Episode 204: Mazes & Monsters

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• From Genius Missing at MSU, Gregory Skwira, Detroit Free Press, 1979: Police continue to search the area Thursday for a missing 16 year old computer science student last seen August 15th in his Michigan State University dormitory. “At this point we do not suspect Foul Play,” said Sergeant Larry Lyon of the MSU campus police. “But we haven’t ruled it out either.” James Dallas Egbert III, a sophomore, was attending a summer session and was last seen in a dormitory cafeteria. He was reported missing by a friend on Tuesday, days later. He had very few friends, Lyon said. “He was a loner and he was obviously a genius.” Egbert had been studying computer science at MSU since last fall. “Many nights when it came time for me to lock up the school I would have to run him out of the computer room where he would still be working,” the school’s principal told reporters. Police weren’t surprised that Egbert had missed four days of class before he was reported missing. “He evidently had a habit of not going to class all that often,” Lyon said. “He really didn’t have to. He had an exceptional grade point average.” A university spokesman said, “We don’t have a bed check. Kids are pretty free to come and go as they want.” Egbert’s parents refused to talk with a reporter. When police searched the youth’s room Lyon said there was no indication that clothes had been removed and anticipation of a trip. “That concerns us a great deal,” he said.”Egbert’s dormitory neighbors were knowledgeable that Egbert hadn’t been around for several days before the youth was reported missing. But that’s not unusual in a dormitory situation, he said. Students sometimes go off for 2 or 3 days to get themselves together. Police have located two friends of Egbert’s and neither say he seemed troubled. Final exams for the summer session begin next week. Egbert once left MSU for 2 weeks during the past school year, but he told someone he was leaving. “We have no other record of him doing that here,” said Lyons.

• From Student’s Disappearance a Puzzle, United Press International, The Daily Breeze, 1979: A thumbtack-studded bulletin board that could be a map or part of a bizarre game could be a clue in the mysterious disappearance of a teenage Michigan State University computer wiz. One theory is James Dallas Egbert III, 16, “is playing a game with us” said Sergeant Bill Wardwell of the MSU campus police. “He was quite a game person.” Police have called in computer and logic specialists plus those familiar with an elaborate game popular among college students in an effort to decode the board left behind by the young genius. The precocious sophomore computer student left behind a note asking his body be cremated if it is found. The police said they are not convinced the message was intended as a suicide note. Egbert, a science fiction devotee, was seen on campus August 15th at a dormitory cafeteria. He had a history of walking off for days at a time. Although certain that Egbert left campus voluntarily and was not abducted, police are not really out of the possibility he ultimately was the victim of Foul Play. The puzzling bulletin board had been removed from the wall and placed conspicuously in the middle of Egbert’s dorm room. Thumbtacks were stuck in the board in a pattern resembling a square with one corner indented. Please have compared the pattern to the shape of several campus buildings but have not reached a final conclusion. Others suggest the board might have been up for a round of Dungeons and Dragons, a highly complex game involving fantasy and roleplaying. Wardwell said police are trying to locate students who played the game with Egbert who might be able to interpret the bizarre diagram and unlock the secret of his disappearance. “I hate to say it’s a secretive game, but you only get into it by invitation,” Wardwell said. “Those people just haven’t come forward.” Wardwell said Wisconsin authorities were contacted because a Dungeons & Dragons conference was scheduled in that state, but nothing came of the inquiry. Wardwell admitted the police are grasping at straws a little bit but added. “That’s all we’ve got right now.”

