David Dubrow

Author

Confessions of a Former (?) D&D Geek

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Our culture has changed significantly since I paid attention to it, which was quite some time ago.  I suspect that fantasy role-playing games (RPGs) aren’t considered quite as nerdy now as they were in my time, but I could be wrong.  With the mainstream popularity of video games, it seems that the pen-and-paper games should also enjoy a little more cachet.

Without them, I would not be a writer.  Games like D&D, Call of Cthulhu, Villains and Vigilantes, etc. were quite formative in my social life and helped build my mental landscape.  Without use, your imagination shrinks.  The stories we told during those games were really quite extraordinary.

It was on a rainy day in 1980 that my older brother introduced us to Dungeons and Dragons, the blue box version.  Though fairly young at the time, I was utterly captivated.  We played, of course, The Keep on the Borderlands module (we called them “modules” because that was what was printed on the box; more properly, they’d be called stories, or scenarios).  Those early games didn’t last long for reasons I no longer recall, but the game had lit a fire in me.

A couple years later, we unearthed those old D&D rulebooks and played again, mostly just my younger and I, with me as the Dungeon Master (also called “referee” or “game master”).  Then, during a trip to a local bookstore, I found the Dungeon Master’s Guide and Player’s Manual for Advanced Dungeons and Dragons.  Advanced!  Wait: you could be both an Elf and a Magic-User?  That was when things got really fun.

In high school, I joined the D&D club (called the Simulations Club) on a whim, which was one of the best decisions of my life: it helped me get out of my shell a little and introduced me to people who are still friends today.  One afternoon a week, we’d spend a couple hours after school killing monsters, sneaking into castles, and other such things.  All on paper.

From there, I found the game Call of Cthulhu: rather than play Lord of the Rings-style adventures, you took on the role of a 1920’s paranormal investigator dealing with H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos.  It was neat, but what really made it come alive for our gaming group was the Dreamlands expansion, where you could descend the seven hundred steps to the Gate of Deeper Slumber, and from there emerge into a fantasy world both surreal and horrifying.  Zoogs and horned Men of Leng, cat-inhabited Ulthar and Kuranes’ Celephais, moonbeasts and magicians.

By this time, I was typically the game master, the one who ran the Sunday night games: it was a role I enjoyed more than playing.  The games got even more interesting when I acquired both the Stormbringer and Hawkmoon role-playing game sets, which had the same core rules as Call of Cthulhu (all of them were published by Chaosium).  Rather than a limited universe of Earth and the Dreamlands, the players went further afield to Granbretan and the Young Kingdoms, and from there to the multiverse.

And then something new came around: Nephilim.  Also a Chaosium game, it had a similar rule set, but the setting was so different, so intriguing, that it couldn’t be folded into the long-running game.  We started anew.  The basic premise of Nephilim was that the players took on the role of semi-immortal spirits who possessed human beings throughout history, acquiring magical power and influence.  It was a world of secret societies, of changing human events to suit inhuman schemes.  Just creating a character took the whole day.

Eventually, as marriages, careers, children, and other elements of daily life took over, the game broke up.  For a while I resurrected it online with some of the old players, using a telnet client, but it didn’t have the same oomph as gathering around a kitchen or rec room table, playing face-to-face.

There’s a lot here I didn’t mention in detail: the Friday night D&D sessions, forays into Vampire: The Masquerade, Villains and Vigilantes, the Illuminati and Family Business card games, Dune, Axis and Allies, and poker.  All of them are worthy of pages of description.  Except for poker, which is fairly pedestrian, even when you get into variations like Follow the Wild Queen Chicago Recall.

Sometimes, I miss it.  But I’m too busy now telling my stories my way to collaborate the way these old games required.

Without it, though, without D&D and Call of Cthulhu, I wouldn’t be here, doing what I’m doing now.  There was true magic in those old games, and the spell they laid on me will last my entire life.  The rule books are still in boxes somewhere, waiting to be opened and enjoyed again.

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Book Review: Dune: The Butlerian Jihad

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It gives me no pleasure at all to write a review like this.  I’m intimately familiar with what it takes to write a novel with multiple characters, attempting to describe events that are epic in scope.  And I understand that not every book is going to appeal to every reader.  You can decide that you don’t like a book, but acknowledge that it’s a difference of personal taste, not the book’s quality.  Nevertheless, Dune: The Butlerian Jihad is an objectively bad book that should never have been foisted upon the reading public.

I tried extremely hard to like it.  It promised to describe a very interesting period in the Dune universe: what caused humanity to throw away advanced computer technology in such a way as to refer to it as a jihad?

