i remember many years ago, reading Steinbeck's 'The Grapes Of Wrath' . i remember what struck me most, was Tom Joad's hat. more precisely, his cap, which was issued to him as he was released from prison; 'His gray cap was so new that the visor was still stiff and the button still on, not shapeless and bulged as it would be when it had served for a while all the various purposes of a cap—carrying sack, towel, handkerchief. ' and indeed, Tom soon uses that cap, with tbe visor that he soon bends and breaks, to the fullest usage, all these activities and many, many more .

but does he ever wear it backwards? or sideways?

no. Tom joad had a long road ahead of him before becoming the carrier of the one ring of power and approaching the accursed land of Mordor, but he would not set out with his family, upon the perilous road with an improperly-oriented hat.

That is because hats can't be worn to the strictest definition of the verb 'to wear' with an erroneous designated direction.

if you understand from This the visceral hatred and concern for our civilizationi feel, by those who would foolishly don their cap in an inappropriate manner. verily, it is an abhorent rebellion against society, but in the most idiotic way:through intentional disallignment of the hat with the head. the panache that these 'rebels' attempt to convey by shunning the least of human conventions, makes the whole endevour of resistance to repression as not worthwhile, unappatizing, and disingenuous.

i hope this attempt at self-assertion will go the way of the codpiece and the one-shoulder capes of ancient infamy.

which brings us to the matter at hand. having proven the necessity of proper directionality of hats, we come across a puzzeling event.

or at least this was my recent experience:

a well-respected, honorable and professional member of the teaching staff, came to work one day with a cap which was marked "FOLLOW ME" on the front side.

being an honorable and caring person, who cares greatly for the wellbeing of her students, she wore the cap correctly.

and yet it was an affront to all that i hold dear!

consider the horror i found myself;

i accept both implicit and explicit calls for orderly navigation. it is encumbered on us all to walk in lines, hopful that the person that we follow so sincerely, is inclined and able to lead us onwards. indeed the word 'forward' is the heart of it!

i shall follow a forward-walking person.

i shall not follow a backward-walking one.

it is an impossibility.

the term 'to follow' , just like the aforementiond verb 'to wear' is a clear-cut case. there is no room for alternative interpretation of the meaning. and just like with the abominable backward-facing cap, or the sideways one, here , with follow, there could be no secondary direction inwhich i could walk, or inwhich the subject of my trust could lead!

if the leader walks forward, it is possible for those that walk behind to follow. if the leader is walking backwards, or sideways, upside down or upwards in flight, it is not a possible thing to follow suit in the strict meaning of the term.

at this point, dear reader, you may call upon the better angles of our hearts, and seek a compromise . perhaps you would attemp to point out that though the impossibility of following behind a backward walking leader, is well and justly established there is some marginal accomodation in expansions, namely , i could 'follow the actions' of the leader, mimicking, or mirroring his movements. and while it could be that this composite expression is not alien in definition, IT IS ABSENT REASON, SAFETY, MORALITY OR PRACTICALITY!!!

could you imagine the fate of those followers, who choose to follow the actions of a leader that is so absorbed in causing a disturbance, that they would face towards his flock, and walk backwards? urging his followers to mimick his actions?

why, the dangers of all those backward-walkers, directing their effort in backward motion, unheedful of the dangers or even the position of their peers who are following in the same manner?! furthermore, having the leader moving in one direction, while the followers moving away , REDUCES the Effect and Affect that the leader has on the rapidly retreating followers as the distance between them grows!!

further unholy experiments could be made.

what if they all walk sidways?

what if the leader uses a mirror of some kind, held by a favored follower?

what if the leader ineds himself, walking backwards among his followers, in turn being led by the runner up?

all attempts of such kind are bound to disaster and dissolution!!

lastly, and most greivious of all. the leader, still bent on his backward walking conceit, tells the followers to walk in THE SAME DIRECTION , and thus , while he is walking backwards he is proudly looking at his followers, who are eagerly walking in the same direction. they shall not be strictly 'following' that person, as he is hazerdously facing towards them and not bravely setting the path with his eyes unincumbered, full of alert, and with a clear vision of where he wants to go. the non-followers or the quasi-followers shall and must be warned and steel themselves to the clear dangers ahead, that are not apparent tovthe one that is looking at them. such shall be their doubt, and skepticism, that they shall surly abandon the neatness of the formation, the beauty of the straight line of people, and move now in their own direction. be it with friends or alone, be it with certainty or confusion and doubt!

