SPALDING WARGAMING CLUB
It was the summer of 1978, the nation was retro-rocking to Grease and I was visiting my mate Simon in Welwyn Garden City. Simon had been my friend at Junior School and was much cooler than me, as evidenced by his musical tastes (2-tone, ska) and the fact that his parents had divorced and remarried (mind-boggling in 1978). Anyway, when I arrived to spend the weekend with him, he revealed his new hobby: fantasy Role Playing Games (RPGs), namely Dungeons & Dragons. The ground had been laid for this already. I'd read The Lord of the Rings and was a huge fantasy/SF fan, a massive Greek/Norse mythology nerd and board games player (such as they were back then: I'm talking Waddingtons, not Avalon Hill). Earlier that year, my mother had showed me a newspaper article about D&D which sounded intriguing, but the concept of a game without a board or a winner surpassed my understanding. So Simon produced these rulebooks: the Players Handbook and the Monster Manual and the old blue 'Holmes' Basic Set (you see, the Dungeon Masters Guide had not yet been published so people had to cobble the game together as best they could). I created a character - Tristan, the Elf - and Simon was Dungeon Master and in search of the unknown we went, venturing into the now-classic introductory dungeon. I was instantly, utterly and compulsively hooked. On and on, into the night we played. Then I lay awake, scouring the books by torchlight, poring over the black-and-white illustrations that held rich and unnerving fascinations for me: flesh golems ... green slime (it drops on you!) ... trolls ("loathsome and rubbery") ... demonesses with actual breasts. Yes, I was Sandy and D&D was my Danny Zuko and I was Hopelessly Devoted from that moment on. Tell me more, you say? Well, I dashed home and told my parents I wanted D&D for Christmas (5 achingly slow months away). To Welwyn Garden City we must go, to the department store that sold this odd and (to my father's mind) hugely overpriced game. I think it cost £10, which was a big deal for a Christmas present then, and the box was unprepossessing. But Christmas finally came and I unpacked the slim rulebook, the oddly-shaped dice, the venerated dungeon module (so replete with secrets, but not, I discovered, any actual green slime or breasty demonesses) and subjected my hapless parents to the game (they played along, mystified), then recruited likelier gaming buddies: fellow 12-year-old boys. From now on, D&D owned my imagination and my very soul. The following Christmas brought the long-awaited Dungeon Master's Guide, which was a monumental piece of reading material with some vocabulary-expanding prose in it. White Dwarf subscriptions ensued and, when I moved to Scotland at the age of 13, I made new friends by seeking out the only kids in the school who played D&D. Puberty, romantic love, sexual angst and moodiness came and went - or I presume they did, because I was too busy drawing dungeons to notice. A lot of ink could be spilled on the subject of why D&D grips adolescent boys so compulsively. It's an escape, obviously. It's a fantasy alternative where problems can be solved with magic or brute power. There's world-building, problem-solving and narcissism. Those demonesses aren't wearing any clothes. And so on. But I don't want to knock it because it was a pretty constructive hobby. I was DM in an ongoing campaign with schoolfriends Andrew, Chris, Gareth and Douglas - or Micdor the Mighty, By-Tor Madrigal, Bron-Y-Aur the Gnome and Riethor Thalion the Ranger. You guys, your characters names are still as familiar to me as Frodo and Bilbo and your adventures were, frankly, just as worthy of big cinema adaptations. Who can forget when you stormed the assassin's guild? or the vampires of Wizard Street? or the land of the Frost Barbarians with its comedy berserkers? True friendship, epic tales and my mum bringing us a tray of tea and sandwiches as the Sunday afternoons slipped away, away, far away and long ago. If there's a heaven (and how can there not be?) then surely we will all meet there, unwearied by age and uncondemned by the years, and play our D&D campaign again. And my beloved mother will bring us tea. But I digress (and am making myself tearful). A long interval must be dispensed with: university, career, marriage; important things but the turning of the wheel was waiting for me when I started teaching schoolkids to play D&D again, running little clubs, presiding over a new generation of heroes, watching the spark kindle a fire of obsession in some eyes, but not others. Why some and not others? It's an interesting question. I've probably introduced a hundred people to D&D in my life and I've never yet met someone who didn't "get it" - who couldn't, after a few moments of following along, realise that you were playing a character, imagining a story and who wouldn't immediately start making their own contributions to the narrative: "I'll hit him!", "I'm going to open the chest", "I'll search for secret doors", "I'll hit him!", "Can I jump over it?", ""I take the treasure", "I'll hit him!" and so on. Nobody is too clever for this to appeal to them or too stupid to grasp the basics. It's so immediate and so accessible that it feels eerily as if storytelling like this is some sort of innate human potential, like singing or playing with babies or cheering at sports, something that we all do naturally and would do a lot more often if our culture didn't direct us away from such activities. Perhaps that's true - perhaps our culture teaches us to think of imagination and storytelling as activities assigned only to experts and people employed by Disney, encouraging us to be passive consumers of other people's stories when really it's our human inheritance to create our own. But even though everyone 'gets it', not everyone likes it. I've introduced D&D to people who've said afterwards (or half way through), "Yeah, it's OK, it just goes on a bit - I'm going to wander over there for a while and watch bugs hit the window." And I've got to say, I play RPGs much less now than I used to. They're tiring, imaginatively and socially. Board games feel much more like relaxation, especially if you're not super-jazzed about winning But then time passes and I get the old itch. I want to get a bunch of people to the table and deliver a round unvarnished tale, then sit back while they squabble and scheme, twit each other and have dazzling insights, crack the funniest jokes ever, draw more creativity out of me than I knew I had, rush to each other's rescue, piece the clues together and screw everything up on a final calamitous dice roll. Yes. Yes I think it's time to play D&D again. Fresh faces very welcome.
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