Will you roll the dice on this book launch?
You’re rushing to a pop-up artisinal snow pea vendor in Greenpoint on Sept. 25 when the skies open up and a freak thunderstorm forces you to take shelter in Word bookstore. You plan to kill time pretending to enjoy reading Sartre, but as you look around, all you see are robes, wizard hats, and prosthetic elf ears — you have wandered into the paperback launch of Downtown author David Ewalt’s book “Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and the People Who Play It.”
A friend of lesser constitution abandons your party, running across the street to suck down a kale smoothie, but you roll a saving throw and it comes up 20, so you cautiously take a seat. Ewalt is explaining how the table-top role-playing game birthed 40 years ago and oft associated with the basement-dwelling set has indelibly shaped American pop culture today.
“It’s really influential and had a big effect on a whole generation — not just in the video game business,” he says. “[Director and actor] Jon Favreau first learned how to tell stories by being a dungeon master and playing D&D with friends.”
It is less a nerdy pastime and more a social and intellectual exercise, Ewalt tells the crowded book store.
“There’s a lot of medical and scientific research that shows that role-playing games are therapeutic and make you smarter and healthier,” he says.
And behind all the many-sided-dice and dioramas lies a dramatic origin tale of back-stabbing and intrigue, Ewalt reads from his book.
“This is the story of a company that had every imaginable thing wrong happen to it — international scandals, people thought game was satanic — they made every mistake possible in the business world,” he says.
Piqued, you buy a copy of the Ewalt’s tome, and thanks to your charisma-heavy stat sheet, he happily signs it before inviting you to play a game of Munchkin — a easy-to-learn card game that parodies the fantasy genre.
“If you’ve ever watched ‘Game of Thrones,’ you’ll see the humor,” he assures you.
“Of Dice and Men” paperback launch at Word bookstore [126 Franklin St. at Milton Street in Greenpoint, (718) 383–0096, www.wordbookstores.com]. Sept. 25 at 7 pm. Free.
