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Preparing to set out that morning for a lucrative expedition into the goblin tunnels, Sſtabhmontown’s pubs seemed all but siphoned of quality retainers for hire, an ill omen up front.
I came up short, pun intended, and the other halfling in our group, Barley Binglebuns, also had no luck padding our numbers against subterranean perils.
Worse, we realized our party’s very necessary, undead-turning cleric Theobald was missing. He’d spent all his recently liberated silver on a blackout bender, last seen stumbling off south toward the dwarven town.
Given the wretched animated dead we’d come across in our last dungeon delve and perhaps a pinch of loyalty, there was nothing for it. We had to find Theobald.
And so, moved by the unseen dice rolls of the gods, we set out.
Then came the snowstorm.
With little warning, we were caught on the open road in a whirling whiteout of torment that reduced our visibility to less than the length of a basilisk.
“Bork’s foul breath!” I yelled, scraping sleet from my nostrils. “Will this misery end?”
But this was just the beginning of a very long night for us, including my war dog Raspberry — she the first to spot the lights with a bark of The White Cat Inn, glowing like murky eyes in the static.
We entered the wayfarer’s respite, wind still howling as we closed the door.
Happily, the missing Theobald was indeed inside clutching a full goblet, impossibly good luck soon paid for.
As we brushed off our leathers, patted shoulders and embraced — our party of treasure seekers reassembled — ordering a meal that would never come from the elderly innkeeper Frizwith, who scuttled into her kitchen, smiling. I would wonder about that smile afterwards.
Raspberry’s ears shot up just before the inn’s thick portal smashed open with a blast of snow, nearby candles blacking out. A meatless skeleton burst into the room with its rusted sword raised high, death cold and incarnate. Twelve more of its kind lurked behind this silently-screaming abomination, frosted like poisoned cakes. The animate dead.
Crouching low to stay unseen, I scanned and considered our low numbers and piteous experience against this squad of bloodless, creaking horror.
“We are not,” I said through a nervous halfling grin, “going to survive this.”
Truthfully, I dropped an f-bomb saying that last sentence in the voice of my dice-rolled character, Icky Steelhead — a decently strong and charismatic female halfling, but limited with a pitiful level one of experience.
Sitting with four other players, our brilliant story referee Adam Waldron-Blain and a preposterous collection of polyhedral dice at the Black Dog a few months back, beating an unlucky 13 armed skeletons felt like pretty dank odds.
Strangers and old campaigners alike, what we were collectively playing was something that looked a lot like Dungeons & Dragons — was certainly spawned from it — with the odd barfly wandering up with a pint in hand and either an “oh neat,” or the oft-asked, “Right, but how do you win?”
But with role-playing games, including its most famous iteration, it’s not the destination, it is — for real — the journey, one Edmonton has enthusiastically embraced for years, and even had a notable effect on in the wider world.
Having enviously watched Waldon-Blain and his reliable clusters of players laughing and yelling for years at the now-defunct Empress Ale House then Dog on Whyte, I finally worked up the nerve to sit down at the table and play six months ago, having a total blast since.
It was my first time in 25 years — almost half as old as D&D itself.
For the uninitiated who haven’t watched Stranger Things or Stephen Colbert play, 1974-born Dungeons & Dragons and its various spinoffs come down to a couple basic elements, which Edmonton actor and internationally admired improvisor Mark Meer explains in the fewest number of words I’ve ever heard it nailed.
“It’s pretending,” laughs the 54-year-old stage chameleon, “with some math.”
“I mean, ultimately, it’s storytelling, and it’s collaborative storytelling,” explains Meer, who’s also notably a world-renowned Dungeon Master, appearing in official books and a few times a year refereeing games at the officially-backed D&D in a Castle over in England and stateside.
He describes both his job at the table, and why he loves it so much.
“As a Game Master or a Dungeon Master, you’re not telling a story to your players, you’re all telling a story together and bringing in the improv aspect.
“The dice are essentially random suggestions coming in that tell you how things are going. You can try to attempt something. The dice will tell you whether you succeed or not, and that ultimately can be a great way to move a story forward.
