Black Gate

Back in April, I wrote a brief article on the Third Edition D&D supplement Cormyr: The Tearing of the Weave, which I purchased for $7 at the Spring Games Plus Auction. While I was delighted with it, I soon discovered it was the first installment in an epic three-part mega-adventure known informally as The Forgotten Realms Trilogy. Bummer!

Fortunately, I also discovered the second installment buried in the second box of auction loot, apparently purchased during an episode of auction fever for just $6. I examined Shadowdale: The Scouring of the Land in a blog post last month.

That just left chapter three: Anauroch: The Empire of Shade, published in November 2007. While copies of Cormyr and Shadowdale are both still available online at relatively reasonable prices, not so for Anauroch — new copies start at around $60 at Amazon and eBay, and there wasn’t one in the boxes I brought home from the auction (I checked). The first two volumes cost me just $13, but it looked like I was going to spend five times that to get the third one.

Luckily, my house rests on top of a Cave of Wonders, a labyrinthine game repository containing thousands of D&D artifacts dating back to antiquity. I mounted an expedition — with a flashlight, a map, and water for several days — and before too long I unearthed a brand new copy of Anauroch: The Empire of Shade, which I apparently purchased some time in 2009. (Alongside it, covered in a light layer of dust, were brand new copies of both Cormyr and Shadowdale, which I hastily replaced and pretended I hadn’t seen. The fewer duplicate purchases I have to confess to my wife, the better.)

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After its initial release in 1974, Dungeons & Dragons enjoyed several periods of mainstream popularity, even faddishness, the largest of which was undoubtedly between 1981 to 1984 or thereabouts, which coincided with the release of not one but two different Basic Sets aimed at younger players. I myself benefited from an earlier surge in interest in the game following the widely publicized disappearance of Michigan State University student James Dallas Egbert III in August 1979. Though the mystery surrounding the young man’s whereabouts was ultimately proven to have nothing to do with D&D, early speculation suggested otherwise, both because Egbert was a player of the game and because it was a game unlike any familiar to most Americans at that time. Playing up the role – no pun intended – supposedly played by this “weird” new game was a great journalistic hook that probably sold a lot of newspapers and magazines.

My father was one of those who, thanks to those newspapers and magazines, became fascinated by the Egbert disappearance and, by extension, Dungeons & Dragons. I also recall that, a couple of years later, he read two novels inspired by these real world events (Rona Jaffe’s Mazes & Monsters and John Coyne’s Hobgoblin), neither of which engendered any interest in me, unlike the news stories, which I followed almost as avidly as he did. It was this fascination on my father’s part that led to my mother’s purchase of a copy of the 1977 D&D Basic Set for him, a set I eventually inherited due to his disinterest in actually learning to play the game itself.

Thirty-five years on, what I remember most keenly about those sensationalist articles is how often they were accompanied by photos of college or high school kids sitting around a table in the center of which were painted miniature figures. In at least one case, I recall a very detailed photograph of an armored humanoid creature – an orc perhaps? – and seeing that image enchanted me. Like most children, I’d played lots of board games, but none of them had playing pieces that looked anything like that one. What kind of game was this Dungeons & Dragons that it had such terrific pieces?

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I’ve lived away from the house where I grew up since I went off to college at the age of 17. That was only a couple of years shy of three decades ago (yikes!). Since then, I’ve lived in three different cities, including one in another country. By any reasonable measure, I’ve spent more years living somewhere other than that house than I ever did under its roof. Yet, no matter how long it’s been since I last lived there, no matter how long it’s been since I last visited it, whenever I return, I’m home. Indeed, when I talk about my parents’ house and the city where it’s located, I reflexively use the term “home” for both, this despite the fact that I’ve now lived with my wife as long as I ever lived with my parents.

It’s a strange habit of mind, one I doubt is unique to me and that manifests itself in other ways. Since high school, for example, I’ve studied four different foreign languages. Just last week, I started learning a new one. Even though I attained a reasonable degree of literacy in all of them, I never gained significant verbal fluency, in large part because I never learned to think in another language. I am always thinking in English and mentally translating from it to whatever other language I am attempting to speak. In short, I continue to be an English speaker, even when I am trying to speak French or German.

Though Dungeons & Dragons was my first roleplaying game and a staple of my hobby for more than a decade, by the mid-90s, I’d largely stopped playing it. The reasons for my doing so are several and not very important. Shortly before Wizards of the Coast released its new edition – Third Edition or 3e – I was working as a writer at a games magazine and was given early access to the forthcoming rulebooks as background for an article I was tasked to write. I did not expect to like the new edition, let alone like it enough that I’d come back to D&D after a prolonged absence, but I did. I owe Wizards of the Coast a big debt of thanks for having helped me to fall in love with Dungeons & Dragons again.

Over the next six years or so, I played Third Edition intensely. I got to know the game and its rules very well, so well, in fact, that I started to find them ponderous to the point where they were getting in the way of the kind of tabletop experience I wanted. This led me to start to think seriously about what I liked in RPGs and how I could best get it. Ultimately, that thinking led me back, ironically, to the games I’d played in my youth, including the earliest editions of Dungeons & Dragons.

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As a kid, Dungeons & Dragons introduced me to a lot of things, from fantasy books and authors I might otherwise not have encountered to obscure medieval weapons (like the voulge-guisarme) to equally obscure vocabulary (such as dweomer or weal). Reading my D&D books and modules was literally an educational experience and I am not ashamed to admit that many of my adult interests have their origins in things I first discovered through the game.

D&D also introduced me to the idea of using graph paper to make dungeon maps. Pictured to the left is the first dungeon map I ever saw (unless one counts the board to Dungeon!, which I don’t). The map appeared near the end of the blue rulebook included in my Basic Set and depicts one level beneath the ruined tower of the sorcerer Zenopus. As you can see, the map includes a square grid, with each square representing a 10 × 10 area, as was traditional in all the TSR Hobbies versions of the game. My Basic Set also included an adventure module, In Search of the Unknown, about which I talked before and its two-level dungeon exercised an equally strong influence over my young imagination.

I was, of course, familiar with graph paper, having used it in school during math classes, but I’d never seen it used for any other purpose. Consequently, I was a bit surprised to discover that D&D players bought it in large quantities, both referees in creating their own dungeons and players to keep track of their characters’ explorations of said labyrinths, lest they become lost and unable to find their way out again. I may have thought it odd at first, but I dutifully paid a visit to the local office supply store and bought myself a pad of paper so that I could get down to the business of laying out subterranean mazes of peril to inflict on my friends (or their characters at any rate).

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