So imagine what it’s like to be my niece or my nephew. First of all, I love them all dearly. They mean the world to me. And usually, as a kid, they’re apathetic to me. You have to be a little sophisticated in order to truly appreciate my level of chaos. The magic number is 13.
Right around the age of 13, they start to get it.
Well, when Plan married Brain, I got two new nieces. One 14, adorable with a great laugh, and one nine-year-old, who scared me a little bit. She was good at everything she tried. Reminded me a lot of her dad. She was excited to hear that I was a writer, and then she skipped away. But the 14-year-old, we’ll call her Shasta, was pretty dedicated. Whenever I was around, she was around.
Time rolls on. Pretty soon, the 14-year-old is graduating. The nine is now 16. They have boyfriends, fiances, and when they come to Missouri for holidays, they stay with us. We’re pretty much the party house at that point. Shadow and a bunch of young adults finding themselves? Yeah, things get pretty wild.
They brought Cards Against Humanity that first visit. We played. We found out that the sixteen-year-old, we’ll call her Lore, had a very sharp wit, which we already knew, and a filthy mind. We found out that the girls and their guys had no real understanding of how demented their aunt was. They were shocked with some of the things she put together, with the obscene game Cards Against Humanity.
One year, the four of them came for three days. Day one was Cards Against Humanity. Day two, we went to visit Vigil and Hymnal, Plan and Brain. We had our festivities, and on the ride home the trouble began.
I’m gonna back up twice, maybe three times, and we’ll get a run at this. And I’ll tell you how four kids made one of the worst decisions they ever could have made.
I guess the first time I was aware of it was 2009. I went to go visit my friend Burg. He was living in Seattle at the time, and I spent a week with him. He told a story about how his next door neighbor was a Dungeons and Dragons player, and Burg mentioned that he played.
“Well, you should come over then,” the neighbor said. “Come on over and I’ll call up a couple friends of mine and we’ll play a game.”
Burg was already shaking his head halfway through the statement. “No, that’s not how we’re gonna do it at all,” Burg said. “You, me, and your friends will chip in and buy a round-trip ticket for my Dungeon Master. He’ll come and run us on a game all week. We won’t be playing 4th edition, we’ll be playing 2nd. See, I have a DM. And I can’t even try to make myself want to play with anyone else.”
That was the first time I heard it. Skip forward three years, and I’m talking to Heart. We haven’t seen each other in a while, but we knew each other in high school, and when I was in middle school. The topic of DnD comes up.
“Do you still play?” I asked.
“No, how could I?”
“What do you mean how could you?”
“My DM wasn’t here. I haven’t seen my DM in decades.”
“You can’t find a gaming group?” I said.
“I’m not playing with another DM, Jesse. How’s another DM gonna run a game that’ll keep my interest? You’re my DM. You should’ve known that already. Shame on you.”
Couple years ago, I was hanging out with Job. Job was talking about his son, who was a senior in high school, and he said, “He’s in a Dungeons and Dragons club in high school. They play for about an hour every Friday. It’s… it’s absolutely ridiculous. I told him, ‘There’s only one real DM in the world. Listen, if you’re not becoming a better person while you play, then you’re not playing DnD. Nothin’ I can do for you, kid. My DM is gone and you’ll never have one.’”
We started talking to other people I played with in the past. Me and Bekah started collecting stories. The consensus was pretty much the same.
“No, I don’t play anymore,” we heard over and over again. “Tried a few times,” we heard a few times. “But you, but your husband, ruined me of Dungeons and Dragons. It’s just no fun anymore. If you can’t play a Jesse Teller game, you might as well not even pick up your dice.”
Well, everything’s going fine that second night. My nieces and their guys are in the car, and I’m riding with them. Bekah left earlier with our kids. Chiming in the back from Lore’s mouth comes, “Hey Uncle Jesse, do you play DnD?”
“Yeah, I’ve played for decades.”
