Other than playing D&D, I don’t remember what else Garth and I might have done with those summer days. But the week ran out much too soon. My family had gone north to visit relatives for two weeks, dropping me off at Garth’s on the way. Now I was to spend the second week at my grandmother’s house.
At noon, my suitcase was packed, and the phone rang. Garth’s mom said it was my grandmother. She would be there in an hour.
While waiting, I asked Garth if I could look at the blue book. “I want to copy the important parts.”
Armed with pencil and ruled paper, I flipped through the eggshell pages. Monsters, I knew, were important, so, I started there.
Garth pursed his lips. “It’ll take you forever to copy all that.”
“I’ll just write the names.”
“Here,” Garth turned to the last page and pointed to three columns of monster names. “That’s most of the monsters. The stuff on those two pages is all you really need.”
Many of the monsters were alien to me. As I copied each name, I tried to conjure up what the creature should look like and how it might make a dangerous foe.
From fairy tales, I knew goblins were diminutive boogie men that run around all harry-scarry on dark nights. I knew bandits from Westerns, and I wondered what they were doing in medieval times. I was overly familiar with ticks from boyhood outdoor explorations, and even giant specimens seemed out of place in the fantastic world.
But orcs were unknown to me. I had seen, too young, cartoon movies with hobbits, but I failed to make the connection to the films’ frog-mouthed foot soldiers.
Then there were berserkers, bugbears, and gelatinous cubes, stirges and displacer beasts. Together the names conjured mayhem, but I wrote them down. Time pressed.
After the monsters, I turned to the magic spells. As the neutral human fighter, I witnessed Kaytar at his esoteric profession. But how magic worked in the game was a complete mystery. The names at least gave some hint to their purpose.
The hour was passing quickly, so I copied the “books” of magic-user spells without thinking. When I got to the clerical spells, I paused.
“Garth, how does light hurt you?”
“What do you mean?”
“This spell cures light wounds.”
“No, it cures a few hit points of damage. Like from a small wound.”
Then I heard a car pull into the drive outside. Time to go. I closed the pale blue book and looked one last time at the cover. A dragon’s treasure, blue flame, tiny stars.
Garth and I said our goodbyes and write-soons and maybe next summer again. I climbed into the backseat and waved out the rear window as the car pulled out of the drive. Clutching the leaf of ruled paper, I studied the lists of monsters and spells until car sickness came on.
