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D&D General The True Story Behind Mazes & Monsters
- Thread starter Nebulous
- Start date
Cordwainer Fish
Imp. Int. Scout Svc. (Dishon. Ret.)
Roof and tunnel hacking is a thing, and at MIT is something of a tradition, but I don't rate anyone playing any tabletop game in a steam tunnel unless it was to be ironic. Paper gets soggy in places like that.
Mannahnin
Scion of Murgen (He/Him)
Sure. Having wandered the tunnels under MIT a little myself in more recent years, it wouldn't surprise me if someone got the idea AFTER Dear created the legend. I've just never seen any real evidence that people were trying such things in the 70s, especially not any place as unhospitable as tunnels with average 115 degree fahrenheit temperatures.
Even the MIT tunnels, much more comfortable though they are, aren't really laid out like a dungeon, and have enough people using them just to get from place to place that they'd tend to interrupt a game in progress. But a few of us played (Vampire, actually) LARPs using parts of them and above-ground rooms in the 90s.
Ralif Redhammer
Legend
I've read both Mazes and Monsters and The Dungeon Master. Dear's book is definitely the better-written of the two, ironically, but it still bears repeating that Dear is a very self-aggrandizing person.
One thing that Dear gets right is that it wasn't D&D at fault ultimately (though his recanting came a little too late to stem the tide), but that Egbert was an intelligent man struggling to come to terms with his own sexuality, struggling with the burden of going to college too young. That he was failed by his support structure (family, friends, college officials) at almost every turn.
One thing that Dear gets right is that it wasn't D&D at fault ultimately (though his recanting came a little too late to stem the tide), but that Egbert was an intelligent man struggling to come to terms with his own sexuality, struggling with the burden of going to college too young. That he was failed by his support structure (family, friends, college officials) at almost every turn.
Alzrius
The EN World kitten
For what it's worth, Egbert's family has publicly stated that "most of the things in the book are inaccurate."
Which is almost hard to believe, considering that Dear wrote in The Dungeon Master that he once rescued another child from a group of armed cultists, exchanging gunfire with them as he carried the kid to a helicopter that was waiting to fly them out.
J.Quondam
CR 1/8
Holy mackerel! That movie would give Die Hard some stiff competition.Which is almost hard to believe, considering that Dear wrote in The Dungeon Master that he once rescued another child from a group of armed cultists, exchanging gunfire with them as he carried the kid to a helicopter that was waiting to fly them out.
Cordwainer Fish
Imp. Int. Scout Svc. (Dishon. Ret.)
"Now I have a Wand of Wonder. Ho-ho-ho."
Celebrim
Legend
I had a cousin about my dad's age that was an early adopter back in the 1970's - OD&D, Traveller, all that culture. He learned about D&D in a 1970's commune that he joined out of college had cult like aspects. I'm old enough to remember when one the best ways to find D&D books was go to occult book stores that smelled of incense and weed, and had D&D books among the tarot cards, cheap pentacles, incense candles, and books on how to cast spells. (I'm not making any of that up, I bought my 1e DMG in such a place with my lawn mowing money on the secret because my parents would have been horrified to know I'd patronized such a place. They were horrified enough by some of the illustrations in the books they found.)
And when I was a teen in the mid to late 80s I did talk to adults who'd done their college years in the 1970s and been in the gaming scene then, and what they talked about was foreign and weird crap that was like occasional LARP and half-cult of personality. One teacher I had for example had a DM that made up verbal components to all the 1e spells that they had to recite whenever they wanted to cast a spell and claimed that when they had outdoor adventures he liked them to go up into the national forest for the atmosphere.
I don't really know what to believe about all the things I heard about. Was her DM actually a practicing witch who liked to have his players assist in night time rituals as part of her gaming and his magick as she claimed? I know that the early 1970s had a huge occult revival so it's possible, but I also don't know how much of her information was actually her taking elements of the resulting occult scare of which D&D is the best known but not only example and making it part of her own story. I don't know how many of those adults were really telling the unvarnished truth, or how many were trying to make themselves look cooler than they really were, or how many were trying to scare me away from the hobby. I think there were probably kernels of truth in what they told me but I don't know how much or what parts are truth.
