Chapter One: The Path to Sala'Thar

GLORY TALES
Or
Zen and the art of Dungeon Mastering.
By Neal Burton
30 Odd Years of Fantasy Roleplaying Games
by the Creator of the REALITY RIDERS Game.

Afore we begin…

The proceeding blog is part memoir, part travelogue, part game, part philosophical blockbuster, part mystery and part celebration.
Like most of the best things in life it probably defies fitting into a neat category. Much in the same fashion that School meals slithered past the classification of food and nutrition back in the 70’s!
(Naturally the proceeding blog will attempt to make a liar out of me ... Especially the part about being a Philosophical Blockbuster.)

The names of the guilty and innocent have been changed on most occasions to protect their identity. In other cases I have left the plain ugly truth in full sight so the people in question can have a good laugh without having to wonder “Was that really me??”

I don’t regret many of the moments I spent on my chosen hobby. Spending time with friends doing things you love is probably the best way to spend the leisure time we often take for granted in the effluent Western World. When I have regretted those moments, I’ve tried to use humour (my first choice as a defence mechanism) to play those moments up and have recorded them here for your amusement.
Whether you are laughing at me, or with me, I can’t know. Please remember, from the outside, and to a disinterested observer, all hobbies seem a touch pointless and bizarre.

Chapter One

THE PATH TO SALA’THAR.

Welcome to my world, it is a world of imaginary dragons, dusty catacombs and meeting nearly every week with friends to play an addictive “lets pretend” game for nearly the last 30 years.
Fantasy games lurched weirdly into my life during the period of the early 1980’s. By my nature and my dodgy inclinations, I was always going to attracted by their lure of Roleplaying Gaming. The delay in time between me not being a Fantasy Gamer and being a fully fledged dice rolling dungeon fiend was really measured in how long it took the hobby to move across the ocean from America to the misty shores of Merseyside.

At the start of my story I am a fuzzy haired Art Student gaining an almost useless diploma in “Visual Communication” at an old gothic art school in the North of England. I was a dedicated and enthusiastic student of Art and Design, but my expectations for art school had been cruelly crushed on the first day when I discovered that far from being the last bastion of bohemian eccentrics and arty beat poets, the place was almost universally filled with clean cut and quite trendy looking young adults.
Before I started Art School I had this impression that I’d be painting swirling psychedelic landscapes through lavender shaded glasses while The Grateful Dead wafted out of battered tape machine in the corner of a large room covered in posters by Rick Griffin. This vision was not to be realised. Instead I discovered I’d been swallowed whole by a business known by the grand name of The Wirral Metropolitan College.
This was a very organized, if a bit clueless, system for turning artistically inclined individuals into “skills enabled” graphic design /illustration communicators. Even in those early days of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain the petty bureaucrats had taken over and were putting their unhelpful stamp on things they didn’t understand. We had a new vocabulary to learn and new games to play … and the actual work of learning how to be an illustrator/designer/artist had to be filtered through approved and validated systems.
It was my first experience of the now pervasive habit of dressing up things with impressive sounding wordage.

If I had known this vile habit with words was going to take over the world, I’d like to think I’d probably have flung myself into the oily dark waters of the River Mersey back then. (Side Note: You may detect a trace of the overdramatic in me. This honestly hasn’t hurt my roleplaying at all over the years!)

If I am painting anything at the moment, it is the impression that I imagined myself the slightly lefty bohemian arty sort. I fitted into that certain stereotype you might have found in many art school’s of the 70’s … shoulder length mop of hair, John Lennon glasses, duffle coat with CND patch and various badges on it (the more obscure the band, the better … for reasons any alienated social misfit will instantly understand!) a collection of various tee-shirts and sweatshirts intentionally chosen to be as far away from trendy as I could get. My record collection was a mish mash of folksy psychedelic rock, I played the bass guitar and “sang” in a band called THE RIDERS OF DISCORD. My room (I couldn’t afford to move out of my parent’s house at the time) was filled with more Science Fiction and Fantasy books than could be comfortably accommodated.
(Side Note 2: Over the years some of these details have changed. Distressingly few of them if you ask my friends and family!)

Picture this, bookcases fill almost all the walls. Boxes of books also fill under the bed space, stacked up on the floor in teetering piles, and stuffed into the remaining loft space. I’d been reading and collecting books voraciously since my early teens. I knew every secondhand bookshop, market stall and charity shop on the Wirral. I also haunted the “Withdrawn from Stock” section at the local libraries. Back in those days a book had to be seriously damaged to be withdrawn … but I remember carefully scraping an amount of scrambled egg from the inside pages of a Frank Herbert hardback before buying it for 20p to add it to my collection.

Lurking amongst my vast personal library were a few books in the Endless Quests Series from the American company TSR. These were the guys from the distant and exotically sounding “LAKE GENEVA, Wisconsin” who produced the Dungeons & Dragons game. The Endless Quests books were a hybrid of regular story, but you also had the option to guide the character in the story via a set of programmed choices you could select following most paragraphs. This probably makes it sound more impressive than it was in reality. The books were slim and quite limited in their scope; certainly the phrase “ENDLESS QUEST” seems to have been a bit misplaced. With a combination of good guessing and keeping your finger tucked into the previous page, you could hammer through one in a matter of a couple of hours. However they gave me a passion for getting my fingers dipped into true fantasy gaming.

