The Honest Courtesan

I was first introduced to Dungeons and Dragons in the spring of 1981 or maybe a bit earlier; I started my first campaign in the summer of 1981, and I’m sure it will surprise absolutely no one to hear that I rapidly began filling up notebooks with additions, modifications, and what I thought of as corrections to the game system; by the early ’90s the game I was running for my players had diverged so much from the “official” system (was it 2nd edition then?  I wasn’t really paying attention) that they could only barely be considered the same game.  When Grace and I became roommates early in 1998, I was delighted to discover that she had played a little herself and was eager to expand on that experience.  Matt, too, enjoyed it, and I was happy to run a solo game for him as well.  But eventually, life intervened as it is wont to do; by the late Oughts we rarely got the chance, and by the early teens we had let it lapse altogether.  It wasn’t for lack of desire; it was just that I was so busy with everything from blogging and activism to trying to build a house to dealing with financial disaster to going through a divorce and moving to Washington, that I simply didn’t have the energy.  Those who have never played may be unaware that the game takes a lot of preparation on the part of Game Master (AKA “Dungeon Master”) – creating a world and everything in it, and preparing adventures for the players to enjoy – and I had precious little creative energy to spare.  Oh, sure, some people enjoy running premade adventures created by others, but to me that was as unsatisfying as a TV dinner, and besides those were created in a version of the system  I couldn’t even have recognized.  By the late Teens I was really missing all the fun; I considered starting a new game several times, but things just never came together.  Then finally this winter, I brought it up to Grace again, and she was enthusiastic; around mid-January we started playing every Sunday, and though neither of us is young any more, we can still recapture a little of the youthful joy of fantastic adventures in a magical land of imagination.