Yet, miraculously, in the autumn of my senior year, still without bagging my first kiss, I mustered the courage to ask out Karen. And broke my best friend’s heart in the process.

The lightning-quick back story: In the early ’80s, like today, kids either willfully blended in with their peers, or actively broadcasted “Look at me.” For years I aspired to invisibility. Deficient in many categories, I knew I’d never be socially adroit or a leader type. I merely wanted to look like everyone else, and I dutifully wore my penny loafers and khaki pants, and listened to Loverboy, the Cars and Huey Lewis and the News. I kept my head down, got A’s in all my classes and avoided the few bullies who could embarrass me by, for instance, pointing out the boner I was hiding behind my geometry notebook.

Not that females were unknown to me. Despite investing every hour of my free time in video and role-playing games, the guys I hung out with still managed to attract girls. Not the school’s stereotypical A-list of jocks and social butterflies, but a species culled from the curious underbelly of band geeks, student government treasurers and French Honor Society members. Mary Ann played the flute, clarinet and piano. Rachel dyed her hair hot pink and wore a purple leather jacket. Claire said she wanted to join the CIA. These girls could keep up with our “fart in your general direction” Monty Python routines. They sat with us at the male misfit toys table in the cafeteria. Like related tribes, we found each other and it was good. But I did not try to date these womenfolk.

Meanwhile, my best childhood friend, Russ, and I began to grow apart. Russ lived about 100 yards away, through a patch of woods that separated my house from his. Since kindergarten, we went sledding together, built model rockets together, played kickball together and explored every nook of our world — rivers, woods and sand pits — bound by the range of our single-speed Schwinn bicycles. We spent nights at each other’s houses, watching “Fantasy Island” and “The Incredible Hulk.” We drew superhero comics and simultaneously read “The Lord of the Rings.” We even invented a D&D-like oral storytelling game about two James Bond-like heroes who one-upped each other on their adventures.

“OK, after he gets ejected from the volcano,” I’d say, as Russ and I walked the half-mile to our elementary school, “then my guy lands on his feet, turns around and guns down the bad guys. Bam!”

“OK,” Russ would counter. “Then MY guy jumps on his motocross bike and books it down the mountain, peeling out as the lava almost fries his butt.”

And so on. Our “guys” survived landslides, pythons and villains. They trekked through jungles and across the Arctic Circle. When I moved away to live with my dad and stepmom for a year, Russ and I continued our “and then my guy” adventures via weekly, handwritten letters illustrated as only 12-year-old boys can, replete with poorly executed superhero rip-offs. Which is to say, badly.

But by the time ninth grade rolled around, which involved being bussed to the neighboring town and its larger, regional high school, other friends began to replace Russ. Not a conscious decision. More by way of osmosis. Russ and I would still take the one-hour bus ride each morning, but our conversations got shorter. I had nothing against him — nothing I could name, anyway. As freshman became sophomore year, Russ gravitated towards jockdom. I headed deeper into the dungeon.

Back to Karen. We had a class together, and somehow she began to sit with the cafeteria misfits. Blue eyes, blond hair, athletic, a jock, a starter on the volleyball team. She also had an edge: spiky hair, funky clothes. She didn’t play D&D, but I thought she was cute. My sister — class president, athlete, socially acute — was also on the volleyball team. She gave me an “in.” Before long, I was going to all the games. One problem: I noticed Russ, who was on the track team, lurking with Karen in the halls after school. I knew Karen also ran track. Surely, he was interested. Surely they were dating?

One night, after watching the volleyball team dominate yet another opponent on its run to the New Hampshire state championship, I asked Karen out on a date. No idea what language I used — possibly Elvish or Klingon. Whatever I uttered, it worked. We did the first date thing: ate pizza (check), walked aimlessly around town (check). Next date, we kissed (check!). A few dates later and we were wrestling on her living room floor. I was falling in love.

But what about Russ? I felt guilty I’d lured away Karen. I knew he’d be pissed.

“So are you two going to duel or what?” my friend Eric asked one day after school. Eric and a couple of our friends took classes at Fred Villari’s Studios of Self Defense.

“God I hope not. He’d kick my ass.”

