The Fiend Folio, Part 1
by guest columnist Matt Briggs
YOU DID NOT BELONG, JUSTIN KRAMER.
We wanted to believe that you fit in with us, or rather, we wanted to believe that we could fit in with you and wear your shirt.
You remember your black and white horizontal striped button-down shirt, the same as the one in the Def Leppard video, “Pour Some Sugar on Me?” I’m sure Betsy Toth bought you that shirt when she outfitted you at the Squire Shop after she had acquired your pretty freshmen face. She introduced you to beer and dope and the volleyball squad.
After Betsy Toth, you carried menthols and Schlitz to Kelly Yoshitomi’s weekly Friday evening Advanced Dungeons and Dragons game. You were barred from his house after his mother found a beer can stuffed with butts behind the bonsai stand in her rock garden.
Now you came to my game, stumbling down the stairs an hour late smelling like cigarette smoke and Elizabeth Taylor’s Passion.
It was New Year’s Eve, and you were a normal American boy, so you had two half-racks of Milwaukee’s Best under your arms. Even so, you should have noticed the five-foot vinyl map with the inch grid calibrated to match the lead miniatures; you should have noticed the customized four page character sheets designed in MacWrite using the blackletter Old English typeface; you should have noticed the distinctly non-alcoholic odor of Cheetos, Mountain Dew, and damp Reeboks.
When I looked up and asked you, “Friend or Foe?” instead of laughing and saying, “We’ll see,” you should have taken the clue right then. You should have turned around and gone to the park and polished the beer off, alone. “You’re an hour late,” Jerry Hopen told you. “Sit down and roll up your character.” He confiscated the beer.
“Where did you get those?” John Segrist asked.
“I picked up it up on the way over,” you said vaguely, alluding to a bored familiarity with the whole process of getting beer.
“Can I have one?”
“No,” I said. “We have a game to play.”
Jerry put the cases in the refrigerator in the back room.
We were in an extended post-adolescent funk exacerbated not just by the pimply breakouts brought on by a pure 7-Eleven diet of hot dogs, nachos, and Super Big Gulps but because we hadn’t actually said anything substantial to each other out of role-playing game character since the age of thirteen.
We spent more time in the fantasy realm of extended wish fulfillment, devoted to the exquisite pleasures of not only rescuing damsels in distress but waltzing through remote towns as desperadoes swinging vorpal blades and bastard swords than we did sleep.
We disdained other players, and therefore you should have never even been invited, Justin.
One of the real pitfalls of playing role-playing games was the inflation fueled by the desire for omnipotence. Each player ended up with characters limited only by the individual player’s outer margin of imaginative hubris. These characters could stop the universe on a whim. The players squabbled to determine who was the baddest. When these players squabbled, universes exploded and the game collapsed back to five kids sitting around a dirty table in some dimly lit basement screaming at each other.
To prevent any break in the continuity of the fantasy, we had developed a complex manifesto describing the aesthetic of our game. This wasn’t kids’ stuff. We were wizards and shamans and there were rules to be obeyed in this fantasy as inviolable as the laws of physics.
You brought your own player character written on the thin, official TSR-issued player character sheet, and I said, “Put that away. You will have to start over again.” Our group allowed no outside characters because they had dubious experience in a different universe and brought with them foreign artifacts with dimly understood magical properties.
I recorded the features of our magical items in a private ledger, and we referred to each item by number. The detail of the game stayed with a single player, the official Dungeon Master, who couldn’t have a player character. I was the Dungeon Master and devised the metaphysical rules of the game, and determined everything from how gravity worked to the precise arc of a fireball. You didn’t understand that individual groups of players played the game as removed from each other as terrorist cells.
Our games proceeded slowly, each one taking progressively longer. They had at first dragged out for weeks, and then months, and the game that you broke up, Justin, had been going for over two years, and despite the interruption you had introduced, would continue until it sputtered out in 1989, with the members of the game spread out to the four corners of the US–Jerry Hopen as a corpsmen in California, Greg as an LSD-fueled prophet in Texas, Mark Imel as a busboy in Washington state, John institutionalized in Idaho, and me in basic training in New Jersey. I don’t know what happened to you.
The radio played “Barracuda.” We spent an hour drafting your character. While we played, we listened to KZOK (“Seattle’s Hardest Rock Station”) count down the hundred greatest rock n’ roll songs of all time. The songs reeled out, toward the grail of the greatest ten songs.
The entire list revolved the eternal roster of canonical of rock songs. They came, from our perspective, from the nameless past, somewhere in the mid-’60s to the mid-’70s, from the time before we bought LPs. The sequence of songs seemed as solid as the stars and the constellations, moving toward Hendrix’s cover of “All Along the Watch Tower,” “We Will Rock You,” “A Day in the Life,” “Hotel California,” and finally, “Stairway to Heaven.”
An upsetting year when “Kashimer” replaced “Stairway.”
NEXT: The tale continues.
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