Ten years of Dungeons and Dragons, Mach II

This May will mark the 10th anniversary of my return to Dungeons and Dragons, all with the same group. I’m not sure how we’ll celebrate the occasion, though we were joking at our last session that we might do something crazy and … play a game of Dungeons and Dragons or something. Maybe we’ll show up in hooded cloaks or armor.

I haven’t posted about RPGs in a long time here on The Silver Key, mainly because I haven’t had a whole lot to say. I never got embroiled in the 4E controversy because our group never made the shift. These days I’m a player, not a DM, and I generally just go with the flow. But this recent article on Salon.com and our impending 10 year anniversary has prompted a few thoughts on why I continue to play and enjoy this uncommon pastime.

This is my second go-round with D&D and the longest unbroken stretch I’ve ever played. Like most folks of my age (37) I started with the Tom Moldvay Basic boxed set, which in 1982 I begged as a gift from my parents. I would have been nine or 10 years old at the time. While the cardboard box is long-gone I still have the tattered red rulebook and my original copy of B2 Keep on the Borderlands, from which I will not be parted even unto death.

Back in those grade school days I played a heavy rotation of games, peaking in middle school. I played mostly D&D with a group of friends but we also occasionally branched out into games like Car Wars, Runequest, Middle Earth Role Playing, Star Frontiers, and Top Secret. Our gaming wasn’t limited to after school sessions and late nights on the weekend, either. My middle school offered Dungeons and Dragons as a Friday afternoon seventh-period elective, for which I eagerly signed up. Yes, we got to play D&D in school! I was typically the DM, refereeing up to 10 rambunctious players at a time. We ran through modules like Pharaoh and In the Dungeons of the Slave Lords and White Plume Mountain with gusto. I remember another group next to us in which everyone was an assassin and they spent the whole game rolling on the assassination tables and killing each other off. It was glorious.

I continued playing into high school but my gaming soon tailed off. Sports, drinking beer, heavy metal concerts, etc. took priority, and I shelved my books. I can recall another aborted 2E session later in high school that didn’t last long.

I dabbled in D&D a little bit in college, playing a few sessions with a gaming club and attending my first con, Total Confusion in Worcester, MA. That would have been 1993 or so. But when I graduated college and got married I shelved my books, possibly for good.

But around 2000 or so my interest in the game was rekindled by the issuance of 3.0, which promised a “back to the dungeon” approach. Around that time I also discovered EnWorld and its “Gamers Seeking Gamers” webpage. Via messageboard and e-mail I arranged to meet with my future DM and another eventual co-player on neutral turf, an interview over beer to ensure we had compatible interests and were not complete lunatic freaks (aside from the fact that we played D&D, of course). When I told my wife I was going off to a smoky local bar to meet up with a strange man to talk D&D she thrust her cell phone into my coat pocket (at the time I didn’t own one) in the event I got abducted. I wasn’t.

With our mutual fears allayed we arranged and played our first game in May of 2001. We’ve been gaming ever since. We’re happily plugging away with 3.5 edition, three book core with a few house rules thrown in, in a long-term home-brew campaign in which our characters recently reached eighth level. We also have another 3.5 game going in the Forgotten Realms, though it’s been a couple years since our last session in the FR. In between we’ve had few one-shots of D20 modern, a couple boardgaming sessions, and even a romp through a 3.5 version of The Tomb of Horrors (which I had to miss, sadly). In general I prefer the older versions of the game because they have far more flavor and are better reads, as I spend more time reading rule books than actually playing. But 3.5 works fine.

I’ve had a lot of fun these past 10 years. Our original plan was to game every other Saturday, but commitments and life in general got in the way. Now we’re good for maybe one Sunday a month.

Like most other role players I’ve given a lot of consideration to the question: why play? If you can get the same experience reading, watching movies, or playing computer games, why play D&D and other tabletop RPGs? What’s the appeal? Why am I still interested in the hobby after all these years?

Here’s my take: What makes RPGs unique is the aspect of collaborative storytelling, entering into a shared space of the unscripted unknown. You’re not reading a novel, you’re creating a story as you play. The tale you spin can run the gamut from brilliant to low brow, from serious to the comically ridiculous. The vagaries of the DM, player decision, and random die-rolls make every game unpredictable.

D&D is rarely boring. I don’t take it too seriously—some prefer earnest, immersive characterization and shrewd tactical play. Me, I like laughing and poking a little fun at fantasy tropes. I enjoy rolling critical hits and also failing saving throws at the worst possible time.

Some of my favorite times are those in which we had to extricate ourselves from our own messes. Carelessly walking into ambushes. Getting swallowed by a purple worm and having to cut myself free. Getting shoved off a bridge by a hill giant and falling onto a rock outcropping surrounded by lava. And so on. At other times we’ve smashed the DM’s big bad evil guy in a round or two and laid waste to his plans, too. Again, you never know what will happen, only that it’s rare to have anything go according to plan.

