Reading: Finished Harrow the Ninth (then grabbed a copy of Nona the Ninth)
Listening to: “Spawn of the Changing Raven” by Black Tiger (HDK 54) and “Journey Through Realm and Region” by Unsheathed Glory (HDK 154)
Watching: The Tempest (Stratford Festival 2019)
Playing: old NES and Sega games like Super Mario Bros. and Golden Axe
A few years back, I first discovered Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG, and then I found my way into the old-school renaissance sub-genre of table-top gaming, and since then, I’ve become obsessed with games like Old School Essentials and Maze Rats, and adventure settings like Dolmenwood.
Unfortunately, I’ve had little opportunity to play any of these old school-inspired games. I’ve got a sporadic DCC RPG campaign going, but we’ve been meeting less and less frequently. And I’ve only ever DMed ONE session of old school D&D (Rules Cyclopedia version).
My gaming group is more interested in 5e, so that’s what we play. There’s nothing wrong with 5e. It’s not a bad system.
It’s just… not my favorite thing. It doesn’t sing to my soul the way the old school stuff does. The simplicity of the old school games (and old school-inspired games) coupled with the grittier, more classic sword and sorcery flavor excites me a lot more than the rules and flavor of 5e.
For many players, the fun of 5e is in character creation. The character-building process is a huge part of what they like about role-playing. They can choose from a host of different character options: different feats, different skills, different race and class combinations, different bonus actions and powers. For many players, the fun isn’t just playing at the table, it’s creating the character and studying the supplemental books, looking for cool stuff to add to that character.
As a mostly-DM, I’m less enamored with this focus on character creation, but even as a player, I’m not particularly interested in it. Making the character is one part of the fun, sure, but it’s not the main part. I would go so far as to say that playing the character (as in, playing “in character,” i.e.: talking like my PC, exploring my PC’s backstory, etc.) is not the main attraction for me.
What I love about RPGs is the exploration. I get to imagine myself inside a fantastical world. My character is my window into that world, but it’s the world that I’m interested in, not the “character build.”
Of course, I enjoy playing a character and growing an attachment to them, but I’m not interested in “playing a part,” like an actor. I’m interested in discovering a new world, of seeing what’s around the corner of a dark dungeon passage, or what’s hidden in the depths of an enchanted wood. The character’s growth happens when they explore the world. They change as they explore, not by leveling up and gaining new feats and skills.
The other thing I love about old-school RPGs is the aesthetic, which, I’ll admit, is my personal preference and nothing more.
And there’s nostalgia too. Old school RPGs take me back to Saturdays at Waldenbooks looking at all those Dragonlance covers on the shelves. They take me back to third grade when I discovered the Endless Quest books, to playing MERP and HeroQuest, to watching movies like Legend and Dragonslayer over and over and over again. The old school gaming stuff–even when it’s really weird and acid-y like Ultraviolet Grasslands–gives me the same vibes I used to get as a kid. I don’t think it’s the rules per se that do it; I think it’s the DIY spirit of the scene and the messy creativity.
But yeah, the rules are great too because they ARE simpler. The rules leave a lot of things open to the imagination of the DM and the players. I like that freedom.
I sometimes think of 5e as one of those adult coloring books with amazingly detailed and gorgeous pictures inside. They are fun to color because at the end of the process, you have this amazing piece of art. But old school games are more like one of those “Child’s First Art Book” things, where on page one there’s an outline of a fishbowl and the directions say to draw a bunch of fish, but what the fish look like, how they’re shaped, what they’re doing, and what else is inside the fishbowl is entirely up to you. And each page is like that: a suggestion of what to draw, but everything else comes from your imagination. That’s what old school gaming feels like. Suggestions and outlines, but you get to draw the world.
So anyway, I wish I knew more people who wanted to play stuff like OSE and DCC RPG. When I’m feeling in the mood, I sometimes roll up a couple of characters and start sketching a simple dungeon and wilderness area, and then sorta run my own adventure in my head. I know it sounds lame, but sometimes it’s all I can do to satisfy my desire to play old-school stuff. Sometimes I read modules and adventure settings and get ideas for games I want to run or even for stories I want to write. Even if I’m just flying solo, the old school stuff ends up feeding my imagination. I might not be able to play a campaign with a full table of people, but at least I can let the old school stuff inspire me.