Well, you can keep asking, because this answer is terrible.  There’s nothing about it that’s worth your time.  Here are some of the low points:

1) The chapter introductions are trite and without insight.  Take this chapter introduction from DTBJ (Dune: The Butlerian Jihad): “When humans created a computer with the ability to collect information and learn from it, they signed the death warrant of mankind.”  Not particularly penetrating, that.  Why bother reading the rest of the book after that?  Contrast it with this chapter intro from Dune: “There is probably no more terrible instant of enlightenment than the one in which you discover your father is a man – with human flesh.”  That tells you something.  You can agree with it or not, but it’s a great insight into what Paul-Muad’Dib thought.  There’s none of that in DTBJ.  The characters and plotting likewise lack depth.

Sandworm: “Ow.”

2) The writing tells you everything without bothering to go through the whole rigmarole of showing you anything.  An example: “He was a serious young man, prone to honesty and with a tendency to see things in black and white….Much admired by his superiors, Xavier had been promoted quickly; equally respected by his soldiers, he was the sort of trusted man they would follow into battle.”  Oh.  Well, great.  I don’t suppose there’s any way the writers could have demonstrated these traits for us in the dialogue or action of the book.  Instead, the reader is beaten over the head with this kind of information.  Clumsy.  Terribly clumsy.  The writers don’t give us the opportunity to judge the characters on their own merits, and instead tell us what to think.

3) The best parts are glossed over, and the story is mundane.  Evil brains-in-a-jar cyborgs called cymeks begin the novel by attacking a planet.  These cymeks have names like Ajax, Agamemnon, and Tlaloc, but don’t act like their namesakes, and there’s little backstory described or told about their origins.  We get ugly little infodumps about them like cat crottes in a litterbox instead.  None of that intricate weaving of history and current action that we’d come to love from Frank Herbert’s work.  The reasons for voluntarily relinquishing one’s own humanity go entirely unexplored here.

DTBJ was a New York Times bestseller, published by Macmillan.  And it’s awful.  Tell me again how self-published books are the scourge of literary quality, and that the more self-published crap gets out there, the less likely it is great, properly-vetted books will be read.  The gatekeepers missed this one.  Big time.

I got 11% in and had to stop reading.  Don’t do what I did and buy it.  Learn from my mistake.  Save yourself.

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“Get out of my MIND!”

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I’ve been rereading Frank Herbert’s Dune.  I’ve read it several times since my teens, but this is the first reread in a decade.  Now that I’m reading with both eyes open: one to be entertained and one to see what Herbert did and learn from it, I’m finding brand new things to like and dislike about the novel.  Despite some flaws, it’s still captivating.

Like many, I came to Dune through David Lynch’s movie.  Dune purists hated it.  The critics thought it was laughable.  It was overwrought, overacted, and, in the Alan Smithee extended version, way overlong.

I loved it.  I still do.

It’s colored my reading the book.  I can’t help but read Paul’s dialogue in Kyle MacLachlan’s too-precise voice.  Linda Hunt has become the Shadout Mapes for me.  The late, great Robert Jordan was unfortunately miscast as Duncan Idaho, a small role in the film but a massive one in the books.  Can’t forget Sting as Feyd-Rautha (in later years, when my friends and I played Avalon Hill’s awesome Dune strategy board game, we’d always refer to him as “Lovely Feyd” in a breathy Kenneth McMillan voice).

If I’d read the book first, I’d no doubt have a different opinion of both it and the film.  Better or worse, I don’t know.  The book was definitely better: a typical claim.

Contrast that with Mario Puzo’s The Godfather.  Same situation: I’d seen the movie first, then read the book.  The difference here is that the movie was much, much better.  It was tighter, more cohesive, more entertaining.  The book had some weird subplots that included a mostly superfluous Johnny Fontaine and a young woman who needed an operation on her private parts, neither of which were connected.  Characters came in and out with little rhyme or reason.  It was a fun read, but didn’t do much for me.

Our current media culture tells us that the book is no longer enough.  If it’s popular, it needs a movie.  Or a television series.  Or a movie sequel.  I don’t attach a value judgment to this: it is what it is.  Before I became a dad, I went to see a lot of movies, and I still like to watch them when I have the time.

What the media culture creates is a crossover effect for the book.  The Dune phenomenon I mentioned earlier can’t be avoided.  David Lynch’s bizarre vision of Frank Herbert’s universe has, in part, become my vision of it.  I know I’m not alone in this.  What’s seen can’t be unseen.  Lynch has put himself into my copy of the book.

The late Puzo and equally late Herbert aside, do the authors of these books know what’s been done to them in the minds of their readers?  Translating them to a new medium doesn’t change the words printed on the page, but it does alter our perception of them.  They no longer exist in discrete vacuums; one format informs and alters the other.

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