Han, Dematerialized // Ian Baaske
As part of our guest-edited month, “D&D and Creativity,” Ian Baaske has shared a touching essay about playing Dungeons and Dragons over the years with his father.
My father kept the D&D miniatures he painted wrapped in tissue and stuffed in black film canisters. A sticker adorned each cap, scrawled in blue felt pen: Elf—Magic-User; Human—Fighter; Halfling—Thief. As a boy, I spent hours opening each one and taking in the details of crumpled felt hats, curved daggers, and jewel-encrusted sword hilts.
My dad's games would be large affairs, featuring maybe a dozen or more people from work:all scientists, mostly men, scruffy with beards and shaggy early eighties hair. There were at least two women. My mother in her big owl glasses and another who looked like Grace Slick.
My character was a chaotic good human fighter named Han. Yes, he was named after Han Solo. He had the special ability to dematerialize at will—which I thought was the coolest thing until I figured out it was just a cheap trick to send me to bed.
Later on, I wished that I'd picked almost anything other than a human fighter. I have always had the ability to see any class and race combination as cool.The dwarf fighter: dour and serious, his gray face lined with history and rage, a war hammer or a battle axe in his mailed fist. The female halfling thief lurking in the shadows: smiling evilly, swinging a spiked chain over her head of closely-cropped red hair. I wanted to be each one forever and still move onto the next.
At the start of one dungeon, my dad passed everyone a piece of paper. On it was a typewritten rumor that only their character knew. We could share it or keep it to ourselves. Mine said there was a magical rock somewhere in the dungeon and, if you put a piece of it in your mouth, it would grant you a wish.
My dad laid out my mom's oversized sewing board. Everyone sat cross-legged around it on the floor, their beer bottles within easy reach. My dad, short and stout in his button-down flannel shirt, sat at one end, the DM's screen in front of him. Pens lined his shirt pocket. As the dungeon progressed, he built out the rooms and corridors with small wooden dowels and we shepherded our lead figures through.
I don't remember that much of the combat. I know we fought orcs. I know the battle took a long time; it spanned multiple rooms, and I can remember impatiently waiting a long while to roll, and most of the time I missed.
In less than ten years, my parents would be divorced. In about twenty, my dad would be gone. My younger brother and I played a lot of campaigns with him in the years between. First at the little fake-wood tables in motels when he'd be in town; later on, at the condo he shared with his new wife. We'd flip through the thin cardboard modules in racks at the hobby shops. We want to play this one. The retro cover art. The zombies fighting the bell-bottom-clad halfling fighter in The Village of Hommlet. The roc shrieking over the head of the monk and towards the badass druid in Eye of the Serpent. A wooden shield hung over her left arm and she gripped a curved scimitar in her right. Her face was smeared red with war paint or blood.
Before all of that, my mom played. Her character was a barbarian named Brutus. She rolled a 17 or an 18 for his strength. He carried a two-handed sword and killed everything in sight. I know he made second-level that first night and then third the next session. Han never got past first level, and I was so jealous. My mom couldn’t care less and wished she could just stop playing.
That night, our party wandered into a new room in the dungeon. This one held a stone fountain. A handful of rocks sat around the basin. I hurried up to it, excited, and put one of the rocks in my mouth. "In your mouth?" I heard people laugh. But my dad held up his hand.
"It tastes rocky," he said. "Uh, not very appetizing."
"Does anything happen?" I said.
My friends had told me about a magic sword called a VorpalBlade. Alice had read about it in the "Looking-glass book"when it sliced through the Jabberwock. In D&D, a natural 20 with a Vorpal Blade meant decapitation. This is what I wanted to wish for.
My dad shook his head.
I miss him a lot.
"OK," I said, "I'll spit it out."
I remember feeling disappointed, but the session wasn’t over.
Near my bedtime, as we left one room, the party's thief—the last one out of the door—lunged at the second-to-last character, backstabbing him and trying to steal his gold. Plus four to hit, and double damage.
"I'll run back into the room to help!" one of the other players said.
"You don't know this is happening," my dad said sternly.
I wanted to see who won but I never did because I faded into shimmering silver and disappeared.
Ian Baaske’s work has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Warship, and REAL. His screenplay “Daisy” was a semifinalist in Zoetrope’s Screenplay Competition last year. He lives in the Chicago suburbs with his family and writes at night when everyone else is asleep.