So the game "Neverwinter Nights" finally came out last week. It's been promised for the past three years. People were drooling over it. It sold out its first day at most stores, and even the second shipments are being snapped up fast. It's a faithful computer rendition of the pen and paper role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons, and has a unique feature allowing users to author and run their own online D&D games -- aided by computers and the internet, but ultimately created and run by players rather than by pre-generated scripts. Thousands of old school gamers are coming out of the closet and saying "hey, maybe I could dig out my old D&D adventures and translate them into Neverwinter Nights..."

And that's where my secret hobby comes in. See, I have this collection that I'm very, very proud of. And simultaneously deeply, deeply ashamed of. But I've decided that the time is right to go public.

I have a world-class collection of vintage Dungeons and Dragons modules.

When I was a young lad, I played a lot of D&D. This probably surprises you, because you invariably think of me as hip, sophisticated, erudite -- not one of those gangly misfits from Junior High who spent their lunch hour scratching out underground passages on graph paper, while cracking jokes about the relative Intelligence and Charisma attributes of various classmates. Oh, that Tavia was a babe. Total 18 charisma. But she was interested in Greg Fields? Oh, man. Her wisdom must be five.

Thing is, I never really stopped playing. There have been many several-year-long stretches where I didn't play at all, but unless you've thrown out or sold your collection, it still taints you. You still carry that "gamer" vibe. So long as you continue to find closet space for that milk crate with your 1st Edition "Deities and Demigods" rulebook, your pheromones will be fundamentally altered to repel 98% of the world's female population. Fortunately, that remaining 2% can be pretty cute. And open minded, if you get what I'm saying.

Anyhow, along with the basic books with rules for D&D they sold "Adventure Modules". Presumably, the players are pretending to be a group of warriors, mercenaries, sorcerers, cutthroats, and holy men. When they walk into the Dungeons of Despair underneath Castle Doom, these modules have all the background material prepared ahead of time. The opening cave has passages leading off to the north and west, and those passages lead to a torture chamber and an underground lake, respectively. The torture chamber has five walking skeletons, the lake has a fire breathing giant turtle. There's still plenty of refereeing to be done with a module (maybe someone in the party speaks fluent turtle, and can talk his way out of a fight), but the module provides the underlying story.

And that's where my particular brand of geekiness kicks in. I love these modules. Not to play. To read. They are the single weirdest form of fiction in creation. (And I speak with some authority here. I've taken whole graduate seminars on Performance Art.) Schematics for haunted castles, abandoned temples, underground tombs, monster-infested sewers -- each filled with deadly, self-resetting traps and huge populations of evil beasties that presumably hang around all day waiting to kill passers-by. I'm sure a psychologist who knew the right questions to ask could have a field day with this hobby. "You say you like dark, moist, underground caverns? Where you fight past hoards of hairy 'bugbears' until you reach the vampire queen at the end? And you say you discovered this pastime at roughly the onset of puberty? Interesting..."

They churned out dozens of these modules in the game's early years, and I'm well on my way to having them ALL.

I have the entire C1-C6 tournament series. (All the early modules had letter/number assignments. Why, I don't know.) The entire A1-A4 slaver series, the G1-G3 Giants trilogy, the D1-D3 Drow series (D2 and D3 in original, first print pastel colors), and of course, Q1 - Queen of the Demonweb Pits, where the whole story culminates. I'm tragically missing the last half of the I series (there were fourteen of them, alas I have but six), and four of the B series that were printed in miniscule runs during the late 1980's and go for $50 a pop on the open market. (Translation: Ebay.) I've got all three L's, even Deep Dungeon Delve, which was only released in the TSR Silver Anniversary box set. All five N's, all four S's (plus the "Return to the Tomb of Horrors" and "Return to White Plume Mountain", nostalgia supplements which were released five years ago), T1-4 (which is cheating, because they were never released as separate modules, except T1, which I also have), the U1-U3 series, the UK1-UK7 series, and WG4-10.

If you had the slightest idea what I was talking about you'd be saying "Oooh. Ahhhh." I promise you.

