Dungeons, Dragons, & Brokers

The lead miniatures that were sold at the hobby store looked really cool. I didn’t have a clue as to how to paint one. They were so tiny. I left mine, a paladin, unfinished, and never gave a second thought to painting it. On the few occasions that I played Dungeons & Dragons, I’d put it on the table and stare at it, sliding it back and forth across the table.

The little metal sculptures were a source of endless fascination, done in a medium, lead, that I was unfamiliar with, and had a slightly greater range of subject matter and detail than I was used to. My experience with sculpture up to that point had been confined to toys like G.I. Joe figures (plastic), Royal Dalton Figurines (porcelain), Saints (plaster, and occasionally plastic), and Jesus (wood, plaster, brass, plastic or various combinations thereof).

Mom didn’t want me to play Dungeons & Dragons, but in the end, she shouldn’t have wasted any time worrying about it. Not unlike my classes in school, I found it hard to stay focused on the game. Role playing games went over my head, because at their heart, RPGs are a collective and co-operative enterprise.

While collecting comic books and playing RPGs frequently go hand in hand, I probably represented the extreme end of the comic book collector bell curve: equal parts bibliophile and pseudo-speculator. Collecting comic books, for me, at that particular point in time, was a highly individualistic and speculative endeavor.

Living in the People’s Republic of Saskatoba, I had no idea what a libertarian, let alone an anarcho-capitalist was, but I brought a Monopoly mindset to what should have been a communal endeavor. I was more focused on acquiring gold, weapons, and magic objects for my character than whatever the hell it was the Dungeon Master was trying to get us to do.

More importantly, it was hard to relate to the games on an aesthetic level. I know that there are many different kinds of RPGs but at the beginner level, it’s all about Dungeons & Dragons, which relies heavily on Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft for its mythology.

I’d read stuff like The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy which mined the same fictional vein as Howard and Lovecraft before I tried Dungeons & Dragons, but Bilbo and Frodo never had a hold on my imagination in quite the same way that Superman, Han Solo, Captain Kirk, Indiana Jones, and Tom Sawyer did.

Apart from the aforementioned miniatures, the games didn’t have much in the way of visual appeal either. While the cover art for the game boxes, player manuals, and novelizations invariably “popped,” inspired, in part, by Boris Vallejo or Frank Frazetta, the black and white illustrations contained within were invariably…crude and stiff. The RPG manuals and character sheets had all the charm and warmth of a school textbook and worksheet.

On the other hand, comic books were a riot of color and frenzied activity. And the late eighties were a good time to be a comic book collector, especially if you were willing to go off the beaten path and sample what the horror, humor, war and crime genres had to offer.

But that’s a story for another day…