"You may consider that you wasted your youth . . ."
With brilliant self-deprecating humour, novelist Mark Barrowcliffe, author of Lucky Dog and Girl 44, recalls his youth as a obsessive Dungeons and Dragons nerd. A pre-digital age role-player game "played by millions of boys and two girls the world over", Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) combined elements of magic and the supernatural with strategy and chance, offering participants the opportunity to escape into a wholly re-created world of pure fantasy. For a time it was this author's all-encompassing livelihood, the game's popularity peaking just when he reached adolescence (circa 1980) and quickly consuming all available time and interest until his early twenties. For Barrowcliffe, it was inconceivable that anything else could engage his attention. All conscious energy was devoted to furthering his skill level, enhancing his characters and generally immersing himself deeper into the D&D universe.
Not uncoincidentally, Mark's friends were wholly preselected on the basis of their affinity for the game and its accompanying mystical aspects, their wisdom on things like wizards, alchemy, dungeoneering and character classes attracting particular favor. Anything and everyone outside the D&D realm was dismissed as simply unnecessary. Even if you've never played Dungeons and Dragons and have only a hazy notion of what it is outside its vague characterization as a game in which some ill-adjusted or rather awkward-seeming boys sit around a table discussing (often heatedly) things like power quotients, orcs, dungeonmasters or cloaked figures, this is quite an amusing read. Barrowcliffe manages to bridge the gap between the bland, often satirical perception of the game and just what it is about D&D (and indeed much of the RPG culture) which incites such an addictive, almost rabid compulsion in select group of individuals over something which is altogether "make-believe". (823.914 BARROWCL)
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