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Chapter Fifty

Somehow you always knew. From one hundred miles up, you have a beautiful view across the Western Mountains to the Savage Ocean and beyond, to nations you’ve never discovered in all your time with Endoria’s champions, and it still stirs your spirit to know that there are lands yet to be explored.

You descend from orbit, and the barriers of time, space, and genre fall away at last. Diegetic conventions shred and transform at the sight of a Terran atmospheric runabout hovering on a jet of blue-white fusion flame above the stillness of the Pendarren Forest, itself the echo of KidBits’ scrubby pines, now grown to enormous size and trackless extent. The Heroes file out onto the surface, inhaling the illusory digital scent of their long-ago franchise. See that it is Pren-Dahr who sinks to his knees; it is Loraq who curses aloud.

Black Arts Studios brings you a gaming experience like no other!

An adventure for slightly-too-advanced characters, Endorian Anomaly pits the galaxy’s rulers against an ancient evil.

You consult the tracking device. There is a clear signal coming from far to the east. The group is silent as they fly over lands where they fought on horseback, moving a thousand times faster than the fastest horse ever could. Down below it is somehow still—still!—the fucking Third Age, its final end delayed for long, long eras as the Heroes busy themselves elsewhere. As you travel, the landscape below you changes from forestland to grassland to dark ocean. From high above you can see the shadow of a leviathan surging in the depths. At these speeds it is only an hour before you set down on the pebbled shore of an unknown continent. Outside, the day is warm and muggy, but you can smell the not unpleasant smells of grassland and forest and… adventure.

“Is this… what anybody was expecting?” Lisa asked.

“All that matters is we find it, right?” Don said. “And we can fix it?”

“Yes,” Lisa said. “It’s just weird.”

Darren shook his head and said, to no one in particular, “Simon, what did you do?”

Wise adventurers prepare for danger. The orbiter’s loadout includes a pair of blasters. Galactic empress Ley-R4 carries the ceremonial blade of her office even though she hasn’t drawn it in centuries. Loraq, of course, scorns all conventional weaponry. Pren-Dahr leads the party inland, flaunting his overland movement rate. It’s been so long since he’s had a ground movement rate, let alone an armor class! Brendan Blackstar lingers on the beach, trying to recall a half-remembered prophecy. A warning, wasn’t it? Well, it’s too late now.

It is not long before you encounter…

What lies in the depths of Black Arts’ oldest and shittiest dungeon?

BACKGROUND

The Four Heroes reunite after many wanderings to discover at last the resting place of the legendary warrior-magus Adric and the accursed sword Mournblade. The Fortress of Adric lies in the far northern reaches of Endoria, amid the half-melted bones of the Great Ice Serpent, who lived far into the Third Age. The site has been abandoned for untold millennia, ever since the long-ago Correllean empire fell (see Correllean Dreams, various authors, Orbit, 1994).

Warning: This adventure is for high-level characters only. Naught but doom and defeat await you below! So you know.

KEY TO DUNGEON MAP

Starting Location

Aboveground, a mere two dozen slabs of stone in the mossy ground sketch the outline of what was once the mightiest fortress in the known world. Alert players (INT check at −4) will observe a small crater a few hundred yards to the east containing a half-buried capsule bearing the markings CCCP and the decayed shreds of a parachute. The capsule is empty. Loraq lingers at the site a moment longer than the others.

After a search, characters will notice a dozen stone steps leading down to a pair of doors built of the same stone as the rest of the fortress. A dwarf or experienced thief—although either would be an odd choice to go on vacation with—will observe that the gates have been opened and resealed several times.

Level 1: The Shallows

The stone complex is a simple maze built to no obvious purpose, terminating in a set of stone stairs leading downward. The air is dry and cold; the rooms are lit by gaps in the ceiling. Its ornamentation is sparse. There are crudely carved mossy granite and marble gargoyles and dry fountains in the larger rooms. The maze is empty and silent. Its floor plan resembles what you would draw in the last fifteen minutes of Western civ, which ought to at least have some cool castles in it, but what do you expect? Things never turn out the way you think.

Level 2: The Maze

Similar to the first level, but the walls and rooms form a more complex pattern, presumably a second layer of defense or the work of a more confident designer. You see the bodies of four or five ampers piled in one corner, mummified in the dry air. Once they were mysterious items of punctuation crawling through the dark; now, in color and three dimensions, they are, disappointingly, revealed to be thuggish bald men with tusks, wearing vaguely tribal leather gear. They were slain long generations ago, evidently by fire.

Level 3: Hall of Pillars

An airy hall of open construction punctuated by two rows of broad pillars that lead to a pair of white marble thrones on the far wall, the seat of absent monarchs. The air is growing warmer, with a hint of moisture. There are more dead ampers here, but these have rotted away to broken skeletons.

This may once have been an audience chamber, although not a very conveniently located one; maybe it’s there to congratulate people who can get through two pretty easy mazes. This marks the last point where anybody remembered constructing what was supposed to be a historical building rather than just going and drawing whatever they wanted.

Level 3: Inscription

You emerge into a set of corridors that form the puzzling words Darren Rules in cursive Roman characters (far away, its designer high-fived an associate producer). The hallways are mossy, and the air grows humid. Here and there a trickle of water flows down the walls and forms a running stream along the corridor.

Here you see what may be your first living ampers. It is unlikely they will stand up well to blaster fire. Ley-R4 draws her sword, which hums menacingly, a vibro-blade from the days when dueling was a deadly feature of life among the Martian aristocracy.

