When Dice Were Made of Flint #4

Although I had played D&D semi-regularly before going to university, it was in my undergraduate years that gaming started to take over my life.

I quickly found a group of friends who had either played before or were interested in finding out more about this (still) obscure and strange game with funny-shaped dice, and before long our entire weekends were devoted to playing.

The circumstances of time and place were perfect. In the early 80s, the student grant system had not yet been dismantled, which meant that none of us had to work a side-job in order to pay for tuition and accommodation. Transport was not a problem because we all lived in the same college, and it took no more than three minutes to walk from one end to the other. It was fully catered and there was a bar on the premises, so we never needed to leave except for classes. The icing on the cake was that the three core books of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons were either published or imminent, giving us all kinds of new classes, monsters, and other goodness to explore.

We leaned into it hard. We took turns DMing, assembling in the room of the weekend’s DM after lunch on Saturday (or sometime after lunch on Friday, if none of us had lectures that afternoon), and playing right through to Sunday evening, stopping only for meals and “bar breaks.”

While I was studying archaeology, the rest of the group were split between physics and mathematics. The differences in our approaches soon became clear: I leaned more toward the narrative, providing backstories and NPCs that only I really cared about, while the others tended toward rules exploits, numerical thought experiments, and pure, unfettered mayhem.

Where I was reading ancient sagas, they were devouring science fiction of all stripes, which is how I found my characters faced with dimensional travel, gigawatt lasers, motorcycles (one handily kept running through a wish spell that caused petrol to be teleported continuously into the fuel tank) and submachine guns (obtained through an astral travel accident that led to an extremely under-reported episode in World War II).

At the time, I thought all these things were not “proper fantasy,” but I realize now that, by definition, fantasy is unrestricted thought. My knowledge of ancient mythology, technology, and social dynamics was actually limiting my creativity.

I was creative in other ways, homebrewing all manner of playable species, classes, spells, and monsters. Since we all had the Monster Manual pretty well memorized, I devoted myself to finding new creatures from myth and folklore (ever the purist!) to keep this unruly group on their toes.

That put me in a very good position to start writing for publication, too – but more of that later.