“Even failure moves the story forward.”
While Meer has made a career of it, Waldron-Blain’s weekly games at the Dog are, believe it or not, part of his long-ongoing art practice. (A professional artist , he’s also program manager at Latitude 53 artist-run centre downtown.)
Role-playing since childhood, Waldron-Blain’s DIY rules, winkingly called Sſtabhmontown, are a long-running and sidestepping and simplification of the ever-expanding corporate D&D. He and fellow artists started it back at their Banff Centre residency in 2011.
His free, online rulebooks get back to the game’s core, part of what’s called the OSR (Old School Renaissance) movement, before the decades — and eternal need to make money — brought on literally thousands of adventures and rulebooks with reliable reboots of the official core rules every decade or so, including a recent, 50th-anniversary revamp unofficially known as the 5.5th edition.
Waldron-Blain shrugs most of that off.
“I was thinking about making art about games, thinking about narrative, and that’s when I came back to this sort of old-school style,” he explains, his simple-to-join game including random workers-for-hire drawn by playing cards.
These hirelings are especially useful if your character gets killed. Just say a quick prayer and keep playing as your former torchbearer!
As his artist statement puts it: “It is purposeful and focused but anarchic and free-wheeling.”
Besides managing a long-running single campaign with a core group in town going back 14 years, the second Monday of every month at the Dog is his first-level drop-in designed for the RPG curious, or the odd longtime stray. This is where I stumbled in from the woods.
As Waldron-Blain explains with a grin to newbies every game, “Don’t get too attached to your characters. I will hurt you.”
Technically, of course, it’s your decisions leading to those dice rolls that may or may not find your player fumbling around for their head.
But it’s always a thrilling moment when a player, down all their hit points, rolls one last, oversized metal d20 to see if they live or die, at which point Waldron-Blain asks, “What are your last words if you don’t survive?”
Besides coming up with the maps and what’s in every room and building, Waldron-Blain sees himself as having three jobs, starting with being a good host running an open table.
“I’m always inviting people in,” he says, which includes you. “And I’m always trying to meet people where they’re at and get people who haven’t played before.
“And then, of course, I have this refereeing role where I have to take what people are saying to me and make judgments about it and fit it into the framework of the game.
“And then,” he laughs, “evil me is what I would call the Dungeon Master.
“I’m trying to kill them with monsters.”
Done with a roll of those dice, of course! So when those 13 skeletons showed up at the icy door of the White Cat Inn, Waldron-Blain first rolled to see if something would show up, then what it would be, then how many.
It was up to our ingenuity, and a number of fateful rolls, to try and survive them.
As even the most casual observer of D&D can tell you, dice seem to come in all shapes and colours.
One of the more memorable rolls I’ve done was at Grindstone Theatre a few months inside a small slice of Edmonton’s live role-playing theatre scene.
Suddenly part of a ridiculous but seriously-played session of YEGDND live improv, I rolled a medicine-ball sized 20-sided dice, landing a flimsy 1 with a groan from my fellow audience members.
Handed the dice by the on-stage Dungeon Master, I’d failed a saving throw in a very chaotic story involving giant talking squirrels, forest gentrification and a villain-tuned hero named Mister Muscles — not to mention some impressively choreographed fighting — all improvised on the spot by the energetic actors.
Produced by Sorry Not Sorry Improv with a rotating cast including its DM, player characters and various baddies, YEGDND looks kind of like D&D — but different.
Which, by the way, is what the official D&D rulebooks have at least hinted at since the very beginning: play however works for you.
So how does live, in front of an audience, work?
Longtime troupe member Glenna Schowalter explains.
“We like to say that it’s a long-form, fantasy-improv show inspired by the mythology and rules of Dungeons and Dragons, partly so people know that they’re not watching a tabletop game.
“And also, in case we get any rules wrong,” she laughs, “we’re kind of covering our butts.
“Because at the end of the day, it is a show.”
Quite the show indeed, with plenty of swordplay.
“We have trained actor combatants in the cast who teach the rest of us how to safely do stage combat, and we use foam weapons.”