The ass-kicking never happened. Russ never said a word. I avoided him in the hallways. I rode my moped, a Honda Hobbit PA-50, to school to avoid him on the bus. Weeks became months. As Karen and I fully entwined, the last connection between Russ and me snapped. The last time I saw him was graduation day, June 1984.

——

Of course, that first romance was somewhat shorter than I’d hoped, imploding the fall of my freshman year at university. College begat post-college, longer-term relationships, marriages and/or attempts at marriage, then the diaspora of friends beyond the homeland. Over the years, I’d occasionally hear from Russ’s older brothers. But what had happened to Russ, the turns and twists his life took, faded into rumor, like a poorly remembered tale. Unenthusiastically, I reached out to him once in my 20s, I think, and again in my 30s. This was before the age of Facebook and Google. No luck. I didn’t even see Russ at my 25th high school reunion. In a way, I was relieved. That decades-old crime of the heart still haunted me. As much as I wanted to see him, and apologize, to bring harmony to the universe, I also dreaded having to face him.

Then, late last year, Russ’s dad died. I found out via Facebook. On an icy, wind-bit night, my sister and I attended the wake. As we drove closer to the funeral home, I began to panic. What would Russ say? Would he give me the cold shoulder? Would he sock me in the mouth?

I walked in and eyed the room of mourners. I quickly spotted Russ’s three brothers, sister and mother, all of them a little grayer, a little chubbier, a little more worn around the edges, but clearly them. And Russ. There he was: 26 years later, but unmistakable.

Russ was speaking with other friends from that other period in our lives. I made my way down the line. Then, the moment I’d dreaded, but also ached to resolve since the demise of the Reagan administration, was upon me.

“Ethan …” Russ smiled. “How are you?”

I drew closer. We embraced.

“Hey Russ.” I smiled.

“Thanks for coming,” he said. “This is my son, Michael.”

“Hey there, Michael.”

“Hey,” Michael said, fulfilling his role as embarrassed teen.

Russ looked at his son, then back to me. “Michael, this guy here was my neighbor growing up. Back in the town where Grandma and Pops live. His house was just through the woods. We spent a ton of time together. Remember the sleepovers? We were at each other’s house two or three nights a week. We’d call up, ‘Ma, I’m eating at the Gilsdorf’s again.’

“We could walk that path in the woods between our houses at night, even blindfolded, we’d been back and forth so much. It’s probably all grown over now.”

“Yeah.”

“This guy’s mom,” Russ said, eyeing his son, then glancing at me, “YOUR Mom was my third-grade teacher.”

“And YOUR mom practically raised me,” I said.

Michael smiled. I struggled for what to say next.

Then Russ gave me a long, hard, warm look. He paused, looking at the air above my head. Then back at me. “This guy was the best friend a guy could ever have.”

Bam.

Uh-oh, here come the waterworks, I thought to myself.

Nothing about Karen. Nothing about how I’d blown him off. Or been a thief. Or had otherwise been a conniving bastard or a lousy friend. Not a peep. So perhaps I wasn’t a villain. Or perhaps Russ wasn’t even interested in Karen. A wave of relief hit me, followed by an undertow of humility. I thought I had wrecked this guy’s heart. I had inflated the effect I had on his life — me, some geeky former friend. None of this was about me. Or, if it once was, he had long ago forgiven and forgotten. I knew I didn’t need to speak of it. Ever again. Case closed.

I didn’t know what to say. I blurted something to the effect of, “That’s real sweet of you. You were a great friend too.” The rest of the wake passed in a blur of hugs and well wishes, and trips down the corridors and alleyways that branch off of memory lane.

Later that weekend, my sister and I went to Russ’s mom’s house, where his family was gathering one last time before dispersing now that their father was laid to rest. We shared a meal like the old days. We stood around the kitchen and drank beer, and tried to compress about three decades into three hours. We vowed to not let as much time pass until our next meeting.

Then Russ introduced me to a woman I hadn’t seen at the wake. “Ethan, this is Sheryl,” he said. “My wife.”

“Hi there. Good to meet you,” I said.

She looked awfully familiar. I gave her a quick once over. Blue eyes, blonde hair. Probably athletic. Holy crap. Subtract 25 years, and she looked just like Karen.