At the base of the second cursive e, adventurers will encounter a figure sitting upright against one wall. It is a corpse, long decayed, wearing a dark robe that survives, stiff with age. A staff surmounted by a broken animal skull lies a few feet from its outstretched hand. Players knowledgeable in the history of the Realms will recognize this as Dark Lorac, once the most feared wizard in this plane of reality. Characters of above-average intelligence may spot (20% chance) an additional set of small finger bones at rest nearby.

[I was startled by a cold pressure on my left hand. Lisa was handing me a Mountain Dew.]

Level 4: Pentagram

The passages form a five-pointed star surrounded by a circular corridor. This area of the complex has no obvious purpose other than to make it slightly more badass and reinforce the popular association between fantasy gaming and satanism. Observant adventurers will become aware that your grandmother is an insane bitch and even after a year your mother is not any closer to getting her head together, and the later you can stay at Darren’s each night the better the chance they’ll all be asleep when you get home, or maybe they’ll be dead or they’ll forget you ever existed (does that happen?) and you can live at Darren’s forever or maybe get your own place.

Another skeletal body is here, lying facedown at an angle where a point joins the circle. The bones lie across a charred patch on the stone. Pren-Dahr kneels down and picks out a pair of modern spectacles and a short length of wire. There is no weapon. Deep in the angle of the jaw you see what is either a small round pebble or a cyanide capsule.

Level 5: The Guardian Figure

The shape of this level forms a crude representation of a human body (Adric?), similar to the Long Man of Wilmington or other hillside chalk figures. It is very evidently male. It makes you wish someone would stop fucking around; truly, this dungeon holds great evil.

Level 6: The Lady

This level has been built in the stylized image of a female face, architectural verisimilitude having been abandoned several levels ago.

The first body you find here lies on its side, with a long dagger resting between its third and fourth ribs; it displays tallness and slightly elongated fingers, toes, and cranium. Fifteen feet farther down the corridor, a skeletal hand still holds the hilt of a long black sword, the NightShard (artifact longsword; +5 to hit and damage; 4% chance of Soul Drain; wielder’s Altruism, Loyalty, and Mercy scores immediately fall to zero). The hand evidently once belonged to the human female whose skeletal remains lie on the very top step of the stairway down to the next, penultimate stage.

Ley-R4 may pick up the NightShard if it is found. She now has the option of remaining in Endoria, walking away from her job as empress of the galaxy, and returning to terrorizing the unjust from horseback. If she does, she will relinquish her ceremonial blade and the title to Brendan Blackstar, the true king of Endoria.

Level 7: A Giant Penis

Here, the walls form what we just might as well say is an image of an erect phallus. The three disconnected rooms to the west of the main complex were originally thought to be sealed burial halls. It is time for archaeological scholars to admit they represent airborne ejaculate.

“Oh, Jesus,” said Lisa. “Really?”

“What, you never saw that?” said Darren.

“Yes, but I deleted it.”

“I wondered if that was you. Yeah, I put it back.”

“Did you ever think that maybe that was why we got a B plus? Which is why I wasn’t class valedictorian?”

“Did you ever think of getting over it?”

There is one body, that of a large human male dressed in scraps of denim and a canary-yellow shirt emblazoned with the words SOUL ASYLUM. Nearby you find the remains of a fiberglass skateboard, its rear wheels sheared off. Brendan lingers, baffled at his doppelgänger’s choice of weapon.

Level 8: The Antechamber

From the base of the stairway a single corridor zigs and zags, then terminates in a large room, one hundred feet square, empty except for a low square altar built of stone. The only other item in the room is a skeleton wearing the gray cotton fatigues of a senior intelligence officer of the Soviet Union. It rests, propped against one wall, in a sitting position, hand extended toward the altar.

You always thought this was the bottom level, but the altar has been pushed to one side to reveal a set of stairs leading down. You check the tracking device: Mournblade is exactly five meters below you.

Level 9: Adric’s Tomb

The final level is a network of natural stone caves plainly much older than the rest of the complex. You see here the skeleton of an enormous beast, half hound and half dragon, a long row of vertebrae encircling the room.

At the rear of the room is an archway built of porphyry, which any competent mage or an associate producer who could stand to broaden his horizons a little will recollect is the primary component of any portal spell. It is sad that they know this, but they are correct—any player present will see through it to another place entirely, a random location in space and time.

Here you see Adric himself, seated on a black throne and dressed in shreds of chain mail. His skin is pearl white and his mouth sneers, even in his sleep. He is slender and beautiful and tragic, just as he is on his book covers. He is, without any doubt, what Simon looks like in his deepest, most private fantasies. At the sound of a living being on his threshold, he begins to awaken. His eyes, when opened, are green and soulful. The Artifact-class greatsword Mournblade is visible on his person.

This is the end of the Endorian Anomaly module. Any further material included is of abstract interest only. It is here that the players will die, regardless of whether they rule the galaxy and can’t believe they are being knocked off by a pissant artifact on a backwater planet in an unfashionable genre.

“So is this it?” I asked.

“Okay, okay, I get it,” Lisa said. “Simon said he’d put it in a place no one would ever find, but I didn’t understand the scheme exactly. The room runs simulated all the time, and sometimes Adric gets activated and wanders out into the world. Or an amper picks it up, maybe. So the sword is out there, and then very occasionally the wielder runs into somebody and kills them. Or the wielder dies and another creature picks it up and the rampage starts.”

“Why’s it happening more often, though?” I said.

“Simon wanted it to, I guess. He had some theory about the year 2000, how there should be some big computer failure. Probably it just checks the system clock, spawns wandering ampers more often.”

There was a scuffling sound in the corridor outside Adric’s chamber. I whipped the camera around to see what could only be a Dreadwarg, the terror of the First Age. A Dreadwarg looked like a standard wolf, but, like that of Mournblade, its palette was wiped to black.

