Dungeons and Dragons game pieces, photographed in 1986.
Joel Congdon/Getty Images
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Joel Congdon/Getty Images
Dungeons and Dragons This year, the tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) has gone through a series of revisions, expansions, and hack-and-slash imitations, survived a Satanic panic or two, and found itself replaced in the hearts and minds of the nation’s nerds by games like Magic: The Gathering And Pokemononly to experience a huge resurgence of popularity in recent years, thanks in no small part to the TTRPG Actual Play podcast and web series like Important role, Size 20 And Adventure Zone.
In other words: As a pop culture phenomenon, it’s been hacked, but it’s still a hit.
I played my first D&D game in 1978, just four years after it came out. I was 10; it was summer. My friend down the street invited me over to his house, usually forcing me to play catch with him in his backyard (ie: He would whack a baseball in my face, I would flinch and let it bounce off me, I would pick it up and throw it back so it landed on the grass three feet away from him with a pathetic thud; repeated until dinnertime). On this occasion, to my surprise and delight, we sat on his screened-in porch as he pulled out what I later learned were boxes of rulebooks and polyhedral dice called Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set.
I fell in love with the game at first sight, largely because everything about it was heavily influenced by my beloved author Tolkien (Wizards! Dwarves! Orcs! The title dragon on the box cover, its pile of gold!). But that didn’t last long; my neighbor started a new school in the fall, and we lost touch.
I didn’t start my first real, extended D&D campaign until three years later. My friend David wanted to try his hand at being a dungeon master, and invited me and three other kids I didn’t know to form an adventuring party. When I showed up for that first session in David’s bedroom, they had already created their characters—a warrior, a thief, and a ranger. They urged me to play as a cleric, who could stick around and heal them whenever they got hit. I liked the idea of staying out of the heat of battle and just being the one to heal my friends, earning their deep and lasting gratitude. Feeling needed, appreciated. I admit it was appealing. But then fate intervened, in the form of my budding weirdness.
David invited me to check out a slim paperback D&D supplement rulebook called Rogues Gallery — page after page of available characters I could choose from. I flipped through the clerics, but nothing caught my eye. But then, on page 12, right above the chart of a character class called Illusionists, I saw it. Him.
The magician is talking.
Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Image Gallery: The Roguesby Brian Blume with Dave Cook and Jean Wells. 1980, TSR Games.
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Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Image Gallery: The Roguesby Brian Blume with Dave Cook and Jean Wells. 1980, TSR Games.
It was a pencil sketch by illustrator Jeff Dee. A tall, thin man stood facing the viewer. His right hand held a staff, while his left hand was open, palm facing up. He held his arm slightly away from his body and tilted his shoulders boldly—the resulting pose was somewhere between a carefree shrug and a hearty “ta-DAHHH!” He was surrounded by a thick mist—presumably the magic he was casting—from which emerged a number of monstrous faces.
I like that. But what I be lovedWhat moved me, what defined the young, closeted, gay me, was his outfit.
One is thigh boots. I mean, what am I made of? rock?
Added to that were the embarrassingly tight pants cinched with a belt and a dagger. And clinging to every line of his lean, muscular body, a sleeveless tunic—basically a tank top—that somehow still showed off his ample shoulder pads.
Here’s the important part, the part you have to understand: I’m not just talking about those thin, epaulette-like shoulder bumps. No, they’re dramatic, flared, Ming the Merciless meets Julia Sugarbaker. shoulder pads.
The other stuff—the center part, the cheekbones, the tiara, the chunky necklace? It was just icing on the cake. Unnecessary. I was self-aware enough to know that it was the padded tank top that did it.
“I want to be a Magician,” I said firmly, causing the other players to roll their eyes and mutter the first in a series of homophobic insults directed at me. I didn’t care, and still don’t care. I’m fierce, and I Great.
Then I got addicted to this game. I signed up. Dragon magazines, and often pestered my mother to drag me to them. Dragon’s Lair, located in a drab strip mall in north Wilmington, Del.where I dutifully bought more rulebooks, more dice, more dungeon modules, and a line of pencil miniatures that I drew very, very, very so bad
It wasn’t easy. Just as I was in the midst of my carefree, all-consuming devotion to the game, the Philly paper ran an article in its Sunday magazine, citing “experts” on the supposed Satanic origins of the game. An article that, the following Sunday, prompted the sweet, kind pastor at our sleepy suburban Grove United Methodist Church to launch into what was (to him anyway) a fire-and-brimstone sermon condemning the game. Around the same time, novelist Rona Jaffe published Mazes and Monstersa long-running literary headache over the supposed harmful effects of the game on American teenagers, which was quickly turned into a an extremely cheesy, extremely funny drama starring a young Tom Hanks as a guy who suffers from a mental disorder caused by the game.
This article in Philadelphia Inquirer The magazine (July 26, 1981) had a generally positive review of D&D, while devoting columns to psychologists who worried that players were using it to escape reality, and to religious figures who warned that the game was the work of Satan. The cover alone might have been enough to provoke our pastor.
TodayPhiladelphia Inquirer/ via Newspapers.com
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TodayPhiladelphia Inquirer/ via Newspapers.com
During the few years I played D&D seriously, back then, I had to convince my parents to give up every time there was a new magazine article or 60 minutes segment brought to light the entire “controversy” that was created around the game. It’s exhausting. But I keep going; I have to. I necessary ARRIVE.
Because there was a time like this? When my friends and I were attacked by an army of Orcs, and I created an illusion of a deep hole in the ground in front of us, filled with bubbling acid and metal spikes, and the Orcs failed their save and believed they had fallen into that illusionary hole, and impaled themselves on the illusionary spikes, and dissolved into the illusionary acid and thus died for real?
Oh? That was great. And, for just a few fleeting seconds, deep down, in the throes of my secret, deeply embarrassing adolescence, so was I.
Oh, oh.
This article also appeared on NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour. Sign up for newsletter so you don’t miss out on what’s next, and get weekly recommendations of things that make us happy.
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