i shall take a moment now to consider something from the field of paleontology:

the Cambrian explosion, which happened 540 million years ago, is perhaps the most dramatic event in the evolution of life, with the obvious exception of the beggining of life and the transition of Theprose.com to the beta site.

before the cambrian explosion, animals were slow, or immobile organisms, lacking in nervous systems, propelling themselves blindky through the shallow waters that they could inhabit, and not muxh more. there was much life in the world, but most of it in relatively narrow coastal bands. most of that life would strike us as boring, and uninteresting. imagine then the rapidity of change, that within the blink of a 30 million year span, all major phylum that we recognize, like the chordites, the arthropods, echinodetms, to name but a few, began to appear!

such was the revolution in place that the oceans of the world now quickly teemed with life.

but the great cambrian explosion was not without casualties.

and one of the greatests determinants whether an animal could survive or not is DIRECTIONALITY.

short or long, big or small. the great successors of the exinct cambrians, were those that had eyes and other sensors at the forefront of their bodies, in proximity to the eating oraficese and away from the hindpart.

this specificity in motion spelled a great doom to those who moved undirected, or spread their sensory and nervous system in equal parts along their bodies. those unfortunate, unguided , un-centralized met their end quickly at the hands of those who had adapted favirablity to directed movement.

so it was then, and so it is now!

Fastidious attention to detail must be taken in order to ascertain the correct directional, if any, pull of followedness as it is measured when an object being followed is facing backwards but traveling forward. The addition of a hat further complicates the equation. Such as, is the hat stylish? Is it merely there for the practicality of holding the note? Is the relationship deeper between the follower and the hat than just the beingness of follow?

To know one must simply look within. What drives you? What gives you that meaning in the morning to stretch those limbs one more day against the backdrop of a dark existence, and pull the curtains wide open? Are you following the mother of all motivation, fear? Is there a deeper purpose that you can elucidate with the vividness of a thunderstorm on a parched desert tundra? Are you dreamless?

After razor sharp skepticism and ruthless critical self-analysis, one may come to know who is being followed. In fact one may realize that both objects, that of the follower and the followed, are both following the beingness of follow. In layman’s terms, the one being followed needs the follower to exist, therefore the the one being followed is the actual follower, and the follower is the one being followed.

As to the matter of the hat. If it is a fizz, the man or woman must have a huge mustache. If it is a cowboy hat, it has to be a Quarter Horse like The Stranger’s played by Sam Elliott in the Big Lebowski. However feathers, chains and pink camouflage are totally out of the question, unless they involve other, less than reputable, extracurricular activities.

The Spanish Pig.

On a warm summer night in Madrid, the sound of pig was everywhere. Not the squeals and snorts you were expecting, the swishing and swallowing of people consuming pig with every course. The Spaniards are not shy about their love of pork. All pork. And not from head to toe, from ear to toe. Every delectable morsel. Especially the baby pigs. The succulent sucklings. The sweetest, most tender meat, ever to almost

not exist. To look at them could be frightening. They were smooth and shiny skinned babies; but this was mostly a tourist's problem, never a Spaniards. Pigs have been on the butchering table in Spain for centuries. Long enough for their fate to be woven into their knowledge of existence. Yet they still fought it. Especially the sucklings. Too young understand their fate per se, they nonetheless sensed when was coming more than any adult pig ever did. They knew when death was coming, just from the sound of the approaching footsteps. They were heavier than usual, because of the knife in the farmer's hand. Thats how in tune sucklings were with their last moments. Too slow to run andtoo immature to figure out a plan however, they succumbed to the blade every time.Until Herve. Herve the suckling pig, who fooled them all and lived longer than any pig ever lived in Spain. This is his story...

ok, to get the ball rolling...

nothing about thos world is fair. there is no equality, no justice and not even hope, if you look at things from a long enough time span.

but...

suppose one individual must compete with another. some advantages that a person possess are considered acceptible ethically , while others will be totally unacceptible and incongruous with the idea of a fair chance.

