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 handlebar status. He couldn’t have looked more like a wizard if he spat fireballs and wore a pointy hat.
He was clearly pleased with our choice of adventure. Once all eight ticketed players had gathered, Mentzer passed around a piece of paper describing several game modules he was play-testing and asked which we’d like to play. The Witches of Chell was described as “minimal combat . . . fatality rating 15 percent,” while Death in Wretched Swamp was “very dangerous . . . fatality rating 75 percent or more.” Wary of looking like wimps to one of the godfathers of gaming, we chose the latter.
Mentzer was developing Death in Wretched Swamp for his new game company, Eldritch Enterprises. After leaving TSR in October 1986, he helped Gygax start the ill-fated New Infinities Productions; when it was sued out of existence, he left the game business entirely and opened several bakeries. But old grognards die hard. In 2010, Mentzer formed Eldritch Enterprises with game designer Chris Clark and fellow TSR alumni Tim Kask and Jim Ward. The company planned to debut their first products at Gary Con and to play-test future adventures; Death in Wretched Swamp was slated for release in 2013.
“Most previous groups that have gone to the Wretched Swamp have gotten bogged down in the first hundred yards,” Mentzer told us. “I have plenty of ways to kill you, no matter what you do.”
As the players readied themselves, a courier arrived at the table with a taped-up cardboard mailing box and handed it to Mentzer. He opened it, removed something that looked like a magazine, and held it up so we could see the title: Frank Mentzer’s Lich Dungeon, Level One. “This is my first published dungeon level in twenty-seven years,” he said. I had the urge to start clapping but suppressed it when everyone else at the table just smiled and nodded. The cover featured a gray-bearded mage in a brown cloak and floppy pointed hat. He looked an awful lot like Mentzer himself.
Eldritch’s modules are old-school adventures, with rich settings and sometimes incredible odds. They’re written in what Mentzer describes as “gamer common,” using generic terms for specific game mechanics and rules. The idea is that fans of different role-playing games can use the story and setting and consult their own rule books to figure out what it takes to pick a lock or knock down a door. It’s not too different from what Wizards of the Coast hopes to do with the fifth edition of D&D.
“The root of our philosophy is whatever system you are using, whatever mechanics are being used to resolve the variables—it’s story and interaction that is the core of the game,” Mentzer said. “That’s the part that really means something. The rest is details.”
Mentzer hopes to build a twenty-first-century game company, small and adaptable, that won’t build up the piles of unsold inventory that killed TSR. Eldritch doesn’t make any physical product, they just design books, and their retail partners—like a website called DriveThruRPG—primarily sell digital downloads. If a customer wants a physical copy, they can print, bind, and ship a single book.
Operating on demand frees up Eldritch’s founders to do what they do best: make games. It also makes it easy to expand around the world. To sell French gamers a copy of Mort dans Marais Damné, all the company has to do is arrange for a translation and then farm out production to a local printer. There’s no risk of piles of unsold livres de règles—and little or even no cost to the company.
“There are all of these gamers all over the world who got their start in D&D on my creation, who look at me as one of the fathers of their role-playing culture,” Mentzer said. “I can call people and say, ‘Hey, would you do the German or Norwegian or Spanish translation of Eldritch’s new game product?’ Because they got their start on my stuff, they’ll work at lower rates, as a labor of love.”
Death in Wretched Swamp has what it takes to be a hit—or at least what counts as one among the tiny world of independent role-playing game publishers. It’s full of memorable action (one fight sets the party against a cloud of hundreds of tiny flying demons) and strange creatures (the catalepus, essentially an elephant with a face on the end of its trunk, which can kill you by looking at you). It’s fast paced, funny, and deadly: Our team of adventurers played for four hours, and while we did get past the first hundred yards, we had to leave our horses behind, and most of our gear with them. Chances are good that if we had more time to play, we’d have exceeded that 75 percent fatality rating.
After it was over, I took Mentzer out to dinner. I wanted to get him away from the crowd and pry away his secrets. After we ate, I laid out my problem. “I’ve been playing D&D since I was a kid,” I told him. “But I’ve hardly ever run the game, and the few times I have, I’ve used prewritten modules. Now I’m planning my first original campaign, and it’s scary.”
He smiled, and I paused for a moment, grateful for the kindness. Then I asked my question. “What’s the secret to being a good Dungeon Master?”
He twisted the end of his mustache and thought. “Emphasize priorities with your players,” he said. “We all have, especially in this day and age, a very limited amount of time. So when you sit down at a gaming table, don’t waste time on trivialities. Don’t get bogged down in rule arguments. Resolve them equitably and quickly and keep things moving.
“Whether you are a teenager playing with friends or you are fifty or sixty years old like me, you must communicate. Talk between the players and the game master. Find out what they want from the game, what rules, what level of granularity, what level of interaction, what type of interaction.
