THE MEGAPOPULAR ROLEPLAYING GAME HAS ALWAYS BEEN BOSS. JUST ASK ITS 50 MILLION PLAYERS WORLDWIDE – AND ONE NOSTALGIC STAFF WRITER.
By Robert Wilonsky
It’s old news that Stranger Things introduced Generation Streamer to Dungeons & Dragons. Plenty of videos are floating around YouTube starring Joe Manganiello, his massive custom-made D&D table and the celebrities with whom he rolls the 20-sided die. “It’s cool now,” video-game illustrator Suzanne Helmigh told The Guardian five years ago when the UK paper decided the now-50-year-old roleplaying game with some 50 million players was having “a moment.”
Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Masters Rulebook (Basic) (TSR Inc., 1983). Available in Heritage’s August 15 Dungeons & Dragons and Roleplaying Games Showcase Auction.
This isn’t just being late to the party; it’s showing up for the next party and finding out you weren’t invited. For some of us, that “moment” was decades ago. Some of us always knew D&D was cool. At least that’s what we told ourselves during the summer of 1980 when the short pants were made of corduroy, the eyeglasses were thick as bricks and the Von Erichs were the only superheroes worth a damn on the TV. Dungeons & Dragons was our Fortnite, Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings bound in a single Monster Manual my parents had gifted me that previous magical Hanukkah.
Though, in retrospect, we might have just been in it for the dice.
Dungeons & Dragons Player Character Record Sheets (Basic) (TSR Hobbies Inc., 1980). Available in Heritage’s August 15 Dungeons & Dragons and Roleplaying Games Showcase Auction.
That summer, my neighborhood pals and I were 11 and 12 years old but tall enough to be mistaken for mature 13-year-olds. Our mothers, unhappy that we had chosen swim-team staycations over sleepaway camp, would drive a handful of us hearty adventurers to the nearby library for what was meant to be an all-day campaign.
That’s how we played back then, which was long before the days of gaming shops offering tens of thousands of lead figurines, detailed maps and ornate dice, painted castles with LEDs and other miniature props, and dozens of tables upon which hundreds gather at any given moment to roleplay into the wee small hours of the morning. That small auditorium in the neighborhood library was our community, our connection, our Internet in the age of rotary phones.
Dungeons & Dragons Module #X3 Curse of Xanathon (Basic) (TSR Hobbies Inc., 1982). Available in Heritage’s August 15 Dungeons & Dragons and Roleplaying Games Showcase Auction.
My parents, the same wonderful people who took me to dingy comic shops and waited while I thumbed through every new title in the spinner racks, bought me all those early books for birthdays, holidays, regular old Wednesdays. They heard all about the “satanic panic”; in 1982, around the time I stopped playing, we watched together that stupid made-for-TV movie Mazes and Monsters with Tom Hanks and Chris Makepeace about the kid who got dangerously obsessed with roleplaying. They laughed at the fearmongering. All they saw were some kids sitting around a table going on adventures together, dorks pretending to be orcs with great charisma and strength on a quest for a dragon goblet … or something? It was a long time ago.
We schlepped the Dungeon Master’s Guide to class and pored over it during lunch in the school cafeteria. I read every word of those early books and remembered, at best, every other word. All of us took turns being Dungeon Masters. None of us was very good at it. At this late date, the most I recall from those afternoons in the library auditorium were the phrases “hit points” and “rock gnome.” Our campaigns, begun in earnest, usually ended two hours later in chaos, confusion and a sun-dazed, sweat-soaked walk to the nearby fast-foodery. But we tried and tried and tried again in between collecting comic books, trading baseball cards, trying to read and make sense of The Silmarillion, and watching Star Trek and Batman reruns.
August 15, 2024
Online: HA.com/40281
INQUIRIES
Lon Allen
214.409.1261
LonA@HA.com
I forgot most of this until I saw it on the Heritage website: the August 15 Dungeons & Dragons and Roleplaying Games Showcase Auction. Browsing the offerings triggered a lot of flashbacks and a couple of remember-when phone calls with old friends. None of us had spoken of those D&D days during the last few decades.
Maybe David Ewalt put it best in his essential 2013 book Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and the People Who Play It (which, duh, has an intro by Joe Manganiello): “Admitting you play Dungeons & Dragons is only slightly less embarrassing than confessing cruelty to animals or that you wet the bed. It is not to be done in polite company. But I am immune to your scorn. I know magic.”
Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Module #C5 The Bane of Llywelyn (1e) (TSR Inc., 1985). Available in Heritage’s August 15 Dungeons & Dragons and Roleplaying Games Showcase Auction.
It was inevitable that those early D&D rulebooks, modules and supplements would wind up being certified, graded and sealed by Certified Guaranty Company, along with other RPG favorites found in the upcoming auction. As Heritage Vice President Lon Allen told CGC in May, when the company announced its latest grading service, “This opens a new chapter in RPG collecting, and given the industry’s ever-increasing popularity, it couldn’t have come at a better time.”
Of course, now I wish I’d held on to those original Tactical Studies Rules books – not just because of their worth and collectability, but because they’re valuable reminders of a time when game-playing meant storytelling with friends. Years later, that D&D table turned into a poker table. But it wasn’t the same. Bluffing a bad hand has nothing on embarking on an adventure.
Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Module #C4 To Find a King (1e) (TSR Inc., 1984). Available in Heritage’s August 15 Dungeons & Dragons and Roleplaying Games Showcase Auction.
D&D might have left some of us. But it never left. And it certainly never stopped mattering.
If you ever find someone smack-talking Dungeons & Dragons, remind them that the two most perfect episodes of two of television’s greatest series involve Dungeons & Dragons. It’s in the episodes’ titles: Community’s “Advanced Dungeons & Dragons” and Freaks and Geeks’ “Discos and Dragons.” In each episode, a campaign served as a comfort, a tabletop as a life raft. Junk food was consumed. Laughs were shared. Treasures were gathered. Demons were conquered. And, yes, lives were saved.
Which reminds me: Where did I put my dice?
ROBERT WILONSKY is a staff writer at Intelligent Collector.