"Hi My name is Luke and I'll be your Dungeon Master."

I would have been less surprised to hear this introduction from inside a BDSM dungeon than how I actually heard it: on a mat in a studio that normally holds dance classes and birthday parties in Park Slope, ready to participate in Dungeons & Dragons yoga.

I will readily admit to being a nerd as a teenager, but I was the kind that knew release dates of indie seven-inches and memorized magazine mastheads. On the subject of games, role play, and elves, I remain neutral-to-dismissive; I don't even watch Game of Thrones.

The idea is the brainchild of artist Scott Wayne Indiana. He came up with the "mashup" (his words) while he was at an ashram (of course!) in upstate New York doing both yoga and guided meditation. "I came up with the idea that a guided narrative could be fun to listen to during yoga," he tells me. "Taking it a step further to involve some interaction, the idea was born to mashup D&D and yoga."

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I knew immediately I was in over my head when the woman seated to my left broke out her own set of multi-sided dice encased in a velvet pouch. There were seven of us, including Sarah, the yoga teacher, and Luke, the Dungeon Master. We were on a quest—I think "campaign" is the correct terminology—to find golden, health-restoring apples, Luke explained, and then began a quick rundown of the game: We'd be assigned characters with certain skills and we'd roll the die to find out our fate. Somewhere around the time he started explaining injuries and that we could use something called "the interrupt" if our special power could come in handy during someone else's turn, I knew I wasn't going to be very good at this.

39 Forks

My character was called Quami (or perhaps Qaumi) and was a bald swordmaster. My neighbor laughed when I got him and said, "Brute strength is never a bad thing to have." I can't say I totally got the joke, but I smiled at her. Luke started describing how we were setting off on a long journey and my eyes started to glaze over. Then I realized he was talking to me—I was supposed to make the first decision of our journey—and I had no idea what was going on. "Um, do I just say go right or left?" I asked. No, Luke said, I need to decide if we would take the long and winding trail or one that was less winding. I chose the winding one. We were off.

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At this point we started doing an easy vinyasa practice, bowing down, raising half up, bowing down again, and then raising one arm to the ceiling and then the other. With each player's turn, she would get an obstacle, like a giant troll or a rock wall, and choose how to proceed. If we fought a member of the undead, for example, we'd do a vinyasa based on warrior one. A roll of the 20-sided die merited its own squatting twist, and the results would dictate if we were successful and what would happen next.

I'm accustomed to vinyasa classes with loud music and intricate sequences that clear my head, so the yoga part of D&D yoga was too simple to really keep my mind occupied. But at the same time, I found the game part of it incredibly bewildering. Each time my turn was about to be up, I started getting mild anxiety about whether or not I could remember what was going on. Not very namaste.

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I was so confused—and frankly bored—that I ended up concentrating on the clock. After about half an hour, I started to pray that my character would die and I could just lie in corpse pose until it was all over. No such luck. After an hour and 20 minutes, we triumphed over a pair of dragons and someone's magic invisibility potion landed us a golden apple. I was one of the three characters who lived until the end, but for me, the real victory was getting to go home.

The next session will be held at Spoke the Hub Dancing in Park Slope, Brooklyn in June. For more information and to sign up for updates: 39forks.com

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