but will the choice of using the term advantage in itself imply unfair play?

consider watermelon-eating contests.

these are surly the most spiritually profound competitive venues that civilization has come up with. watermellons were carefully bred over thousands of years from small bland, cucumber-like fruit to large, sweet succulant perfection. this was a competition between individual specimens; all were eaten, but only the winners won the prize of continued propagation. thus, winners with an advantage were chosen, violently devoured, then spread across the juice-drenched soil. no one would want the advantage-less ones.

then a new advantage presented itself to the industreious cucurbit; the abilility to sound hollow and deep.

in ourvage of plenty, grocery shoppers are given a choice between conpeting specimens. the customers and attendants tap the engorged watermellon, struggling to devine their merits . some tap them hard, some place their ears upon the skin, and merely lightly brush. the delicate seismology of watermellon choosing is a beset with regrets, anguish but also jubilation and triumph. yet the watermellons, compete still. they care not for our pleasure, they care only for the reproductive advantages, and so they evolved further, to provide an acoustic enticement for their choosing. the right kind of sound is chosen, all else are sent to the dumpster. more advantages that are perhaps misleading, or outright falasious, and yet are a reward to the winner.

which brings us again to watermellon eating contests. these battles of mandibular prowess , these gastronomical skirmishes are epic and heroic. they symbolize all that is good and honorable about the perpetual search for and the gaining of advantage. i have watched these ceremonies , these rituals of sacrifice with great admiration and awe.

and yet i was never allowed to participate.

you see, my presence may be tolarated among humans , at least to a certain extent, but it is immidiately apparent, to all who see me, that my advantages regarding the rapid consumption of foodstuffs, talents that i had honed over years in the swamplands PRECLUDE me from ever participating in such a sacred and morally significant event.

why is that?

the high preists of the contests asserted many times, that the fact that i have five seperate digestive tracts, lengthy expansion areas in my stomachs, and eight pairs of mandibles , pose an unfair competitive advantage over other contestants. and so i am forever banned from participating in such events. the learned men question the fair-play of possessing the ability to rapidly devour and digest and label it as excessive, and in opposition to the spirit of event.

"if we admit you, and enter you in the list" one judge explained, seeing my anguish sympathitically "then surly we shall soon face other challengers, such as mechanical woodchippers, and black holes. placing HUMAN contenders among such ravenous singularities will be both UNFAIR and even UNSAFE!, why, if i accept you, we will not even be required to CUT the watermellons!!" he excalimed.

i protested that it was not my fault that i had evolved and am in possession of such attributes and that i intended to participate as a worthy competitor, eager to participate in observance of the strict regulations regarding the event.

"shall you fault my expandable stomachs? shall you sully the honor of my kind by alluding to miscarriage of rules, subterfuge, or non-compliance?!"

but the adjudicator was unmoved by my cries. "nay, i fault you not . i merely wish for you to understand that with humans and sporting events, we at times assign standards that shall remove a contender that will be unquestionably and invariably the winner. by enrolling you, i will doom all human contenders, to vie at best for the second place. they will have no possible way to contest your voracious appetite and so will not be fairly served by my office as the adjudicator. "

"but is not an advantage something to celebrate and exalt?" i asked, still struggling to reconcile the peculiarities of what the wise man was saying.

“oh, advantage is indeed celebrated in sports. But unlike other endvours where ANY and ALL advantages are accepted, the challenge of competition requires that the advantages woud be of a similar kind or within the kind shared by all contestants. In this case, all contestants have but one stomach, a single pair of mandibles, and only one row of teeth. Admitting someone such as you would be to sully the real , mental and emotional aspcet of the competition, and turn it to a matter of mechanics. Would you accept that the other contestants be given blueberries instead of watermelons, while we count the fruit in number? it would be perhaps proportional but still defeats the purpose of a watermelon eating contests, as that bluberries are NOT watermelons in the leadt. Nay, you shall not. You must forgive me, my friend. But perhaps i failed to explain this, as i construed that it was clear for you. A sporting competition is held in such a way that all contestants are put in an as much of an equal level of effort, as possible, and have as much of chance to win as possible. It is then up to their will , tolarance and stamina to succeed or fail over their peers. If either the specific conditions or contestants are fundamentally unequal, it is an unfair competition. We do not celebrate the advantage as a matter onto itself, but as a component that contributes to the success. Because of your grotesque physical capabilities, admitting you would be as much of an unfair competition as i could imagine.” he concluded and proceeded to envigilate the first round of contestants. As i watched them go through slice after slice of watermellon, it was clear to me that the judge had spoken true and that were i to enter , it would pose an unfair challange.

