deaths. Where necessary, there were gods.
History progressed, blissfully free of historical or political or technological progress. Kingdoms rose and fell over the millennia, but there was no trend toward democracy, no Enlightenment, no industrial modernity, no Luther, no Hume, and absolutely, definitely, no gunpowder. No Principia Mathematica or Declaration of Independence. We held certain truths to be self-evident, but those truths were that elves hate orcs and wizards can’t wear metal armor.
What we had instead was world history frozen in an eternal thirteenth century—or, rather, something more complicated than that. It’s more as if history had paused forever during eighth-grade study hall, a Thursday afternoon free period stretched out into countless millennia, where knights and castles mix in with fantasy novels, fairy tales, vague orientalist fantasies, Arthurian kitsch, Norse mythology, Star Wars, Paradise Lost, medieval travelogues, heavy metal album covers, and dimly remembered historical trivia.
I felt it then, Simon’s victory. We could indeed make a world. Chess is a game with simple rules and pieces, a small sixty-four-space board, but there are more possible chess games than there are atoms in the universe.
But in the middle of all this, there’s you, a person playing a video game. For fun, for a challenge, for reasons hard to understand. Some of it is just cognitive burnoff, something to take up the mental cycles you aren’t using and, frankly, desperately don’t want, because a lot of it is just compressed, impacted sadness.
But there is only so much you can do about it. Your character is always going to be you; you can never ever quite erase that sliver of you-awareness. In the whole mechanized game world, you are a unique object, like a moving hole that’s full of emotion and agency and experience and memory unlike anything else in this made-up universe.
You can’t not be around it; it’s you, even though “you” might be the last person you want to be around. But when the game, the second-person engine, starts again, it tells you about yourself, and maybe this time you will get it to tell you the thing you’ve been waiting to hear, the mighty storytelling hack that puts it all together. You’re lost in a forest, surrounded by mist-shrouded mountains. You’re in command of a thousand gleaming starships in a conflict spanning the galaxy. You and the machine, like Scheherazade and her king mixed up together in one, trying over and over to tell yourself your own story, and get it right.
CODA: RULES SUPPLEMENTAL
Introduction
Simon’s original paper-and-pencil role-playing game notes were left in his old bedroom until his mother sold the house, at which point they went into storage for a few years and wound up in the Black Arts office. I’d seen them long ago, sat reading them sometimes during sophomore year, waiting for the school bus, waiting for the long afternoons to end and my dad to get home. I read and read them, but we never ended up playing them even though I’d gone through all the dungeons in my head.
There are two main rule books. There’s the one with the red dragon on the cover, a picture of a dragon rearing up and breathing fire down on an armored figure whose upraised shield divides the stream of flame. REALMS OF GOLD is written across it in gold letters. And then there’s the Creatures and Items catalog, the cover of which depicts men and women in medieval dress posed stiffly around an overflowing treasure chest, their eyes wide in greed and wonder. There were also many, many supplements and photocopied articles, and the maps to all the dungeons and lands, with accompanying descriptions.
You got the books for Christmas when the game was first popular, and maybe your parents didn’t know what to get for you, but heard this was a good gift. The sample character sheets are marked up and erased in a bunch of different places, with joke character names written in and doodles in the margins.
(It’s hard to explain to Lisa how some of this matters; it helps that she used to play bridge a lot. Also that she is a good listener.)
Basic Rules
It’s a game, but there’s no score and no winner, and too many rules to remember properly. There are six terrain types: Town, Forest, Ocean, Mountain, Ruin, and Sky. There are five public character attributes: Fortitude, Acumen, Nimbleness, Resolve, and Folly; these cards go faceup. There is also a sixth secret attribute that is different for everyone. It goes on a card you hold