Canterbury Tales

JACK'S GAME

 

One of the great things about university is the chance to try new things. One of my new things was roleplaying. Roleplaying is a social activity - you get together with a group of people and make up a story. One of the people runs the group. He (it's heavily male-dominated) creates the setting and the situations (we call him the Games Master or Dungeon Master). Every other person has a character, and in each situation, your character acts accordingly. Of course the whole thing is organised with dice and tables and statistics, so you know what you can and can't do. And there are a plethora of systems available - some for specific genres, others for any.

 

In the game I started playing, back in 1998, the system was called Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, 2nd Ed. As you may have guessed it's a system for a fantasy game, with elves and dragons and mysterious quests which begin in little taverns in the middle of rolling countryside. We just called it Jack's Game after our Dungeon Master (DM).

Jack's Game had already been going for a year before I joined. Every Monday night of term time, about 8 guys would gather in a room up on campus and guide their little band of adventurers through difficult quests. The party had stabilised and grown out of the days of being low level (when every farmer and his dog can kill you) so my character (a runaway fighter called Brangwen) joined Sir Kael, Corwin Demon-Slayer and Whiteflight the bard on their travels.

They were adventuring through Kursaval, when I (as Brangwen) met them. Kursaval was a pleasant country in the land of Hurssia. It was bordered by Turse, run by the evil Green Lady with whom the party had already been in a lot of trouble. Around us to the west were deep Elven forests, and icy mountain ranges to the north. As time went on and we travelled further we found swamps where goblins dwelt, and the Shire, and Ukrall to the South. Then we discovered Hurssia itself was only a continent and there were other lands including an island to the north called Hervaxiath from where the Evil Emperor Aragorn had been making plans for hundreds of years.

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You won't find Hurssia in a source book (published by RPG companies to help the DMs). The land and the history were created by Jack. Have you ever seen the cartoon of Dungeons and Dragons with the small annoying Dungeon Master in the red robes? That was Jack. We'd be quite happily getting on and he'd turn up, say something cryptic, change our plans forever and disappear again. Jack would play all the other characters in the story - the demon child, or old king, or a green dragon. And his voices and facial expressions meant we would answer back in character too. In some games you always talk about your character in 3rd person: "Bran does this". But in Jack's game we acted in response to our DM.

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I remember times when the group would curse him, behind his back. We'd mutter about the latest unsolvable riddle, or how he'd been moody the other night. But we all knew the reason the game was so good was Jack. He spent hours preparing and writing each scenario - his detailed background knowledge filled more folders than he could carry to the game each week. Yet he could also improvise so well that we never knew if he'd planned this interaction, or that fight.

If we'd chucked the whole adventuring in and gone off to become llama farmers, Jack would have coped - and it would still have been fun enough to turn up every week and play. And more than that: life in Hurssia, world events and the plot would have gone on regardless. The whole party managed to get locked in a magical box for five years - and yet Hurssia still happened.

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That was what made Hurssia so real. It was a place which existed independently of us, where other stories unfolded and other people lived. It was Jack's ability to react to us as a whole world would, and to ignore us when the whole world would that made Hurssia real, and the place we lived for three hours every week. It was his ability to create flying purple exploding omelettes, or magical spades of digging, or give very tree-ish answers when Crysannia cast Speak with Plants that made it fun. He encouraged us to write backgrounds for our characters by giving them life points if we did. Jack said that characters we'd thought about and cared about shouldn't die so easily. He'd work our mad imaginings into the plot, till we weren't sure if he'd thought it up or we had - or if, like the rest of Hurssia, it had somehow always been that way.

Hurssia worked its way into our real lives. We talked about Jack's game as we would what had happened in the bar. Sitting round the breakfast table we'd talk of Kursaval, or the latest riddle, or laugh at Indran's getting his head chopped off or Aspen's gender (we got very confused about that one, over the course of the game). I remember my housemate Sarah's confusion when Indran, Chris and I were talking, until she realised we were talking about the game.

When I started playing I didn't even know the other player's real names. For weeks I thought of them as Kael, or Corwin, or Indran - actually that was his real name, - he was using it because the DM had recently ruled that characters with Star Trek names would die a swift and unpleasant death soon after creation.

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By four years later, we'd become housemates and friends. All of the group had lived with at least one other member. It started at Chris's 21st birthday, and in the years following we drank together, hung out together, celebrated graduation together, and even caved together. Jake left Canterbury, Marc and Neil returned from their years out. Tim was only here for a year at the start - Ian for a year at the end. Malc left for Nottingham... and came back. But we had something in common, and something worth meeting up for - Jack's game.

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Part of Canterbury for me will always be the roleplaying game I played on Monday nights for the first 3 or 4 years I lived here. Through it I started a brand new hobby, and met friends I still see every week, including my present housemate. I was (bizarrely) the president of the roleplaying group at uni for a year, and got to meet people who I would normally have never known existed. My second ever website was written about the game - and I spent months planning a third before I admitted it would never happen now! Every so often I still think of how I would dress as my characters, were I to play them in a live action game. Four years later, Marc (the only member of the group I see regularly) and I still tease each other about our characters - him because Randall got pregnant when a goat, me because my PMT-ing, berserking, thick, were-bear had a great charisma which we decided must be entirely down to her figure.

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At university, you get to do new things and meet new people. I'm always going to be grateful for Jack's game, and the chance to do that, and more.

 

Clarie (2004)

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