I turned forty this past year. 1992 was thirty years ago. Somehow, in my fortieth year, I can see images of my childhood more readily than I can see the here and now. They are TV images set to high contrast.
Seven years ago, when I began Avalon Summer (my fictional, fantasy adventure memoir), I didn’t reckon with the time that had passed between the early 1990s and 2015. I didn’t reckon with how much older I had grown. It felt like the past, sure, but it wasn’t that long ago. It didn’t feel that long ago to me. It hadn’t yet become “the past” the way my parents’ childhood decades had.
Now, I cannot help but reckon the time. 2022 and 1992 are thirty years apart. Thirty years is a big round number; it is substantial and significant and feels hard to ignore. Everyone makes a huge deal out of these decade-markers (like the incredulity my aunts and uncles and older cousins have when they realize I’ve turned forty — I, the “youngest” of the cousins). Thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, etc. These numbers denote something, I guess, when we notice them and point to them and say, “This is a marker of time.”
So it’s been thirty years since 1992, since I was ten-going-on-eleven, since I was in that liminal space between childhood and not-childhood (but not really adolescence, not yet), and I still hoped to run around the woods pretending to be on a quest, fighting ogres, and seeing elves without embarrassment, without judgment or teenage scorn. By the end of that year, such hope was gone. 1993 was a different time.
Everywhere I turn now, my memory sees my childhood. Maybe it’s because I’m watching Pee Wee’s Playhouse with my kids these days, or sharing grainy videos of old Muppet Babies episodes with them on Youtube; maybe it’s because I’m listening to Paul Simon say “call me Al” on the home stereo, or Cyndi Lauper comes up on my ipod in the car while I’m driving the kids to Grandma’s, and along the way, the sunlight bursts over the world and warms it on a cold April morning so that I feel a fleeting promise of what Saturday mornings used to mean, in my childhood, when I had a whole day to daydream and tell myself my adventure stories and read books and wonder.
I float back into memories a lot these days. Every new gray hair or old pop song does it. And thirty years was so long ago now that it feels long ago, it feels like the 1960s felt to me when my parents were forty: a golden-hazed Polaroid, an almost-foreign land — but it’s a photograph that’s coming more and more into focus, the contrast between then and now growing more and more pronounced. I don’t mean in a “Those were the good ol’ days!” kind of way where I deride all the changes that have happened these thirty years hence; I like a lot of changes we’ve seen; there have been and continue to be many good changes. I am not pining.
What I mean, simply, is that my childhood was a long time ago, so I can see the differences now. Technicolor has bled into the frames and rendered that part of my past ultra-vivid — but ultra-vivid because it has separated from the whole. It isn’t part of the continuum anymore: it’s a space set apart, at least for me.
I wish I could live in these images, honestly. They feel more real. Is this what it means to grow old: to be more in the past than in the present? To live the here and now like Dorothy in black-and-white Kansas while bright-colored Oz awaits when we close our eyes and remember? I don’t know. I don’t know if this kind of rumination is even very healthy or helpful. But it feels significant: a recognition of my mortality, perhaps.
The problem, as I see it, is that this feeling — this experience of my past — is what I want to convey with my novel, Avalon Summer, but I know I’m failing at it. I know I’m falling short. And I wish I knew how to fix it. I can see it all so clearly — I can feel it so deeply — but I’m afraid I can’t help you see it or feel it that way. No matter what I write, no matter what words I use, the communication of these feelings eludes me. This is the anxiety of the artist, I guess. The continual failure of a sub-creator who can only render shadows on the wall when she wants to breath life into clay.
I want Avalon Summer to be finished this year. Thirty years from 1992 to 2022. I don’t know why, but that feels fitting. It began life as a NaNoWriMo novella, then it became my “side project” when I needed a break from writing the Merlin’s Last Magic series, and now it has been my focus for the past twelve months — this side project has become the center of my imagination. The memories and ideas that have lingered with me for thirty years have burst through the wall like the Kool-Aid man, like a Nickelodeon orange splat across the screen, like the feeling of a Saturday afternoon bike ride through my old neighborhood.
