you are affecting people’s lives,” he said. “It’s entertainment, so it’s not like healing the sick. But it’s something that’s really important to fans.

“We’re the caretaker of something people have put passion and energy into. You know, they could just sit and watch TV or do something passive, but they choose not to, they choose to be engaged. And the game is filling something in their lives that they can’t get somewhere else.”

1
. “Lesser God (Lawful Good): Delleb, an old man clutching a white book, cares only for the accumulation of knowledge . . . his clerics quote from book after book of scriptures, but the libraries in a temple of Delleb have books on all topics, not just religious matters.”
The Complete Divine,
page 122.

2
. “When this spell is cast, the magic-user causes an opaque sphere of force to come into being around his or her person . . . The tiny hut will withstand winds up to 50 m.p.h. [but] in no way will Leomund’s Tiny Hut provide protection from missiles, weapons, spells, and the like.”
Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Players Handbook,
page 74.

3
. Even though we call the current edition of D&D “4.0,” there have been many more major revisions: Original, Basic, Advanced, Advanced Second Edition, 3.0, 3.5, 4.0.

4
. “A corpulent creature with sickly yellow skin [that] wears black studded leather armor. It is armed with a short sword and shortbow. As it attacks, a smell of brimstone emanates from its body and the faint sound of rolling dice can be heard.”
Monster Manual IV,
page 190.

5
. “Table 3-10: Doors,”
Dungeon Masters Guide,
page 61.

O
n my final night at the D&D Experience, I had a ticket to play another game—an old AD&D module,
Dwellers of the Forbidden City.
It’s a tournament game, first run at the Origins Game Fair in 1980; author Zeb Cook earned his TSR hire in part due to the strength of the adventure. The final module, published in 1981, is considered a classic.

I skipped it. Instead, I hit the convention center snack machine and stocked up on Mountain Dew and candy. I went back to my hotel room, plopped on the couch, and pushed everything off the tiny coffee table. Then I laid out two mechanical pencils, a highlighter, and an unused leather-bound graph-paper notebook I’d been carrying around for months.

I cracked the spine, skipped a few pages in, and sketched a map: a deep valley, a forest, and a tower at the edge of the tree line. This would be the home of Mad Marv, a powerful wizard who would serve as the antagonist for a new D&D campaign—
my
D&D campaign, the one I’d run for my friends using fifth-edition rules. My first campaign,
my first serious attempt at being a Dungeon Master, the apex of my art. It was time. I was ready.

I flipped the page and wrote “TOWER MAP” across the top line, and then “FLOOR ONE” below. An attempt to sketch a circle freehand failed miserably, so I jumped from the tatty hotel couch and ransacked the room looking for something to trace. A plastic coffee cup lid and an empty can of salt-and-vinegar Pringles were too big and too small, but the water glass from the bathroom was just the right size: precisely seventeen graph-paper squares across, or at five-foot scale, a tower eighty-five feet in diameter.

With the external walls in place, I erased a bit to open up the bottom of the circle and closed it with a straight horizontal line, three squares long. I erased the line’s center and drew in a rectangle, and then bisected that with another line—map code for double doors, each seven and a half feet wide.

The first floor should be majestic, I figured. Anyone who entered needed to know they were facing someone powerful, not just a random encounter. So I drew a solid horizontal line across the map a few squares above center, creating a grand hall forty feet deep. Another wavy line just below that indicated a tapestry—perhaps this would depict some allegorical scene, a way to reward observant adventurers with information about the perils that lay ahead. On either end of the tapestry I drew a circle with a star in it, the symbol for a statue. Maybe they were previous “guests,” turned to stone by the mad wizard?

Behind the wall, I sketched in a tiny guardroom, two squares by three, and a storeroom with a locked door. Inside that, a rectangle marked with a letter
C,
to indicate a locked chest: treasure, perhaps . . . or better yet, a trap. A box full of poisoned darts ready to pincushion a careless thief.

Steps led to the second floor: a lounge area, with couches and
tables; a small study; and a few hidden passages, so servants could pop in and out unnoticed. On the third floor, guest rooms and kitchens. I hesitated, worried that it might be dumb to put the kitchens aboveground, and then left it.

The fourth floor started as more bedrooms, but then I had an idea. Marv built this tower before he was Mad—sure, he intended to host guests and live like a noble, but as his power grew he became alienated from society and increasingly obsessed with his studies. I imagined consecutive floors in disarray, expensive furniture piled up haphazardly to make room for inscrutable experiments.

Or maybe one big experiment? What if Marv became obsessed with astronomy, and at some point he’d gone through the tower and hacked holes in each floor with an axe, creating a multistory space where he could hang a Foucault pendulum, an apparatus that demonstrates Earth’s rotation?

I flipped back through the notebook and carefully erased the same spot on each floor of the tower. I got on the Internet, studied Foucault’s design, and calculated how much room a pendulum would require to swing freely if it hung on an eighty-four-foot cable.
¹
Then, on each level of the map, I drew a hole just big enough to fit the width of the pendulum’s swing—14.9 feet at the second floor, 12.8 feet at the third, and so on.

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.