I was at the controls. Select all Heroes, target the warg as an enemy, attack! Pren-Dahr’s blaster didn’t seem to damage it. Ley-R4 cut at it with the NightShard, but for some reason it rushed past her to attack Brendan Blackstar. It took 75 percent of his hit points in one bite, but Brendan’s riposte with the Martian blade cut it in half. A gimmicky black wolf had almost managed to kill the rulers of the galaxy. A howling noise came from the passageway outside. Perhaps they could smell the royalty in Brendan Blackstar’s blood.

I paged through the Heroes’ inventory for the first time. Nothing much, only their few weapons and useless imperial money, until I reached the weaponless Loraq, who turned out to be craftier than the rest. He possessed a number of odd items, some of which he spawned with, some of which he had looted from corpses as we passed. A Soviet-era codebook, the Tentacle of the Over-Mind (purpose unknown), and an antimatter grenade, far more powerful than anything these Iron Age fucks had ever considered.

Purely from the point of view of gameplay, it was my option. I had him start the timer on the grenade, proceed into the corridor, and shut the door behind him. The blast was well in excess of its targets’ toughness. After a thousand millennia of shame, Loraq had found a way to give his life for his true king.

We turned to see Adric shambling toward the portal, as he had been doing for millennia. As we watched, Adric passed into the world of American finance to kill and despoil. When he passed through, a metal door closed behind him and locked. I had the Heroes try to break it with the blaster, the NightShard, and the Martian vibro-sword, all without result. On the far side, Adric would kill until the sword consumed him, and then a luckless character would pick the sword up and wield it after him, until at last the sword ran out of wielders and teleported back. In a city as dense as the AstroTrade level, the carnage would be indefinite, a building wave of panic and fiduciary bloodletting.

“Adamantium,” said Matt, looking over my shoulder. “Nothing cuts it.”

“C’mon, nothing? That’s bullshit. This is a plasma gun or some shit.”

“It’s just a rule—there had to be a thing nothing could cut so we could keep players from breaking out of the world entirely.”

“Can’t the thief pick the lock?” Don said. He pointed at Prendar. “Isn’t that a thief?”

“Uh, right,” said Matt. I set Prendar to working on it. It took about five seconds. It was a hard lock, but Prendar had been a thief since back when doors were made of stone.

“Weren’t you going to cut the thief class?” said Matt. “Something about their being useless.”

The door opened, and, as Brennan, I went through. Brennan wasn’t dressed for it, but he had a sword from the future and melee skills superior to anyone except maybe Adric himself. The door slammed shut behind me. I wouldn’t see the others again.

Beyond the portal, it was spring in Endoria the Electronic Trading Platform. I stood in a city square next to a dry fountain. It had rained recently, and there were puddles among the cobblestones, puddles that reflected the sky beautifully. Lisa had written a really, really pretty renderer.

Adric stood there, looking around for souls to drain. Around us, trading continued; with their combat instincts suppressed, the innocent dwarves, gnomes, humans, and elves would go on with their speculation and arbitrage until they picked up the cursed sword. The stage was silent. Brennan faced Adric. The vibro-sword buzzed; the black runesword moaned.

Darren got up to take my place. “I should probably do this part.”

“Let Russell do it,” Matt said. “We kinda tweaked things after you left. Added a couple of things.”

“Okay,” Darren said, but he sounded dubious, and I decided Matt was right.

One way to think about game design is in terms of verbs—what is the array of verbs available to a player? Obviously, there must be fighting, because otherwise (at least for many of us) why play a video game? But what verbs does that involve, exactly? Matt and I considered the previous game’s system too simplistic, too dumbed-down, and Don agreed. We set to work to change that.

First, we prototyped the combat system as a card game using 3-by-5-inch note cards to stand for actions. A player could choose to attack high, attack low, block high, or block low. Once the cards were turned over, a high attack against low block, or low attack against high block, dealt the most damage. Simultaneous attacks resulted in less damage. Each player had a limited supply of hit cards and block cards, so by counting cards, players could guess at each other’s strategies. Not terrible. We demonstrated it at the next company-wide meeting, to modest applause.

It wasn’t enough. I’d had a semester of saber fencing in college and had a green belt in hapkido. Matt had an extensive knowledge of the writings of Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Roger Zelazny, and Michael Moorcock, plus he had seen all the Highlander films in their original theatrical release. We agreed that a really good sword fight wasn’t about just choosing one of four options. We needed panache, daring, and creativity. We needed more note cards.

We began to build out the system. What if a strike that directly followed a successful block did extra damage? Now the simple matching game acquired a new rhythm, and just a tiny element of drama. Thrust, parry… riposte!

It wasn’t enough. Encouraged, we did what any self-respecting game designer does: we added a gratuitous number of features. Forehand and backhand attacks; long-range thrusts; sweeping cuts. Directional parries, first the basics—tierce (right), quarte (left), and quinte (upward)—then prime, seconde, sixte, septime, octave. Corps-à-corps! En garde! We shared the conviction that a simulated universe that could not express these things was not a universe worth simulating.

Still, it wasn’t nearly enough. The minutiae of footing and weight changes, obviously. Stances, hit location, armor, unarmed combat, different materials. Flint ax heads shattered against metal plate. Bronze weapons could be hacked to pieces by carbon steel blades.

After ten weeks of work, we could play out an altercation between an eighteenth-century French mercenary with a short sword and buckler (a saucer-size shield with a pointed spike—as Eskimo language is to snow, so archaic English is to “metal objects designed to cause harm”) and a Roman legionnaire from the age of Marius, with his gladius, scutum, and pilum. Vae victis!

