Chasing the Dragon
Here it is….in all its glory. White Dwarf 118. The issue that started ALL the trouble.
October 1989. I was 11 years old.
It didn’t happen like this. I know it didn’t. Yet this is how I always remember it.
The year is 1989: it’s my first academic term at St.George’s Foundation School in Broadstairs, and despite having desperately waited all morning for the tannoy to announce lunch break, I am nevertheless standing in the playground, transfixed by the sight of a boy in the year above me playfully tossing a dwarf.
That’s not how it sounds, by the way. Written from the distant, lofty hindsight of 2022, you might be forgiven for thinking that I’m about to intimate that dwarf-tossing was some sort of sport in English high schools during the 80s, but the dwarf in question was a plastic miniature from a now oft-forgotten game called Heroquest.
I was cold and hungry and quite determined to follow several of the girls I fancied into the lunch canteen, where a snaking line of hungry pre-teens had already meandered around the corner and past the caretaker’s office....and yet I couldn’t quite bring myself to move.
The boy, a son of the sharply-spoken textiles teacher, then launched into a ridiculously detailed conversation about a game called Dungeons & Dragons, in which he argued that a barbarian like Conan the Destroyer wouldn’t be able to beat an even bigger barbarian like Thrud from the cartoons in the monthly White Dwarf magazine because the latter would have a higher Strength and Constitution score.
‘I’d be Thrud,’ he said, confidently. ‘Strength of 18 but at the cost of an Intelligence score no higher than 3.’
Hand on my heart, I didn’t have the first clue what they were talking about. I’d seen a movie about Conan the Barbarian, where Arnie from The Terminator ran around a medieval landscape in a loincloth, waving a massive sword and launching himself at people. Still, the name Thrud was pretty alien to me. I wanted to know more about a game where you could be a barbarian, especially as I’d spent most of myfinal year in primary school quite literally lost in the Fighting Fantasy series of adventure game‐books by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone.
‘Er...what the hell are you guys on about?’
I remember being genuinely shocked when they turned around to answer because I was pretty certain I’d only asked the question inside my head...but they were friendly enough, considering that I was a lowly First Year and the Second Years usually ate us noobs for breakfast.
‘Dungeons and Dragons,’ he said, chirpily. ‘But, to be honest, we’re all playing Runequest at the moment.’
I frowned slightly, noting that the last of the kids from my own year were now getting dangerously close to the end of the lunch line.
‘Runequest? What’s that?’
‘You haven’t heard of Runequest? It’s a roleplaying game where YOU’RE the hero...you know, like D&D or Call of Cthulhu. We have a club on Friday nights: you should come and play.’
...and that was when it happened, even though it didn’t happen exactly like that.
There were two pathways through school: the path through the canteen, with most of the sporty kids and all of the girls....and the path that led to the Roleplaying Hut.
Guess which one I chose.
A month later, things have gone from bad to worse, and the secondary school experience is literally begin‐ ning to pass me by, largely unnoticed. I haven’t been beaten up or bullied yet so my days should still be relatively new and exciting. There are so many amazing bikes, so many new potential friends and so many GIRLS....but I’m no longer interested in racing bikes, making new friends OR asking out girls (which I guess is quite fortunate as I’m going to turn out to be truly TERRIBLE at those things).
Instead, I’m Chasing the White Dwarf.
My sole purpose is Dungeons and Dragons. I don’t know this yet.....not really....all I actually know is that I spend the same day each month desperately waiting for home time so that I can race out of the school, onto Broadstairs High Street and into Games Den.
Games Den was a shop owned by a miniature painter called Mike. At the time, I thought he was the greatest fantasy artist in the world...and, to be honest, I’ve never seen anything that makes me doubt that. Mike would paint miniature goblins, orcs, ogres and trolls that he kept in a glass cabinet in the window. He once painted a tiny
version of Thrud the Barbarian that I saved a month’s worth of pocket money to possess.
Mike was a god, a purveyor of dreams and the only reliable dealer for my particular addiction: fantasy role-playing games. He also sold White Dwarf.
White Dwarf was a magazine that opened a door for me, a door that at the time I thought would lead me to riches, success and happiness. It spoke in a language only I understood and featured pictures of (among other things) the sort of guys I imagined would naturally end up becoming my friends. At the time, I failed to notice something that I really should have paid more attention to: there were no women in the magazine - like, none.
Nevertheless, White Dwarf was my drug of choice. It was like a tiny taste of a different world, a weed gummy that gave you a glimpse of a buzz. I didn’t know it at the time, but White Dwarf would lead me on to Advanced Heroquest, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and ultimately (gulp) Dungeons and Dragons.
Dungeons and Dragons was the hard stu. All the kids like me knew it. You needed a beard even to open the Dungeon Master’s Guide, and there was no way you’d understand anything beyond the introduction unless you had a degree in The Arcane.
Parents thought it was devil worship, and to many fathers who wanted their sons to like football and girls it might as well have been devil worship: it certainly led kids astray.
Dungeons and Dragons became my world. I started to actively feel like a wizard at school: I would spend my lunchtimes away in my head, poring over books in a dusty study at the top of some distant tower when I should have
been looking around the playground and thinking ‘Wow – they look like they’re having fun: I’ll go join them.’
Instead, for me, it was D&D. A decade after I rst discovered the game, I would be running the sort of adventure campaigns that it took a year for my friends to complete: I would do this as my main hobby activity, even before my job became writing fantasy books. When that finally happened, I would end up occupying another world literally twenty-four hours a day, writing The Illmoor Chronicles during the day and running Dungeons & Dragons games in the evenings. The boys would come round, order pizza, and we’d all sit there, immersed completely in ancient forests and fantasy cities until my baby son would start crying and I’d have to dash o upstairs to change his nappy. These sharp doses of reality would completely fail to ruin the atmosphere, as the guys would only stop playing D&D to talk about OTHER games of D&D they’d played in the past. It was all-engulfing.
I’ve said for a long time that the single biggest mistake I made at school, looking back, was making that split- second metaphorical decision when faced with the choice of either following the boys who went to the canteen at lunch or the boys who went to the roleplaying hut.
Here’s the thing, though: I don’t actually BELIEVE that I made the wrong choice.
I’ve always been bad at sports.
I’ve always struggled with making new friends.
I’ve always been a complete disaster with the opposite
sex.
The one thing I am good at is creating worlds inside
my head. It has brought me fame, success and made me a
fortune. It has paid offa mortgage and provided an incredible base of support for my family. It has connected me with my heroes and has given me a place of escape and a refuge from quite terrible mental health issues.
All that was because of Dungeons & Dragons....so it really was worth chasing The White Dwarf.