Combat aside, what’s impressive is the way the troupe literally rolls with a crowd-sourced idea or two, quickly figures out its characters’ motivations, and finds some sort of resolution, all in less than an hour.
“We have the DM invite our (player characters) on stage as themselves to kind of describe the characters like we’re playing a game. And then it shifts into the fantasy realm, and we start the story,” Schowalter says.
“We have the different scenes, and then we’ll usually do a recap at about the 45 minute mark, both for the audience but also for all of the players — kind of just like, ‘OK, these are the important points we have to wrap up.’
“In the regular season, it’s pretty episodic. We go in knowing who our player characters are, and our Dungeon Master may have some ideas of what they want to do.
“But it’s totally improvised as a show, so we get a suggestion and start our adventure and improvise what it looks like along the way.”
During the Fringe, with eight-plus shows in a row, larger story arcs develop, a la the Varscona Die-Nasty soaps.
“So we’ll usually start our adventurers at level one, and by the end they’re level 20.
“And we have a big, two-hour finale every year,” says Schowalter.
They recently had a main-stage show at the three-day gaming jamboree GameCon Canada at Edmonton Expo on June 20. Looking ahead, she notes YEGDND will be doing a BYOV at Queen Alexandra Hall.
Of course, you can’t talk about D&D around here without digging into Meer’s wild journey, which shifts us from the “what is D&D in Edmonton” to the “what is Edmonton in D&D” part of this story.
Meer first encountered the game in elementary school in small-town Sedgwick, Alta.
“It was kids who were a few years older than me, they literally needed somebody to play a cleric, and so I started playing with them. And I loved it. I couldn’t get enough of it.”
“And then they all basically moved on,” he explains. “They gifted me their books, and they were just like, ‘Nah, we’re not going to play D&D any more. I think we’d prefer to, you know, maybe try to be popular.’”
Remember Meer’s words about failure moving the story forward? This abandonment forced Meer to run his own games, which changed his life forever, and not for the last time.
“I was left in the situation with, well, if I ever want to play D&D again in this small town, I’ll have to teach people how to play it, and I will always have to be the Dungeon Master.
“Dungeons & Dragons,” he says, “I will credit as being my first acting experience, my first improv experience, my first writing experience.”
A massive moment for Meer was when parents took the family stateside in 1987 for one of the famous Gen Cons. This is the absolute ground zero of international players coming together — started by D&D co-creator Gary Gygax himself before his game existed.
“They very selflessly spent a weekend of their summer in Milwaukee with nothing that would have attracted them there with my little sister while I played D&D all day.
“That was my first sort of larger look at the world of role-playing.”
I first met Meer at the exact same moment as we met Bob the Angry Flower creator and our former premier’s brother Stephen Notley in September 1989, the three of us answering a call for cartoonists at the University of Alberta’s Gateway newspaper.
Besides being a hell of an illustrator, it was fast apparent as we joked around that here was a fellow teenager who knew that “bree-yark!” did not mean “we surrender” in goblin tongue.
As time passed, I watched with pride as he increasingly took his wit and humour away from the U of A Fantasy Gamers Club into the city’s thriving improv theatre scene.
Meer was already finding success with his improv troupe Gordon’s Big Bald Head and his uncanny knack for doing brilliant callbacks — a key Dungeon Master skill — in the Die-Nasty soaps at Varscona and Fringes far and wide when local game developer BioWare rang the dinner bell in 1997.
“Dungeons & Dragons gave me an early leg up in my early video game voice work, because BioWare was doing D&D games,” he says. “I did my cattle call audition like pretty much any actor in town, but the fact I was a player gave me an advantage. Plus I lived pretty close to the studio.
“There was just a shorthand there. I just knew immediately, like, this guy’s a lawful evil kobold shaman and I already know the name of the god that he worships. I know the background of kobold society. You don’t have to explain stuff to me. I can just hit the ground running and go.
“So the very first voice work I ever did was a line in the final cut scene at the end of Baldur’s Gate. You had to play 40 hours to get to my line,” he laughs, noting, just like back in Sedgewick, he began by playing a cleric — just an evil one this time.
