The road goes ever and ever on...

It took until I was what society deems to be a fully mature adult before I felt empowered to allow my freak flag to fully fly: I was a proper nerd and I didn’t care who knew it!! To be fair, it was 2011 and nerd media empires Geek & Sundry and Nerdist were on the verge of being birthed, catapulting names like Chris Hardwick and Felicia Day to internet fame, returning Wil Wheaton temporarily to the lime light as a board games evangelist, founding member of Acquisitions Incorporated and a kind of geek philosopher and forming the chrysalis for the actual play juggernaut that is Critical Role. (Team Visibitch!). It is remarkable how central these two media entities were when Nerd Culture was just taking its first, shaky steps into the mainstream, and how little of the original projects is left. The genealogical tree between those two networks and Dropout is nothing more than a thick red line. Their work has spread like pollen, sprouting into a thousand podcast networks and YouTube channels, though they themselves only exist as wan shades of their former selves. The parallels to Napster are eerie.

In truth, I had never been able to fully hide my cultural proclivities. Comics, from their lowest to their highest forms, printed or web, have been a fascination of mine since I was but a wee lad. It is not for nothing that Calvin, looking forlornly into the stars for meaning, is my chosen avatar. Video games too, have contributed a number of vertebrae to the central spine of this portion of my identity. Stars of the War and Trek variety were also part of the mix, as they ever are, along with the Buffys, the Mulder & Scullys and many many others. But I had always been reticent to venture into the lands of the Deep Nerd. My unspoken guiding principle up until that fateful year could be summed up by another portion of my favorite monologue delivered by Al Pacino: “Look, but don’t touch. Touch, but don’t taste. Taste… but don’t swallow”.

Maybe it was the fact my family viewed my geekish tendencies with bemusement, mixed with a mild dash of contempt. Or maybe it was the lack of actually good board games or that getting too enmeshed in these hobbies still carried a perceived societal tax for young men that I was not then willing to pay. We were still a decade and a half away from Gamer Girls after all, let alone Debrah Ann Woll smoothly demolishing any journalist foolish enough to question her nerd credentials or Henry Cavill gawping at a Custodes and building his own PC while looking like Apollo made flesh.

Fact of the matter is that these three pillars of nerddom (board games, tabletop rpgs as mostly represented by D&D and wargaming as seen through the prism of the Warhammer universes) accompanied me basically thorough out my meandering 40+ years of existence. The first core memory is one probably shared by many of my Jahrgang: the twin classics Hero Quest and Space Quest (known as Space Crusade outside of Germany). The former I encountered through a sleep over at a friends house. During our session, the host disappeared just to return dressed a very late 80’s Russian style Hazmat suit of his fathers. Why he wanted to spring this on a group of boys who were living in a country still gripped by the aftermath of Chernobyl, even 5 years later I cannot tell you. I asked him at our 25th high school reunion. He just laughed at the memory. Vague recollections suggest the wizard being a vehicle of frustration for me, while the dwarf was a far more satisfying experience. These preferences are imprinted early in life.

I remember the Space Quest box prominently positioned in the display of the local toy store, the art by titan Jim Burns, singing of glory and desperate battles in cramped corridors, beckoning me through the impenetrable barrier of molten sand. No coincidence that it is roughly at this point in my life when I, my younger brother and our two cousins had our first illicit viewing of that James Cameron classic. It ended with us cowering under tables and behind chairs with the lights on. Again, the signposting here is not subtle.

Childish persistence eventually wore my parents down until they bought the box despite their considerable and vocal misgivings (my mother had very clear ideas about what type of interests and activities were appropriate for her children to pursue and they did not involve burly men shooting guns at aliens, she found it “ugly”). However, the treasure came with strings attached: a certain academic performance had to be achieved before it would be handed over into my greedy little hands. Needless to say, I did not prove worthy to earn the Precious and it languished in a cupboard for a many months. So long in fact that I had even forgotten it existed, so that when it appeared on my chair at Sunday breakfast after having correctly written some 100 words in an impromptu vocabulary test, I was genuinely surprised.

Ultimately, I think I would only play the full game one or twice, and the box would follow us on our many moves until the cardboard disintegrated. But every so often I would take the figures out to make play with them, setting them up and imagining scenarios in much the way I also did with GI-Joes or teenagers that were also mutated amphibians. They were loci of creativity, arcane focuses through which the worlds contained in my developing brain could find their outlet.

A few years, a move, a new school, new classmates and my world expanded. One friend, a Finnish lad whose name escapes me was a True Follower. In retrospect he was one of those for whom John Blanche was something of a spiritual Tenzing Norgay. His notebooks were more often filled with sketches evoking Blanche’s peerless work than they were ever of our actual class subjects. I keenly remember bringing him to tears when I inadvertently stepped on a tank or titan. I was deeply abashed, though I also had the suspicion that he had been using my ignorance of the rules to his advantage.

I also have core memories of spending biology class with another fellow student, pouring over Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rule books, creating characters I would never play but for whom I would craft great adventures in my head. Alas the memory lives alongside some of the sharpest recollections of awkward adolescence. These Imagineering sessions took place in the biology lab, that was also the site of our 7th grade sex-ed class. The teacher actually had put into practice the meme of a jar filled with questions and had honestly, diligently and with a straight face answered every absurdity a class full of 13 year-olds could conceive of in an attempt to embarrass him (forget not, this was pre-internet). My would be DM took an opportunity to out me in front of the class for the sin of finding athletic women attractive in the mid 90s. Once the laughter had died down, the teacher had looked at me sympathetically over his bushy moustache and assured me that he too shared my appreciation. “Wannabe” would reach number one just a few years later and Melanie C is still my favorite.

