Raven's Roads
Living an interesting life: the travels and musings
of motorcycling author Linda R. Moore

Mar 22, 2007

Thinking Out Loud: Wandering monsters

I had a theme in mind for this week that was topical, but the more the week goes by the more my mind wanders in random directions, because it’s full of too many things to do and is becoming rapidly swamped. And then the phrase wandering monsters popped into my head because it’s how my mind feels like right now, monstrous and wandering, and I wondered how many of you know what wandering monsters were.

Back when I was twelve or so we used to go to Grandma’s house every Saturday for a visit and fish and chips. She got the magazine that went with last week’s Sunday paper and because I enjoyed reading it she’d save it for me. In one of those magazines was an article about live roleplaying and I read, fascinated, about both it and Dungeons and Dragons.

Within a week or two I had located a boxed set at the Castleford toy shop and google-eyed at it longingly until, finally, my disapproving parents succumbed and bought it for me. Thus was a dungeon master born. I roped in my next door neighbors and that was that. Three girls between 10 and 13 playing D&D, every week, as often as we could get away with it. I adapted their characters’ names to use as countries in the world I created for my novel.

I got an early boxed set of Basic Dungeons and Dragons which existed alongside, but separate from, AD&D. AD&D 2nd Edition hadn’t been born yet–it was a few years before I hooked up with that one. You could buy adventures, ready-made, but they also had a system where you could randomly generate dungeons by rolling dice. And when you were playing the game, if you rolled a six or a one or whatever it was, “wandering monsters” (what kind was determined by a roll of the dice) would come down the maze of twisty passages all the same to deplete the hit points of the hapless player characters.

We were all young, so when someone died after much wailing of “that’s not fair” I would find a way to miraculously bring the puny first level characters back to life, because living seemed a lot more fun than dying. The laws of physics were not an issue as they carried their three swords plus one and their twenty potions and their entire fortune of 20,000 gp, not to mention ep and sp and even the lowly cp in a single small backpack. Identifying the jewels and gemstones was no problem: you found a diamond worth 25 gp. Cool!

It was a trip through the imagination, and a glorious one. I played the game in form period, the half hour of school before classes began, keeping an ever-changing crowd of adolescent boys under my dice-wielding thumb. I learned about programming Basic by taking the random dungeon generation tables and turning them into a program, never quite finished, but quite complicated.

I began writing adventures, and got every issue of Imagine magazine, Britain’s answer to Dragon. I own, to this day, all 30 precious issues and the arrival of each was a joy. My parents must have been surprised that what they’d thought would be an expensive whim turned out to be a many-year delight and obsession. I sent off submissions to the magazine and eventually got a hit, a short scenario set in a wax works run by vampires (the wax figures were people who were magically frozen and being used as a blood bank).

It was my first ever paid piece of writing. I was fifteen years old and my pride hit the ceiling when another reader of the magazine acknowledged me at school a few days later.

When I got to university, I joined Lancaster University Role Playing Society (LURPS) and when we decided that once a term we’d maraud some random Lancaster restaurant in costume, it was I who coined the term SLURPS. Riding back in pooled cars, we’d wave our rubber swords out of the windows because it just seemed like the right thing to do. I was able to go live roleplaying a time or two, and joined the Dark Ages Society which at its high point created a village and sword practice displays. Some of our members had real swords, which were too heavy for me to lift. I gained a scar on my finger from practicing spear-fighting. There is a picture of me in the newspaper with my legs in the air, hiking boots, permed hair and a big grin: “authentic fighting display”.

We were as authentic as purple egg yolks, but we were happy.

I met my first husband that way, both of us dressed up as magicians–it was meant to be. When I went to Germany and was lonely, I came across a gaming store and met a group that way, learning the German for broadsword and dragon and orc alongside economics and politics and das Arzneimittelskostensdampfungsgesetz.

But when I finished college, and jobs and life came along with their inevitable distractions, it became one of those things that had been fun, but which I no longer had any time to do. Dungeon creation is time-consuming and by now I was involved in a writers’ group and using all my creative energy to write short stories and my “best-selling” fantasy novel.

I’d bought the five books from the second basic D&D edition and then graduated to AD&D second edition, but when I divorced my ex (it wasn’t meant to be, after all) and married Don, the only piece of my D&D that came with me were a few painted dragons and the original boxed set, now over 25 years old.

I own the basics of what is now the only D&D game, nicknamed Third Edition, but I bought it because it looked neat and not because I play. I do, however, fondly leaf through the pages and use them as inspiration from time to time, feeling the old stirring of hack and slay style playing, of memory, of imagination…of childhood. The artwork is superlative, a long way from the line drawings and crude figures of yesteryear, but the text could be a little bigger. Some of we DMs are aging.

If I ever make it big. the first thing I’ll do is buy one of everything ever published for the game.

And then after leafing through a few more pages, I wander away, a wandering monster in a strange and offbeat world, making sure to double check that I’m not about to step into a giant acidic jello cube.