Chapter 2 - Dark Dungeon Master

Someone got me into Magic: The Gathering around my freshman year of high school, which brought a circle of new friends to match my new surroundings. For those of you who don't understand Magic, it's a collectible card game based loosely around the principle that you play a wizard who doesn't like another wizard very much, and you take turns unleashing magical shitstorms on each other and summoning monsters to tear their lungs out. These spells and monsters take the form of cards you're forced to purchase in packs of 15 for $3 a pop. Naturally, the best cards are rare, and if you hope to win reliably you'll design your deck of cards around a theme. This means that most of the cards you buy you have almost no interest in except as trading fodder, and you end up buying a veritable assload of cards.

I got out of Magic around my senior year. Three years is a fairly common duration before the average rational person burns out on their first card obsession. Myself, I just find it ironic that most people talk about quitting Magic the same way they do about a meth addiction. The game is totally harmless, of course, but I think there comes a time in every Magic gamer's life that they give themselves a sudden terrible reality check and realize just how much money they've sunk into buying thousands of cards to win local store tournaments where the prize is more cards. And just when you've perfected your deck of ultimate ass-kickery, one of three things happens:

1) A new edition of cards is released which is designed specifically to undo the strategies abused to great effect in the last edition, and your deck will be obsolete in about two weeks.

2) Your deck works wonderfully and nobody will play you socially because you can't lose, and you end up designing a new deck anyway, requiring more cards.

3) You get bored with your good deck and start designing other weird variant decks, usually because someone dares you to. Suddenly you've designed your deck around the Rabid Wombat card, or slapped together 70 cards attempting to make Plague Rats feared in tournament circles again, and then you realize you've officially lost your mind.

I quit because almost as soon as a new edition of cards came out, Scrye Magazine would almost immediately write an article about the best possible decks their playtesters had designed, and most of my friends would copy it. And sure enough, compared to me they were darn near unbeatable. The popular decks when I was playing were the "burn" decks based on direct-damage cards, "denial" decks and "stasis" decks, both based on the theme that
with the right cards you can force your opponent to do nothing as long as you do nothing, so eventually the other person will simply die of old age and you win by default.

The real reason I quit is because when I started, there were already more cards floating around from previous editions than I could keep straight in my head. I couldn't even imagine trying to get back into the game today. There have literally been dozens of new sets released, each with hundreds of new cards and tons of new rules. No person could remember them all, and I value what little remains of my frayed sanity too much to attempt it. In my day, if a Craw Wurm hit the table (6/4 with no special abilities), that was some serious shit. Then all of a sudden I would see entire lunch sessions pass where every game was a "stasis race," where everyone at the table had a stasis deck, and it was just a question of who lucked out and got the right cards first. I couldn't keep up with the suitcase gamers. I didn't want to. I was the guy making stupid chucklehead theme decks.

It just wasn't my thing. CCGs take a level of commitment and maintenance that eventually wore me down. What the heck, it was fun while it lasted, and it served as a gateway into almost every other game I ended up playing since my freshman year.

We played during hour lunch hour, sometimes in the cafeteria and sometimes outside, sitting right on the concrete when the weather was fair. Our nutrition was humiliating. I usually had the school-assigned meal du jour, be it hamburgers & fries, hot dogs & fries, pizza & fries, burrito & fries, sandwich & fries, or salad. So basically I had a lot of fries. Bill, crazy bastard that he ever was, bought the same thing every day without fail: two chocolate chip cookies about six inches in diameter and a Dr. Pepper from the vending machine. It's a wonder he didn't die of insulin shock right in front of me after a year of that.

We were approached about a month after the start of the school year by a couple of very concerned-looking girls. We were playing a number of games. Bill and I had just begun dealing the cards, and I'd set aside an old edition of the AD&D Player's Handbook on the ground nearby. They watched us laugh and taunt each other for about a minute before one of them spoke up in a quiet, fearful voice.

"Do you guys worship Satan?"

That was unexpected. We looked up at them with blank "say what now" expressions for a long while. Not so much offended or horrified, just mentally unable to process the stupidity of the question posed to us. Most of them laughed. I had to hear it again just to be sure I understood them. "What?"

"Well there's a devil on your book." She pointed down at my Player's Handbook, printed from the old days of AD&D when the book had demons and devils in it before TSR bowed to parental pressure and renamed them baatezu and tanar'ri, and in a few instances even had art of bare-breasted nymphs and succubi. This particular cover is probably well-known to most old-school gamers, depicting an adventuring party engaged in a battle around a great statue of a horned demon. Exactly the sort of picture most ignorant people seriously over-reacted to when they heard D&D players were the sort to cut pentagrams into themselves with straight razors while jerking off over copies of The Silmarillion.

