When Dice Were Made of Flint #2

It was the monsters that got me interested in Dungeons & Dragons, all those years ago in 1978. I’ll tell you about my first game later on, though. This week’s column is about monsters, and how the path of my life and career was pretty much inevitable, and it’s all Ray Harryhausen’s fault.

It all started with Jason and the Argonauts, a 1963 movie adaptation of the Greek myth. If you haven’t seen it, go and watch it. No, really – watch it immediately. I’ll wait.

You’ve seen it? Good. Those skeletons, right? Yes – that’s exactly the effect they had on me.

Barely two weeks later, the travelling library van brought a children’s retelling of Homer’s Odyssey to my primary school. Recognizing the costumes on the cover, I grabbed it. By the time I was done, I needed to know everything about Greek Mythology right away.

That Christmas, I asked a rather nonplussed department-store Santas for a book on Greek mythology. He reached into his sack and pulled out… an Airfix kit of a Model T Ford. You can’t win ’em all.

Through the rest of primary school, there were projects and activities on ancient Greece and Rome. A school trip to the British Museum added ancient Egypt to the list. In 1969, I got into a local boy’s grammar school. The place was like something out of the previous century, with gowned teachers and compulsory Latin. Several more years of Latin and classics, bolstered by day-trips to local Roman forts and villas in the holidays, fostered an interest in archaeology, and in 1979, thanks to a government grant, I was at Durham University studying Hadrian’s Wall at first hand. And playing far too much Dungeons & Dragons, which reminds me that I’m getting ahead of myself.

Back a year, to my first game. There was a minotaur. A minotaur! In my mind’s eye, I pictured its massive frame stop-motioning along the dungeon passage on its way to slaughtering our whole party. My character was one of the first to die, so I looked at the three little white rule booklets while I waited for the game to end.

So many monsters! I’d expected dragons, of course – it’s right there in the name – but there were zombies, and chimeras, and basilisks, and medusas (and gorgons, which confused me), and hydras, and rocs, and, and…

You could use this game to figure out whether a Greek minotaur could defeat a Norse troll, and you could do so much more!

I’m still a hopeless monster nerd. I’ve written bestiaries for many different games, and my Monster of the Month Club on Patreon gives me another excuse to write beasts from myth and folklore. I’m still that six or seven year-old kid watching Ray Harryhausen’s skeletons for the first time. I always will be.