“You must have your sensors out, find out what grabs people, and cater to it. The ideal game is a player-driven game. They are not acting in a play that you wrote. You are presenting a setting, you are doing the stage dressing and letting them come up with the play. And when they come up with a plot twist, you should be able to go that way full force, because that is what they want to do. Some of the worst games are when somebody has a great, grand, and glorious vision, and they want victims to walk out and play their roles with no input in what happens.”
I knew he was right. As a player, I delight in the freedom of role-playing games and love when my party surprises our DM with unexpected solutions to problems. But as a DM, that’s my biggest fear.
“What if my players come up with a great idea, and I have no idea how to respond?” I asked. “I can’t plan for every path they might take ahead of time. Isn�
�t that impossible?”
Mentzer shook his head. A good DM doesn’t need to counter every clever idea with a clever rebuttal, he explained. Instead, they collaborate with players to find common ground, a place where both can be comfortable.
“Remember, the game master is part of the group,” he said. “It is not an adversarial situation, though plenty of game masters run it that way. The game master has to be able to transcend his own desires and evolve. All the members of the gaming group—and that includes the game master—have to feel like they’re winning.”
The old wizard had advised great kings and seen empires rise and fall. He was renowned for his wisdom, so many desired his counsel. But few succeeded—for while the wizard was benevolent, his time was valuable, and the demands on it were great.
David was not yet a hero, but he was not without skill. So he brought the wizard to a tavern and showered the innkeeper with silver. After a warm bowl of tortellini, the old sage spun a tale; the lesson, he said, was one of cooperation. Lone heroes are for storybooks; real heroes work together, to make sure everyone wins.
David heard the words and knew they were true. He bade the wizard farewell and returned to his bunkhouse, where he changed out of his tunic, for it had become stained with diavolo sauce.
Then he set out again, into the heart of a walled castle, to receive the blessing of a prince.
Paul Erdős understood the value of cooperation. During his six-decade career, the Hungarian mathematician published more than 1,500 papers with 511 coauthors—an astonishing level of output. Today, his colleagues celebrate the feat by calculating their Erdős number, a measure of collaborative distance. Share credit on a paper with the man himself, and your Erdős number is 1. Write with someone who wrote with Erdős, and your number is 2. It’s a nerdy in-joke, but it serves a purpose, reminding mathematicians that they belong to a worldwide community.
Similarly, D&D fanatics have been known to track their Gygax number—the number of players between them and the world’s most famous DM. When I began playing the game, my Gygax number was effectively incalculable: I played only with my friends, and they played only with me. I shot up to a 2 when I played with Frank Mentzer. Sadly, I’ll never climb higher. But after visiting Gary Con I feel like my number should have a footnote or notation after it: David Ewalt, Gygax number 2, played D&D with Ernest Gary Gygax Jr.
“Ernie” Gygax, Gary’s oldest son, was present for the world’s first session of Dungeons & Dragons. He and his sister, Elise Gygax, were the only participants in their father’s initial play test; they didn’t just play the game, they contributed to its creation. When I saw Ernie was going to DM an “Old School Dungeon Crawl” at Gary Con, I had to be there. It felt like an apotheosis, something that would elevate my game, making me part of the D&D pantheon. Before tickets for the game were scheduled to go on sale online, I sat in front of my computer for hours, checking and rechecking my Internet connection. I scored one of only six spots at the table a few seconds after the event went live.
The day of the game, I arrived at the assigned room early. But Ernie was already there, at the head of a large playing area—two long rectangular tables, set side by side, with a round table at the top, like a fat lowercase i. He was perched on the tittle1 behind an unfolded four-panel Dungeon Master’s screen, and I recognized him instantly. Like his father, he had a paunch, wore wire-rim spectacles, and had long gray hair pulled back in a ponytail. Four other eager gamers had arrived even earlier, so I took an open seat near the far end of the table.
When all the players had gathered and Ernie handed out blank character sheets, I began to remember some of the reasons I once fled from the arms of Dungeons & Dragons into other role-playing games: First-edition AD&D is ridiculously complicated.
Ernie wanted us to make our own characters. I decided to be a thief, and marked the class on my sheet. But then I rolled my ability scores, got a 6 for dexterity, and discovered the rules set the minimum for a thief at 9. I erased and started over. My highest stat, a 13, was wisdom. So I decided to be a cleric instead. But then I started talking to the other players, and we realized we didn’t have a dwarf in the party—a crucial ingredient due to their ability to find their way underground. I erased and started over. A slow but strong dwarf cleric. I liked the idea, but then I realized the rules forbade dwarves from becoming clerics. I erased and started over.