“Ethan!” she’d yell from her lair. “Help me get up!” She might be half-dressed in her bed, or on the toilet, or on the floor, or in the bathtub.

Years before my mother’s “accident,” as we called it, my dad had moved several hours away. We saw him regularly, but he and my stepmom were largely out of the picture. A family friend had moved in to help take care of my Mom, my siblings and me. The theory was, Sara Gilsdorf might make a miraculous recovery, and the friend would move out. We eventually discovered this would never come to pass.

It didn’t take long to figure out I couldn’t tame my mother, not this beast. I knew I couldn’t save her, either. I fought with her for a while, usually battling over her inability — what I mistakenly read as her refusal — to regain her old life, be it making a cup of coffee or making a family decision. After a while, I gave up. And kept my distance. I was stuck with a mother I was afraid to love.

We began calling her the Momster.

 ——-

Coincidentally enough, the film “Super 8″ also takes place in the summer of 1979. Like the boys in that film, I armed myself with a movie camera and was determined to be the next Spielbergian blockbuster kid. I studied Disney animation books. I built sets in my sister’s bedroom where stop-motion Plasticine creatures ran amok through an HO-scale train town. I ripped apart Revell model airplane kits to make my own “Star Wars”-like space ships that I’d film, frame by frame, as they dangled from fishing line in front of a hand-painted star-scape.

As I built and destroyed these worlds, my journey through the realm of adolescence to the kingdom of adulthood began to reveal itself as a tricky maze filled with traps, monsters and dead ends, not to mention broken mothers. I longed for some safe way through that labyrinth of conflicting, constricting emotions. The Super 8 movies I shot provided one avenue of escape.

Then, later that same summer of 1979 when my mom came home from the hospital, a stranger came to town — a new kid moved into the neighborhood. And a new path appeared to me.

JP and his family bought the house across the street from me. Not a ramshackle, creaky, 19th century New England colonial like mine, but a more modern one, with linoleum in the kitchen, wall-to-wall carpeting everywhere else, and a fully present, fully functioning father and mother.

I hung out a lot at JP’s house that summer. After a few weeks of watching “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century,” listening to Electric Light Orchestra’s “Discovery,” and programming primitive video games in BASIC on his TRS-80 Radio Shack computer, JP told me about Dungeons & Dragons.

“Elves?” I said one particularly hot afternoon as he cracked open the Basic D&D boxed set’s lid. “Like the Keebler kind?”

“No. Not little ones, doofus.” JP seemed a little miffed. “Have you read ‘Lord of the Rings’?”

“I saw the movie,” I countered. Ralph Bakshi’s half-baked, but still haunting, adaptation of Tolkien’s fantasy novel had come out the year before. I saw the cartoon on a trip to Boston to visit my mother in the hospital and it blew my mind.

“Well, D&D is kinda like ‘Lord of the Rings.’ Only you’re in the book. You’re in the movie. You choose what happens. You can be an elf, or a dwarf, or a human. You can be a wizard, or a fighter, or a thief. Even a cleric.”

I wanted to ask what a cleric was, but I kept my mouth shut. “A fighter. You mean like Conan? Or Strider?”


“Strider is more of a ranger. But yeah, you kill stuff. You’re the tank.”

I didn’t know what a ranger was either. All I could picture was the Lone Ranger, and the Texas Rangers. Mentally, I thumbed through my baseball card collection that my pet cat had recently peed on, ruining it. Neither of the Wild West or Major League Baseball universes seemed to be of use here.

“OK, I’ll be a fighter.”

JP handed me a pile of polyhedral dice — not just 6-sided dice, but 4-, 8-, 12- and 20-sided. I rolled as he instructed and before I knew it I had written six numbers on a sheet of loose-leaf paper, next to six categories that JP called attributes.

“Is 14 Strength good?” I asked. “Wait. He’s only got 5 for Intelligence.”

“He’s pretty strong,” JP said. “But he’s pretty dumb. You’ll have fun.”

Strong and dumb. This sounded like exactly the opposite of me, Ethan: about 5-foot-6, 130 pounds, a predictably good, B-plus/A-minus student, and never once tested in a real fight. Fun. “So now what happens?”

“Go to the store and get your equipment.” JP said my character had a few gold pieces to outfit himself.