The other appeal of playing D&D is the out of game camaraderie. Getting together for a session gets me out of the house and among the company of like-minded individuals. We drink a few cold ones, eat good food, talk about books or films, and laugh a lot.

So yeah, once a month I play an Elf. But it’s been a lot of fun.

Happy anniversary guys (and gals).

Forth now, and fear no darkness! Tolkien in his own words

Courtesy of Miguel, former co-blogger on The Cimmerian, this amazing find from HarperAudio: Four audio clips of J.R.R. Tolkien reading selections from The Lord of the Rings.

I've never heard these before, and did not expect I'd ever have the opportunity to listen to Tolkien thundering out Theoden's speech before the charge on the Pelennor Fields.

Arise, arise, Riders of Theoden!
Fell deeds awake: fire and slaughter!
spear shall be shaken, shield be splintered,
a sword-day, a red day, ere the sun rises!
Ride now, ride now! Ride to Gondor!

Awesome stuff. Thanks Miguel.

Drinking in the demonic energy of Tolkien’s The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun

If you like the sound and rhythm of words — and if you’re a hopeless J.R.R. Tolkien junkie — you’ll like The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun (2009, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Lacking either of these prerequisites, you probably won’t. And there’s not much more to say than that.

Casual Tolkien fans likely won’t buy The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun, and even semi-serious fans who have tackled The Silmarillion may lack the appetite for it. It consists of two long poems, around which are sandwiched an exhaustive introduction and a pair of lengthy explications/footnotes, the latter written by Tolkien’s son Christopher. Added together, this additional material is longer than the poems themselves.

The real reward of The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun is its wonderful language. The poems—“The Lay of the Volsungs” and “The Lay of Gudrun”—are composed in eight line alliterative stanzaic metre. Reading them makes me wish I knew the native Old Norse Tolkien of which Tolkien spoke so admiringly; the modern English is pretty darned powerful already.

To read the rest of this post, visit The Black Gate website.

Tor.com releases poll results for best SFF novels of the decade

Tor.com recently polled its readers on the best SFF novels of the decade. The results are in (analysis here) and the top ten include:

Old Man’s War by John Scalzi
American Gods by Neil Gaiman
The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
Blindsight by Peter Watts
Kushiel’s Dart by Jacqueline Carey
A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
Anathem by Neal Stephenson
Mistborn: The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson
Perdido Street Station by China Mieville

I’ve only read three of these, two of which I liked (A Storm of Swords, American Gods), and one I’m rather indifferent about (Perdido Street Station). I’ve heard a lot of good things about Anathem and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and intend to read them one day. But unfortunately as I’ve said before there’s so much fantasy on the market, both new and old titles, and not enough time to read them all. I know I’ll never get to all these titles, sadly enough.

Tor.com is featuring essays about the novels on their blog. The first is up: An appreciation of American Gods by novelist Patrick Rothfuss. Rothfuss had the same reaction to American Gods as I did: He can’t quite explain why it works, only that it does, and it’s pretty brilliant. A couple recent commenters on The Silver Key expressed their dislike for AG but I’m glad to see it get some love over on Tor.com. I enjoyed it a lot.

George R.R. Martin’s A Storm of Swords is a bloodbath of a book with perhaps the most painful scene I’ve read in a fantasy novel. It made me not want to continue (though I did manage to finish it). It’s extremely well-done gritty fantasy, if you like that sort of thing.

I freely admit that I don’t get the appeal of Perdido Street Station. It’s dark and byzantine … and, well, dark and byzantine. I found the characters unappealing and the plot meandering. The slake-moths were kind of cool and New Crobuzon was well-done, though.

What are your thoughts? Have you read any of these? Any you’d recommend? Any head scratchers/notable absentees that didn't make the list?

Me want

Here's some ultimate nerdity that I would nevertheless gladly wear (look closely/zoom in on thumbnails below): http://www.threadless.com/product/2293/There_and_Back_Again.

I wonder if the Tolkien Estate will be putting the smack down on this, though.

Chewing over realism in fantasy: A few morsels more

Fantasy literature is rife with pour souls being fed to hungry beasts. A hungry crowd watches as weaponless prisoners are forced into the Arena of Tokalet where the monstrous, half-intelligent ape Nji awaits (L. Sprague de Camp’s The Tritonian Ring). In George R.R. Martin’s A Storm of Swords the unarmored female warrior Brienne is thrown into a bear pit for the sport of onlookers. The tentacled demon-god Thog devours drugged, defenseless denizens of an ancient city in Robert E. Howard’s “Xuthal of the Dusk.”

It’s all pretty awful (albeit suspenseful, and gruesomely entertaining) stuff, but the way in which one author handles this familiar scenario vs. another I think sheds a little more light on my discussions of realism in fantasy literature.

