Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and The People Who by David M. Ewalt Page A

Entertainment System for Christmas in 1986, so I was probably ten or eleven years old when I made the character. Looking at it years later, I couldn’t help but be impressed by the way I replicated powers I saw in the video game: Wizzrobe wears a ring of teleportation and carries a magic wand that casts the spell Telekinesis. 4 Farther down the pile I found Aries, an eleventh-level human cleric. In the upper left-hand corner of the character record, in a space labeled “Player’s Name,” I’d written “Dr. Dave,” and below that, after “Character Began,” the date: 2/19/88. I was eleven years old. Aries carries a Bag of Tricks, one of my favorite magical items: It’s full of small fuzzy objects, and when a character pulls one out and throws it, it balloons into a full-sized, living animal. Rolling 1d8 determines the species, and, depending on your luck, you could get anything from a weasel to a lion.
    As I flipped through the sheets, each character reminded me who they were and what I wanted them to be. Leaf, a rogue, wasinspired by Matthew Broderick’s role in the 1985 fantasy film Ladyhawke. Robin, a swashbuckling fighter, was my attempt to emulate C. S. Lewis’s Prince Caspian. Another character, written in pencil on a faded piece of graph paper, wasn’t mine, but I remembered it all the same: Nightwind, a level-fifteen human ninja, carried a distinctive +3 wakizashi. 5 He belonged to my friend Michael Bagnulo and was used in a campaign we played all summer long before we started sixth grade. When school was out, role-playing game campaigns could stretch to a truly epic length and complexity; this one drew to a close in a marathon thirty-hour session at a beach house owned (and barely supervised) by our friend Scott Johnson’s parents.
    Not long after that, Michael transitioned from player to Dungeon Master and eventually ran the games that captivated me throughout high school. The next character sheet in the pile, a tenth-level human magic-user with the goofy name Alka the Seltzer, hinted at the beginnings of that storytelling skill: In the character description area of the sheet, under “Fears/Dislikes,” I wrote “sharks and anything else Mike thinks up.”
    Next I found Sir Howland the Wolf Knight, a level-fifteen human ranger. This character was a great example of a game gone wrong—an inexperienced Dungeon Master who has allowed his players to build ridiculously powerful characters and then showered them with money and treasure. 6 Sir Howland carries a +6 vorpal sword, a +4 dagger, and a +5 lance; in the section of the character sheet labeled “Special Abilities,” my younger self wrote “incredible senses, great speed, immune to disease, detect evil, summon ethereal sword, black belt in karate and ninjitsu, use technology, time/dimension travel.”
    Deeper in the red vinyl organizer, I found character sheets from other pursuits, like Star Trek: The Role-Playing Game. Instead of controlling wizards and warriors in a medieval fantasy setting, players of this 1982 game took the roles of crew members aboard a Federation starship. It bored the hell out of me, but I sure did like imagining new Star Trek heroes like the ones on these official “Starfleet character data records.” There’s Charles Adams, captain of the USS Achilles ; T’Pec, his Vulcan helmsman; Lieutenant Commander John Martin, first officer of the USS Lexington ; even Lieutenant David Ewalt, chief security officer of the USS Enterprise .
    The final pocket contained characters I created when I was in high school and devoted to bleak dystopian games like Cyberpunk 2020 and Shadowrun. Their Blade Runner –style settings were the perfect places for nihilistic teenage boys to run rampant, and the futuristic weapons and gear echoed my growing interest in computers. My characters from this era tended to be high-tech savants or streetwise urban brawlers. There’s Leonard Collins, a scientist who goes by the code name of Doc; most of his