The Escapist Issue #105 Now Available

The latest issue of Escapist Magazine features five new articles, including one called “Tabletop Gaming and the Hypnic Jerk” that looks at the popularity of tabletop role-playing games (and the hobby stores that have sold them) over the years.

In the early days of tabletop gaming, when game clubs born of college basements, long winter nights and too much enthusiasm had spawned conventions, tournaments and an overriding feeling of goodwill toward all who carried a bag of dice, stores like Perfidium threw wide their doors, and all comers were welcome.

Alternately called “hobby” or “game” stores, these shops sold the accoutrement of our second lives: the games that occupied our minds, the books from which we gained the knowledge to play them and the dice, miniatures, maps and miscellaneous money sinks which in some way or another made the entire experience more visceral, more real. The people minding the stores were gods. To converse with them and hear their tales (dark, lonely nights playing Dungeons & Dragons in the campus steam tunnels, navigating the Ethereal Plane with a half-dragon sidekick, meeting a girl at a convention) was ecstasy.

There was one such store in the town where I grew up, wedged between a supermarket and a discount barber. They promoted walk-in games of D&D. You carried your dice with you when you stopped by on the off chance you’d be pulled into a game just by saying hello. Inside were rows of dice, sorted by color, in candy bins, alongside the acrylic paints we used to color our pewter miniatures. It was library quiet, punctuated with the occasional burst of laughter. The smell was a heady mix of fresh plastic and not-so-fresh clothes, and the hours I lost there are countless.