And of course me, being an insufferable smartass, swung my hand in the air, made devil horns and said "What do you think?"

Believe it or not, this gesture, long the salute of heavy metal fans everywhere, made these two young ladies recoil a step. Whether it was disgust or fright, I'm not sure, but the whole display was so ridiculous the other gamers found it pretty funny so they mirrored my gesture. We all got a pretty good laugh out of it.

What I didn't know at the time, and I slowly learned through the rest of the year, was that my school was populated almost entirely by Mormons. Now, I don't have an issue with Mormons in general, and I don't want you to think that when I mention Mormons I'm talking about the creepy, maniacal kiddie-raping polygamist dirtbags we see on the news. There are assholes in every religion, so it's not fair to judge an entire faith by those people, just like I don't think all Catholics diddle choir boys.

Anyway, what you have to understand is that Mormons are very conservative, very staunch believers with a strict code of ethics and a mandate to evangelize when they can. I'm not a Mormon, and have never been religious by any stretch. I don't care what you worship or who you screw as long as nobody is hurt or forced to act against their will. When it comes to religious debate, I just want to be left alone. But at my school, there were a number of real go-getters flush with the good word they'd just received from their daily seminary session in the middle of the shcool day, and they had a way of passive-aggressive sermonizing, putting on a show of concern when they saw you doing something they disapproved of, like drinking something with caffeine. They had an entire litany of facts on how unsafe it is to imbibe a drug like caffeine, and by god you were going to hear it. Just once. Message delivered, they knew where you stood.

They never associated with me, so socially I found myself on the same level as the stoners and the criminals-- actually rather good friends to have when you weigh 80 lbs. and have a big mouth.

In hindsight, throwing the devil horns in the air was an incredibly stupid thing to do. The Mormons took it seriously. All of a sudden they were looking at what amounted to a Satanic cult in their midst, and I had suddenly put everyone in a lot of trouble.

The next day I was brought to the principal's office and asked if I would open my bag. I did. I would have even if there was a lawyer around to warn me that it wasn't a very good idea, and let her inspect the same goods I'd brought the previous day: Magic cards, a Player's Handbook, and a leather bag full of funny-shaped dice. She suspended me on the spot for gambling on campus for the dice and the cards, and threatened expulsion if I ever brought any of my gaming materials with me again. I half-expected her to offer me some kind of a deal to name my other co-conspirators in this gambling ring, but instead she gave me my things back and sent me home.

I never really knew where the principal really stood on the issue. If I was committing some kind of a crime she shouldn't have given my dice and cards back. Maybe she was just responding diplomatically to a public outcry against me. The suspension didn't mean anything; it was just a warning. She might have been doing me a favor.

My mom remained strangely quiet on the matter, seeming to trust that I'd made a lapse in judgment that I wouldn't repeat again. Needless to say, we weren't gambling, we didn't worship Satan (and Constitutionally-speaking, so what if we did?), and we weren't out to cause a spectacle. But the worst thing I could have done would have been to make a public issue out of it. By raising a fuss I would have just made a lot of people angry and made my expulsion a certainty, and maybe gotten some of my friends the boot out of school, too. If it was just me, I mightn't have cared. How do you argue this logically with people with a load of moral outrage to retaliate with? All they'd have to do is whip out the infamous Magic card "Unholy Strength" which bore a flaming pentagram in the background and it would have been enough to sink my argument. It's a hard matter to argue rationally when your detractors are convinced that you serve the master of lies.

Bill & Keith helped to smuggle my goods to the school. I was never searched or bothered again, but we'd all decided it would be best to lay low. They'd made contact with a sympathetic electronics teacher who looked like the bassist for ZZ Top. During lunch we'd sneak off to his lab in one of the school's peripheral buildings, safe from the prying eyes of our persecutors, and roll the bones. I'd become a real persona non grata, that Satanist kid nobody would talk to with the dirty cards and filthy books. Nobody did anything blatant like spit on me or make the sign of the cross in my presence, but quite a few people knew I was a gamer and thought I was evil for it. Or if not evil, some kind of a pervert. I thought we'd left that kind of paranoia behind in the 70s. Not so. I never suspected until later that the electronics teacher who offered us sanctuary and allowed us to game in secret was probably risking a lot if we'd been discovered. He was housing what many people considered to be a gambling ring.