“There is no need for concern,” Meer growl-hisses, still remembering his line. “The fate of this fool is sealed.”
And though no fool, Meer’s fate was sealed, indeed.
During a time D&D started to wobble under its own weight, Meer ironically found reliable — and more prominent — voice work in various Baldur’s Gate sequels, not to mention Asia-flavoured RPG Jade Empire, fantasy game Dragon Age and of course the thing he’s probably best known for worldwide: voicing the male Commander Shepard in the global hit Mass Effect games starting in 2007.
This and other work eventually brought him to a lot of fan pop and cosplay conventions around the world.
Among those trips, Meer ended up at a huge promotional event by then-owner of D&D Wizards of the Coast in 2018, which took a soundstage in L.A. and turned it into an immersive, lore-rich facsimile of fantasy town Waterdeep.
“They had a blacksmith, a half-orc butcher, and you know, all these storefronts and even the Yawning Portal Tavern at one end. It looked like a million bucks.
“And that’s where I met a lot of the people that I ended up playing online with, like in the Black Dice Society, for example, which was an official game by Wizards of the Coast,” he says.
Essentially, Meer was now professionally playing Dungeons & Dragons for Dungeons & Dragons itself, as well as his own Improvised Dungeon & Dragons shows in Edmonton and beyond.
All of this led him, and leads us, to one of the coolest paid gigs in the world: Dungeon Mastering for the ongoing international vacation event, D&D in a Castle, over in the U.K. and the U.S.
Which, can you believe it, also has huge origins in Edmonton.
Enter Tara Rout, local event planner and founder of the Jane Austin-themed Pride and Prejudice Ball at Hotel Macdonald, who also had a stint running the Harry Potter-themed Festival of Witchcraft and Wizardry in Wilbur McIntyre Park.
When they were kids living in New Zealand, Rout’s dad brought she and her siblings the 1984 red D&D Basic Set.
“My nine-year-old sister was the Dungeon Master, and we just played the adventure in the box. And Cam, my younger brother,” Rout laughs, “was hooked for life.”
At least, that is, until he grew up. Got married. Moved away to the U.S. And like so many, stopped playing.
But after years of unsuccessful attempts, he got his old crew together, rented an AirBnB and blew the dust of the old dice, character sheets and figurines.
“Everybody was going through hard times, divorces, etc.,” says Rout. “Of course, they ended up just playing D&D solid for days, piles of takeout surrounding them. And they were all like, ‘Guys, this is the most cathartic thing anybody could have done — beats any other kind of therapy.’
“It was just this realization of what was missing in their lives. And they started thinking about how they could share this experience.”
Busy running her literary-themed costume events, Rout got an excited call from her brother one day.
“He said, ‘Tara, I’m going to ruin your life. … I’m going to say some words to you and you’re going to hate me because you’re going to have to do it — D&D in a Castle.’
“And I was like, ‘This is this is a terrible idea, Cameron. But I think we have to do it.’
“So we did.”
Thinking they would have to referee the games themselves and that no one would care, they booked a castle in France and posted the event on Facebook.
Big names quickly showed interest, like comic book illustrator and cosplayer Satine Phoenix, and official D&D game designers Jeremy Crawford and James Inrocaso. It’s even licensed with D&D’s current owner, Hasbro.
The first one was six DMs, 36 guests. Hundreds have come to play since.
Meer did his first castle in 2019, “then there was that little worldwide thing that put the kibosh on any worldwide events for a while,” he notes, “but subsequently I was going back every year and doing a few events.”
“We have a saying at the castle,” says Rout, “which is ‘Mark is the best.’ And every time someone new joins the castle, there will be a moment where they come up to me and say, ‘I just had a moment with Mark Meer. He’s the best!’”
Local actor Belinda Cornish, Meer’s wife, often joins as support talent in a whirl of cosplay, era-appropriate dining and solid adventure.
“The motto is eat, sleep, roll dice,” Rout says.
“You’re with a party, you’re going on an adventure for three solid days, all day and all night, every day with a great DM who has planned a proper campaign.”
