Read Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and The People Who for Free Online

responsible for a kind of resurgent atavism. We fight and win and live or die along with the members of our gaming group. D&D players are our clan.
    That’s why, after more than a decade clean, I picked up my dice bag and responded to a Craigslist ad seeking players for a new D&D campaign. It will make a good story, I told myself. I hoped to justify the lost hours of my youth by approaching the game as a journalist and reporting on the phenomenon with the advantage of insider experience. And I didn’t worry about getting sucked back into the world of swords and sorcerers, even if my friends and girlfriend did: I’m an editor at Forbes now, I bragged, an award-winning journalist, not an impressionable kid in a Conan the Barbarian T-shirt.
    I was wrong. Before long, I was in over my head. Sure, I did witness the revival of the game and met lots of normal people who play D&D the same way they might join a weekly poker game. But Ididn’t expect the game to change my life. I didn’t anticipate making new friends—good ones—and coming to terms with the way I relate to other people. Returning to D&D forced me to redefine my self-image, reexamine my childhood, and change the way I look at the world. And after a while, I wasn’t just a reporter writing about people who play Dungeons & Dragons. I was one of them.
    Now I know magic.
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    1 . That sound you hear right now is thousands of fantasy geeks shouting their dissent. Debating what D&D classes fictional characters or real people would belong to is a contentious sport in nerd society. I once spent hours at work arguing with a colleague about the makeup of our office. At the end of the day, we agreed the boss was a dwarf rogue.
    2 . Table 3–17: Random Door Types, Dungeon Master’s Guide, page 78.
    3 . It’s a long story. Suffice it to say that if we ever manage to rid the earth of vampires, the next world-killing peril we’ll have to deal with is a badass flying serpent with a raging case of multiple personality disorder.
    4 . Just imagine if the battleship eventually gained the ability to fire its cannons and blow the thimble to pieces.

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LITTLE WARS
    T he current publisher of Dungeons & Dragons, Renton, Washington–based Wizards of the Coast, estimates that over thirty million people have played the game since 1974. I’m willing to bet that twenty-nine million of them had their first adventure begin in a tavern.
    It’s easy to imagine why. Bars are a dramatically convenient place to bring together a cast of characters—where better for strangers to meet and decide to do something dangerous? As a result, “You’re all at a tavern . . .” has become the D&D equivalent of “Once upon a time.” In a section on establishing a campaign, The Dungeon Master’s Guide actually refers to this as “The Cliché.” Still, you can’t argue with tradition. Even Geoffrey Chaucer gathered his pilgrims in a tavern before they set out for Canterbury.
    My adventure into the origins of Dungeons & Dragons began at Bemelmans Bar on East Seventy-Sixth Street in Manhattan. It’s an upscale Art Deco cocktail lounge: brown leather banquettes, black granite bar, twenty-four-karat-gold-leaf-covered ceiling, and a mural painted by Ludwig Bemelmans, author of the classic Madeline children’s books. It is, in other words, almost entirely unlike Chaucer’sTabard Inn or Tolkien’s Prancing Pony. But it’s also just a few blocks from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the perfect place for a drink before seeing some of the primitive progenitors of Dungeons & Dragons.
    Fantasy role-playing games were born in the 1970s, but you might trace their family tree back half a billion years. At some point in the Paleozoic era, a frisky invertebrate picked up a shell and passed it idly from tentacle to tentacle, thus becoming the first living creature on earth to engage in voluntary recreational activity, or play. (To be fair, definitions of “play” vary wildly, but I’m crediting