Everything old is new again

my original dice bag

I was introduced to Dungeons and Dragons in 6th grade. My memories are a bit fuzzy. I grew up in a house roiled by turmoil and I struggled with unrecognized learning differences (girls didn’t have ADHD back then, and people barely understood dyslexia, much less the nuances of dyscalculia). When your life is battered by a relentless stream of drama and the fallout of other people’s mental health struggles, it becomes really difficult to record the details. 

That was 1980. We were in a magnet school for bright kids, so we could be openly nerdy and nobody cared or bothered anyone about it. This was a nice change. I was transferred into that school after five years at an elementary school where it was customary to torment Asian and Latino kids, and Jews were singled out for particular nastiness. Kids who were bright and ethnically different were doubly cursed. (Even in 1980 it was possible to see the ruin and havoc that comes from a big have/have not divide in intellectual currency.) So my 6th grade year represented a respite of sorts, even though we were all miserably teetering on the brink of puberty. Everyone had baggage - most of us were fleeing the same anti-intellectual and anti-diversity bullshit that I experienced. But the intellectual playing field was level, personal computers were just taking off, scientists were studying things like DNA and pulsars, and whales were tentatively making a comeback in the nearby ocean. And we were in a place where we could openly geek out about these things, and nurture fragile tendrils of hope for the future. This was the era of D&D’s first early success as a franchise - what is now known as 1e, or first edition D&D.

So we sprawled out on a corner of the playground on days when it wasn’t raining. We wore zipper hoodies and Adidas sneakers - Nike was not yet the arbiter of all things. It was raucous and rowdy, with far too many kids involved for any continuity or order. I was one of two girls in the group. I wonder whatever happened to Debbi. It was perpetual chaos laced with wry humor and what would ultimately be labeled as snark. By the standards of the day, Debbi and I were treated very well. Inappropriately sexual or sexually violent remarks were generally not levied at us, and in retrospect it seems obvious that the fact that Debbi and I looked much younger and smaller than our ages played a role. I see the photos of myself from then and I look every inch a child. A diminutive child with mammalian brown eyes tinged with distress like a dog at the groomer’s. 

Sometime later that year I bought the D&D starter set - a red box that contained among other things the “Into the Borderlands” module - a module that has recently been re-released, converted to 5e mechanics.The rulebook was red with a yellow banner in the upper left corner that said “BASIC RULES” and it featured a green dragon attacking a male warrior bearing a wooden shield and a helmet decorated with what might be Hermes wings, or hands. The most prominent figure on the cover is the female wizard, blonde tresses blowing back in the wind, hand raised high filled with a luminous green globe she apparently intends to hurl. Her red dress is conveniently slit to the waist so that she can expose a long slim leg up to the hip, and a torso decked with two enormous teardrop shaped breasts. Evidently the technology of the game setting was insufficient for machinery beyond the complexity of a catapult, but they had discovered spandex and breast implants. And while my language was not as sophisticated then, I do remember thinking these thoughts, and wondering why women were never shown as fighters or wearing clothing appropriate for combat. The set had the hideous flesh-colored dice with the numerals pressed into the sides. You had to rub a crayon over the facets and wipe them so that the numerals were easily visible. I crocheted myself a little dice bag. I still have it, and it will outlive me. Cheap acrylic yarn is forever.