“Well, I played a game a few weeks ago with P’s (the boyfriend sitting next to her) friends. It was really fun. Do you think maybe you could just, I mean we don’t have to play an actual game and make characters and dice and everything, but I figured, you’re a fantasy writer. Maybe you could just make up a scenario for us?”
“No, if we play, we’re gonna play. But you don’t want that.”
“Yeah, I think it would be fun.”
“No, you don’t want that.”
Shasta was driving. She looked over at me and said, “Yeah, we love DnD. Me and Fa (fiancé) play twice a month. We play over Skype. It’s a lot of fun. We love Dungeons and Dragons.”
“Yeah, Uncle Jesse, come on,” Fa said.
“Listen, I’m gonna do you a favor here. You don’t want this. You don’t want me to run you on a game. You’ll never wanna play with another DM again.”
Fa laughed. “Well, I think we’ll be okay. I’ve been playing with my gaming group for years now. I know what a good DM is.”
“Listen, please don’t do this. If you love Dungeons and Dragons, don’t do this. We’ll have a couple drinks tonight, maybe play some Cards Against Humanity.”
“Come on, Uncle Jesse,” Lore said.
P grabbed my shoulder from the back seat and shook it. “If you’re so good then you have to prove it.”
“Fine, we’ll play when we get home. But I warned you.”
Shasta and Lore were the first through the door. They were greeted instantly by Bekah.
“Uncle Jesse’s gonna run us on a game!”
“Yeah, we’re gonna play DnD with Uncle Jesse.”
“No, no, no, you don’t want that,” Bekah said. “He ruins people on other DMs.”
“Yeah, that’s what he said,” Fa said as he walked in the door. “But I know what good DnD is. I’ve been playing DnD for years.”
“Yeah, how good could he really be?” P said. “I’ve been playing with my brother and his friends for most of my life.”
“You really don’t wanna do this, guys, but if you do, just know, this might be the last game of Dungeons and Dragons you ever play.”
They played 5th edition but it was not hard to teach them how to run a character in 2nd. I gave them a plethora of different races they hadn’t heard of that came from my world, a world I have been building since 1994 that I write my books in. They all picked exotic races, except Fa. He looked at me with a cocky smile and said, “I think I’ll just run a human, thank you.”
Not a problem.
We made characters and I took Shasta to my office first to let her know what her backstory was.
She was raksa. A race of creatures with the bodies of fur-covered humans and the heads of some animal. She wanted to play a Snow Leopard. We talked about her life previous to the game with little detail. I would give her snippets of a closer look at her character while we were playing. It was the concept of the game that interested me, and I would find out, her as well.
A master criminal was dying. He ran organized crime syndicates all over the world. He had more enemies than hairs on his head, and he had been poisoned five years earlier. Slowly he was wasting away, and as the days ticked off, he decided to invite every ally and enemy he had to a great two-week party at his massive castle on a private island. The party was called The Death of Fa La-may, and by the end of the party, he would be dead.
Shasta was the name of her character and she was friends with his daughter. She knew that with as many monstrous villains as would be in attendance, her friend was in danger. She would come to protect her. And Fa La-may had a bracer that would give Shasta incredible amounts of power, back in her home where her noble family was almost wiped out.
Simple enough.
Lore and P were lovers. The only problem was she was a half Jinn the size of a human woman and he was half sprite, a fairy race that stood no more than three feet tall. Fa La-may was legend for having created a potion that made all of his castle guards ten feet tall. If they could get their hands on that potion, they could cause the half sprite to grow to human size and they could live the perfect life. They knew that Fa La-may would not just hand it over, and they knew that most likely they would have to steal it.
Pretty simple, but a tad more complicated.
Then Shasta’s fiancé.
His character’s name was Marndark and Fa La-may had a son named Marndark.
I laid out the premise of the game to him.
When I was done telling him the background of his character, he stared. He did not blink. He did not look away.
I asked him, “Can you do this?”
He blinked and nodded, “Yes, yes I can do this.”
“Don’t fuck up my game.”
“No, I got it. I can do it.” But from the look in the kid’s eyes, I knew just as well as he did. He was in over his head, and he had never seen anything like this before in his years of playing this game.
