Fantasy freaks...

This book is a must for anybody who ever played Dungeons & Dragons and then put aside that part of themselves as life simply got in the way.

Ethan Gilsdorf's* journey back into the Dungeon, in no small way mirrors my own, a box of old maps, books and dice, that opens a floodgates of memories, wonderings and perhaps more importantly, new images of wondrous places, strong heros and dungeons filled with the vilest of the underworld.

I read this book, as I read many, either on the throne or as a diversion from another activity...only now those activities included graph paper and pencil, or rather a tablet PC and a new way of drawing maps and crafting a small corner of a world for me to dust off my DM skills and test the mettle of my players.

"As I met more and more gamers, particularly those my age, a pattern began to emerge. They'd tell me after years of playing only online, they returned to in-person paper-and-pencil games. "Soloing" on adventures in WoW and other MMO's made them lonely. They missed the face-to-face-ness of low-tech, tangible, tabletop gaming. I knew I had missed D&D's weekly ritual of camaraderie and fellowship." 
- pg 52, Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks

And maybe as a passage that's what any return to youthful fun is, our simple desire to engage, to share camaraderie, to connect in a world that is, thanks to the very thing that has made Geek mainstream more and more separate and distant. Or maybe, on some level, we all yearn for that child-like enjoyment we had before life and the world at large become the Orcish warrior threatening our way. Maybe, returning to D&D after all these years is a quest to return to something or rather sometime when everything was a little simpler, and the world focus was not so $$$.

* Sounds like a great name for a Dwarf...the Gilsdorf, not so much the Ethan.