Summer of 86
The comic this week was a fun nod to my lifelong hobby of role playing games. The double meaning of adventuring inside being both the home and the mind was something that I thought about quite a bit when I was a kid. Role Playing games like Dungeons and Dragons have been a cornerstone for me since I was 10. If you are not familiar with this type of game, imagine a story telling game, shared with others and with a set of guidelines to arbitrate outcomes. They can range from rules heavy to almost freeform improv. If you are new to the concept I highly recommend looking into them, the games provide so much positive benefit that I think they should be a part of standardized education. There are a million and one places on the web to find role playing examples, and the variety of games and tables, vibes and overall story arcs is a diverse treasure hoard waiting to be discovered.
My origin story when it comes to roleplaying games is something I have told from time to time. I am sure that roleplaying will seep into the comic from time to time or the website in general so here goes. Some back story
Summertime 1980-something, small town and night had fallen. My brother was around 6 at the time and probably already in bed when my mom and her friend left to go dancing. I was often allowed to have an independent run of the house without supervision during the day but at night when mom was going to be cutting loose we got a handler. Babysitter for the layman. We didn’t have a regular, just whoever could be scrounged at the time. This particular night it was my moms friend's son. Shawn, he was an older kid and got roped into watching my brother and I that particular night.
Some context of who I was at the time. I was about 10 and my parents were divorced and we lived in a small town with very little access to the outside world. No bookstores, no museums, no zoos. Our town had 3 tv channels and 1 radio station. I was a smart kid, had an advanced reading level though at the time I didn’t love to read. I was also tiny, the shortest one in my class, not good at or interested in sports and I had a funny name compared to the rest of the kids. So I was pretty introverted, had a wild imagination and liked to spend time either alone or with only a few close friends. I was also very interested in drawing at the time, it seemed to be a great way to get some of the odd thoughts in my head out and into the world. I loved saturday morning cartoons and sci fi movies, fantasy when I could find it and anything odd or strange.
Cutting back to the summer night. I was drawing in my sketchbook, I had been on this kick where I drew animal people with suits or armor or tactical gear. Not cartoony, not cute, my drawings at the time were trying to emulate bold warriors with weapons and courage. I was 10, so they probably looked alot more doughy and amusing than anything else. My favorite toys at the time were Battle Beasts and I couldn't get enough of them. I was working on a dog man with a set of knights armor and sword when Shawn the teen that was watching us happened to look over my shoulder. His reaction to my youthful masterpiece; aka collection of scribbles, was that it reminded him of a D&D character. I had no idea what he was talking about so I asked what that was. It’s funny how some things will stick with you. It has been nearly 40 years.
“D&D is Dungeons and Dragons, it's a game where you play as a wizard or a fighter or a thief and you and your friends fight monsters.”
I remember setting my sketchbook down and grilling Shawn for the next few hours. I asked about rules, monsters, books, what this or that term meant. I asked how to play, how to start, how to win, and a thousand other questions. Many of the questions were silly but I was a kid and had no idea what any of this exciting new hobby was going to mean to my life.
The next day the reality of that small town came crashing back in. There were no game stores or comic book shops within fifty miles of my home. I wasn’t going to just bop down to the store to get books and dice. So I did the next best thing. I raided all of our board games, I stole all the dice from monopoly and scrabble and anything else I could find. I commandeered chess pieces and graph paper, pencils from my school bag and I started drawing my first fantasy map. It was on a single sheet of graph paper, a magical forest with a few roads leading through it. It had dragons and unicorns, fairies and a sword in a stone. I enlisted my best friend and we spent the rest of that summer playing a game we made up in our heads. The best thing was, it used none of the books or rules or even correct dice of the game I had described. We made everything up and it was just as much D&D as Critical Role is today.
Side note, if you are looking to get into RPGs and would like to see very talented people play them I would look into Critical Role, Dimension20, Adventure Zone and the list could go on and on…
We eventually got the books, a hand me down from my friend's older brother. Having the books gave us more structure and ideas, depth and challenges. But from that first day of rolling a few D6’s and deciding what that meant we were telling stories and letting the little math rocks decide our narrative fates. Role Playing games have been part of my life ever since. I don’t think I have ever gone more than a couple months without playing something and most of the time I have had a weekly or at the very least monthly session going. I have slain dragons, hunted werewolves, raced motorcycle gangs across a neon light cyberpunk dystopia and flown a starship across the heart of a dying galaxy. The stories are diverse and complex, or simple and straightforward and each and every one of them I love.
So yeah, my origin story. Or at least as far as role playing games goes. I think we all have several origin stories. Different aspects of our lives are tied to a series of different events.
Enjoy the comics. I am getting back to drawing now.