Fa La-may sent out the invitations with the cryptic statement of: “All debts will be paid. And everyone will get exactly what they deserve.”
Shortly after the party begins, Fa La-may goes to his office and starts meeting with his friends and enemies and handing over items from his treasury to end old beefs and solidify alliances.
Lore’s character is a wizard of sorts with the ability to open portals. She leaves the long line of people waiting to talk to Fa La-may, and walks to the side of the room. She sliced open the room so she can watch what is going on before she has to go in and see for herself. While looking in on Fa La-may, she does a very simple spell called ESP. It is defined in the Player’s Handbook as a spell that can read the surface thoughts of the target.
“Come with me,” I said to her and she blinked. She followed me into my office, where I closed the door, turned to her and said, “That is not Fa La-may in that office. That is an actor hired to play Fa La-may. Fa is disguised somewhere in this party looking for the one that poisoned him.”
She looked down at her pad of notes as if she was checking to see if I were lying to her, then she looked back up at me with wide eyes and said, “This is much more intense than I thought it would be.”
“You okay?”
She stared at me for a moment, as if seeing me for the first time. In large part she was. She nodded, but I could tell she was rattled. “I’m fine.”
Back in the living room, she wrote a tiny note to her boyfriend P. He looked up at me with shock and his mouth fell open. They feverishly began whispering to themselves and they kept looking at me.
They needed to ferret out who the real Fa La-may was and get him to give them that potion. They needed to unravel the immense party they were in the middle of, and they needed to figure out how to navigate an Uncle Jesse game.
When I gave Marndark his backstory, I told him that Marndark’s father, Fa La-may, hated him and had killed him and assumed his identity.
The fiancé was in way over his head, and the man who I referred to as Fa earlier in this chapter was terrified.
For four hours we continued to play the most intense game any of them had ever imagined. So many times, I pulled one or two of them into my office to give them tiny bits of information no other player had. Secret meetings with Uncle Jesse fueled a twisting and rippling game that had their heads spinning.
We had one more night to play. Four more hours to bring it all to a head and try to figure out everything that was happening in the Unreal Mind of the Madman Dungeon Master.
The next day was Christmas and none of them cared. We ate, we opened presents, and the entire time they whispered to one another and pulled me into the side room off of Vigil and Hymnal’s living room to ask me about things they had figured out. Wild theories they had that could not be true, but maybe. Maybe Uncle Jesse was twisted enough to think this way. Maybe this game was more complicated than they ever could have imagined.
Every question they asked quaked the ground of the story and just left them with more and more questions. Every time they pulled me aside, two or more of them would walk to a corner of the room and whisper. The game of games was quaking through their heads, and no one knew how to do it. None of them had ever seen anything like what I was doing to them.
The more they dug, the deeper in the hole they got. Soon all of the heads were spinning, and no one had any idea which way was up, and who they were looking at.
Fa was furious that the actor he hired had started giving away gifts to the guests. That had not been part of the plan at all. He saw his treasure vault slowly dwindling as his health got worse and worse. And there was nothing he could do about it. He figured out the actor knew he was dying, and if he could make allies of every enemy, then that actor could assume the identity of Fa La-may, and all the wealth and power that came with it.
“Uncle Jesse,” Lore said, pulling me aside when we got back to my house with an immense puzzle to dismantle. “I have to be back in Milwaukee early tomorrow. I have a test I have to take for my senior year coming up, and I can’t stay up past midnight. I need some sleep and I need to make sure everyone is up early. How long do you think this game will take?”
“I can have it done by midnight, if that’s okay, no problem.” It was 8 PM, and this was easily the most complicated game any of them had ever seen or even heard of.
As we played, more and more shadows became exposed, and more and more the plot thickened into a sludge that hardly anyone could figure out. No one could swim these waters.
Lore and P found and stole Fa La-may’s recipe book of potions. But they needed an interpreter, and they needed someone who was apt at making potions. They found Fa La-may’s potion partner and worked for a solution. But that man could see Fa was dying, and he wanted that recipe book for himself.
