Juha-Matti Santala suggested the topic of love letters to his readers last week, and I’m glad he did, because it helped shake something loose in my head. Six months ago, James Maliszewski made a pensive entry on his blog Grognardia called “Why I Stayed.” Reading it made me feel pensive in turn. That day I added a reminder to my phone that has been prodding me ever since: you should write about Bruce.
Maliszewski’s post, on the occasion of his birthday, was about why he stuck with role-playing games when the rest of his childhood group turned to other hobbies. Half a year later, I’ve just had a birthday of my own. I’m younger than Maliszewski, but just like him, I first found a copy of the D&D Basic set intended for someone else tucked away in a closet. I wonder how many of us out there have that oddly specific element to our it-was-there-and-nobody-stopped-me stories.
Many people in my demographic have related how evocative those books could be for a geeky kid; I’ll save you my own recitation. Unlike Maliszewski, I never found a regular gaming group until college. I prevailed on my patient younger brother to join in short-lived adventures many times, but most of the fun I had with the game was in reading the materials and generating ephemera that I never put to use.
If I try to answer why I stayed, I have to question my own premise. I didn’t play an actual D&D campaign for more than a decade after I found that box set, and as I write this, it’s been at least a decade since I played last. I’m still a tabletop person—just last weekend, I had a great time with a few dozen strangers at Forge Midwest—but I grew to prefer a very different style of game. Why did I stay? Well… did I stay at all?
But if I instead ask myself who I stayed for, all of that clears away. Bruce was my cousin, and the closest thing I had to an older brother. I wish I didn’t have to write about him in the past tense.
After I first dove into that D&D Basic set, with its red books and pointy beige dice, I saved up allowance (or parental indulgence) for more supplements when I could. But at least four-fifths of the D&D stuff I came to own was a gift from Bruce. He lived in our basement for a while, and when he moved out, he left me boxes of rulebooks, adventures, and magazines that I would pore over throughout my adolescence.
I’ve told this story before, fifteen years ago, in a eulogy I sent to be read when I couldn’t attend Bruce’s funeral. He was too young. I will always miss him.
I still have most of the original collection, lined up in particle-board squares in our attic. The photo above depicts the shelf with the adventure booklets, which TSR called modules, and all the classics are there—the Tomb of Horrors, the Isle of Dread, the Palace of the Silver Princess; Hommlet, Saltmarsh, Inverness, and White Plume Mountain. I’ve read them, but never played them. Not yet.
My wife and I don’t have kids, but my nieces and nephews are growing up quick, and one thing they have in common is that they love dragons and dungeons. It won’t be long before it’s time to hand the collection on to them. But some of these books are older than I am, with all the cultural presumptions of a once-narrow hobby, so I want to make care and context a part of that handover. Not just in words, but in practice.
In part because of Bruce, I’ve spent most of my life thinking about games, and how they convey themselves to all kinds of people. One of my goals for the next few years is to sort out how I can share imaginative play with the young people in my life, passing on the best parts of the traditions that shaped me while trying to leave the old stumbling blocks behind. If that means I finally get to run a party of small nerds through a house-ruled Dungeon Module B1, that would be pretty cool.
I don’t know if my niblings will hang onto their current interests any longer than James Maliszewski’s friends did. Their futures are still so unknown, and sometimes I feel at least as anxious as I do excited about that. But I love them like Bruce loved me. I’d better stay, as long as I can, to see where their adventures take them.