I felt the three of them watching while I tried to work through the variables in my head. I would play Brennan, a tall muscular human with high skills across the board, but he favored a heavy blade. To his disadvantage, he now held a delicate saber, light and whippy, with a fiftieth-century keenness. My opponent, Adric, I judged to be a maxed-out Scottish greatsword artist wielding a four-foot blade.

I had a great deal of speed, but he had the longer reach. I was unarmored; he wore chain mail and a fancy helmet that flattered his cheekbones. In addition, Adric was a First Age Correllean noble, which involved a long string of modifiers I didn’t know about, although I could assume it meant he was a badass. He suffered from a long-term Byronic depression, although that might not translate tactically.

Adric advanced forward without ceremony, the massive sword held out in front of him, vertical and tilted slightly back, just as it was in the Renaissance fencing manual we’d taken the moves from. When the blade descended, its moaning dopplered up and down the scale. He made three looping overhand strikes that I backed way the hell away from, because I wasn’t sure the cursed sword could be blocked at all. But I had to at least try. I blocked the third one; when the blades touched, the sound suggested a dying god impacting an electrified high-tension wire. Adric’s pale horse face kept its signature expression—the weary, sophisticated sneer of a man who has forgotten how many souls he’s taken, who pities the world that must contain him.

I ran at him and struck at him over and over, fast and sloppy, thinking to outpace him, but his defense seemed immaculate. He waited for a break, then stepped behind himself and pivoted all the way around for a low backhand. I fumbled at the keyboard for a split second, no idea what was happening, and wound up blocking in a crouch. Then Brennan wouldn’t stop crouching and shuffled around parrying until I realized the Caps Lock key was down. I wished Darren weren’t watching.

I made mistakes, but I knew the system, or I knew what to try. I slithered in and cut up Adric’s forearms. I ducked under sweeping cuts and jabbed for the belly. I started to remember the little tics of posture that led into his special attacks, and anticipated them. I nicked him a few times—his blade was unquestionably slower—but he had the hit points of a bull elephant. He had a guard stance that made him almost unhittable, a stance I let him take until I realized he was regenerating hit points. I switched stances, too, to a slightly precious-looking saber stance, body sideways, left arm tucked behind the back. I nipped hit points off of him. Brennan could do a lot of things. He had nifty forward roll and upward thrust. He had a countercut off a parry in quarte that popped back in the opponent’s face. But Adric had responses ready. I circled around Adric, and he sidestepped to cut me off. It was hard to commit to a real attack when I couldn’t risk taking even a minor cut. I had the fleeting thought that in all this, some part of me was learning a lot about game design.

Fighting games, Jared once explained to me, are about yomi. Yomi is a concept popular with game theorists, tournament-level fighting-game players, and people who like having Japanese words to throw at you. It means, literally, “reading.” Figuratively, it means understanding your own and your opponent’s options in a given situation while simultaneously knowing that your opponent knows those things, too, and then trying to predict what he will do, knowing that he may know what your prediction might be and change his mind accordingly.

Sword fighting has its yomi. There is a thing fencers call the tactical wheel—the strategic laws that decree that each attack has its own specific countermove, the way scissors beats paper, paper beats rock, rock beats scissors. Our combat system was no different, it just came with a great many more options and more ways to predict the outcome. Strong cuts committed a fighter’s weight forward; countermoves took advantage. Certain maneuvers had to be set up by a specific prerequisite move. Some attacks required a recovery phase, leaving the combatant tragically vulnerable. Every choice set up the next set of possibilities on both sides. It was a complex decision tree that both fighters were constantly trying to think their way down, down to the place where their opponent didn’t have a winning option.

Adric—I couldn’t guess how—fought as if he knew his advantage. I gave him false openings and he didn’t move. He fought as if he knew he was fighting a coward. He feinted and jabbed and played with me as I backed up, practically chasing me around the square. I really did look like a coward. I very possibly was a coward.

“Don’t forget, if he can’t recharge he’s going to die,” said Matt. I tried waiting for Mournblade to drain him, but he smoothly decapitated a passing dwarf. It flashed white, which meant another soul gone to power Mournblade’s wielder, who was now back at full strength. He could do that forever.

Lisa said, “Just kill everybody in the city and then he can’t recharge.”

“Isn’t that a little counterproductive?” I said. “Plus, Brennan can’t fight indefinitely. Not since we added the fatigue model.” And Brennan was already getting tired, fighting two-handed now. I was getting a little tired, too. “And stop helping me,” I added.

Brennan started to do his “I am very fatigued” animations. He panted; he staggered when blocked. I tried to rest him by getting out of range; when I did, he’d lower his sword and let the point drag on the ground.

Meanwhile, I was trying to yomi Simon’s own AI, even though everyone knew Simon was smarter than I was and had always been smarter than I was. I could feel—with an inner certainty—that everyone wanted me to give somebody else the controls. Darren, a world-class player who would already have taken Adric’s head off. Matt, who knew the system and the entire world better than I did. Lisa, who understood what was happening and why, and whose nerve wasn’t going to break.

But I knew that Adric would live forever, a walking curse on the world. That was his story. He was a loner, an outcast, an eternal, pretentiously sad fantasy douche bag. Simon had already written his story for him and given him the AI and the devastating magic sword to make it happen. There had to be a way out of that story. That’s why we had video games, which were an enormous amount of trouble to make. So you could do that.

I wasn’t going to win inside the tactical wheel. Screw the tactical wheel. Endorian Anomaly enabled all the game functions, all that code kicking around. I could probably play golf in there if I wanted to, not that that seemed productive. I backed up and watched Adric advance to keep me in range.

Then I turned and ran, sheathing my sword as I went. Probably people were yelling at me, but I didn’t listen. Why should I? The sun had almost set, turning the puddles gold and orange and purple. It seemed just right, the last moments of a warm evening before it gets chilly and you think of going home. It was, in fact, an excellent moment to shred.