P had played before and Lore really hadn’t. So he would look at the Player’s Handbook at spells she was reading and understanding as she played, and he would tell her what to cast.
Not okay.
Bekah yelled every time he did it that he was playing her character, and Bekah was getting pissed. We warned him many times and he kept doing it anyway. When Bekah, Lore, and P were in my office talking, and in the middle of role playing, P said, “Lore casts ESP on Aunt Bekah!” Bekah spun on me and pointed her elegant finger.
“That is not okay!” she said. “What are you going to do about that?”
I nodded to her and looked at P. “You will not do it again and you will be punished.”
Lore and P froze.
“What are you going to do to him, Uncle Jesse?”
“I haven’t decided yet. My wrath will come in the form of the plot of the game.” I looked at P. “Expect it to come. I know not when. I know not how, but I will lay my wrath upon your head.”
A bargain was struck between Lore, P, and Fa La-may’s potion partner. He would make one potion for them. Then he could leave with the recipe book. No questions asked. But what potion? The man was sure he had figured out the antidote that Fa La-may needed to survive, but was unwilling to brew it. They needed to decide if they have him make the growth potion and let Fa La-may die, or if they would save Fa La-may’s life and have him brew the potion they needed.
But an alliance with a grateful Fa La-may is nothing to scoff at, so they decided to brew the antidote. The partner made the antidote and disappeared with the book.
They had figured out who Fa La-may was hours earlier, so the fiancé, Lore, and P were brought into Uncle Jesse’s office and the gift was given. But Fa had been drinking what he thought were antidotes all night, and every time they had been lies. Every time he took another, his condition worsened. So the fiancé had to decide if Lore and P were trying to kill him, or if they really had figured out a way to save his life.
After looking at the other two hard, he decided to trust him. Fa was saved and he told them he would give them anything they wanted. Instantly they asked for the growth potion and he nodded.
“No problem, let me get my potion recipe book and I will make it right now.”
But see, that recipe book was long gone. They admitted to him that they did not have any way of knowing where it had been taken, and Fa looked at them stunned.
He would have to make it from memory. He had to roll the dice over and over again with penalties added because he did not have his book. He missed one of his checks. When the potion was made, it was blue. But cloudy.
Bekah’s character was Fa La-may’s daughter. He had actually stolen the recipe for that potion from her. She had intended it to be a shrinking potion. Bekah tried to help, but she missed one of her checks and her potion was green. She was pretty sure Lore could drink it and shrink down to P’s size, but there was no way to tell if it would work. That potion was cloudy, too.
And here at the end of the night they sat. Lore and P had to decide which potion they would take by trying to figure out which one gave them the better chance of success. What if he drank the growth potion and it malfunctioned? It would make him even smaller. If Lore took the shrinking potion, it might make her even bigger.
All of it depended on a die roll. Depending on which one they took, they would have a percentage chance of failure or success.
“I told you I would punish you,” I said to P. “Now choose. Choose which of these you will drink and let’s get to it.”
A Dungeon Master screen is a tiny standing piece of cardboard the DM can roll his dice behind so he can flub his rolls if cornered. I told them all I would roll out front. There was no way that favoritism would save them.
They chose the growth spell and I grabbed my dice. They had a fifty percent chance of failure, a fifty percent chance of success.
No one was breathing. No one made a sound as the dice rumbled in my fist. I stared at P and grinned.
Then I rolled. There was an explosion of excitement when the outcome was decided.
When Shasta was walking past my office that night talking to Fa, she shook her head. “How are we ever going to play with Greg again?”
But they couldn’t. It was over. Dungeons and Dragons for them had been destroyed. They tried to play with their gaming group back home, but Shasta walked away. Fa played through Skype with the gaming group he had been playing with for years, but halfway through the game he muted his mic and started playing a computer game.
Fa and Shasta started coming down twice a year to play the game they loved so much with the only Dungeon Master that could satisfy them.
I had warned them.
For more about the series Reality of the Unreal Mind, visit Amazon.
Jesse Teller 
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