I then recalled challenges that i had participated in theprose.com . here my capabilities of eating watermellons rapidly had no bearing. Neither were any of my other advantages, such as secreting poison, or the ability to catch the scent of slamander eggs from a distance, neither were my acheivments in warming food in a microwave much of a contributing factor in the arts of composition. Consequentally i have grown to accept failure and tend to participate in challenges where no one else participates.

And how do advantages serve in affairs that are not mere passtime engagements?

Here things are even more complex morally.

Let me give you a professional example.

In these early summer months, students tend to be distracted and uninterested in the subject matter of myvlessons. like all teachers, I often face this challenge with frustration and unease. I am often tempted to exude some of my neurotoxin into the air. You must understand that I would never devour one of those cannibals. However, i often dream of the advantages of having a classroom filled with immobilized, stunned or temporarily paralyzed students. It is true that the students would not draw much of the material i hope to convey to them, being in such a state. Some perhaps will react more severely to this treatment.

But here i find myself at a disadvantage. I am not eloquent as my colleagues. Nor am i at all an enjoyable sight for my students, many of whom often shriek in terror as i approach heavily toward the classroom.

Is it then an unfair advantage that my fellow teachers have over me, that they actually possess a human form and that their voice is not the bubbly gurgle which i struggle to produce? Should they handicap themselves just because i have tentacles and that the laser pointer is not easy to grasp with the suction cups?

Of course not!

It is good that they have abilities that allow them to successfuly teach human younglings. My attributing these abilitis as “advantages” intrinsically necessitate a comparative state of mind to my observation. Consider then, that If i did not falter personally and observe their success thusly , then these abilities would not be definable as advantages but merely skills or talents or good fortune. It gets worse, because if i am saying that these are not only advantages, but “unfair” advantages i am also assigning some kind of blame of the failure that transpired on them rather than on my own shortcomings.

The ethics of competing in other forms of human interaction are even more gray. What of the advantages of one company over it’s rivals? Of a warring state over it’s enemies? Residents and their neighbors? Much of what is the code of laws is based on the conception that there must be some restiction to the way people and other entities interact. The codex defines for us some advnatages that are allowable and legaly acceptable, while other paractices that are wholly unethical, or even criminal.

If someone was to open a business, say , a manufactury for collecting the secretions of the angler- newts and attempt to cater for the growing market of their galndular secretions.

It is certain, that having an expertiese in the entrappment of angler-newts and the careful milking of their glands, would be starkly advantageous over those who have never attempted such a feat. This advantage will be an objective one. It shall be counted in liters of ooze and possibly in severed limbs. Having experience in the field for many years of slithering in the lower reaches of the swamp, I shall be one of those who draw upon such an advnatage. I shall not restrain myself, nor disrupt the efforts of others, and yet probably succeed more than others in this venture. You might question the ethics of the obtainment or the usage of such a dangerous substance, but can not doubt the fact that possessing knowledge and experience, and a tolarnce to radioctivity is an advantage in this neich market.

This advantage, would be an unfair advantage , if during my endeavour i will flood the nesting sited with the bottom tar, leaving my competitors stuck and at the mercy of the enraged, revently-milked newts. that would be unfair of me, and possibly even homicidal. here unfair advantage and criminality are in overlap.

i shall conclude by reminding participants that words are not meaningful within themselves. their importance draws upon the field of definitions , connotation and representations that hide behind them, and deep within our minds.

Don’t remember where I read it, but apparently Abraham Lincoln was once challenged to a duel by a political opponent. Standing 6’4” tall and being the challenged party, Lincoln was invited to select the location for the deadly contest, and to choose the weapons that would be used.

Preferring not to fight, Lincoln famously chose sledgehammers for weapons while standing in 6’ of water. The duel was called off.

That a fair enough advantage for you?

