We’re Rollin’, They’re Hatin’ at Version>07
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But in fact Dungeons & Dragons is doing just fine, thank you, despite (or perhaps because of) the enormous popularity of similar online games like World of Warcraft. It’s currently owned by Wizards of the Coast, which made a pile of money with Magic: the Gathering and in 1997 bought original publisher TSR. A Hasbro subsidiary since ’99, Wizards of the Coast has released two updates to the game’s rules and continues to crank out supplements and adventures at a respectable clip. Moreover, as all things 80s have become new again, D & D has received a life-giving infusion of hipster cred. The flagship exhibit of this year’s Version multimedia festival, “We’re Rollin’, They’re Hatin’” (see Section 2 for more on the fest), not only has a role-playing theme but features actual gamers in the back room rolling up characters and a D & D library provided by Wizards of the Coast. If the gods are kind, a full-size functional catapult will make an appearance at the opening party.
Art dudes being what they are, the show will undoubtedly include plenty of self-aware distance and easy irony. But at least one team of exhibitors is determined to bring some honest-to-God D & D geekery out of the back room and into the exhibit hall: Todd Bailey and Nate Murphy, who are making dozens of copies of a playable D & D adventure by hand.
For the narrative part of their adventure, Bailey reworked a scenario he’d written years before for an ex who’d been immobilized by a motorcycle accident. Quest of the Sun Key is a romping hodgepodge of classic fantasy and gaming tropes, complete with pseudo-Egyptian iconography, epic themes of light and dark, rumor-laden taverns, gibbering priests, carefully calculated experience-point bonuses, and gratuitous pop-culture references (mostly to hip-hop–there’s a witch called Spinderella and an orc shaman named Koopsta Knicca, after a former MC for the Three 6 Mafia). Murphy’s art hews similarly close to ye olde tradition. At the bottom of one piece, he proudly points out, is a goblet half-buried in a heap of treasure–an image that’s probably appeared at least once in every D & D product ever published.
Copies of Quest of the Sun Key will be available for $40 at the opening of “We’re Rollin’, They’re Hatin’,” tonight at a former Bridgeport department store that Version organizers have christened the Co-Prosperity Sphere. Bailey says he might drop some more off at Quimby’s afterward, and if any are left he’ll bring them to the exhibit’s closing on May 20. If you miss them, you’re out of luck: there will be no second printing.
