Destroy All Monsters

NOTE TO THE READER

This article is divided into two parts: a manual and a scenario. The first part, the manual, is an exposition of the game Dungeons & Dragons: what it is, how it’s played, how it came to be, and how it came to be popular, at least, in certain circles. If you once played D&D yourself (no need to admit that you played a lot, or that you still play), you may want to skim the manual, or turn directly to the scenario, which is an account of a trip my friend Wayne and I took last spring to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, in order to fulfill a wild and uncool dream: to play D&D with E. Gary Gygax, the man who invented the game (more or less: see below). If it isn’t immediately clear why this would be an interesting, or, to be frank, a fantastically exciting and at the same time a curiously sad thing to do: well then, you’d better start with the manual.

THE MANUAL

1.0 OUTSIDE THE CAVE

You are standing outside the entrance to a dark and gloomy cave. If you are anything like me, you have been here many, many times before. It isn’t always the same cave: Once it was a “cave-like opening, somewhat obscured by vegetation,” which led to the mystical Caverns of Quasqueton; another time it was the Wizard’s Mouth, a fissure in the side of an active volcano (“This cave actually seems to breathe, exhaling a cloud of steam and then slowly inhaling, like a man breathing on a cold day”). Once it was a passage from the throne room of Snurre, the Fire Giant King, “extending endlessly under the earth.” Once, memorably, the “cave” was made of metal: it was the outer airlock of a spaceship which had crash-landed in the crags of the Barrier Peaks.¹ You don’t know what lies in that darkness, but you have heard rumors: there are troglodytes, dark elves, a long-dead wizard, terrible creatures, treasure. You are here to learn the truth. So strike a light: you’re going in.

If you are not between the ages of eighteen and forty-five, or if you happen to be a woman, you may not know what Dungeons & Dragons is, exactly, or why you would want to get involved with it, even in the context of an essay in a respectable magazine such as this one. This introduction is for you, although, as it turns out, neither question is easy to answer from outside the cave. TSR Hobbies, the company that used to make D&D,² once wrote...