Here’s how J.R.R. Tolkien handles anthropomorphs as monster food in The Two Towers (Chapter 7: “Shelob’s Lair”):

And sometimes as a man may cast a dainty to his cat (his cat he calls her, but she owns him not) Sauron would send her prisoners that he had no better uses for: he would have them driven to her hole, and report brought back to him of the play she made.

That to me is a great piece of writing. It tells you plenty about the cruelty and maliciousness of Sauron and his relationship with the giant she-spider (which he half-hates and half-fears, but tolerates as a valuable guardian into Mordor).

As for the gory details, it allows my mind to fill in the rest. Tolkien goes on to explain that Shelob cares not for wealth or power, but spends all her time brooding on her next feast. "For all living things were her food, and her vomit darkness," he writes. That's about as nasty and explicit as Tolkien gets.

Now compare that passage with this preview of Richard Morgan’s forthcoming novel The Cold Commands:

In the wild, a Hanliagh black octopus would have wrapped tentacles around surface prey this large and dragged it deep, where it could be drowned and dealt with at leisure. Defeated by the bobbing wood and the manacles, the creatures settled for swarming the boards, tearing at the chained bodies with frenzied, suckered force, biting awkwardly with their beaks. So skin came off wholesale, gobbets and chunks of flesh came with it, finally down to the bone. Blood vessels tore – in the case of a lucky few, fatally. And occasionally, a victim might smother to death with tentacles or body mass across the face. But for most, it was a long, slow death by haphazard flaying and flensing – none of the creatures was bigger than a court-bred hound, they could not otherwise have squeezed in through the chamber’s vents, and even their combined efforts were rarely enough to make a merciful end of things.

Jhiral was watching her.

She forced herself not to look away – the spray of blood, the up-and-down flail of tentacles like thick black whips, the soft, mobbing purple-black shapes hanging off the wood and flesh, crawling across it. Her gaze snagged on a wild, wide-open human eye and a screaming mouth, briefly blocked by a thick crawling tentacle, then uncovered again to shriek to shriek, to shriek……

As for that passage, man, it’s brutal. It’s effective, and horrifying, and well-done. But it’s not why I read fantasy. It jerked me back into reality with its clinical descriptions of flensing and tearing blood vessels. Perhaps Morgan intended this scene as a condemnation of torture. It vaguely reminded me of the real-life practice of waterboarding, albeit turned up to 11. I don’t know. I read it and it just felt — too much.

Perhaps what I object to in some modern fantasy literature is the degree to which it emphasizes violence—graphic carnage is shown in vivid, sometimes nauseating color, vs. implied in the older forms. Because in the end, being the plaything of a monstrous, reeking, millennia old spider, paralyzed with poison, and eaten alive, isn’t any more comforting than being consumed piece by piece by a swarm of ravenous octopi. But I know which one I’d rather read. And it does not involve cephalopods.

I’ve said my piece on this a few times and have little else to add; I happened to see that Morgan posted that excerpt at his website and thought it provided a timely example of what I was trying to convey in my couple of previous posts on the subject.

Just more food for thought (no pun intended) and a rather lighthearted example in the ongoing realism debate.

Internal, external conflict ignite Cornwell’s The Burning Land

“Our gods prefer feasting. They live, Uhtred. They live and laugh and enjoy, and what does their god do? He broods, he’s vengeful, he scowls, he plots. He’s a dark and lonely god, Uhtred, and our gods ignore him. They’re wrong.”

–Bernard Cornwell, The Burning Land

Conflict — internal to fictional protagonist Uhtred of Bebbanburg, and external to blood-soaked, fire-ravaged Britain — burns brightly in The Burning Land, the fifth and latest entry in Bernard Cornwell’s Saxon Stories, a partially fictionalized chronicle of the real-life Viking invasions that swept Dark Ages Britain.

A Saxon-raised-Dane, Uhtred is a microcosm of the rough mixing of Christianity and pagan culture that occurred in war-torn ninth century Britain. Uhtred is a Saxon whose father was killed in a Danish raid. Taken prisoner as a thrall to the Dane Earl Ragnar and raised hard, he nevertheless grows to love the Danes. Although they’re ferocious raiders, the Danes drink deep of life, scorn Christian virtues of humility and pity, and worship the pagan gods of Thor and Odin (they expect less of their followers than the one God, and leave more leeway for fun).

But Uhtred’s loyalties are torn. His hereditary home is the Northern kingdom of Bebbanburg and his peoples are Saxon. Over the course of the series he comes to respect the coldly pious and serious, but brilliant and fair King Alfred of Wessex (Alfred the Great) and at times reject the occasionally murderous habits of the Danish warlords.

To read the rest of this post, visit The Black Gate website.