Lest we think that I was only meant for the grimdark future, Fantasy, or the “The Old World” as it is now known, managed to squirm it’s way into my life. TV commercials for the board game known as “Battle Masters” drove their hooks deep into my brain and one Christmas it too was mine (again in Germany, the game was renamed, but this time to the infinitely cooler The Claymore Saga). I’ll admit, I never made the connection to the GW universe until years later, but my hands still recall phantom sensations of laying out the vinyl mat and moving the trays of little plastic men around with my younger brother. His interests always leaned more in the traditional “boy” topics like basketball and being American. But, whenever he was sure his friends weren’t around he would snoop into my room, asking what I was doing and testing the waters. He still does this. He once joined me and a few friends for an afternoon of board games not to play himself but to watch and to heckle from the sidelines. Meanwhile, he is more open about his love for folded cardboard.

After that things become more blurry, the years and experiences flowing together like candle wax as other things started to take precedent, friends, girls, school, athletics, SATs, college, love, sex, heartbreak, alcohol, weed, Spain, Mexico, work, life etc. Well, somewhere in there my cousin, the younger of the two I had watched Aliens with as a child briefly got into the hobby. I remember he had a classic metal Arbites. The area where my contact with the nerd realms was evergreen though was the medium of the screen.

Computer games ranging from Warhammer: Shadow of the Horned Rat to the original Chaos Gate came in the full game CD gifts that were back then included in various magazines. The era of the live service game that is meant to spin cash eternal or be contemptuously dumped in a charnel pit renders the idea utterly alien, but yes, sometimes magazine would give you free games when the publisher deemed they had made as much money as they ever were going to make. Dawn of War and Winter Assault swallowed countless hours of my time in the early 2000s when I was a hapless college grad, working retails and not really thinking too hard of the future.

And through out that time, I kept in touch with the lore and changes of the Warhammer worlds via the website, scouring the model descriptions and lore wikis over and over again. I never felt compelled to try it out, the stigma still lingered, as was the appeal of other goods to spend my money on. But the worlds I was free to explore to my hearts content. I journeyed north with Karl Franz, breathlessly following the ins and out of the Storm of Chaos from a Internet Cafe (WOOF.) in Mexico and reveled in the art drops of Blanches ultimate creation, the Black Templars. Somewhere in there the Middle Earth game was flung into a market ravenous for anything even moderately hobbit flavored, but curiously that game always left me cold despite owned every one of the extended editions and first enter the Tolkienian realms at the tender age of 14.

RPGs were also a constant staple of my digital dispersion. Every version of Diablo that has ever existed burned itself into the hard drives of my Turing machines, and I dumped hundreds of hours into both Oblivion and the first Witcher game. I tend to obsess and then drop such experiences before they are complete. In the case of my Elder Scrolls experience, the air violently leaves the balloon when you are the head of every guild and can slay abominations from the nether realms with contemptuous ease.

We roughly arrive to my time in grad school, a season of tumult both geopolitically, economically and emotionally for me. The world economy burned around me while sitting in an air conditioned lecture hall in Phoenix, AZ listening to a finance professor confidently predict that the recession would be done and dusted by the time we graduated. This was 2008, at graduation, only a third of us had job offers. The details of that particular period of ego dissolution and self manufactured emotional angst shall remain unexplored for the moment. All the needs to be said is that I committed myself to alcohol consumption and serial monogamy with a side order of studying. Dawn of War 2 and the first Dragon Age game kept the flame alive, but it was a very small, sputtering candle at this point. Until, roughly in 2010-2011, during the nadir of a period of unemployment, I discovered the already mentioned first few seasons of Acquisitions Incorporated.

While the main storyline was the initial attraction, four nerds at the height of their powers engaging in witty tom foolery sponsored by Wizards of the Coast, it was actually a smaller adventure that has stuck with me over the years. The Penny Arcade Dark Sun podcast is smaller and shorter, one of their unnumbered side projects that exist for the briefest flicker and is then discarded. But it is more true to how I imagined then and now, an rpg session to be. The atmosphere is closer and more intimate, away from the center stage of PAX and by then already choreographed player-audience interactions. The audio equivalent of the dark basement with the single light hanging from ceiling as if it were a poker game amongst gangsters in a Dick Tracy movie. The setting is darker and weirder and Jerry Holkins DMs the session with the soft touch of a veteran, guiding Mike Krahulik, Scott Kurtz and first time D&D player Kris Straub through the world of Athas, a place where hope had been replaced by dust and the basest instincts of humanity.

Thus, after many many words, we come to the watershed moment. My friend Chris was visiting his parents with the unnumbered children. The eldest was a avid reader and drawer of manga, as person of that age oft are, and I had told her and my friend that the comics store in the city had an ample selection. So, one cool and misty afternoon in late summer, we piled into a car and traveled to T3 Entertainment in Frankfurt am Main. There, while the child rummaged around the shelves of books that must be read from right to left, I pulled the Dungeon & Dragons 4th Edition Red Box from off a shelf and eyed it critically. Penny Arcade had been thoroughly instrumentalized to promote this particular First Taste so I was well aware of the pedigree it was harkening back to.

There in that basement (always basements!) fate turned. I bought the box, and that evening, in my parents friends kitchen, at the table I had sat at often as a yoof, the three of us cracked it open and took out first steps into a larger world.

I think I will leave this here for now and continue taking a deeper look at my experiences with tabletop rpgs. Look out for that one.

Lata.