• From The Disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III (Part I), Shaun Hatley, Places To Go People To Be, 1999: Dallas was a D&D player. That is not in dispute. It is also not in dispute that students at MSU played live-action games in tunnels under the University buildings. There are other facts to be considered, however, which got nowhere near as much coverage: Dallas was either gay or bisexual. He was also a drug user who used his knowledge of chemistry to manufacture his own supply. Dallas also suffered from severe depression caused or exacerbated by, in the opinion of an MSU psychologist, “parental pressure, criticism, academic pressure, and the failure of all persons to realise that, although Dallas Egbert was a genius, he was socially [helpless].” When William Dear was called in, he learned all of this. He also found a board in Dallas room which had a strange arrangement of drawing pins placed into it. The design was a map. Dallas had attempted to mark all the rooms in the tunnels underneath the University, as close to scale as he could manage. The only one he had not marked was the room he intended to hide in. Dear considered a number of possibilities: That Dallas had committed suicide. That Dallas had gone into the steam tunnels and been injured or killed. That Dallas disappeared for the sole purpose of making people look for him. That Dallas had overdosed on drugs. That Dallas was being held by a gay man or a group of gay men. That Dallas had been kidnapped by some sort of intelligence group to make use of his special talents and intelligence. That Dallas had come to identify so much with his D&D character that he believed he was his character. That Dallas had been sent on some sort of a mission by a D&D Dungeon Master in order to prove that he was worthy to play in an advanced game. Dear wanted to keep the drug and sex theories out of the papers for several reasons: The first one was that he didn’t want any people holding Dallas to panic and kill him, because they thought the law was closing in. He also wanted to protect Dallas, and Dr and Mrs Egbert as much as possible. For these reasons, he pushed the Dungeons & Dragons theory. Dallas had been planning to disappear for a long time. His reasons differed at different times. He planned suicide over a nine month period, and at other times decided merely to run away. He took sleeping tablets in the tunnels with the deliberate intent of ending his life. He awoke the following night and went to a friend’s house. This was a gay man in his early twenties, and Dallas stayed there about a week. When the story of Dallas’ disappearance broke, this man felt himself to be in danger from the police and did not come forward. Dallas took a train from Chicago to New Orleans and lived on the streets for several days before meeting a man from New York. They became friends, and this man helped him to get a job as a roustabout in the oil fields near Morgan City. It was this man eventually who persuaded Dallas to contact William Dear.

• From The Dungeon Master, Publisher’s Preview, 1984: William Dear wears cowboy boots, sports enough gold nugget jewelry to make a cattle baron envious, and would have you believe he’s a good old boy. Don’t believe a word of it. The super sleuth extraordinaire obviously has his suits tailored, his custom boots made from sharkskin, and is suave enough to have tea with the royal family. The London Times once said, “If there is a real James Bond, he’s in Dallas and his name is Bill Dear.” Unorthodox his methods may be, with spies spying upon spies and mysterious planes landing in the dark. “Any deviations I have made were necessary to save lives. If they want to take my license because I helped save the human life then let them try,” he says. Dear is well known for his investigations and solutions on many difficult cases. His lifestyle is also legendary. Dear’s million dollar home on Cockrell Hill Road draws sightseers from far and near. Security is tight at the residence of Bill Dear/James Bond because it is necessary. “In this business you get threats all the time.” One room is filled with the most advanced spy gadgetry available. His bedroom is a replica of James Bond’s in “Diamonds Are Forever.” For hasty getaways his limousine is equipped with a remote control starter. Deer is unmistakably Texan in his three-piece Bond suit  and the rings he sports on each finger. When James Dallas Egbert III disappeared for the Michigan State University campus in 1979 the family called in Dear, the real life James Bond. Dear’s search for the boy reads like a sensational novel although in fact every detail and adventure is true. The Adventures of Bill Dear read and sound like a Hollywood script. Perhaps it is why so many Hollywood producers have acquainted themselves with them over the years.

• From The Dungeon Master, William Dear, 1984: They suggested we search out near Party Hollow, the clearing in the woods that campus groups use for a variety of purposes. The Tolkien Society meet at Party Hollow once a year for a ritual to celebrate the birth of Gandalf the Magician. It was perhaps thirty yards in diameter, a clearing in the middle of the forest. In the center, arranged in circular fashion, were signs that big bonfires had been built here: ashes, charred rocks and wood, the remains of seared newspapers. I could imagine a bonfire out in this remote spot. Had it risen eerily to the tops of the trees while strange rites were being performed, or had it been a pleasant campfire, with songs filling the air, hot dogs and marshmallows roasting, sweethearts cuddling in the crisp, cool night? I imagined that Dallas had come out here to think. I wondered if he had come out here to die. But if Dallas had died out here, he would have been found by now. Party Hollow was obviously a place that had frequent visitors. The note had indicated that a meeting was planned. It was almost surely something completely harmless, a college get together under the stars. Yet it might be more. Lambert and I had seen pentagrams painted on trees surrounding the clearing. Between the two circles were magic symbols which, I was later told, were associated with druidic witchcraft, and were used as protection by a sorcerer against demons. Pentagrams had also been drawn into the ground, where a sorcerer could stand on them and be safe .I retreated back into the woods, and soon there were four students, two boys and two girls. There seemed to be nothing out-of-the-way or bizarre about their dress—no pointed wizard’s hats or strange polka-dotted costumes. From what I could tell, which was hardly a great deal despite the light from the fire, they were dressed as thousands of other college students might be. They formed a diamond shape around the blaze, hunched much as I was, and if a single word could capture the atmosphere, that word would be serious. No one had lugged a case of beer out to Party Hollow. The four crouched around the fire. One of the girls, wearing a necklace, rose and tilted her head skyward, and I heard her voice cry out, “Great Gurdjieff, guide us to the goodness of God’s goals!” These were the only words I understood the entire evening. The students remained 45 minutes, then extinguished the fire and trekked back through the woods. I was interested in how many such cults existed on campus? One of them might have the answers I sought.