My first experience of tabletop role-playing games - commonly referred to as D&D (even though that was, strictly-speaking, merely the abbreviated form of the proprietary name belonging to the most popular RPG) - came about, essentially, because of a quarrel with a friend over a girl. My best friend in my first couple of years at university was ‘Bristol Boy’ Jeff. It was his romance with Carolyn, the girl who would later become his wife - a girl whom I also fancied - that led, for a time, to a pronounced cooling in our friendship. It resulted in my seeking out other friends, living on the opposite side of campus.

Initially, the common denominator I shared with these new friends was one that I had also shared with Jeff, Carolyn and my original circle of university friends: we were all members of the Christian Union.

But even by the time I was getting to know them, they (like me) were becoming somewhat discontented with the evangelical certitudes of the CU. And, one night, I discovered that most of them had an abiding interest in a hobby that was decidedly frowned upon in conservative evangelical Christian circles.

They were role-players.

***

Role-playing had first burst onto the indoor gaming scene as an offshoot of miniature war-gaming, with the launch of the fantasy game Dungeons and Dragons in 1974. When I was at grammar school, between 1977 and 1982, there was an after-school war-gaming club which also hosted some role-playing. A couple of the boys in my class attended: but at the time I had no particular interest in it myself, and so the increasing popularity of role-playing as we entered the Eighties initially passed me by.

Probably the first time I ever had a glimpse of a game in action was when Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was released in 1982. An early scene in the film shows the central character of Elliott, his older brother, and his brother’s friends, all playing a game of D&D. (Interestingly, Spielberg had run a D&D session himself for the young cast members prior to the production of the film). It’s not a long scene in the film, and at the time I certainly didn’t attach any particular significance to it. My own first encounter with role-playing was still four years away…

It’s strange, in a way, given my love of both fantasy and science-fiction - the two most popular milieus for early role-playing games - that it took me so long to become a role-player myself. The most likely reason for this, looking back, is the rather more conservative Christian viewpoint, on all manner of issues, to which I adhered in my mid to late teens. This was the early to mid-Eighties, the time of the most pronounced ‘moral panic’ about role-playing games, and their supposed ‘dark side’. As well as E.T., with its positive - or, at least, neutral - portrayal of RPGs, 1982 was also the year in which the preachy and antagonistic Mazes and Monsters was released. The film starred a young Tom Hanks (in his first leading movie role), as a young college student who suffers from psychotic episodes that are supposedly brought on by his obsessional interest in role-playing. Subtle? It was not.

***

And so it was, one evening in 1986, that I had my own ‘initiation’ into the strange world of role-playing. It was a Friday night, and I was at a loose end. I went and knocked on the door of my friend Gary, who happened to have the largest student flat in his particular hall of residence. It had become a natural place to hang out for me and a number of other friends. And that evening, I discovered a bunch of them huddled around a coffee table in his flat, covered with graph paper on which a make-shift plan had been drawn. Small miniature figures were positioned on the paper. Next to the figures were some peculiar dice - not the usual 6-sided cubes which I normally associated with board games, but a pair of polyhedrons with 20 sides each. In their hands, Gary and the others were holding sheets of paper which seemed to be filled with a bewildering plethora of statistics. It all seemed most mysterious.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked, curious.

‘We’re playing a role-playing game,’ replied Gary. He looked slightly shamefaced, as if I had caught him and the others in the act of indulging some esoteric vice. Then he added the words that were to really perk my interest. ‘It’s set in Middle-earth, the world of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Have you read it?’

Had I read J.R.R. Tolkien’s magnus opus? What kind of daft question was that? It was only my favourite novel of all time, after all, the very pinnacle of the mountain of works of fantasy and science-fiction that I had ploughed through during my teenage years.

‘Of course I’ve read it. So,’ I continued, ‘you’re playing D&D?’ Now I’ve got it, I thought to myself. This is a session of the fabled Dungeons and Dragons in progress.

But Gary shook his head, and explained that no, this wasn’t D&D. Not as such. There were many different role-playing games, operating with different game mechanics, and set in different milieus. This particular game was called Middle-earth Role Playing - MERP for short. It was a game tailor-made for Tolkien’s fantasy world. Players could play dwarves or elves, humans or hobbits, undertaking together chivalrous and daring quests, battling orcs and trolls, wargs and giant spiders, even perhaps a dragon or a Balrog; all lovingly crafted and carefully adjudicated by the referee, or game-master.