This whole role-playing thing was new to me, but not to JP. Using words only — and in my mind, but also in the combined words and minds of JP and me — my fighter went shopping. Once in the “store,” in the “town,” my fighter (me) asked JP (who was the gamer referee, or the Dungeon Master) if he could buy himself a sword, a suit of chain mail, some torches, 50 feet of rope, a grappling hook, food (what JP called “rations”), a throwing dagger, a shield and a helmet. JP said he could. By the time he got out of there, my fighter had about six copper pieces left. JP told me to write down all these items on my character sheet. I dutifully complied.

“So now, you need to find the other adventurers,” JP said. “I’d suggest you go to the tavern.”

Go to the tavern. This was strange. D&D felt too much like little kid’s play, too much like make-believe. But I liked where this story was headed. “OK. I go to the tavern.”

“Good idea.” He smiled. “You push open the door. Inside, it’s gloomy. A fire crackles in the corner. You hear that a ship just docked in town, and a big battle against some nasty goblins just ended, so the place is full of tough-looking guys. There’s a dude in the corner with a funny hat. You might, you know, go over and talk to him.”

“I go over to the corner and talk to him.”

“Hello there, traveler,” JP intoned, with a kind of mysterious, Mr. Roarke from “Fantasy Island” voice. “I have heard of your exploits. You are a brave warrior.”

“I am? I mean, I am.” Maybe I could be a brave warrior. Even if I felt far from brave in the real world. “Yes, good sir, very brave.”

“Well, I have been assembling a group of worthy adventurers for a task.” JP looked up from his books and dice spread out around him on his bedroom’s pale green carpet. “Oh, how rude of me. I forgot to introduce myself,” Mr. Roarke continued. “My name is Malicus. Malicus the Wise, they call me. And your name?” JP raised one eyebrow, wizard-like.

I was sitting on the floor across from him, propped up against his bed. My fingers sunk into the soft fibers of the carpet. “My name is … My name is E … Ethor.” Ethan + Thor = Ethor. It was the best I could do.

“Well, Ethor,” Malicus said, “I know an Elvish archer named Quikpuck, a Halfling thief by the name of Slyfoot, and a cleric named Fabian the Just. The four of us have been hired by Lord Rathbane to investigate some mysterious happenings in the Krog Mountains above this port town. We have been told of treasure in a dungeon there. But also many men have died trying to get it. And these parts are overrun with goblins. We need a fighting man.”

“Uh huh. Well, Sir Mal … what is his name?” I whispered.

“Malicus.”

“Sir Malicus, I am not afraid of goblins. I have slayed many a … uh … Fell beast.” I had no idea where the phrase “fell beast” came from, but I was pretty proud of myself. I raised my arm in the air. “I will join you!” I was getting the hang of it.

“Very good. A stout warrior like yourself will come in handy. We leave at daybreak. You’d best get some rest, Ethor.”

It was way past dark. I could see, across the street, a square of light from my kitchen. The TV flickered like a blue flame. Mom would be wondering where I was. “I should probably go. Can we play again tomorrow?”

JP nodded.

“Can I take this?” I held up Ethor’s character sheet.

“Sure,” JP said, his nose in a rule book, already onto the next thing. “I gotta plan the adventure anyway. Come over after dinner.”

I gathered my stuff and booked it across the street, hoping to get though the front door and sneak past my mom without her seeing me. Maybe like Slyfoot.

——-

That summer, I kept making Super 8 movies, but D&D soon took over. It quickly became more than a game: It became a vital experience that let a geeky, introverted, non-athletic kid — a kid who felt about as powerful as a 3-foot hobbit on the basketball team — take action, be the hero, go on quests, and kill monsters. Not that all guys (and they were mostly guys in those days) who played D&D were geeky, introverted, non-athletic kids, but enough were, and at least this one felt invisible. With everything going on at home, perhaps I was the perfect candidate for escape. But I was also drawn to the idea of this game. I had always sensed that something was missing from the real world. My no-budget movies were one Band-Aid. But shooting my “Star Wars” remakes and clay monster battles took weeks and resulted in three-minute movies. Entering the D&D fantasy was effortless, instantaneous and endless. Epic.