I even have the Bloodstone Lands series (H1-H4), which now go for insane prices because they're epic beyond the slightest hope of playability. This series assumes the players have assembled characters that are powerful beyond measure, and decides "Hey, what would happen if these immensely wealthy and skilled individuals were suddenly tasked with saving an entire civilization from the onslaught of invulnerable demon armies from another plane of reality? Maybe that could kill them!" If you take a wrong turn in this adventure, it can run you through the entirety of Q1 - Queen of the Demonweb Pits - just as a sidebar to the main plotline. (Modules that reference other modules make me weak in the knees.) Conservatively speaking, it would take about 3 years to slog through. By then, your characters are literally in Hell plunging the fabled Wand of Orcus into the still-beating heart of the 5-headed Babylonian dragon god Tiamat.

Fortunately, for this occasion, I have the rare Judge's Guild module "Inferno" which remains the only published attempt to translate Dante Alighieri's fourteenth-century poetic masterpiece into a Dungeons and Dragons adventure. Sure, some of it has been done before. Providing hit points, armor class, and special abilities for Charon, the ferryman for the river Styx? Common as dirt, across a dozen different genres of gaming. Plotting out the statistics for the Lion of Violence and Ambition, Leopard of Malice and Fraud, and She-Wolf of Incontinence, which Dante meets in the Dark Wood of Error in Canto I? Demented beyond all reason.

I even have "Castle Greyhawk", the most genuinely cruel supplement ever created. Not because its contents are cruel, but because it was a deliberate (and successful) attempt to crush the ego of E. Gary Gygax the creator of the game. Gygax spent over 12 years working on Castle Greyhawk. It was his ultimate dungeon adventure. He never wanted to finish it, just keep adding and adding, making it bigger, harder, and more complex. In the late 1980's, he lost control of the company. He lost all rights to the game he created, even the notes he had for Castle Greyhawk. So the new owners of TSR decided to finally publish it -- only instead of using Gygax's notes they turned it into the first "joke module" written by five different authors, each tasked with making the most absurd contributions they could think of. The cast of "Star Trek" is present, on level three. It includes the only official appearance of a "Lemon-Lime Soda Elemental." While Gary was creating an entirely new genre of entertainment, that would go on to make billions (that he'd never see) across movies, video games, and publishing, he was secretly building this perfect sand castle to epitomize the soul of his dream. And the new owners of TSR said "Hey look! That nerd's building a sand castle! Let's go JUMP ON IT! Yaaaay!"

(Side note: Gary's notes were eventually rediscovered by later TSR employees and turned into module WGR1 - Greyhawk Ruins. It had a small print run and was released during a time when the game was doing poorly, so it's very hard to find. It includes dozens of pages of maps, with over a thousand separate encounter descriptions. It's every bit as convoluted and unplayable as you'd imagine. Playing all the way through it would be work enough for a lifetime. Do I own a copy? You bet your sweet ass.)

I'm not insane. I have boundaries. I decided to go with the "buy a house and think about kids" life plan rather than the "collect all the super-rares, no matter the cost" plan. I'd love a copy of the banned, recalled Orange-cover B3 - Palace of the Silver Princess. (It included a drawing of a scantily clad woman, tied up and surrounded by leering goblins. This made distributors very nervous, because even though other materials had fully nude demonic seductresses, the B series was being marketed to children.) I'm not willing to shell out the $1000 it would cost though. But I might just kill and eat a child for one of the original typewritten "Lost Caverns of Tsoconth." Eight looseleaf, unbound pages, originally distributed in ziplock bags at the 1976 Wintercon V gaming convention. Fewer than 300 copies were ever made, no doubt half of them thrown out within the hour... some day! Some day it shall be mine!

So there. I've come out of the closet. Want to take a look at my collection? Come on by! I'm dying to show it off. And now that Neverwinter Nights is out, I can begin the painstaking task of translating ALL of them... Except that the game has been out for a week and a half already. Someone else is already finished with the project.

Damn internet.

Columns by Cindy