Yes, my board had no back wheels, but not all the moves needed them. In point of fact, the lack of back wheels just made me more hard-core. I reached the fountain and tried a little minigrind, balancing on the board as it slid along the rim. It worked just fine. In fact, the camera even knew to run a 180-degree pan to show off the move—which, incidentally, revealed that Adric was closing in, runesword ready to strike. Brennan landed and transitioned, prepping the move I had in mind. It was one of those moments when you’re good enough to forget there’s even a controller. I got into the handplant, feet up, one hand on the rim, and the point of view revolved around me to catch the setting sun, a beautifully thoughtful piece of programming. I triggered the second stage, and Brendan whipped his sword out with his free hand. As he came down, he swept it in a showy circle. It even did the sound effect, a surf-guitar sting and a deep-voiced, heavy-reverb roar as the true king struck home.

Chapter Fifty-One

I came in the Saturday after we shipped to look at the game we had finished, right at the last possible instant. No matter what happened, I wanted to see what we had before they took it away.

WAFFLE was so legally radioactive at that point that we’d be releasing it as shareware—all the tools, all the source code, a game construction anthology for the ages. Focus had, sadly, become the prey of Bain Capital, which managed to make a modest profit from its assets, either because of the unexpected value of cask-aged intellectual property or its superfluity of high-end office chairs.

Matt, Don, and I were forming Magus Games, a start-up stealth-funded by Vorpal, now flush with cash. The film rights for Clandestine had sold for more than what I would have believed possible. Hollywood had decided to start taking notice of video games; I could almost believe we were beginning to scare them a little. Darren immediately packed up and moved to a house in Pasadena, and was reportedly “in meetings.” Lisa walked into an MIT doctoral program after a lengthy interview and presentation of her work, and the discovery that very few people could keep up with her in conversation.

For now, I just wanted to look around with the virtual camera and see what this place was. I let it spawn in at a random location. Take me anywhere, I thought. I don’t care.

We wound up on a hillside far out on the eastern continent. A half-elven prospector looked out in the blue early dawn over a misty virtual pine forest. Water condensed in tiny drops on his leather armor. I could see him breathing as his standing-still animation cycled; I could almost feel the moist air in his hybrid half-faerie lungs, his narrow eyes watching the pixelated trees in the far distance.

This was Simon’s vision brought to life as truly as I could make it. Display technology didn’t matter; who cared how many polygons the trees had? I could feel this world breathing.

I drew the camera back, kicked the time scale up, and watched days and then years pass. Smoke ascended from a solitary woodcutters’ camp in the ocean of pine. Every few turns there was a low-percentage chance the forest would spread out and become fields, or die and become desert, or a tribal people would settle there and form a village.

Clouds gathered, herded around by a rough climate model, towering over plains in jagged cubical stacks, shadowing castles and armies on the march, piling up against the mountain ranges that ribbed the continents. Rivers and streams trickled from the mountains’ heads and shoulders, through bumps and ridges, down into the plains. There was no geologic time per se, but we registered a few types of terrain-altering events, the rare earthquake or volcano, the once-in-an-era feat of earthshaking high magic or divine retribution.

Simple probability pyramids governed the world’s production. Fields generated crops in appropriate proportions, more staples and fewer luxury goods; regional imbalances generated trade. Forests generated x amount of game, and x/10 predators, and then rarer exotic or magical fauna, populations swelling and shrinking by Malthusian logic. The seas generated fish and whales and, in the depths, the leviathan and kraken and the odd stranger things, ancient things that belonged on other planes but found their way into the deep ocean. When a dragon, our apex predator, appeared, it automatically aggregated treasure and laid waste to the surrounding countryside. (It is a privilege of my profession to know where dragons come from.)

In our toy economy, all the world’s wealth started at the top of the supply chain, as gold and wood and leather and food. Dwarves and humans dug for minerals in the deep folds of the irregular crust, and so jewels and metals and rarer things propagated along caravan routes and clogged in the cities then radiated outward as crafted goods. X number of ingots became a dagger or a sword, so many hides became a cloak or a suit of leather armor, and so forth for all the myriad daggers and bridles and lanterns and helmets and vestments and statuettes and bowstrings and scroll cases that equip and ornament the world.

The supply chain had a top, and it also had a bottom—a benthic sludge of used boots, misfired arrows, torn surcoats, sunken ships, blunted weapons, and burned siege engines that simply vanished from the simulation after a set time. The economy worked, but we were long past understanding why, because every employee who had ever touched the system—which was almost every designer or programmer in the building—had added their own little algorithmic tweak to it, and by now the price-setting algorithm had fifty different half-remembered undergraduate versions of Keynes or Weber or Adams feeding into it. Add to this the nonlinear fluctuations born from player behavior—tweaks to the magic system revalued every magical herb and powder, and every infusion of treasure every adventuring party hauled up from the depths, to upset the markets like a diver cannonballing into a neighborhood pool. It still worked suspiciously well. In fact, I suspected that large sections of the economics programming were a front, and that Lisa ran it all from a little console, four or five sliders controlling pricing and production as though it were a tiny Soviet-style command economy.

Cities and settlements held together in fanciful political congregations—the lands sparkled with barons and dukes, viziers and khans, elven kings, orcish warlords, dwarven magnates, tribal elders, Lich Kings, robber-chieftains, matriarchs, regents, god-emperors, and petty lordlings who ruled a stockade and five or six men-at-arms, an underground convocation of thieves.

After much overpromising and backtracking from Toby, we agreed that yes, there would be a day-night cycle running at eight to one, roughly three hours per twenty-four-hour day. Things were a little hacked at night, colors were wrong and nothing shadowed correctly, but there were three moons and they were beautiful.

