Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and The People Who (29 page)

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 structure 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.

W
hen 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.

Then one day, as men do, he found himself wanting. He wanted the one thing he’d always been denied: He wanted danger, he wanted risk, he wanted adventure.

But the bard was no warrior. So he left his homeland and walked from town to town, collecting stories of the great heroes of old. With each new tale he grew stronger as he learned from their triumphs and failures. It had been a long journey, and he was nearly ready to begin his own adventure. But not yet.

The bard broke his reverie and stopped in the road. He adjusted his pack and tapped his boots against a rock, shaking loose the dust of many miles. He raised a hand to shade his eyes from the sun and gazed into the distance.

Ahead, he could see the city of the gods, the place where the world began. Inside its walls, he would seek out the great elders and learn from their wisdom. Only then would he be ready for whatever adventure lay ahead.

David, the wandering bard, member of the tribe Jor-na-lizt, scribe in the court of Lord Forbes, tightened his pack on his shoulder and entered the holy city.

“We’re gonna start off with a whole lot of blood and guts.” Frank Mentzer sat at the head of the table and smiled at his new players. “You’re headed to the most wretched, dangerous place in the entire realm.”

Mentzer, sixty-one, was the perfect person to run my first game at Gary Con: a close friend of Gygax, one of the most experienced Dungeon Masters on the planet, author of the legendary 1983 Basic D&D “Red Box” and the subsequent Expert, Companion, Master, and Immortals sets. He looked the part, too: gray hair pulled back in a long ponytail, bushy arched eyebrows, a full beard, and an overgrown mustache twisted to points just a centimeter short of han
dlebar status. He couldn’t have looked more like a wizard if he spat fireballs and wore a pointy hat.