And so my human fighter became a half-elf cleric, and the first ninety minutes of a four-hour game were wasted as we repeatedly tried and failed to create first-level characters. I erased my character sheet so many times that by the time I’d finished, I was surrounded by a cloud of dirty bits of rubber. It was like the Michelin Man had sneezed on the table.
Finally, the game got started, and Ernie explained that our characters were headed toward a walled castle, with a goal of penetrating the fortification and exploring the passageways below. He quickly expedited our entrance (we found a shack outside the walls with a trapdoor in the floor) and the party set itself to dungeon crawling.
Surprisingly, that’s just what the game was—a crawl. We’d enter a room and find it empty. Ernie would describe its dimensions and the location of the exits. Then we’d move on. No combat, no role-playing, just exploration. The players fell into repetitive execution of the same few actions: The thief listens at the door. The fighter and ranger smash down the door. The ranger and cleric, both half-elves, search the room for secret doors.2 Finding nothing, the party approaches an exit. The process repeats.
Room after room, hallway after hallway, we discovered nothing, or next to it—like an abandoned holding cell with manacles chained to the wall but no prisoners. We even found a privy. Eventually, Ernie described the approach of another group of adventurers, mostly armored humans, and I got my hopes up for some action. But the other party passed without incident. One of them even called out a warning to look out for kobolds.
Our only challenge was not getting lost. Once we were in the dungeons, one player was pressed into mapping our travels on a whiteboard, drawing rooms and hallways with a dry-erase marker. But because Ernie’s dungeon was so sprawling—and so empty that we moved through it quickly—it wasn’t long before the map spilled over the edge of the board and had to be continued on pieces of paper.
For many players, this is the point of a dungeon crawl. These old-school adventures offer exploration and path finding; it’s the thrill of spelunking, without getting bat poop in your hair. The challenge is to find your way and see how much you can discover, not to role-play your way through a narrative. Killing monsters and finding treasure is part of the fun but not the point of it.
Ernie’s a talented DM. Great skill is required to manage a complex map and accurately describe the players’ surroundings; I know because I lack it. Every time I have tried to run an adventure, I’ve given incorrect dimensions or described doors on the wrong side of the room. But I get away with it, because in my sort of games, those navigational details aren’t that important. I’d crash and burn in an old-school dungeon crawl, getting hopelessly lost and driving my players insane with frustration.
Eventually, with less than an hour to go in the session, we opened yet another door and finally found something different: four humans wearing plate mail and shields, and a man in long robes and a peaked cap. Frustrated by the slow pace of the adventure, our party’s not-too-bright barbarian came out swinging, and we began the game’s first and only combat. But before I could even get a spell off, the pointy-hatted wizard cast Sleep and knocked me out—as well as most of my party.
As the game’s four-hour time limit drew close, I couldn’t help but feel disappointed. In my head, I’d built playing D&D with Ernie Gygax into the apex of gaming: I expected to be not only entertained but enlightened. I thought I would somehow become more skillful, as if mere exposure to a legendary DM could bestow his special powers. But playing D&D with Ernie Gygax isn’t a magical act; it’s just playing a game. And not every game is for me.
D&D means different things to different people: Some folks want action, others want drama. I want problem solving, a sense of achievement, and an interesting narrative. To be a successful DM, I have to remember that. If I’m not having fun, neither will my players.
I also must know my strengths and weaknesses, what kinds of games I can and cannot run proficiently. I won’t succeed through gross osmosis, reading every book on the subject and playing every edition. Play what you know, and love what you play.
Strangely, the key to role-playing mastery has little to do with understanding a character. It’s knowing yourself.
Every hero needs a quest, and every kingdom has one. A kidnapped princess, a missing treasure, maybe a dragon terrorizing the countryside. David was sure the prince would give him purpose and grant him the powers necessary to deliver the king’s justice.
He arrived at the royal palace early, eager to begin a great adventure. But he did not find it there. “You want to be a hero,” the prince told him, “but I cannot tell you where to go. You won’t find fortune and glory following footsteps others have trod.
“Know yourself, and you’ll find your own path.”
David thanked the prince and left the castle.
On the second day of Gary Con I ran into Tavis Allison, one of the designers of a new role-playing game called Adventurer Conqueror King, and his son, Javi. Tavis was at the show selling copies of his game, and playing D&D whenever possible. Javi had just come from one of the convention’s kid-friendly game sessions, D&D for preteen players, run by a twelve-year-old DM.
“I played a wizard, and I named him Gandalf,” Javi said, shaking my hand up and down with exaggerated fervor, until Tavis told him to stop. When the adventure concluded early, he explained, the DM let the players fight each other for fun, and it came down to Javi versus one other kid. “I hit him with a web and then a magic missile, and then I hit him with my staff, until . . . ka-pssh!” He mimed something exploding with his hands.
Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and The People Who Page 23