Elves (high / wood / dark) lived in dark forests or fanciful spun-sugar Bavarian castles. Dwarves lived in caves and forged things. Orcs lived their economically ineffectual tribal lives in the wastelands. Humans did their bit, filled up the map with farmers and thieves and priests and castles. Lizard men lived in deserts and swamps and carried on their biologically doubtful lives in isolation. Exotic horrors lurked in the darkness. Daemons, devils, spirits, giants, benevolent jinn. Extraplanar magi and ethereal predators that intruded into the world from extraplanar civilizations, through gates or summonings or natural rifts. We’d get to these other worlds in fourth- or fifth- or sixth-edition rules. The toughest adventurers would still be killed—by undetectable traps, by unpredictable monster types, or, if necessary, by mobs or armies of midlevel monsters. There would be epic deaths, throw-the-controller-across-the-room deaths. Where necessary, there were gods.

History progressed, blissfully free of historical or political or technological progress. Kingdoms rose and fell over the millennia, but there was no trend toward democracy, no Enlightenment, no industrial modernity, no Luther, no Hume, and absolutely, definitely, no gunpowder. No Principia Mathematica or Declaration of Independence. We held certain truths to be self-evident, but those truths were that elves hate orcs and wizards can’t wear metal armor.

What we had instead was world history frozen in an eternal thirteenth century—or, rather, something more complicated than that. It’s more as if history had paused forever during eighth-grade study hall, a Thursday afternoon free period stretched out into countless millennia, where knights and castles mix in with fantasy novels, fairy tales, vague orientalist fantasies, Arthurian kitsch, Norse mythology, Star Wars, Paradise Lost, medieval travelogues, heavy metal album covers, and dimly remembered historical trivia.

I felt it then, Simon’s victory. We could indeed make a world. Chess is a game with simple rules and pieces, a small sixty-four-space board, but there are more possible chess games than there are atoms in the universe.

But in the middle of all this, there’s you, a person playing a video game. For fun, for a challenge, for reasons hard to understand. Some of it is just cognitive burnoff, something to take up the mental cycles you aren’t using and, frankly, desperately don’t want, because a lot of it is just compressed, impacted sadness.

But there is only so much you can do about it. Your character is always going to be you; you can never ever quite erase that sliver of you-awareness. In the whole mechanized game world, you are a unique object, like a moving hole that’s full of emotion and agency and experience and memory unlike anything else in this made-up universe.

You can’t not be around it; it’s you, even though “you” might be the last person you want to be around. But when the game, the second-person engine, starts again, it tells you about yourself, and maybe this time you will get it to tell you the thing you’ve been waiting to hear, the mighty storytelling hack that puts it all together. You’re lost in a forest, surrounded by mist-shrouded mountains. You’re in command of a thousand gleaming starships in a conflict spanning the galaxy. You and the machine, like Scheherazade and her king mixed up together in one, trying over and over to tell yourself your own story, and get it right.

Simon’s original paper-and-pencil role-playing game notes were left in his old bedroom until his mother sold the house, at which point they went into storage for a few years and wound up in the Black Arts office. I’d seen them long ago, sat reading them sometimes during sophomore year, waiting for the school bus, waiting for the long afternoons to end and my dad to get home. I read and read them, but we never ended up playing them even though I’d gone through all the dungeons in my head.

There are two main rule books. There’s the one with the red dragon on the cover, a picture of a dragon rearing up and breathing fire down on an armored figure whose upraised shield divides the stream of flame. REALMS OF GOLD is written across it in gold letters. And then there’s the Creatures and Items catalog, the cover of which depicts men and women in medieval dress posed stiffly around an overflowing treasure chest, their eyes wide in greed and wonder. There were also many, many supplements and photocopied articles, and the maps to all the dungeons and lands, with accompanying descriptions.

You got the books for Christmas when the game was first popular, and maybe your parents didn’t know what to get for you, but heard this was a good gift. The sample character sheets are marked up and erased in a bunch of different places, with joke character names written in and doodles in the margins.

(It’s hard to explain to Lisa how some of this matters; it helps that she used to play bridge a lot. Also that she is a good listener.)

It’s a game, but there’s no score and no winner, and too many rules to remember properly. There are six terrain types: Town, Forest, Ocean, Mountain, Ruin, and Sky. There are five public character attributes: Fortitude, Acumen, Nimbleness, Resolve, and Folly; these cards go faceup. There is also a sixth secret attribute that is different for everyone. It goes on a card you hold facedown on the table.

The way it starts is that you meet an ancient traveler in a village inn who tells you a tale about a lost ruin deep in a mountain fastness; beneath it lies the gateway to a fantastic underground empire containing fabulous riches. At its very center is a treasure of untold value.

There are four of you. You listen, spellbound. Things aren’t going well at home, not for any of you. Barbarians sacked your village; your master was killed before your eyes; you were jilted by a lover. A usurper stole your rightful kingdom, and you stood around and let it happen. Somewhere out in the world there’s got to be a fix for this. You’ve got to find it.

As you exit the Town Zone, there is a rush of feeling, a mixture of relief and regret as you leave your backstory behind.

On the map, the Forest hexes are cool and green, with darker green trees, like lumpy pillows, sketched in. The elf ignores movement penalties here, but it’s not like he cares—according to the manual, elves live for a thousand years.

As you wander the trails, there’s too much time to think. About whether the old man was lying, about why you didn’t just do something about that fucking usurper. It was all you had to do, deal with one guy in a velvet chemise. Why couldn’t you have been just a little bit brave? You imagine pushing him off a balcony; the crowd below cheers, the king and queen smile approvingly. You walk a little faster—can’t we get this over with?—and the track of an ancient road leads through miles of underbrush to a break in an ancient stone wall. There you make camp, crouching in the dimness like coders from Lisa’s graphics team.