I’d seen Dungeons & Dragons the game in a shop not far from the art college and had been intrigued by it. Trouble was, it was shrink wrapped in plastic and I wasn‘t able to trawl through the contents.
The back of the box promised…
“wandering through dark dungeons, meet strange wizards, and battle ferocious dragons. Playing a D&D game is like writing a novel with each player contributing a part.”
The text was accompanied by a photograph that appeared to show three booklets, some funny shaped dice and a pen. I wasn’t sure how this collection of books (there were only two … to make it appear better value a reproduction the box lid was included in the photograph!) dice and a pen would be able to achieve this bold promise. The price was the off putting part, it was nearly ten pounds, if my memory isn’t playing tricks on me! (It is playing tricks. Just found a magazine from that year and an advert listing the shop price of £8.95)

I fell into a curious habit of calling into the shop, picking the box up, reading the blurb on the rear …then I’d give it a shake and put it wistfully back on the shelf. It seemed like something I would really enjoy. Certainly wider in scope that the Endless Quests Books, which quickly became frustrating to play as the choices presented to you often were limited and quite unimaginative.

After a few months, when I’d done the ritual of the Game Shop and shaking the box several times too many, I happened to mention Dungeons & Dragons over a lunch break in college. A couple of the guys on my course had heard of it and one of them confessed that he had been playing D & D with his brother. I immediately pressed him for details of what it was like! He described roughly how the game worked and told me intriguing tales of adventure inside his brother’s home designed Dungeon. I found the ideas a bit more bizarre than I’d imagined they would be. The dungeons appeared filled with room sized microwave ovens, huge red fish and riddling dwarves. His antics and his brother‘s creativity had me laughing, and I begged to be invited to one of his sessions. He promised to check with his brother (The Dungeon Master) if this was okay.
In the meantime I vowed to put enough of my tiny grant money aside to buy the box set. Strange to think this was actually quite an undertaking. I got such a tiny piddly amount of money to fund my college attendance and nearly all of this was eaten up with art materials and the cost of commuting to College each day. As was previously mentioned, my reading habit was budgeted in at ex-library books filled with dried on breakfast items inside them! However such was my growing obsession with finding out what was in that box and what possible words could spawn these imaginary worlds, I found myself scraping together money, trading in records and hitting my dwindling savings account for the money. With cash in hand I boldly quested to the shop to buy claim the box I had rattled so many times. However when I reached Birkenhead and the Department store with the Games Section (Beaties, now sadly defunct), the game in question had been sold. I felt massively betrayed. I had already considered that game was mine through sheer amount of attention I’d lavished on it.
Though the shop did stock some other fantasy games, at that moment I was so focused on getting Dungeons & Dragons, that it did not even occur to me that other games was an option. Luckily a helpful assistant behind the counter came to my rescue. He told me about a shop across the water in Liverpool called … da darrrrr … “GAMES Of Liverpool”
It was easy to find, being located by the tunnel entrance. I was assured that their stock was far superior and I would have no trouble getting a starter box set there. He also recommending getting a book called “Dicing With Dragons” by Ian Livingstone. The local WH SMITH (only chain bookstore in our 1980’s high street) stocked it. This bookstore (combination travel agent, record shop, newsagent)was on my route back to college. This book had a game inside it that was playable with regular dice, a full overview of the field and lots of helpful advice that wasn’t in the core D&D books. This tome of wonders was also only four quid, he said, and I’d be much better off reading it before I decided on the game I wanted to invest in.
It has to be acknowledged that this was the best piece of gaming advice I received in my whole career as a gamer. I thanked the man, then took off speedily toward the bookshop. My goal was an oversized paperback in a heavy cardstock cover. The photograph on the cover was a tabletop layout with metal miniatures and cardboard dungeon map tiles. It looked amazing … and a quick glance inside confirmed the presence of the solo game I’d been promised. Unlike the Endless Quest game books, this required you to create a character, roll dice and match more than just blind chance to win out. I trolled back toward college with this book tucked in one hand and a song in my heart (probably Beethoven’s Ode to Joy from the last movement of the 9th Symphony)
I wanted to sit down and read it there and then, but my lunch “hour” was rapidly fading away and I had lectures all afternoon.
College was a pain, an unwelcome distraction from devouring Dicing With Dragons. It sat on top of my book bag, luring my eyes to it whenever the tutor appeared to be droning off topic and getting as distracted as I was. Eventually I grew bold enough to casually reach down and flip a few pages. I was possibly the worst student in the world that afternoon. I believed I’d been handed the key to a fantastic new universe, but was obligated to absorb a slab of information on advertising design theory instead.
After an eternity of waffling the lecture finally reached coffee break and I grabbed the book up onto the table. For 20 minutes I poured through descriptions of games, ways to play them, and intriguing lists of extras to enhance the game experience. I cursed myself for not having the foresight to have bought some 6 sided dice from the games shop. Right now I could have been playing the Dragon’s Eye solo game.
I began making an exhaustive list of things I would need to start gaming, then the lecturer wandered back in from his coffee and we were hauled screaming back into design theory again.

Over the next few days I devoured the book cover to cover. Played the solo game so many times I had it nearly memorized. I carefully read through the descriptions of the games and “modules” available. Absorbed the guru like advice of Ian Livingstone on multiple aspects of fantasy game theory. I also laid the groundwork of getting my friends involved in a new gaming group. To my surprise they appeared less than impressed with the notion. Looking back I suspect I might have come across as slightly wild eyed and manic about this new love in my life, like a cult convert trying to peddle his weird new religion.
I also started designing my own game system, despite the gulf in my knowledge and never having read or played any of the available games on the market. Designing a game from scratch didn’t strike me as overly ambitious at all, Ian Livingstone’s book was empowering stuff. He made you feel it was all possible (and it was!).
Eventually I had read that list of Available games just too many times and it was time to change fantasy into reality. I decided it was about time to actually own one. Dungeons and Dragons was still my first choice and I knew where to go.