Dark Dungeons

I played a lot of Dungeons and Dragons as a teenager. Gaming trailed off as I entered into young adulthood, got married, and had kids. I still play now, usually only for a week or so once a year with a couple of the same guys I gamed with in high school.

In addition to playing D&D, I also attended church regularly and was an active and heartily believing young Christian lad. I began doubting my faith, ironically enough, as a result of the now classic religious tract, "Dark Dungeons" published by Chick Publications. The art isn't too bad, in a hyperbolic comic book way, but the dialog and situations portrayed in the tract are so ludicrous, it made me begin to wonder about the realities of my strongly held faith. Could it be just as much of a fantasy as the games I played?

Thanks, Chick Publications, for being the catalyst that began my questioning that ultimately allowed me to look at my faith with critical eyes and finally to discard it.

Artifacts #3: Hey MU, What's Your AC?

These volumes sit in a place of reverence on my living room bookshelf and remind me of my place in the RPG universe. My original, 3 volume D&D set and AD&D Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's guide and Monster Manual were lost on a rainy night in Santa Ana in 1980, but a friend provided me this set on long-term loan to what has become a single-shelf museum to the grandfather of pen and paper RPG. The fact that we now have to prefix "RPG" with "pen and paper" bring on a melancholy that is sometimes hard to shake.

A few years ago, a couple friends and I decided to run a couple of nostalgia games using first the original rules and then another game using the AD&D rules. How we managed to play with these in the 1970s and early 80s is beyond us.  As we played, we tried to find rules we were sure existed, but were nowhere to be found. There was so much ambiguity that house rules accumulated like flowstone, obliterating the original core and becoming indistinguishable from the literal rule sets.

It was an enjoyably frustrating few hours at the end of which we decided we would probably never try again. With D&D, as in life, you can never really go home.