Book Worm: a Sort of Autobiography

The Lord Of The Rings

Our family doesn't always agree on movies or TV, which I imagine is the human condition. (Can I get an amen?) My son and daughter bicker over what to watch and, for better or worse, Netflix provides lots of options. The French say, "Quel embarras du choix." An embarrassment of choices, which is like saying there are so many options it makes it difficult to settle on one.

In recent weeks, we actually (miraculously) agreed upon Stranger Things, a series my wife and I had dismissed after an episode awhile back, but our daughter got us all excited to give it another try together. It instantly became our family show, and I'm altogether grateful that we were able to enjoy it together for the first time.

Out of this developed a probably predictable interest in Dungeons & Dragons, a game I also dismissed after trying it only once, way back in high school.

Now, almost thirty years later, I find myself in a store that specializes in role-playing games, video games, and comic books, discussing the easiest possible method of introducing my son to D&D. There's a shelf of campaign books, each an adventure designed to last hours. Each a gentle guide through a fantastical quest. There are primed, unpainted, grey sets of figurines - half-elf male rogues, and dwarf warriors. Mages and paladins and bards. Trolls and orcs. And dragons.
I can see that leading my son into this world is no small endeavour.

I'm not just buying a game like Monopoly (which also take hours to play), I'm taking up a mantle - a position of responsibility both as a rule keeper, legislator, and judge, but more importantly as fantasy storyteller. I have to learn the intricacies of when to use various dice configurations, the relative hit points to armour classes, a host of creature stats and world locations, but I also have to balance the game play with engaging storytelling that is more collaborative than I'm accustomed to.

The rule book, I soon discover, is nearly cryptic. It doesn't answer all of my questions, although I know in truth nothing will. I always have a metric crap tonne of questions that in this case likely don't matter.

It takes me a week to read enough of the rules and watch enough Youtube videos to even attempt the first scene of The Lost Mine of Phandelver (D&D Starter Kit with training wheels), but when it came down to it it turns out that Gary Gygax (co-creator of D&D) was right all along. "The secret we should never let the gamemasters know is that they don't need any rules."

I survived my first encounters as a Dungeon Master, and my son loved his first leg of the adventure. I know I messed up the protocol for dice rolling and I think my understanding of armour and saving throws is deeply flawed, but my son and I had a marvellous time telling the story, describing the scene, navigating the first battle, and getting to know each other's characters.

I played a character on top of guiding the game as a DM, which is unorthodox but necessary. The DM runs the monsters and Non-Player Characters, but I felt like a barbarian wandering around raging at monsters was a recipe for disaster. Strangely enough it worked, so only Gygax can judge me.

I'm a first level human ranger whose skin is scarred from a terrible battle against a monster that still fills me with such dread I cannot speak its name. My name is Roland Bowie (tributes to Stephen King's Gunslinger as well as one of my favourite artists - David Bowie). My son is a first level human Barbarian named Gorb, from the Crags. He's a fearless warrior who has a talent for lopping off goblin limbs with his battle-axe, matched only by his innate skills of interrogation.

The more I think about it, the more I wonder how I avoided this sort of extension of stories this long. It seems only natural that I'd arrive here sooner or later. I read The Lord of the Rings when I was a boy, almost as soon as I finished The Hobbit. My Uncle Dave was reading the series and he said it was brilliant. That was the equivalent of a positive Google Review back in the early 90s. I remember how he described the Battle of the Pelennor Fields.

"It's so well written," he said. "Almost poetic in how it describes the scene, but somehow Tolkien keeps the action suspenseful and thrilling for like thirty pages. It's rad."

Having read it several times, I can confirm that yes, it's rad.

I've read battle scenes. I've written battle scenes. I've studied and read author's tips on how to craft effective, engaging, exciting battles in a story, and I know how difficult it can be. I have a lot of room to grow there.

I slowly devoured the books, then the appendices, and then moved on to various other works by Tolkien - even The Silmarillion which was not easy to dig into, but something about my personality drove me to seek out all the imagined lore of Middle Earth from genealogies to maps to bestiaries.

Some stories, you adore them so much that you feel a keen disappointment that you're not a part of their world. Harry Potter was like this. You so desperately want to exist there that you catch yourself translating between runes and the Roman alphabet to figure out what's written on the cover of LOTR, or memorizing how to greet a friend in High Elvish. It's the same motivation that leads you to download Duolingo and start learning Klingon. Or buy a lightsaber. Or join a Quidditch league.

There's a stigma surrounding D&D, one that isn't dispelled by its prominence in Stranger Things. You know that you're not going to increase your popularity among the in-crowd by playing it, but it's really your call whether that ever mattered. Your standing among artists, especially content creators, may actually be elevated by having some experience either playing D&D or leading as a DM.

My nerves as I sit down to play with my son start to jangle and clang around, but I have to remember that he's a great storyteller, creature-designer, and world-builder, and more than that, he's already designing video games. He crafts the artistic world from lore to game mechanics to characters. It's not all on me to tell the story - he can help create it as we go. And we don't need the complex rules - we can roll some dice and make it work, but we're always keen to describe the scene as those rolls translate to character actions.

Rolls 9.

"You swing your battle axe down with crushing force, and while the giant beetle's shell is strong, the curtains of bloodthirsty rage draped over your vision add strength to the swing of your weapon."

Rage modifier, +2. Total 11. Roll 1D12 for 3.

"The battle axe splits the fell beast in half and you, a barbarian, feast on its guts."

Again, I shouldn't feel unprepared for this. When he was six, The Hobbit was his bedtime story, but I didn't have a copy of the book, so for two months I just told him what I remembered, and he was enthralled. When we finished, we started co-creating a side adventure at bedtime where Balin the dwarf leads some of his kin on a separate quest to reclaim the Mines of Moria.

Making it a game with dice is only a natural progression, I realize. And the rules don't matter as much as the story.
Although that collection of polyhedral dice is pretty rad.