No Control at All

Let's continue in the spirit of the last post.  This may seem an odd series, one that I hope may provide some perspective — though I suppose somewhat self-aggrandising, as I include superfluous autobiographical detail about myself.  Ah well.  Writing has to be fun for me, too, as well as the reader.

As the reader may remember, it's 1973, and I am nine.  D&D hasn't been invented yet officially, and so none of my few friends have heard of it, nor have I any rule books nor places where I may go and buy them.  The rules are sufficient different from anything else in 1973 that it would be useless to hunt up other game rulebooks as a template.  All I have is my imagination — for, as I said, I've travelled back in time and I retain all of my knowledge and experience, though now lodged in a 9-y.o. body, in a home that's familiar to me, with parents who nominally love me in name if not in nature.

And I want to play D&D.

So, three problems: I haven't any players, I haven't any written rules and I haven't a game setting of any kind.  On top of that, I live in quite a strict home by today's standards, bedtime at 8 o'clock, nine on Fridays, and I absolutely wouldn't have been given permission to run a "party" once a week, which is how my parents would have viewed putting a game together.  My elementary school's library closes half-an-hour after the end of school.  If we assume today is the date I jump back in time, so that it's December 14, 1973, I'm in grade 4 ... and of all the people in the school, I'm the only one who knows that the school, Dr. E.W. Coffin, is going to burn down come the very early morning of January 13th, 30 days hence.  I remember waking up that night and seeing the bright orange light coming from up the hill about three A.M., and not knowing what it was.  I lived a block from school.  The next day, Sunday morning, a lot of us went to look at the smoking ruins.

I have a vague memory of who was responsible; some boys from the Junior High School did it as a revenge against school in general, setting a blowtorch in the maintenance room near the office and letting it burn against the wall while they fled.  They were caught.  I don't remember their names, so I'd have trouble convincing anyone I knew the school was going to burn down.  That would probably get me in trouble.  I'd be damn sure to empty out my desk the previous Friday, though.  I lost personal books and other things in that fire — though all these years later, I don't remember their titles or any specific item.  I imagine that returning to the age of nine would involve a lot of staring at things that I haven't seen and have long forgotten, fascinated with the very fact of their existence.

After the school burns down, in desperation the school board is going to stuff the first three grades into Brentwood Elementary, and make space in Sir Winston Churchill High School for grades four to six — including me.  Thus, I went to high school at the age of nine.  The same high school I'd return to later.  We occupied all of five classrooms at Churchill, without access to the library there (I don't remember any books at all, to be honest).  We were there for the rest of the school year; starting grade five, we were bussed half an hour to Westgate Elementary, so again there was no opportunity to use a library either before or after school.  I didn't get to use a library again until E.W. Coffin had been rebuilt; we were returned to the rebuilt, much more modern school the spring of 1975.

All this is to explain that I had next to no control over my life at that time ... certainly not the sort of control I'd have needed to run D&D with my peers, even if I had rules and game written out for me.  We could have gotten together on Saturday afternoons, perhaps; but at that time, it was very common for suburban parents to dictate chores and other activities during our free time.  In the summer, my parents would relocate us to our cabin at Sylvan Lake, often picking us up from school on Friday afternoon and returning us on Sunday night, every weekend.  In the winters, we weren't allowed to leave the house at all after dark (which, in December, comes around 4:30 p.m. in Calgary) — a moratorium that wasn't lifted until sunlight lasted until 7 or 7:30 ... whereupon we'd be allowed to go out for half an hour or 45 minutes, as bedtime came soon after.

I know how alien this sounds to the present-day ear.  I was just explaining to my partner Tamara the other day that none of this was unique or odd to my parents.  These were the rules all my friends were held to — except for those who had parents who were even more strict.  My friend Andrew, for example, was never allowed to play after school, ever, as he had piano lessons and chores, along with having to do his homework while his father supervised.  We drifted apart as we got into Junior High, but I took classes with him right up to High School graduation.  Andrew wound up in International Baccalaureate, doing four to six hours of homework a night ... and when he got into university, and out from under the thumb of his parents, discovered drinking and drugs and how to fail classes for the first time in his life.  I don't remember him amounting to anything.

Not the only IB student I knew who walked that path.

So ...

I don't think I'd be very concerned about players for a good while.  Things did ease up by grade six; my bedtimes were extended, I was allowed to stay up until ten (!) on Fridays and nine on Saturdays, though it was church the next day.  My sister turned 12 that year and that was the end of babysitters.  That was my brother's last year at home; he was 17, not home a lot, and he'd end up leaving in a rage after graduating high school.  I kinda did the same thing, though I was a little older than him.

My first priority, I think, would be the game world.  I've been clear that I like my present world, and wouldn't feel the need to change it.  Thus, I still choose to run the real Earth as a fantasy world.  Those same encyclopedias I have now were there in my parents house.  Their set was dated 1959; I found my set in a used bookstore in 1986, dated 1952.  The differences were minimal.  Thus I'd have the wherewithal to establish my "settlements" and scan the encyclopedia to build up "references" for my eventually built trade tables — though, like I said, I'd wait for Lotus in 1983/4 to tackle that project.

Before launching myself into computer graphic design in the 90s, I'd learned a lot about drafting and the use of graphic tools: the right pencils, erasers, brushes, tape, t-squares, drafting boards and so on.  All that expertise is entirely worthless to me now, though no doubt it built good instincts and work focus.  For a time, with world building, I'd immerse myself in all that again, and learn a lot more to boot.  That'd please my father the engineer, who'd get all weepy-eyed about his son taking his first steps towards becoming an engineer like his old man.  I got the "you're going to be an engineer someday" lecture about every two months growing up.  As such, so long as I didn't tell him why I wanted a drafting table for Christmas, I'd probably actually get one.  Though not at 9.  Maybe by 12 or 13 ... with an expectation that I'd have to raise half the price myself.

My father was a Methodist.  You know the joke about the Methodist Santa that knocks on the front door and offers the kids toys if they'll help paint the sleigh?  There you are.

Here's a good time to put this down.  I'll get more into starting the setting and building a rule set with my next post.