And that goes double for a guy trying to profit from telling a sensationalized story. There is very little of that narrative I take at face value. I don't know what the true story about Egbert really was, but I don't trust Jaffe or Dear to tell me.
There was a recent thread about Old School D&D where people argued about what Old School was. Based on my older cousin and the older teenage groups that I knew of that played D&D in the 1970s, the real Old School involved heavy drug use and lots of weirdness. There is a scene in the novelization of ET I read, where the mother is listening from the other room and hears her oldest son joking about taking pills with the other boys and she's afraid to find out just how much of the jokes are based on reality. That passage that I don't think is in the movie always felt spot on to me, in the same way some of the kids on bikes experience in Stranger Things feels real to my real D&D in the early to mid-80s (minus the cute magical pixie grrl and passages to the far realms). I didn't play with the older group, but they were who introduced me to the game and they were dopeheads - no question about it. The 1970's were a weird anyway with lots of social experiments going on as people tried to figure out how to do modern life or fought against their dissatisfaction with it, and also remember that this was before high function autism was understood or accepted in anyway and people were seeking safe refuge.
tl;dr
Don't believe everything you read or hear. There is so much about the past that just becomes unknowable after a point.
And when I was a teen in the mid to late 80s I did talk to adults who'd done their college years in the 1970s and been in the gaming scene then, and what they talked about was foreign and weird crap that was like occasional LARP and half-cult of personality. One teacher I had for example had a DM that made up verbal components to all the 1e spells that they had to recite whenever they wanted to cast a spell and claimed that when they had outdoor adventures he liked them to go up into the national forest for the atmosphere.
I don't really know what to believe about all the things I heard about. Was her DM actually a practicing witch who liked to have his players assist in night time rituals as part of her gaming and his magick as she claimed? I know that the early 1970s had a huge occult revival so it's possible, but I also don't know how much of her information was actually her taking elements of the resulting occult scare of which D&D is the best known but not only example and making it part of her own story. I don't know how many of those adults were really telling the unvarnished truth, or how many were trying to make themselves look cooler than they really were, or how many were trying to scare me away from the hobby. I think there were probably kernels of truth in what they told me but I don't know how much or what parts are truth.
And that goes double for a guy trying to profit from telling a sensationalized story. There is very little of that narrative I take at face value. I don't know what the true story about Egbert really was, but I don't trust Jaffe or Dear to tell me.
There was a recent thread about Old School D&D where people argued about what Old School was. Based on my older cousin and the older teenage groups that I knew of that played D&D in the 1970s, the real Old School involved heavy drug use and lots of weirdness. There is a scene in the novelization of ET I read, where the mother is listening from the other room and hears her oldest son joking about taking pills with the other boys and she's afraid to find out just how much of the jokes are based on reality. That passage that I don't think is in the movie always felt spot on to me, in the same way some of the kids on bikes experience in Stranger Things feels real to my real D&D in the early to mid-80s (minus the cute magical pixie grrl and passages to the far realms). I didn't play with the older group, but they were who introduced me to the game and they were dopeheads - no question about it. The 1970's were a weird anyway with lots of social experiments going on as people tried to figure out how to do modern life or fought against their dissatisfaction with it, and also remember that this was before high function autism was understood or accepted in anyway and people were seeking safe refuge.
tl;dr
Don't believe everything you read or hear. There is so much about the past that just becomes unknowable after a point.
Nebulous
Legend
"I think he went way overboard with all his quotation marks. After all these years, I don't know how he could remember all those conversations."For what it's worth, Egbert's family has publicly stated that "most of the things in the book are inaccurate."
Which is almost hard to believe, considering that Dear wrote in The Dungeon Master that he once rescued another child from a group of armed cultists, exchanging gunfire with them as he carried the kid to a helicopter that was waiting to fly them out.
The aunt said this. While reading the book, the same thought occurred to me. Dear wrote it four years after what happened. The book is FULL of intimate conversations and small details. I recall thinking at the time, how the heck did he remember all that? Either he is good at inventing dialog, or he has a photographic memory for conversational details. Or a bit of both.
