God and Dungeons and Dragons

 Gasp! I started writing this in 2012? I guess I wrote myself out of the memory assault. Besides that I've exhausted myself with almost eight additional years of career drudgery. Work as a foreign service officer has actually been quite interesting, and I've had some assignments where the work was deeply important and meaningful to the welfare of American citizens, or even to people generally. But the 7am to 6pm daily grind, much of it in front of a computer, had the effect of dulling down memory. 

Assignments to date: Non-Immigrant Visas in Shanghai. American Citizen Services in Shanghai after a lengthy medical evacuation. Non-Immigrant Visas in Rio de Janeiro. Children's Issues - International Parental Child Abductions - in Washington DC. Non-Immigrant Visas in Hanoi. I am a Consular Officer after all. 

Getting back to the blog, it started as an exercise to get the upper hand on a deluge of memories and sentimentality, but even in the first post I said I'd have to write about D&D and role playing games to hold my interest. That is where I am at now. I can only keep this up if I write about RPGs. 

Tonight I turn to religion and D&D, specifically the character class of cleric. The D&D cleric is more or less a holly warrior, someone who has devoted life to upholding the tenants of her or his faith typically through martial means . In most D&D games this often mean fighting against the forces of darkness, evil, and chaos. The three other character classes in D&D are mage, thief, and fighter. None of those, come to think of it, are self-explanatory either. The different between a fighter and cleric though is the religious aspect. Clerics are warriors connected to their faith, god or gods, and this means they also have access to special holy powers, which in game terms manifest in protection and healing spells (plus others), and the ability to turn away undead creatures. In the basic rules of D&D that my twin brother and I started with there was not much explanation beyond this. However, it could beg the following questions: What faith, and what god or gods are cleric characters devoted to? Or are we talking about God? The basic D&D rules were purposefully ambiguous here, seeking the largest possible customer base. Advanced Dungeon's and Dragons, or AD&D, was not. 

The AD&D game had the book Deities & Demigods that detailed the pantheons of 15-17 different religions, depending on the printing. Some of these were "historical" such as the gods of ancient Egypt and Rome. Some were fanciful and copywritten, such as Cthulhu and Nehwon. Some were just legend, such as Arthurian. Then there were the handful of pantheons that were basically contemporary faiths, such as a collections of gods from Hinduism, and some Japanese and Chinese gods seem historical but are in fact still worshipped today after an Eastern fashion. One basic assumption of Deities and Demigods is that players may have their clerics devoted to these religions or gods. Not included in the book is God from the three monotheistic faiths of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. 

So when my twin brother and I got stated playing D&D in earnest  it was without the above Deities and Demigods, which we had never seen or heard of, and the friend who played with us, Casey, was a devout Mormon. Right off Casey wanted to play a cleric, and he was a holy warrior of God. This would have been about the time the big Satanic scare got started in the U.S. with regards to D&D, and I can remember Casey's mom, Elaine, grilling us on that, plus clerics. We made a good defense of the game  by saying that clerics were holy warriors devoted to God, fighting against evil everywhere. I had not thought at all about who clerics worshiped or where they got their powers until Casey started playing with us. When I did start to think about this it felt off somehow. I didn't invite God into my toys and hobbies and fun time, and it was a warren of a rabbit hole if you started to think seriously about how applying D&D rules to God and prayer might work. We later found that the D&D cleric and rules did work half decently if used with the ancient Greco-Roman cosmology and the like, but again, only if you didn't put too much thought into it. In the mid 1980's of rural Texas we never could have played D&D if we had gone the non-God route with Casey, so our clerics back then remained holy warriors of God, full stop. Don't think about it at all, just play the game and have fun.  If we had been aware of Deities and Demigods I wonder if we would have dropped the game altogether, at least until our next chapter in life.

Here is the first image of a cleric you see in the 1984 edition of  Dungeons and Dragons Basic Rules. It is an ink and pencil by Larry Elmore and a true beauty.  At some point I'll have to write about Elmore's contribution to the puberty years, but that is another story. 

This picture reminds me of a funny moment the first time Casey played D&D. He had armed his cleric character with a mace. Wielding it in combat the first time he said something along the lines of; "I pull out my mace and spray it right in the goblins eyes!" Damn dude, wrong century. I probably showed Casey this picture to get him on track with the older version of a mace. 

 

Introduction to Gary Gygax

 I've noted that I am not a game geek. That said, Dungeons and Dragons was my defining hobby through middle and high school. My twin brother and I bought and filched what what became a too large collection of D&D rule books, supplements, and settlings, much of which satisfied an itch to collect things and look at art work. Much of it went unused and little read. Essentially all of my allowance went to D&D, and if I could have played D&D every week I probably would have. But I couldn't quote a book, couldn't reference a rule beyond THAC0, was unaware of who the authors or game designers were, could not name a single RPG aside from D&D, never went to a gaming convention, had only a handful of Dragon magazines, and get this, was unaware of who Gary Gygax was. Never even heard the name until 1989 or 1990, seven or eight years into playing D&D.

Gary Gygax.  The first time I heard the name was from an odd encounter in my house with a visit from a friend of my Mom's which included her bringing over her son. I have no idea what the woman's name was, but I think his name was Troy. Mother and son were both fat and looked older than they probably were due to bad health. Apparently Troy wanted to meet us to talk D&D, and he was down in our Valdosta Georgia visiting from Atlanta.  I don't know if he was a college student, senior in high school, or what, but he impressed me as someone much older than myself. I guess maybe he was on a mission to recruit us to a gaming convention. Dragon Con remains huge in Atlanta, and I think Troy was involved in organizing Dragon Con somehow. The encounter took place when I was in 8th grade, 1989 or 1990. Leif and I were playing AD&D 2nd edition at that point. Troy looked at our books in disgust, and wanted to see our collection of Dragon magazines to reference a few points. We had only one, which had come out perhaps that month, or a month prior. He quizzed us about rules and personages and famous D&D titles and on and on. Leif and I have a way of shutting down when we don't know how to respond socially to a situation, and we did then. Most of his questions we met with silence, utter lack of eye contact, and exuding awkwardness so thick you could eat it with a spoon. Troy launched into a tirade against David "Zeb" Cook (whoever that was) and AD&D 2nd Edition, plus the Blume brothers (again, who the fuck?), and a frothy defense of Gary Gygax (again who? some guy akin to the right hand of God maybe?). It all went way over our heads. So now I knew the name Gary Gygax and that he had something to do with inventing D&D. And that was it for years to come. I could not have cared less. TSR painters Clyde Caldwell, Larry Elmore, Keith Parkinson, and Jeff Easley, sure I would have liked to know more about them if it didn't require too much energy on my part. Gary Gygax? No, I'm fine. 

Over a decade later I learned more about the guy. I remember when he passed away reading a headline "Gary Gygax failed his last saving Throw" and I thought, hey, that's the guy who started D&D. After that I started reading more about him and the origins of role playing games, but by then we had the internet and Wikipedia, so little effort required. 

To this day I 'm not concerned about Gary Gygax. I don't need to know about the man to have me one hell of a D&D session. But I am a father now and realize that we should give credit where credit is due. So thank you moms everywhere; thank you Jesus for being you; and somewhere down a long list I say thank you to Gary Gygax. Thank you for creating RPGs. 

And here is my first Dragon Magazine, issue #162.  I would have encountered Troy in the fall of 1990. I started playing D&D in 1982, at the age of six. I bought my first Dragon at the age of 15. That provides a sense of how disinterested in the details of the game I was and largely remain.