The next words from my mouth almost took me by surprise - let alone Gary.

‘Can I play?’

‘Well– ’ Gary hesitated for a moment, and looked across the room. ‘That’s not really for me to decide - what do you think, Tom?’

Tom was the one there that night whom I knew best. He - like my now-estranged best friend Jeff - was on my course, so I saw him in lectures several days a week. He was a short, softly-spoken and somewhat shy young man. I was surprised that Gary - a confident, charismatic and even slightly domineering individual - should be deferring to him, especially as they were all sat in Gary’s flat. I noted that Tom was sitting at another table, slightly set apart from the others, pencil in hand, with what appeared to be a couple of rule-books, and reams of hand-written notes. On his table was another pair of the strange, 20-sided dice, a box containing a jumble of miniature figures, more pencils and an eraser.

‘Tom’s the GM - our game-master,’ explained Gary. ‘It’s his campaign we’re playing. It’s his call whether or not you can join.’

I looked expectantly at Tom.

‘Well,’ he said, thoughtfully. ‘This is merely the second session of the campaign, and we only started half an hour ago. I suppose we could shoehorn you in - it would be better with four characters, actually. But I don’t have time to explain the rules - you’ll just have to muddle along for tonight. And we don’t have time for you to roll up a new character either. I’ve got some pregenerated PCs - those are player characters that come with their game stats already prepared. What kind of character would you like?’

‘What’s everyone else playing?’ I asked.

And so, briefly, I was introduced to the other characters. Matt had created for himself a laid-back mattock-wielding warrior dwarf of very few words. Phil’s character was a hobbit - but a rather serious ninja-scout who was a lethal dab-hand with a sling, far-removed from the rather more jolly Shire-dwellers of Tolkien’s novel. Finally, there was Gary’s character. He was a noble, though slightly down-on-his-luck Dúnadan ranger - a high man of the same stock as Tolkien’s heroic king-in-waiting Aragorn. His character was clearly the de facto leader of the group, a role with which Gary himself seemed very comfortable.

‘Can I play a hobbit?’ I pleaded.

Tom smiled. ‘Perfect. The party are about to arrive at a small hobbit community. They are taking refuge there, having just survived a combat with some wargs in the wilderness. The dwarf– ’ he gestured towards Matt, ‘was badly wounded. They’ll need to rest for a few days. It’s the ideal way to introduce your new character, if we make him a member of this community. I say “him” - but of course it needn’t be him. Do you want to play a male or female character?’

I was surprised at the question. The idea of playing a female character hadn’t occurred to me - and seemed downright odd.

‘Um - definitely male.’ I looked at the others in the room. ‘You’re all playing male characters, after all, yes?’

Indeed they were. As I was to discover, female role-players are almost as rare in gaming circles as female dwarves are in Tolkien’s works. The only time our group included the occasional female character was when one or two of the more confident players were willing to play against gender. Matt was the first to try his hand at this, playing a supplementary character for a time alongside his dwarf, a female healer of noble birth. She was a Maid Marian of sorts to Phil’s new secondary character, a complex wandering minstrel (possessing elements drawn from both Robin Hood and Alan-a-Dale) with a shady past. I always stuck to playing male characters. When I eventually had a go at GMing, I found myself perfectly at ease devising and controlling female as well as male non-player-character roles: but that was nothing like as intense as seeking to inhabit the skin of your own player-character.

And so I acquired my first character - a hobbit who I deliberately made a more exaggerated version of the fun-loving halflings of the Shire - a kind of cross between Merry and Pippin, with a penchant for pink pantaloons - in contrast to the darker, brooding and slightly sinister personality that Phil had developed for his hobbit. We might have come from the same race, but from the outset we weren’t particularly friendly towards one another, as characters. We later found out Phil’s character was actually in thrall to an evil magician; duly liberated, he developed a much more likeable personality, as far as the rest of the adventuring party were concerned. Gary’s noble Dúnadan was far more straightforwardly heroic, and counterbalanced Matt’s somewhat cynical, anti-heroic dwarf rather well. Their characters clearly had a strong affection for one another (even though they would have denied it), and in so doing they mirrored Gary and Matt’s long friendship - both had attended the same grammar school before coming to university.

