It’s a Wednesday night from a couple years ago. My friends and I are playing the Dungeon of the Mad Mage, a pre-made campaign. I’m interpreting Methonimika Udorovic, a female halfling monk who’s trying to escape the guilt of her failed marriage by looting ruins and kicking monster asses.
She and her fellow adventurers, roleplayed by my friends, are deep in the Dungeon, walking through ancient stone corridors, counting freshly-looted gold coins and wiping off our clothes the remains of the gelatinous cube we just killed. The party’s morale is pretty high, especially for Methonimika.
Suddenly the adventurers come across a rough circular hole in the rock brick wall. It’s too small for everyone but my halfling, who immediately ties a rope to her waist, hands the other end to the human ranger, and says, “Fish me out when I jerk it.” Then she grabs her torch and goes in.
The hole leads to a rough, dark tunnel, which descends into a small room. As far as she can see, the floor is made of natural rock, too uneven to be functional, at least to humanoid standards. Which means it wasn’t made for a humanoid, Methonimika thinks. However she dismisses the thought almost immediately, switches to shiny-search mode, and paces around the room.
A few minutes go by, and she finds nothing of interest. She just finds a lot of boring, useless bones. She lets out a disappointed sigh, and is about to tug the rope so her party pulls her back…
When her daughter’s voice calls to her.
Methonimika turns her head to the farthest corner in the room, the one she thought she had explored, but actually has not. She peers at the darkness, but sees nothing.
“Rimla?” she calls back. “Rimla, are you there?”
“It’s too dark in here, mommy. I’m scared.”
Methonimika drops the torch to the ground. For some reason, she doesn’t question whether the voice is coming from the dark corner of the room or just from a dark corner of her mind. She walks forward, steps into the black.
“Rimla?” she says, her words as stiff as the air she’s breathing.
“I’m here, mommy.” Something moves in the darkness, slowly shifting towards the halfling.
“What in the gods’ names are you doing here, Rimla?”
The something has a mouth. When it opens to speak, it shows rows upon rows of needle-like fangs. “I wanna eat you, mommy.”
The torch’s fire behind Methonimika blazes for a second, and that’s when she sees the other mouths. The other eyes. Hundreds of mouths, hundreds of eyes all belonging to the same creature—a gibbering mouther (warning: its sight might not be for the faint-hearted).
Methonimika hasn’t yet shrugged the illusion off when the gibbering mouth wolfs her down in one bite.
When she wakes up, she’s back at the entrance of the small tunnel. Her fellow adventurers, still shocked and battle-worn, explain her that as soon as they heard her scream, they managed to pull her back up the tunnel—along with the monster who had eaten her, of course. A short, but difficult fight ensued, the cleric was badly wounded, and the mage tapped into the last of their daily magic energy to drive the slime back to their nest.
“So she was an illusion, then?” Methonimika asks them.
The ranger regards her with a confused look. “‘She?’ Who are you talking about, miss?”
“My… my daughter…” she stammers, before the pain of a hundred cuts brings her fully back to earth. Her battle tonsure is pretty much torn apart, and looks like it’s soaked in more blood than what’s still inside her body.
But nothing hurts more than not knowing where her daughter is, and whether she’s safe. Whether she’s still thinking fondly about her mom, or if her ex husband has convinced her that, to put it in his own words, ‘She was just a complete failure anyway.’
“Hey, Meth?” says the cleric. “You look like you could use a Heal Moderate Wounds potion. Want one?”
Meth turns to her friend, stares at her without blinking for a full ninety seconds. Then she says, “I don’t think there’s a potion that’ll ever heal this wound.”
I’ve played D&D on and off for more than ten years, and—with great regret—I never managed to fully enjoy it. Maybe because my body gets stiff if I sit on a chair for more than half an hour (in fact I’m lying on my bed as I’m writing this); maybe because writing fiction is already a good enough creative outlet for me; or because I’m a quasi-professional phubber and I get caught up in the notification stream halfway through the session.
And yet I’m recommending it anyway. Because roleplaying—the game of pretend—has been out for longer than mankind (even cubs play predator and prey, if you think about it), and offers great opportunities for growth and healing. Because if you don’t mind sitting, and like to play with your mind’s eye, you can create characters with completely different backgrounds from yours, and watch as those backgrounds influence the character’s decisions. It’s acting for your own sake. It’s liberating, it’s beautiful, and you can have these amazing epiphanies in a completely safe environment, with your friends.
Are you sold yet? If not, or you don’t know how where to start playing D&D, do me a favor and watch this beautiful video from The Cosmonaut Variety Hour. It’ll surely explain things a lot better than I’ll ever be able to.
Happy roleplaying, scrap-pals. May your sword be sharp and your spells never fail.