You wonder who built the wall—dwarves or orcs or humans. Certainly not adventurers like you, who pause at places like this to search them for treasure but who never figure out how to stop and build a city. People like you only hoard the spoils, dividing it among sons who fight among themselves then ride off into the wild. Nobody learns to weave or make bricks or anything; there are just men in furs on horseback, bows and arrows and swords, and at night it’s cooking fires to the horizon.

A nameless, deserted fortress stands alone, deep in the wilderness. Once upon a time, this was the center of a great kingdom surrounded by a forest without end, a vast swath of Town terrain that stretched the length of the map until, long ago, it was annihilated in a strategic-scale campaign. When the kingdom fell, its terrain type modified to Ruin; one day, centuries from now, it will change to Forest.

(Ruins can contain multiple specialized terrain types: Cavern, Corridor, Debris-Strewn Corridor, Door [Standard and Secret], Room [Large and Small], Stairway, Pit, Special.)

A) Dungeon

Under a wooden trapdoor in the courtyard, stone stairs lead downward into a narrow space smelling of earth. At first, tree roots poke through the ceiling and stray sunbeams come in through the cracks, but after a few hexes, sunlight and the sounds of the forest disappear.

Skeletons hang from manacles in rooms and corridors of damp stones coated with algae. Goblins, giant rats, vicious animals roam the otherwise empty halls. A false wall at the back of a cell opens to reveal stairs leading still farther down.

(There’s a picture showing the ruined hall; Lisa says the artist could stand to learn a little about stonework, not to mention where to place load-bearing elements.)

B) Tombs of Terror

Were these built at a later date? The workmanship is much finer, although poison spikes and mocking inscriptions ward explorers off from the graves of the honored, eternally pissed-off dead. In the Tomb of Lorac, there is a cache of gold and precious magic objects surrounded by the bones of luckless adventurers who came before you.

This is as far as the old kingdom builders ever dug, but a crack in the tomb wall gives access to the Glowing Caverns.

C) Glowing Caverns

A rough landscape of towering stalagmites and luminous, overgrown fungi. Colored crystals protrude from the cavern walls. A pool of shimmering rainbow liquid yields random magical effects—invisibility, telepathic powers, hallucinations.

Your pouches are now full of rubies and emeralds dug from the walls; you are all wealthy enough to live comfortably for the rest of your lives. You think fleetingly of going back, but no one mentions it aloud. Why would you? This is the best part of your lives—the four of you together against the darkness and the unknown, a quest that could last forever without your ever wanting to leave this basement.

D) Underground Stream

The distant sound of running water beckons you forward to the place where a swiftly running stream of black water has carved a channel in the stone that leads downward into the earth, through a series of narrow tunnels and larger chambers. An Ancient Giant Cave Pike swims just beneath the surface. Farther down, the stream becomes a river that drops then drops again, then cascades down into a cavern so vast you cannot see the far wall. A fresh breeze blows through it, smelling of salt water and carrying the sound of… crowds?

E) Goblin City

The Goblin City has always lain beneath the kingdom and was perhaps the secret agent of its downfall. You follow the river as it winds through crowded streets and markets to a dock where a skiff is moored, and the party stops to camp by the dark waves of a mysterious underground sea.

Probably everyone’s pretty tired by now, and outside the sun has long since gone down and you’re going to need a lift home, or else you’re going to have to ride your bike a long way on a cold March night, your back wheel sliding on wet leaves as you pass the lit windows of houses and wonder what it’s like, how you’d be different if you lived there. You’re way too much inside your head, and other people notice, but you won’t realize that for another ten years, maybe more, and by then maybe it’s too late.

F) Subterranean Ocean

As you cross the subterranean ocean, shadowy, enormous forms move beneath your boat, lit from below by phosphorescent algae. Nautical movement rules apply.

G) Maze of Wonder

Those who journey to the far shores discover the gemlike Maze of Wonder, where corridors bend at impossible angles and the rules of space and time become less certain. The monster population becomes more exotic—outré, whimsically lethal inventions out of rare rules supplements. Lorac himself lurks here, now an undead being of near-infinite power. He warns you to go back. He, too, was once a prince and a twenty-sixth-level magus, until he opened a portal to the Burning Worlds and was lost.

Here and there portals lead off into other dimensions, where you can fight angels or mutants or space aliens or Nazis for as long as you want to, but the quest remains here.

H) The Base of the World

Few indeed have seen the silent chamber at the base of the world, which is littered with the most flagrantly unfair traps available—soul traps, contact poison, portals leading into doorless chambers filled with water.

Each of you will find a hidden treasure inside, and it’s the one thing you always wanted. The royal signet ring; your master’s sword; a lock of hair; a seed to regrow the forests of your homeland. But now that you think about it, you’re not sure if your origin makes sense anymore. Has it been weeks since you left home, or months? Years? It’s getting late and everybody’s tired and you can barely remember what was said at the start that meant so much, about a girl in a muddy village or a third-level barbarian chief who threatened your tribe. Seems like inventory could just about buy that town by now.

But when you get home, you find that everything has changed. While you were away the town grew into a sprawling city. They built walls around it, then the city expanded past them. It sent roads into the outlying fields, past new farms and over the borders to other lands. The old king died, and in your absence the false prince took the throne. He sent the kingdom deeper and deeper into debt until he in turn was replaced by a council of merchants, and that’s it for the royal family.