I now see it was no accident that the year I found D&D, or it found me, coincided with my mother’s return from the hospital. It took courage for a teenage boy to deal with the Momster — more courage than I could muster at the time. I couldn’t face down the creature that plagued my own house. But playing D&D let me act out imaginary, possibly symbolic battles instead, and distracted me from the prospect of facing the real ones waged within my family’s four walls. In the D&D playscape, I learned to be confident and decisive, and feel powerful. Even cocky. Some of the guts and nerve and derring-do I role-played began to leak into my real world. By the time I graduated high school, I had transformed. I had used fantasy to escape but also to gather strength for later, when I could face and embrace my mother again. Which, as an adult years later, I finally did.

But in the summer of ’79, I was but a newbie. I needed to gain experience. I had only tasted the power Dungeons & Dragons. I didn’t know that game was about to save my life.

Back to those two archetypal narrative plots: someone goes on a journey; a stranger comes to town. That summer, two strangers came to town: JP, and my mother. Three, if you count me. I would become a stranger, myself, again and again. I would play many new roles. I would go on incredible journeys to imaginary lands. And I would defeat many monsters.

When I got home that night after my virgin D&D session, after slipping past my mother, I headed straight for Webster’s. “Cleric |ˈklerik|, noun. A member of the clergy; a priest or religious leader in any religion.” The next day, back at JP’s for another adventure, I would learn that in the D&D game world, clerics weren’t just priests. They were characters who had dedicated themselves to a god or perhaps several gods. They could cast spells such as “cure light wounds” and “protection from evil.” They could dispel the undead.

Surely those powers would come in handy, at home, or in my head, or in whatever life I would choose to live that summer, or in some realm far away in the future.

But wanting to be a cooler, beer-drinking, girl-bedding kind of guy, I stopped playing D&D when I went to college. There was shame in them thar imaginary hills. So I shelved that yearning for fantasy heroics, which looked so weak and antisocial. I told myself, You don’t need D&D anymore.

Boy, was I wrong.

When I hit 40, I discovered my cache of D&D rule books and dice some two decades after I’d last laid eyes on it. Stirred by nostalgia, I wrote “Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks,” a travel memoir/pop culture investigation that records a year spent “re-geeking” myself and reintegrating D&D and its ilk back into my life. Thanks to the widespread acceptance of gaming and fantasy subcultures — from “Lord of the Rings” to “Harry Potter” to MMOs (online role-playing games) like “World of Warcraft” (aka WoW) — that re-geeking was easier than I expected. I emerged from my hobbit hole and saw a kinder, more tolerant world. A real world where it’s safe to make peace with one’s “inner geek” without risk of reprisal from the jocks. And I’m not the only one making peace with my 20-sided die. “Your story is my story,” countless men tell me. We are ready to embrace those nights of unbridled game-playing and storytelling as crucial, formative experiences that were as real and memorable as any heroic feats on the football field (from which, of course, we were excluded).

OK, you check for traps, says the Dungeon Master. The coast is clear.

But wait, you say. Didn’t D&D disappear?

Didn’t the role-playing game succumb to controversy and those evangelical, just say no-era rants that linked the game to overweight kids listening to Judas Priest, practicing satanism and committing suicide? Besides, who has the patience for D&D? The world of books is dying, CDs are dead, and print magazines are swirling the toilet. Word has it the local youths can’t tell or write a story longer than 140 characters. Is it humanly possible in our hyperspeed, hypertext moment that biped mammals, amped on shots of Mountain Dew, could still gather in dimly lit Holiday Inns to scratch out combat strategy with knife-sharpened pencils?

It turns out D&D is alive and well. And it’s being played more or less the way it was played back in the Dark Days of the Reagan administration, on real tabletops, not virtual desktops, with dice and graph paper and miniature figurines. There’s nary a pixel in sight.

Why does this primal form of gaming and group narrative continue to have such a hold on guys like me? It’s more than simply a failure or refusal to grow up. Because I’ve had enough “life experiences” to level-up a 60th-level druid. For gamers of my generation, a sense of wistfulness — or even regret for having left behind these realms — plays a role in the resurgent status of D&D. Gen-X gamers like me, folks in their 30s or 40s (yes, mostly men, sigh), we want back in.

Can I roll again? I want to ask my Dungeon Master of yore.