It was there that I started game mastering when I'd brought out a boxed set of maps and Battletech miniatures, a game about people pummeling each other with astoundingly expensive giant robots for the sole reason that punching stuff with 20-story tall nuclear-powered robots is an awesome thing to do. Admit it: if you could, you would.

We started rolling up characters under the Mechwarrior system, which was an awful, awful system, but it was never meant to be anything spectacular. We all liked the idea of giant robots, and Battletech had those cool sheets depicting the robots where you could fill in dots corresponding to how much damage you took. It was easy to run. They customized their 'mechs, put them on one side of the map, and I'd put an opposing force on the other side of the map, and we'd go at it for an hour at a time. All I had to do was weave a story of intergalactic warfare in which they, a combat lance of the Ghost Bear clan, were the biggest badasses around.

It was a good game. The system was one of the weakest I've ever played, but that doesn't matter when you have interested players who enjoy the story. I won't lie and say the game was a dramatic wonder; it was just a group of heavily-armed psychopaths bopping around the galaxy causing absurd amounts of collateral damage for great justice.

That particular game ended when Jim's character, the feared Star Colonel Striker was unexpectedly killed in battle against a lowly Inner Sphere Hatchetman 'mech, in what has gone down in my mind as one of the most catastrophic and improbable critical hits I've ever witnessed. It was during a routine reconnaissance mission of a suspected Inner Sphere forward command post. The IS 'Mechs were no match for the Ghost Bear clan's superior technology and genetics, and their sentries fell easily before their combined might. During the mop-up, Striker engaged and quickly brutalized a lowly, outclassed Hatchetman guarding a weapons cache. The Hatchetman suffered grievous damage and even lost its primary melee weapon when Striker turned the weapons of his Kodiak loose. In desperation, the Hatchetman fired his only remaining weapon, a pair of chest-mounted machineguns (one of the weakest weapons in the game, doing only a paltry 2 points of damage at most).

Somehow-- don't ask me how-- the hit location roll came up snake-eyes: a torso hit with a chance for critical system damage. And the bad news just kept on coming: somehow those ballistic rounds found some unforeseen weakness in the Kodiak's armor, punched through, and ricocheted around inside, causing three direct hits to Striker's engine. Three engine hits are enough to destroy the 'mech completely. It was one of those miracle shots that only happens in exaggerated gaming stories that nobody really believes, because the odds are ludicrous. But there you have it.

Jim-- the guy playing Striker-- refused to allow me to fudge the die results. I argued (and would probably still argue today) that there's no conceivable way that anyone could pull such a lucky shot off, but Jim was adamant. He pronounced Striker dead. Shamed by their failure to protect their commander, the other officers in the lance returned to homeworld and committed suicide as an apology for such humiliation. Oh sure, it sounds funny now, but at the time it was a very somber, teary-eyed event. These guys were very samurai and they took it hard when their boss got aced by some lowborn punkass. It totally derailed the campaign.

We decided to move on and tried AD&D. The genre change would allow us to start fresh and release some tension. My older brother had bought me an AD&D boxed set called Ruins of Undermountain, and I volunteered to run them through it.

Undermountain is an agonizingly huge dungeon that nobody is ever really supposed to finish, and even if you did, at the bottom is the dungeon's creator: Halaster Blackcloak, a guy who the party should never encounter because if anyone were to write his stats down, it would look like this: "Halaster Blackcloak: EXTINCTION LEVEL EVENT." He's one of those guys like Eliminster that are untouchable. Even if you had a party of characters annoying enough to kill him, he's got clones scattered all over the world. You just don't mess with him. He's an act of God, not a character.

Around this time I'd attracted a lot more players. Discreetly, of course: we sort of had our own "you do not talk about Fight Club" rules to keep the fuzz off our backs, but when we started Undermountain I had twelve, maybe thirteen players. Most DMs will tell you that you should limit your groups to six at most, and they're right. I was doing fairly well, all things considered, but table talk with a group that big was approximately as orderly as the WWF's Royal Rumble. Not to mention that battles started taking three days to complete, because any force I could create that would be a challenge to twelve hardy player characters amounted to a small-scale war. It wasn't feasible.

I ended up splitting the party into two groups, each playing two days out of the week, and on Friday we'd do something else. For a while I was DMing Shadowrun on Fridays. These were days I had a lot more energy. I don't think I'd ever want to try DMing two days a week again, much less five. Somehow I pulled it off. I even signed up for the RPGA: a national AD&D club that held organized gaming. There weren't any conventions in Arizona except for twice a year, but for a time I was even DMing RPGA games on Sundays at Waterloo. Six days a week of DMing?

No wonder I burned out.