Gaming Summer Camp
Mostly, those of us who are passionate about roleplaying games fell into the hobby in a fairly informal way. But as the hobby becomes more widespread, there have also become more formal ways of being introduced to the games. Conventions often have panels or gaming tracks that are specifically designed for introducing new gamers to either gaming in general or to a specific game system. I’ve even heard of college courses that include elements from roleplaying games as part of the curriculum.
An old high school friend of mine is doing his part, running a summer camp centered around Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition in Durham, NC. Unfortunately, he’s already completed the first of three weeks of the camp, but there are two remaining, so still plenty of time to get your kids involved if you live in the area. It runs from 11:00 am to 3:30 pm at the Dimensions Family School, with more information and registration available here.
In speaking with my friend, Brock, about what he had planned. He’s taught courses on Dungeons & Dragons at Dimensions Family Camp for 3 quarters now:
Each quarter I try something different. The first quarter was a multi-generational epic, where they played the same heroes, re-incarnated over and over, battling the same world-ending villain from the creation of the world until the climactic apocalype-averting battle at the end of class. The 2nd quarter was a world-hopping romp through the D&D settings, where they met all the most iconic heroes and villains from D&D history. The 3rd quarter was a “bottle episode”, where they spent almost the entire quarter in the same dungeon, over a period of only a few days, with a high body count and many tough ethical choices, rounded out with a grand finale involving the Deck of Many Things and the Tarrasque.
There’s a paradox in the nature of a dictionary of monsters. The medieval bestiaries at least claimed to be compendia of actual knowledge. But books like Jorge Luis Borges and Margarita Guerrero’s Book of Imaginary Beings (Manual de zoología fantástica) and perhaps even Katharine Briggs’ Dictionary of Fairies are only superficially rational collections of information. Though alphabetised and cross-referenced, the logical framework’s a way of presenting wild fantasy and dream: basilisks and baldanders, brownies and banshees, sylphs and sphinxes. The Monster Manual, and the role-playing handbooks it inspired, take this contradiction to a new level — detailed statistics for each creature described along with the avowed intent of inspiring new stories featuring the legendary or imaginary entities. Quantified, numerically precise, the monsters in these enchiridia still crack open the inside of the head, driving readers to imagine worlds big enough to hold dungeon-dwellers and dragons. Rupert Bottenberg’s Fourscore Phantasmagores is the newest volume of these wonders for gamers and monster-lovers of all stripes, presenting, as it says on the cover, “A Gathering of Grotequeries for Gapejaws and Gamemasters.” And, conscious of its predecessors, the book’s a rich source of inspiration; a grimoire seeding new myths.