I bumbled along, as best I could, having the most important rules explained to me along the way. Despite the initial strangeness of it all, I was soon immersed. Tom was a consummate storyteller, and very skilled at describing each scene. The combat sequences were thrilling, and it was made very clear to me that it was perfectly possible - either because of a poor choice on my part, or simply through an unlucky roll of the dice - for my hobbit character to come to a sticky end. There was no script immunity at work. And if we were to have our best chance of survival, then we had to work together.

Thus I began to have an insight into the moral value of role-playing games - in complete contrast to the hysterical nonsense spouted about them by religious fundamentalists. At their very best, role-playing games teach the importance of cooperation and problem-solving, and encourage their participants to take on the mantles of heroes. And that first night, I remembered that our adventure was taking place in Middle-earth: even if only in a small way, we were playing our part in the great struggle against the Shadow that was Sauron, the Lord of the Rings himself. We were following in the footsteps of J.R.R. Tolkien, inspired to let our imaginations run riot within the world he had brought into being. What could be a finer way to apply our creativity than this?

We’d been playing for an hour or so when another knock came at the door. Another friend, Ken, had cycled round to Gary’s flat. He - like myself - was curious to see what was going on. Fortunately for our poor game-master Tom (who thanks to me had already been forced that evening to accommodate one new character into his campaign), Ken wasn’t interested in taking on a role for himself. He was content to watch, quietly amused by the unfolding drama of Tom’s storytelling, and our engagement with it.

At about three o’clock in the morning, my first ever game session concluded (on a suitably thrilling cliffhanger). Ken had given up and ridden home by now; but the rest of us, ravenous, headed off to where we knew a burger van would still be open, supplying hungry (and often drunk) students with sustenance well into the early hours. We weren’t drunk - we’d been imbibing from a deeper, richer draft, I reflected in a heady moment, as I munched upon my double-dog with cheese, mustard and fried onions.

***

I borrowed a rule-book from Tom - I was determined that by our next session I would be fully-familiar with the rules. A few days later, I felt ready to roll up a secondary character to my hobbit hero - one whose characteristics I could tweak and shape for myself. A Beorning shape-changer, this first character I’d devised from scratch was also the first of our characters to come to a bloody and untimely end, after only a few sessions. Thus I learnt, early on, what Tom had warned me, right from the beginning: in good role-playing, there is no script immunity. Just like life itself.

Over the next few weeks, two other friends who were also gamers joined our group: Jack, who was interested in all things Oriental, and usually played warrior-heroes with a strong moral code, somewhat akin to the bushido ethics of Japanese samurai; and Tristan, who unlike the rest of us was a postgraduate student, and a devout Roman Catholic. He chose to play a Gondorian ranger-prince, the most high-born of the ten player characters that featured at one time or another in our MERP campaign.

As our band of adventurers grew, so our exploits became more epic, taking on a grander, more mythic turn. We travelled far and wide across Middle-earth. Our enemies became more dangerous: we moved on from fighting orcs, petty rogues and cutthroats to battling malign spirits, Nazgûl and even a water-demon (a terrifying adversary who succeeded in immolating one of Jack’s two MERP characters, a largely self-taught mage from a commoner background, by reflecting one of his own fireball spells back against him). One of our most colourful foes was a malevolent sorcerer from the royal line of the Northern Kingdom of the Dúnedain, who was originally designed as a one-shot opponent, but who ended up becoming a formidable returning villain. And then there was the adventure in which my happy-go-lucky hobbit had a momentous encounter with a lost Silmaril - one of the wondrous jewels that gave their name to Tolkien’s posthumously-published final great work, The Silmarillion. It was an incident that utterly changed him, every bit as much as Frodo was transformed by the burden of bearing the One Ring.

Over time, most of us took our turn at game-mastering. Sometimes we used published scenarios from gaming magazines; more often, our adventures were of the GM’s own devising. We were the Magnificent Seven - one game-master, six players. We started playing other RPGs besides MERP: science-fiction games like Traveller, Star Trek and the darkly comic and dystopian Paranoia; superhero games like Champions and Golden Heroes (where my character was a reincarnated Welsh druid with magical powers); the wonderful steampunk Space 1889; fantasy games like Rolemaster, Runequest and - even - D&D itself. But you never forget your first love, they say - and my affection for MERP remained, long after we stopped playing it on a regular basis.