Yes, the Dungeon Master says in my mind. You may proceed deeper into the dungeon. Pick up where you left off ages ago.

- – - – - – - – - -

Today, those 25-year-old fears of D&D-as-devil-worship seem quaint, even laughable. The harm of sitting around with guys plotting how to defeat a 10 foot-by-10 foot gelatinous cube (not easy: It’s invisible and stings you) and predicting what effect fireballs have when cast down narrow subterranean passageways (think Kentucky Fried Chicken) seems as tame as Tiddlywinks compared to the panic over video games like “Postal 2″ and “Call of Duty: Black Ops,” the latest scourge on America’s youth.

It’s true that Dungeons & Dragons — the first tabletop game to combine strategy, improvisational theater and Cheetos and let players describe their action in character to an impartial referee, the Dungeon Master — may not be as popular or attention-grabbing as it was in its heyday. But I see people rediscovering it all the time (including a fair share of womenfolk, too — certainly more than played back in my youth). In the past couple of years, I’ve been appearing at fantasy, science fiction and gaming conventions, from the biggies like Gen Con, Dragon Con and Pax East (which comes to Boston this weekend, March 11-13) to the many local “cons” that have sprung up like so many regenerating trolls. These mostly low-tech, old-school cons aren’t devoted to the latest first-person shooter game for XBox Live, nor are they backed by a Hollywood studio plugging the latest fantasy, sci-fi or superhero movie franchise. Come to a con like TotalCon, in the metro Boston area near my home, and you won’t see corporate booths hawking the latest MMO on banks of bright and flashy video screens. The bulk of the event is simply hundreds of gamers huddled around dozens and dozens of tables.

“I used to play D&D,” a goateed dude around 40 will say. “I really miss the game. I’m here to get back my mojo.”

“D&D is intrinsically nostalgic,” Tavis Allison told me in a recent e-mail. Allison, 40, is a fundraiser for a hospital in New York City and an avid D&Der who also moderated a panel discussion called “Dungeons & Dragons in Contemporary Art” at a New York City gallery this fall. “The art in the oldest books is weird and crude and like a medieval manuscript; even when it was new it reeked of some strange past, and part of the appeal of fantasy in general is this longing for a past that never was. Can you be nostalgic for something you never had?”

Yes. Yes you can.

Pure and simple, for many, D&D represents a lost age: It was an individualized, user-driven, DIY, human-scaled creative space separate from the world of adults and the intrusion of corporate forces. As Allison rightly noted, D&D recalls that day “before orcs and wookiees were the intellectual property of vast transmedia corporations.” Back when you had lots more free time than money — before girlfriends, job, kids. Life.

But it also reminds me of a part of my creative imagination that I lost touch with as well. Artist Timothy Hutchings curates a Web-based archive called PlaGMaDA, whose mission is to preserve and celebrate dungeon maps, or other maps made while playing text adventure computer games, in all their bad penmanship and wanton imagination.

Looking at PlaGMaDA, I remember how D&D taught me to love maps and hand-draw them myself. In that trove of old gear I found at middle age, I had discovered my beloved backdrops for heroic stories and imaginary derring-do: the Craggy Hills, the Untreaded Lands, the Lorsearch Plains. Mountains called Ramen-Nashew I’d painstakingly scribed with a blue quill pen. Here, an evil wizard’s lair etched in Magic Marker. There, an underground labyrinth guarded by traps and monsters, with rooms numbered from 1 to 37, which I had drawn on aqua-lined graph paper, now smudged, almost sepia-tinged with age.

But by playing RPGs (role-playing games), I was not only teaching myself shoddy draftsmanship. I also learned to be confident and decisive, and to feel powerful. Even feel cocky. Some of the guts and nerve I role-played began to leak into the real world. By the time I graduated high school, I had transformed. I had used escapist fantasy to gather strength for later, when I was ready to come out of my shell. In this sense, the wave of nostalgia I’ve felt also springs from a desire to pay tribute to D&D. To thank the game for the gifts of creativity and self-actualization it bestowed upon us.

