![Roots and Beginnings: Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (Mindflayer art by Sam Bosma)
When it comes down to it I’m not even sure if playing D&D even counts toward the “Roots and Beginnings” rubric for this column, as I didn’t start playing until after my...](https://cdn.statically.io/img/64.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ly08lhmdM41r2uzyoo1_500.png)
Roots and Beginnings: Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (Mindflayer art by Sam Bosma)
When it comes down to it I’m not even sure if playing D&D even counts toward the “Roots and Beginnings” rubric for this column, as I didn’t start playing until after my freshman year in college. But I’m an old done man now, and those happy golden bygone days recede like a rest stop in the rear view mirror, and certainly D&D suffused my childhood and adolescence even if I never played myself.
But when I did, boy, did I ever.
I joined a campaign that was already years old, waged by all of my closest hometown friends. The merry band we were a part of – we dubbed ourselves the Benevolent Horde – included a death-worshipping elf, there was a barbarian with a shrunken head, and there was me, a thief who was basically always fucking up, etc. We never really had any single goal in mind; each of us had their own shit to sort out. Our main philosophy was simply trying to leave each place we visited a little better off than how we found it. You know, just try to be a mensch.
But we did have a guardian angel/guide in the form of Oolitek, who was a, get this, fundamentally benevolent Illithid. (Go ahead and laugh, D&D people, we deserve it.) In addition to helping us out of scrapes and jams and generally making us feel like the mindflayers had gotten a bad rap, Oolitek would go so far as to provide each of us with emotionally powerful insights into our characters, leading us to major breakthroughs as people, goddammit. That he’d help us kill the occasional dragon or wizard, destroy a crashed spaceship, and wipe out a beholder stronghold was just gravy.
But there was a method to this mindflayer’s uncharacteristic munificence: He was manipulating us into helping him take over the world.
Yep, every step of the way, for months – maybe for years, I’m not exactly sure how far back before I joined our DM made him a part of the game – Oolitek was guiding our company into confrontations with beings that could present a threat to him and his fellow Illithids, so that we could do the wetwork required to eliminate them on his behalf. His ultimate goal: fucking blotting out the sun and replacing the surface world with the Underdark.
Which he did. With our unwititng help. As we watched, screaming, frantically trying and failing to stop him.
It was awesome.
I learned a great deal from this experience. I learned that in the hands of the right DM, roleplaying is a form of storytelling, of collaborative narrative fiction, with an unbelievable amount of power and art at its disposal. I learned the value of upending an entire narrative, of the everything-you-know-is-wrong moment – but only if, as was the case here, it used the emotional and psychological drives of the characters as the fuel for the switchover. I learned the importance of rooting spectacle to emotion. I learned that if you really want to make a character suffer, have his do-gooding cause the apocalypse.
But most of all, I learned this: Never trust a mindflayer.