More time passes, and the palace you grew up in is now a museum. The forest is cut down; the city spreads along the river to the sea and establishes a port where ships come from all over the world and bear people away to countries you’ve never heard of. The ships bring back textiles and jewelry and gunpowder. New character classes appear, some playable and some not, artisans and musketeers and gangsters and astronomers, which are explained in still more supplemental rule books, Realms of Gold: Age of Sail and Realms of Gold: Sages and Scientists. You pack away the lock of hair, the signet ring, and the sword. All that stuff was long ago.

Decades go by, faster and faster, and now, of the original party, only the elf survives. He has aged only fractionally through the years, and his accumulated experience points have taken him far off any of the level charts. He spends the day lounging in cafés on the cobblestone street where the old tavern used to stand; he pays his rent with jewels and odd coins that ring strangely against the table. He owns a horse and carriage and half a dozen houses in town. He’s an eccentric guest at dinner parties, the subject of society talk and gossip. You—and somehow it’s still you—can invest in merchant caravans for profit. You can finance other adventurers if you want, for a share in the returns. You never marry or have children. You collect old books, a few of which make reference to your early adventures, but only as legends.

One day a hot air balloon passes over the city. It only costs five gold pieces to ride in it. An amusement for gentlemen and ladies of quality!

You ascend. The Sky Zone was never meant to be playable, so now what? You scrounge up a Xeroxed page and a half of sketchy guidelines. Rules for movement, suggested cloud maps, lightning-strike table.

It’s raining hard outside the office this evening, too, there’s lightning here, too, and past nine o’clock it doesn’t feel like work. You’re hanging out late in the break room with Matt and Lisa and you’re trying to steal soda from the machine using adhesive tape, which doesn’t work but is hilarious.

The Sky Zone contains air elementals, floating eyes, yellow lights, storm giants. Giant Erl from the Legendary Adventures supplement in a cloud castle. All areas of the Town, Forest, and Ruin maps are accessible. You find portals to all the elemental planes. You may reach the Starlight and Ethereal Zones from here.

You order new rules through the mail from an address in the back of Dragon magazine, rules not published officially, to describe galleons that sail between planets and starfish with arms that span continents. You resolve to reach the center of the galaxy, the center of everything, if you can, and that’s where the game ends, now not a game at all but a campaign that’s going to go on as long as your life does, no matter what you think of me now, because we are graduating from high school, from college, getting married, and now it’s time for all cards to be turned over, all items identified, all secret areas revealed. And now at last maybe we can score this thing properly.

A Selective Time Line of Video Game History

1971: The Chainmail tabletop strategy game is modified to include rules for person-to-person combat, rules that would ultimately be used in Dungeons & Dragons.

1975: Adventure (a.k.a. Colossal Cave Adventure)—the first text-based computer adventure game—is created by Willie Crowther and Don Woods.

1979: The first Choose Your Own Adventure book—The Cave of Time, by Edward Packard—is published. Adventure for Atari 2600, containing the prototypical video game Easter egg, a secret room showing the name of its creator, is released.

1982: The hit single “Pac-Man Fever” by novelty act Buckner and Garcia reaches number 9 on the Billboard chart.

The movie TRON is released.

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, widely accepted as the most loathed home video game of all time, is released for Atari 2600.

1983: Ultima III: Exodus, often cited as the foundation for the computer fantasy role-playing genre, is released.

Realms of Gold I: Tomb of Destiny is written in Mr. Kovacs’s intro to programming class.

The movie WarGames is released.

Electronic Arts runs the famous “Can a Computer Make You Cry” advertisement in Creative Computing.

Realms of Gold II: War in the Realms is written at KidBits computer camp.

1985: The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) is released in the United States.

1987: Realms of Gold III: Restoration is released.

1988: Clandestine for the Commodore 64, Black Arts’ first commercially published title, is released.

1989: Solar Empires I is released.

1990: Realms of Gold IV: City of Hope is released.

Super Mario Bros. 3 is released for NES.

1991: Black Karts Racing is released.

1992: Realms of Golf is released.

id Software releases Wolfenstein 3D, introducing the first-person shooter genre.

Clandestine II: Love Never Thinks Twice is released.

1993: Cyan releases Myst, an artistic milestone and the first mainstream hit on the CD-ROM platform.

Realms of Gold V: Aquator’s Realm is released.

Realms of Gold’s Worlds of Intrigue: High Society is released.

Clandestine III: Mirror Games is released.

1994: Clandestine IV: On American Assignment is released.

Realms of Gold VI: Far Latitudes is released.

1995: Clandestine V: Axis Power is released.

Solar Empires II: The Ten-Thousand-Year Sleepover is released.

Pro Skate ’Em Endoria: Grind the Arch-Lich is released.

1996: Tomb Raider, featuring the first successful female action hero in a video game, is released.

Clandestine VI: Deathclock is released.

Clandestine: Worlds Beyond (Limited Edition) is released.

Tournament of Ages is released.

1997: Clandestine VII: Countdown to Rapture is released.

Ultima Online, the first massively successful multiplayer-only role-playing game, is released.

Solar Empires III: Pan-Stellar Activation is released.

Founding member Darren Ackerman leaves Black Arts and founds his own studio, Vorpal, which will continue the Clandestine franchise.

1998: Mike Abrash publicly reveals the technology behind the Quake game engine in a talk at the annual Game Developers Conference.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, one of several games often referred to as the greatest video game of all time, is published.

Clandestine: World’s End is released.

Realms of Gold VII: Winter’s Crown is demonstrated at the Electronic Entertainment Expo.

2000: The Sony PlayStation 2 is released.

2006: The Nintendo Wii, the first mainstream motion-sensing console, is released.

2008: Gary Gygax, principal inventor and popularizer of Dungeons & Dragons, dies.