save for a slight shimmering of light in the corner. they are mere pin pricks, too small to be the glow of enchanted weapons. there is a sweet smell hanging like a fog over the room. sickly sweet almost, like cheap chocolate. as your eyes grow accustomed to the dark you make out a group of humanoid forms gathered near the tiny lights, unmoving. “i remove the firefly from my pouch and cast a light spell on my staff”. for twenty feet all around you a bright light is cast and at that exact moment when the shadowy figures are bathed in light and revealed to you, they let out a cry in unison, “happy birthday!!”. it is your friends. the ranger, the paladin, the dwarf, the bard, the cleric, and even the hulking fighter. you see that the pin pricks of light were candles atop a giant chocolate cake in the shape of a reclining swordwraith. yes, dungeons and dragons they remembered. you are 30 this year. now before you cast wind on the candles and blow those 5,000 experience points on a wish spell, let’s reminisce a bit.

when i think D&D the first thing that comes to mind is ninth grade. i had just moved to a new town and a new school. it was awful. torture of the kind only kids can dole out and only kids can experience. in the first month i made some friends, basically with the only kids who would have me so soon upon my injection into this new social order, namely the despised, the trod upon, etc, kids who had their whole lives to make a name for themselves in this small community and still managed to find themselves at the bottom of the high school food chain. well, with these guys i played my first late night, black coffee fueled D&D games. maybe 5 in all and they were actually really fun. after about six months though i found myself being accepted by some of the “cooler” kids, who informed me in no uncertain terms that the guys i was hanging around with were, to put it nicely, filthy sickening pariah. (an exact phrase which stands out in memory is: “dude! you can’t sit in here, this is the losers cafeteria, come sit with us in the cool cafeteria”) well, i was a kid after all, and six months of kindness and good faith are not the most valued currency at that age and hardly do lasting friendships make. it was like the classic “drug friends” scenario, where people united by a habit, must break with the people in order to break the habit. in this case the habit was being despised and derided on a daily basis. so, naturally, i abandoned my D&D friends one after another until even the memory of my having hung with them was expunged from the general consciousness. at this point i can only remember one of their names, stinky dirtyson (changed to protect the innocent of course). ah well, they had each other, and i had a new world of alcohol, drugs, and lithe, laughing, high school booty to supply me with my allotted youthful miseries. a good trade, all in all, no matter how cruel it may sound, even to me, in retrospect. anyhow having left them behind i, of course, also left behind D&D. (not to mention my old atari and a garbage bag full of game cartridges which i left behind and was too ashamed to ever go retrieve. stinky dirtyson!!!! i shake an angry fist in your direction!)

after reading that D&D was turning thirty that was my initial memory, but while searching the internet a bit, the real scope of dungeons and dragons in my own thirty years came back to me. peppered throughout my childhood there were D&D related ephemera which i had totally forgotten about. first off, long before i even knew that dungeons and dragons was a role playing game i had books. in my earlier first life as a misanthrope who shut out the world and stayed at home involved in his own artistic endeavors (not to be confused with my second life as a misanthrope who shuts out the world and stayed at home involved in his own artistic endeavors which i am living through at this very moment) i liked to draw characters, super heroes, soldiers, monsters, and what have you. back then i had some treasured sources of inspiration like the handbook of the marvel universe and dc’s who’s who, but upon reflection it struck me that two of the most treasured of all, long lost somehow, were my fiend folio and my monster manual. where as the others contained mainly aspirational hero types, with tights and matching accessories,  these two were nothing but pure, weird, six-headed, fanged, tentacled freak show, rife creatures like these and these.  looking at them now i can see the archetypical differences between the two ethos that by proxy characterized the people who were interested in them. on the one hand were athletic guys, spandex encased titties bouncing all around them, with the head of weird oddball geniuses under their boots. on the other was strangeness and lots of imagination, usually the type associated with evil geniuses…

other D&D ephemera that made its way into my life were, warduke one of the only non-g.i.joe action figures that had any place in the universe of action figure playtime, and owing to his obvious differences a special place at that, usually an assassin or bounty hunter or head evil henchman. then there was the cartoon which though not among my favorites i certainly remember, especially venger. also there was the dragonlance chronicles which i remember reading voraciously at a time when reading big thick books was not a priority to say the least. and this brings me to the D&D offshoot that i had almost totally forgotten, but which none the less was a staple for years, something i collected, scoured caldor’s and kay-bee for, and poured over lovingly. namely the endless quest books. seeing some of these covers actually sent shivers down my spine. i remember looking at them over and over, choosing my adventure again and again, trying usually not to cheat when i was flung down some endless slime coated chasm to my death. looking at a cover like this one for example almost puts me in shock. seeing these and others in the same vein (like this, or this, or this one) makes me almost painfully nostalgic. these were among some of the first books i remember obsessing over, reading every bit of text on them, from the cover, to the contents page, to the “other books in this series” page at the end. a habit which continues to this day. these books may very well have been the wellspring for my… book lust you might call it. for that alone i can’t ever bad mouth D&D.

later, in college, i actually played D&D again. this time bleary eyed, drunk and drugged. in a room full of quasi adult art students the game really took on a totally new cast. we played a few times, mostly just for something new to do with our peaked senses. and it was a lot of fun. there is very little chance i will ever play D&D again, aside from the occasional foray into neverwinter nights or baldurs gate on my computer, but looking back now i have to say i actually really enjoyed my forays into that world. so here’s a link to an article on the history of D&D, and happy 30th.