At a sci-fi event this winter called Boskone, four gamers served on a panel called “Playing With Dice” and re-animated the game’s manifold influences. As Peter V. Brett, 38, bestselling author of the “Demon Cycle” series, said, the Dungeon Master had to build the world and play all the extras: the innkeeper, the drunk goblin at the bar, the sphinx who challenges characters to a riddling contest. He had to improvise. He learned how to work an audience directly, and could see when players just wanted to joke and when all they wanted do was draw swords (and dice) and kill monsters. “I don’t think I would be half the writer I am now without D&D as my training ground,” Brett said.

Myke Cole, 37, another author on the panel — the first in his military-fantasy “Shadow Ops” book series is forthcoming — echoed Brett’s thought but added one more wrinkle: “We are socially enfranchised and successful because of our D&D days.” A nine-year veteran of military operations and federal law enforcement, he’s been to war three times. “I wasn’t raised to the sword. My parents were committed aesthetes who eschewed violence and the institutions that wield it, and worked hard to instill those values in their children,” he wrote me in an e-mail after Boskone. “It was D&D that permitted the pasty, scrawny weakling child that I was to imagine myself as a broadsword-wielding knight of the realm.” He played a lot of fighters and paladins before he became one in real life. “That game gave me a gift I will never forget: It stretched my mind around the possibilities that hover around us, unnoticed, all the time. D&D taught me to imagine, and that was the first step to bending the world to my will.”

And, as someone described it, if you can run a D&D campaign — a months-long series of adventures requiring infinite attention to detail, exacting execution and on-the-fly problem-solving — you can run an advertising campaign. Or run an IT company.

To my mind, the game has finally come into its own as a powerful cultural force. In recent years, I’ve seen it finally taking its rightful place in the Valhalla of other game-changing phenomena. Alongside “The Lord of the Rings” (published in 1954-55) and “Star Trek” (first aired in 1966), one could argue that D&D (created in 1974) had been equally instrumental in establishing fantasy and science fiction’s rule over the box office, bestseller lists and the pop culture’s imagination. And of course, the tropes of leveling-up, collecting experience points, and role-playing a character — “Ha! I will strike the She-orc with my +3 broad sword!” — wouldn’t exist without the D&D adventuring party of dwarf, elf, wizard, ranger, hobbit. They have collectively blazed the trail through dungeons dark ahead of us. Without D&D, MMOs would not exist.

The game can be seen as a common “nerd experience” that taught millions of geeks to socialize, empathize, level-up (in game and in real life) and emerge from the dungeons of their solitude to tell heroic stories. Now in their 30s, 40s and 50s, these geeks have shown their quality. They forge and hew the media you consume: movies, television, music, novels, art and, of course, video games. They are the generation of creators now telling the biggest stories. And for that, they’re thanking D&D.

Every week it seems there’s another BoingBoing posting about troves of scanned dungeons maps. Even Stephen Colbert and Vin Diesel admit to their D&D pedigree. Google “Basic D&D” or “Advanced D&D” (versions of the game popular in the late ’70s and early ’80s) and “art,” “television” or “YouTube” and it doesn’t take long to find a trail of bread crumb artifacts. And when you pore over uploads of the endearingly amateurish artwork from the 1977 edition of the “Monster Manual,” it’s an easy leap to that memory of hours spent in your room, lying on your “Star Wars” bedspread and gawking at pictures of kobolds, owlbears, purple worms and that hot, half-lady, half beast, the lamia.

It was by casting the magic spell called “Internet” that I encountered Tavis Allison, who moderated that panel discussion at New York’s Allegra Laviola Gallery in conjunction with an art show called “Doomslangers” — paintings and drawings of swords, spiders and skeletal hands, and polyhedral ceramic sculptures, all inspired by D&D. The panel looked at art and D&D as “forms of ritualized human creativity.”

“Now we are living with the consequences of a nerd-run world,” Allison told me on the phone, after I’d met him in New York. “WoW is now seen as a public health problem.” We’re in the midst of “the ‘baby boom’ of Dungeons & Dragons” and people are desperate to establish their “nerd cred.” Looking back at your own childhood, he said, people now can claim, “Hey, I was at ground zero when this whole wave was taking over.”

