Part I: Companions & Chainmail

Vin Diesel - Dungeon Master Judi Dench - New Player Mike Meyers - Barbarian Warrior Stephen Colbert - Fallen Paladin

It's a scene familiar to many across the world. A small group of people sitting around a table littered with strangely shaped dice, thick books, and pieces of paper filled with arcane statistics. It's agame, and while the rules may have changed a bit since it was first published, the social interactions between the players haven't. That makes it impossible to tell if this is a group of gamers from 1974 or 2004. Impossible, that is, until you take a look at the faces of the players and realize that one of them is Dame Judi Dench, aof British cinema and an accomplished actress, (she's best known in America for her role as "M" in the Pierce Brosnanfilms). The place is the set of the big-budget summer blockbuster, and the Dungeon Master is none other than Vin Diesel -- action star, leading man, and 25-year veteran ofcampaigns.That story, as relayed in the introduction to a coffee table book published by Wizards of the Coast, is fascinating, The fact that somebody as popular in the mainstream as Diesel would come out of the closet and reveal himself as an ¿ber-geek puts him in good company with more than a few celebrities. They include Mike Meyers (whose "Lothar of the Hill People" sketch onwas based on hischaracter),Stephen Colbert, and David X. Cohen, producer of. Indeed, just mentionto almost any random person on the street and the fact that they'll almost certainly recognize the name (even if they deride it as a hobby for socially maladjusted "nerds") shows just how deeply the game has entered the culture. As video games continue to enter the mainstream and begin to wield a profound influence on popular culture,continues to exert a profound influence on video games.Indeed, one would be hard pressed tothe impacthas had on the video-gaming world. The game has had an influence far greater than just the licensed games and millions of knock-off RPGs that owe something to the gaming system designed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. Many of the most basic gameplay paradigms we currently take for granted have their roots in. Consider your standard, off-the-shelf first-person shooter. When the player is struck by a weapon, they lose a certain amount of "health" as measured by an arbitrary number subjected to computer calculations -- a direct descendent of the "hit point" measurement of a character's life in. In fact,is, in many ways, a video game in which the screen is in your mind and the "computer" consists of dice and charts. It's not surprising, therefore, that a high percentage of today's game developers are, or were,aficionados.Before there were video games, though, there were enormous conventions of gamers meeting every year. Beforeandand, there was a group of friends in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. They enjoyed getting together and pushing plastic army men around on a dining room table. They called themselves the "International Federation of Wargamers" and from their games of miniaturized combat would come a convoluted 30-year saga of triumph, tragedy, hysteria, wild success, incredible failures, and more twists and turns than even the most complicated dungeon crawl.and it all begins with a little plastic wizard.