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| Ascension by Arik Roper. Used with permission. |
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I
would hate to start a rumor that there is a link between role-playing
games and drug addiction, but my compulsive search for spiritual meaning
really did begin in an essential way with some twenty-sided die, a few
sheets of graph paper, lead figurines, and the 1977 boxed set of
Dungeons & Dragons. Maybe it began there because role-playing a
half-elf ranger who could hear and interpret the voices of stone, wind,
and rippling water, who could see in the darkness of a forest in the
dead of night, who could track deer or orc or hobgoblin with equal
acuity, who was schooled in various types of magic but was no slouch
with a bow and a short sword, was immeasurably better than what I was: a
thirteen-year-old boy with a piece of wire (from his electronics
workbench) in place of one of the temples on his glasses, his hair
hanging down to his shoulders in greasy strands, his clothes from
Bradlees, and his sneakers from Caldor. But it more likely began with
D&D, because that venerable role-playing game was a perfect storm of
the various fantastical narratives that had found their way into every
aspect of my consciousness and organized my world in a meaningful way.
It was the 1970s, and for a boy filled with nameless, unspoken anxiety
and fear, all the weird and unusual pop-culture artifacts—from a
resurgent love of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy to the black hole called Cygnus X-I on the progressive rock band Rush’s album A Farewell to Kings—reflected
and comforted my adolescent existential unease. Uncannily, Dungeons
& Dragons distilled it all into a perfect interactive chronicle of
my consciousness.
D&D
had its own repetitiveness, to be sure (enter room, check for traps,
fight monster, get treasure, repeat), but it was the eternal quest that
was so attractive, the never-ending cir cular campaign in search of that
elusive something, some hidden power, some great magic item that would
make the users like gods, give them control over demons and fair maidens
alike. Beyond the most obvious sorts of desires, there was something
else that kept compelling me toward the game. I had fellow players who
didn’t make me feel like a freak, but there was something else that had
me up every night studying the rule books, going over each statistic,
creating dungeons and maps, rolling and rolling and rolling forever
those many-sided dice. It was that the game understood, at its core,
something about the value of hidden treasures and the even greater value
of having to fight your way toward uncovering them.
I
grew up around hidden things, hidden fears, hidden wor ries. It was the
suburbs, after all, and despite their origins, which were a promise of
new beginnings and open possibili ties, mine was a familial and social
culture built on the barely hidden restlessness of the generation that
preceded mine. We had all arrived here the same way: on a highway
through history, encouraged by the end of a great war and the spiritual
fortitude that was a result of being victorious.
Illustration and visionary art have long been kindred spirits. Many
artists belonging to the Symbolists and Decadents (art movements heavy
with occult and esoteric flavor) started off as illustrators or graphic
designers and many continued to incorporate these techniques into their
work. This tradition continued into the twentieth century with artists
such as Ernst Fuchs, H.R. Giger, and — more recently — Mark Ryden and
Amanda Sage. In the Sixties, this commingling of visionary states and
illustration crossed over into pop culture by way of comic books and
album covers. Some of Jack Kirby’s
cosmic landscapes and other-worldly machinery are as mind-altering as
any Symbolist painting, and the ethereal floating islands on a Roger
Dean album cover convey a similar sensibility. And then, there is Arik
Roper.
