Dungeons & Dragons

I just finished up my first Dungeons & Dragons campaign.

I'm thirty years old.

My body is not riddled in acne.

A lot of people were surprised to hear that it was my first go round on the old nerd mobile but the truth is that I had never even heard of D&D until I was well into puberty. You see, I grew up in this little church called the Worldwide Church of God, founded by Herbert Armstrong. You can look him up and see all the paranoid delusions the man spoke as literal gospel. Something like D&D was probably seen as satanic witchcraft.

When I told my dad I was in the middle of a D&D campaign, he revealed to me that he was a player when he was growing up. Of course, I asked why we weren't introduced to it by him.

"Probably thought it was satanic."

Look, my folks are good folks but they were very young when they had kids and a little direction in the form of apocalypse cult was probably pretty good for them. I'm not ashamed. It meant I grew up around a wide swath of humanity but mostly working class folks of all types. 

Now, my whole family is done with that brand of weirdo-Christianity and have moved on to a more acceptable, less crazy form of Christianity. As for me, not really into the whole thing. After several bouts of deep Bible study and all that, I thought myself out of religion. 

I was invited to be a player in a new campaign hosted by my good friend, Luke (the founding member of the If Onlys, whose album you can buy here - it's great). I decided to be a half elf who didn't discover he was half elf until the tail end of puberty when his nose started elongating and his ears started pointing. This was especially unfortunate since he was a low level thug in the human supremacist Human Ancestry Preservation Society (the HAPS, naturally). Once his non-purity was discovered, he was driven out of town to adventure alone as a rogue assassin.

Naturally, I named him Elvis Thurgood.

D&D is a blast for storytelling. Everyone plays the way they want to play and we all get into shit we think we can't get out of until we eventually do. I really think it should be done as a team building exercise for kids in schools to flex their creative muscles collaboratively but that could just be the deepening nerd in me talking.