People who were into D&D at its peak of popularity are now in a position of freedom to talk about it. With the shackles of an insecure youth shaken off, confident and mature, they can even get a show produced that’s all about a D&D session. In the recent episode of NBC’s “Community,” featuring a misfit dubbed “Fat Neil” getting his revenge on Chevy Chase’s evil character “Pierce the Insensitive,” the writers both paid homage and poked fun at D&D, in a good-natured way. (Self-deprecating jokes about D&D did not exist back in my day.)

“By referencing D&D, you are not saying ‘I’m just an ordinary orc-killer,’” said Allison, who runs an after-school D&D program in the New York City public schools and just launched a D&D birthday and bachelor party business called Adventuring Parties. “You’re saying, ‘I’m an original D&D gangster.’” You get a new form of respect: street cred points.

Poke around the blogosphere and in short order you’ll find cult hits like “D&D Monster Man,” a video of an actor’s mock audition mimicking monster sounds. Literature too: Sam Lipsyte’s recent New Yorker short story called “The Dungeon Master” evoked the cruel, power-tripping aspects of the game. “The Kobold Wizard’s Dildo of Enlightenment +2” (an adventure for 3-6 players, levels 2-5) is a tongue-in-cheek novel about D&D characters who, once aware they’re fictional, try to find freedom from the tyranny of their players. (The jacket design is made to resemble one of the game’s pre-packed gaming adventure “modules”). In the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” author Junot Díaz describes his eponymous hero as “a dork, totally into Dungeons & Dragons and comic books.” In the reality-TV web series “I Hit It With My Axe,” name-brand porn stars play D&D.

In my day, luring a girl to play with my gang would have required a +5 Necklace of Enchantment.

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When I returned home from TotalCon, a red box was waiting on my doorstep: the new “Starter Set,” a streamlined, no-frills introduction to D&D, released last fall by Wizards of the Coast (the Hasbro subsidiary that owns Gary Gygax’s old RPG empire). The “Red Box” contains two thin rule books, some cardboard counters and a flimsy map, and embodies the appeal of “original D&D,” before the game pimped itself out with cumbersome game mechanics and mountains of hardcover rule books. Wizards wants to lure back your old gaming group that disbanded but still hankers to play. They hope the Red Box is just the ticket.

I spoke to Mark Jessup, 40, Wizards’ director of marketing and communications, who told me about the Red Box and also the “D&D Encounters program,” a weekly game session that takes place at game stores around the world, expressly designed for players whose lives don’t permit them to play an entire D&D adventure

“Everyone daydreams. You don’t have to hold onto those dreams,” he said, recalling his core game-playing years as a teenager. “With D&D, you would build on them, make them more ambitious.”

Which made me think of the other reason why D&D is back: Gamers are married, making babies. They are encouraging their kids to discard their Xbox consoles in favor of the communal storytelling experience that is the cornerstone of D&D. They want their beloved dream-making experience to survive.

“As a parent nowadays, we want to pass that on to our sons and daughters, that gift of the imagination,” Jessup added. “We want to make that fire inside them.” (By the way, Jessup’s brand team got a call from the producers of the “Community” episode, who wanted D&D’s blessing. Jessup worried if the show would be a “lovingly accurate or a cheap character sketch, a lampoon.” He was pleased it was both respectful and funny.)

Like Tavis Allison’s program, other youth programs like the Game Loft in Belfast, Maine, are teaching leadership and social graces via role-playing games. I met an evangelical priest at TotalCon who was running D&D sessions in his church basement. Times, they have a-changed.

But like so many people my age, I miss that Friday night realm of paper and pencil. That camaraderie, that connection to open-ended storytelling. D&D was an experience we made for ourselves, for each other. Was D&D then a “better” imaginative experience than “World of Warcraft” today? I like looking back on my primitive game and scoff at these younger generations of video gamers. All I needed to “immerse” myself in fantasy worlds were pencils and paper, not PlayStation consoles and pixels, I snort.

But I’m not 17 anymore. My hand-eye coordination sucks. And who knows how my mind would be wired in new ways, were I from Generation Y, strapping on my headset and playing “Halo” or “Gears of War” for 20 hours a week

Meanwhile, I feel compelled to post some of my old dungeon maps on PlaGMaDA. Aside from my failing memories, those faded maps and character sheets are the only evidence I’ve got of the places I once created. That I was a hero back then, and I wandered those realms, and that I was victorious.