Registration, which pays for the castle rental, all the talent, gourmet food and atmosphere, runs around $3,400, plus $220 a night for lodgings.
“All your needs are taken care of, and nobody has to go home because the babysitter had to quit,” says Rout. “And nobody forgot to bring the snacks, because all the meals are provided by the castle. You don’t have to do dishes.
“There’s just the game the whole time, and everybody there is just excited to be there.”
Mind you, not everyone can afford such an excursion. But there so many opportunities to play around town for way less of a dent in your bag of silver.
IntrigueCon running Oct. 16-18 at Meadowlark Mall is a good chance to try various new games — some D&D adjacent — under various themes. The one in May had a western vibe, Springo Unchained.
“The one before that was pirate themed, the one before that apocalypse,” says organizer Daniel Hodges. “We give people an opportunity to try a bunch of different games that they wouldn’t ordinarily do, and you can play any of them for about $30 all in.”
If you can pull a group of your own together and want a sweet setting, Authentic Dungeons has a number of beautiful rooms you can rent for $69 for six hours.
And, of course, there’s always Waldron-Blain’s drop-in sessions at the Dog, 8 p.m, every second Monday of the month.
A recent game found local communications specialist Janis Galloway giving role-playing a try for the first time, coming at it from an odd angle.
“I love true crime podcasts, and so through them was very aware of the Satanic Panic in the ’80s, where these kids were accused of crimes and murders simply because they were playing D&D or playing Black Sabbath or whatever.
“But my actual origin story of not playing isn’t thinking that it was for nerds — I do adult musical theatre, and that’s way dorkier than D&D — but actually being too scared to play.”
Not of the monsters and the violence or anything, she says, but rather that she couldn’t grasp the rules or be clever or witty enough to contribute.
The furthest thing than this happened, though, as Galloway’s enthusiasm and energy helped make the session glow one night, even when the character she rolled up was killed by a ghoul.
“Because I was a new player, I feel like I wasn’t as precious about my character, whereas I almost felt like everyone else was really stressed out about me dying,” she laughs. “Everyone was so nice!”
Moving forward, she took over a cleric-for-hire named Snagus, who with a lucky roll soon successfully convinced a towering ogress to let us pass without harm.
But, hilariously panicking, Galloway’s Snagus suddenly yelled, “Repent or die!” And so it was we all had to fight this bewildered giant to the death. It was scary, ridiculous, and so much fun.
“One thing that surprised me is I thought D&D was just fighting,” says Galloway.
“But it was way more nuanced than that. Like, we need to get a ship. How do we get a ship? How do we convince an orgress to let us pass? There was a lot of conversation, and I appreciated that it wasn’t just like boys wanting to fight with imaginary swords.”
I remind her that she actually started the fight with the ogress, and she laughs, “Oh yeah. Oops! Well, I got excited!”
Either way, she’s looking forward to her next dungeon delve.
“I would say, if you’ve ever been intrigued and curious, but think that you don’t belong, I would highly recommend trying it out.
“Adam’s specific game was so welcoming, and he was just so good at laying the foundation and helping you get started and being really patient with questions. So I would say find a beginner group like that.
“Or if you have a group of friends that enjoy D&D, they might be waiting for you to ask,” she says. “You never know.”
Walking skeletons have no blood, but I was covered in it in the dawn light, a little of my own and a lot more from of our unfortunate slain hirelings.
Whether the innkeeper Frizwith somehow summoned these creatures, we’ll never know, because they put a grim end to her, too.
But starting with wardog Raspberry stealing a femur and bringing the first one down, the creatures were either all destroyed — five with my help, several by a hallway-rolled barrel — or had fled from Theobald’s holy spells in a night that earned most of us concussions or new scars.
The goblin caves would have to wait.
We were exhausted, the storm was over, and it was time to head back north with nary a coin to show for it, though Raspberry claimed her liberated femur.
I rolled my dice to give some sign of what lay ahead, laughing at the result out of a possible 100 amid the blood and shattered bones.
Thirteen, same as the wretched skeletons’ number.
No matter. I had my dog, my steel and my friends in arms.
Alone so long, this is where I belonged.
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