The following academic year, we moved into student digs together (all except for Phil, who unfortunately was kicked off his course at the end of his second year). We had obtained a house for seven: and in place of Phil, it was Ken who joined us - our token non-gamer. Ken aside, we continued role-playing. Meanwhile, I mended bridges with Jeff; and though I was never quite as close to him as previously, we became good enough friends again for him to ask me to be his best man, when he married Carolyn a year after their graduation.

In my third year at university, my father fell ill. During that year, I needed all my university friendships - old and new - more than ever. Three months after his cancer diagnosis, he passed away. In life - just like role-playing games - I was reminded: there is no script immunity. And there are some Shadows that cannot be overcome in real life, however much one might wish to change the outcome of the throw of the dice.

***

Towards the end of the year, I was game-mastering once again. Graduation was approaching for most of us. Our Fellowship, inevitably, would be breaking. Determined that we should go out in style, I devised one last grand scenario for our Middle-earth characters - those that were left, anyway, having not as yet perished on the battlefield, been retired (like Phil’s hobbit), or experienced elevation to quasi-immortality (the fate of my own once-humble halfling character).

The final tale was imbued with the essence of Arthurian romance. The death of my father undoubtedly played its part too, subconsciously, as I wrote the outline for By the Sword Divided, the concluding chapter of our characters’ adventures. This was to be our Le Morte d’Arthur, in which we dared to rewrite the work of the Master, Tolkien himself. Tom had taken over playing Phil’s minstrel with the mysterious past. He’d been revealed in previous chapters to be the bastard scion of a noble Dúnadan house, and had become an inadvertent kin-slayer, twice-over. His impetuosity and arrogance now became the trigger for a cataclysmic civil war, and the downfall - three hundred years earlier in the timeline than Tolkien had envisaged - of the Northern Kingdom. Talk about destroying canon...

I played Holst, Orff, Mahler and Wagner in the background as the battle-scenes on The Field of Lost Dreams played out. I’d deliberately stacked the odds against the characters, and one after another, their inevitable deaths came. Matt’s laconic dwarf, his mattock buried deep in the chest of the dread Black Reaver that he and Jack’s bushido-warrior had vanquished together, at the cost of their own lives. Gary’s Dúnadan stalwart, going down against a dozen foes still yielding Ologcrist, ‘Trollbane’, the wondrous sword that had once been gifted to him by Glorfindel of Rivendell.

Finally, there remained the kin-slaying bard, facing his hateful and treacherous father as he had once faced his two brothers. ‘Come, father, let us embrace,’ intoned Tom grimly, with impeccable timing, quoting Mordred’s last line from John Boorman’s wondrous 1981 film Excalibur. It was the concluding combat. The dice practically rolled themselves.

One character alone survived, to tell the tale - Tristan’s Gondorian prince, remaining just like Bedivere, the last of Arthur’s knights left standing on the field of Camlann, as the blood-red sun disappeared beneath the horizon. The curtain had descended on the most complex, and involved, role-playing campaign I had ever been part of. It was our Götterdämmerung. And it was glorious.

***

Forty years have passed since E.T. came out, giving me my first glimpse of role-playing. And now, the fourth series of Stranger Things is about to be released - a nostalgic television drama series set in the 1980s, the very first episode of which, just like E.T., practically opens with a group of teenage boys playing D&D. I was a few years late coming to that particular party myself - and it’s been five years now since I last played in an ongoing campaign (the sad reality of friends moving away, and drifting apart, is something that gamers and non-gamers alike would recognise). But I still have enormous affection for the friendships forged and strengthened across a graph paper map of caves and dungeons, strewn with miniatures representing heroes and monsters, and dice of a variety of shapes - some with 20 sides, others with 12, or 10, or 8, or 4 or even common-or-garden 6 sides.

Maybe, one day, I’ll pick up those dice again. I’ll generate a character or two. I’ll find some friends, and go adventuring again. I’ll open the doorway, and I’ll see what paths our imaginations can take us down, once more.

Though somehow - without the three o’clock in the morning, post-session trek to the burger van - it will never quite be the same.