Avalon Summer is meant for anyone who has ever read a book that made them glad to be alive, for anyone who has ever wanted to lay down alone in the grass and think, for anyone who has ever wanted to be loved despite feeling undeserving. It’s for the square pegs and the dreamers. For the misfits and the weirdos.
I don’t know if I’ll finish the book this year. Days flow by and so much still seems undone, but I know I’m trying. I know I’m trying to find the words and fill the pages. I haven’t abandoned Merlin’s Last Magic or the second book in the series (Ysbaddaden), but right now, I have to finish Avalon Summer.
I’m looking ahead: another Saturday morning, R.E.M. comes up on the ipod as I drive the kids to Grandma’s, and along the way, a breeze blows through the open window and cools the world in warm July so that I know the fleeting promise of what a Saturday morning still means. It’s still a day for daydreams and adventure stories and reading books and wonder. And on the shelf is my own book, a letter to myself, a moment of grace. Anyway, that’s what I hope.
The 1980s spilled into the early 90s.
This is a phenomenon we see throughout the 20th century. The early 60s were a continuation of the 1950s (until Kennedy was assassinated). The early 70s continued the tumultuous counter-culture of the 1960s (until withdrawal from Vietnam).
And the early 90s were one last flourishing of the tubular 80s: neon was still en vogue (though perhaps declining); jangly college rock was still ascendant; hip-hip was still funny and loose and political; for me, Nickelodeon still represented the kid-centric spirit of the age, with its slime and its orange splat and its strangeness.
The 1980s were the decade of strange: Pee-Wee Herman, They Might Be Giants, Dungeons & Dragons, Garbage Pail Kids. The early 90s were strange too; Ren & Stimpy were born, and Dick Tracy came to the big screen, and R.E.M. could sing about “Shiny Happy People.”
The early 90s are R.E.M. to me. The early 90s are color-change t-shirts. Super Soakers.
First emerging in the 1980s, “nerd kid culture” took wing in the early 90s. The dweebs from all those John Hughes movies gave us permission to be proud pre-teen dorks in the early 90s. Drop Dead Fred told us to go play with our imaginary friends, and Salute Your Shorts invited us to make summer camp adventures in our own backyards.
The backyard was still a world in the early 90s. So were sidewalks and community swimming pools. So was candy from the corner store.
Do I sound ancient? Do I sound like I’m murmuring “the good old days”?
Well, I am. If today is all flatness, then the 1990s were the last decade of dunes and divots and bumps. It was a pimpled decade — especially the early 90s — not yet completely air-brushed.
Everything is on the internet now, or so we tell ourselves. Hundreds of thousands of websites and articles and listicles about the 1990s, but none of them really contain the early 90s. Not my early 90s, anyway.
My early 90s are not these flattened versions, these smoothed out versions that we see reflected back at us today, all these websites showing us the same things. My early 90s doesn’t exist on the internet. It can’t.
It’s too personal, too wrapped up in the strange confluence of pop culture and real, lived experiences that make my memories my own. When we write about these decades in our usual flattened way on the internet, we reduce them to the culture of the time, to advertisements and trends. But these don’t capture the experience of living through a time period. They don’t reveal what it felt like to live in that era.
Maybe this is why I decided to write Avalon Summer, my weird memoir-that’s-not-a-memoir. I wanted to see if I could capture the experience of my childhood. Stories, after all, aren’t websites or articles or listicles. Perhaps narrative is the only way we can really express the lived experiences of our memories.
Looking for the early 90s is quixotic. It only exists inside my head, just as it only exists inside your head, if you were lucky enough to be alive back then. I don’t know why I want to write about it, except somehow, I want you to understand. I want you to go looking for the early 90s too. It won’t be found in a “You Might Be a 90s Kid” video or a pop culture website. It can’t be found on the internet at all.
And that’s why we have to find it.
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