Here’s the truth: No matter how hard you try to suppress some jagged part of your past, it invariably comes screaming back. Especially when you label that subterranean aspect of your previous life “unfinished business” and sweep it under the rug.

Such was the case with my Dungeons and Dragons obsession. The last time I played was senior year in high school, 25 years ago. I thought I had put my gamer days behind me. But what I had simply done was quit playing. My desire to inhabit some fantasy world remained, haunted me throughout my adulthood, and kept beckoning me with its crooked, wiggling finger.

I had played D&D, that oft-maligned fantasy role-playing game, for six hours every Friday night (not to mention the hours I spent scheming and dreaming my next D&D adventure), from the summer before my eighth-grade year until my last year of high school. Week after week, for five years straight, I sat at a table of pimply-faced boys, surrounded by bags of cheese doodles, bottles of Mountain Dew, and mounds of polyhedral dice. In and around those mundane trappings of 20th-century rural New Hampshire life, my D&D gang and I conjured a more fantastic reality, one filled with magic swords, blistering fireballs, and heroic leaps from castle parapets onto the backs of giant rats, goblins, and umber hulks.

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