• From The Exploitation of James Dallas Egbert, Grady Hendrix, Reactor Magazine, 2014: If you’ve played D&D you know that a game “goes wrong” when someone throws a hissy over a roll or one player keeps screwing around on his phone and ignoring what’s being said. And if you’ve never played D&D you assume that when a game “goes wrong” Satan is summoned and sucks out everyone’s soul.By the time Dallas Egbert was found, two books about the more colorful version were already on their way to market. The first was from Rona Jaffe, extremely famous author behind the scandalicious bestselling proto-Sex and the City novel, The Best of Everything. Mazes and Monsters is a book written by an author who knows nothing, and cares less, about roleplaying games. Each of the kids turned to RPGs because something was broken inside of them (Kate’s parents are divorced; Daniel’s parents push him too hard; Jay Jay is neglected by his divorced parents; and Robbie’s brother ran away from home). Mazes & Monsters is probably best remembered today for its TV movie version, which aired in 1982 and featured Tom Hanks in his first leading role as Pardieu the Holy Man, freaking out on the streets of New York, then trying to jump off the World Trade Center. (“I have spells,” he says. “I’m going to fly.”) It’s an unwritten rule that if you’re going to try to make a quick buck off a young person’s attempted suicide you should at least be entertaining. Jaffe broke that rule, but the next book would not repeat her mistake. 

• John Coyne was a slick journeyman writer, turning out relatively forgettable mass market horror paperbacks in the wake of Stephen King’s massive success. His cash-in attempt, Hobgoblin (1981), isn’t a thinly veiled account of Egbert’s story and the result is a book that is  less offensive. Meet Scott Gardiner, exactly the kind of kid Jaffe warned us was vulnerable to the lurid lure of RPGs: brilliant, creative, socially awkward, and WITH A DEAD FATHER OMG NO THIS KID IS DOOMED. Scott is obsessed with a truly terrible RPG called Hobgoblin that may be less boring than Mazes and Monsters but only just barely. One part RPG, one part Magic: The Gathering, it’s based on Celtic mythology so it’s full of unfortunate character names like “Boobach” and questionable spells like “fairy vision.” Players speak in fraught, reverent tones (“The dice? Oh, God, Gardiner, no! It’s too risky.”) and, in a deeply unrealistic touch, Scott is wildly popular after introducing this role-playing monstrosity to his fancy boarding school. Scott is a whiny jerk with a hair trigger temper. When Valerie, the resident hot girl at school, falls for him because he memorizes his locker combination so quickly, he tries to make her play Hobgoblin, gets angry when she doesn’t take it seriously enough, then erupts into a rage when she calls him a “turkey” (“Kids say it to each other all the time,” she explains. “Not at Spencertown. I never heard it at Spencertown.” he mutters). After a ambling along like a relatively slow-moving character study for 18 chapters, chapter 19 is a gibbering, blood-drenched scene from a slasher movie set during the school’s Halloween dance, For all that Dear, Jaffe, and Coyne posit that RPGs are a way for disturbed individuals to escape from reality, it turns out that they themselves were the ones running from the truth, fabricating a fear of games based on false information about a missing persons case. https://reactormag.com/summer-of-sleaze-the-exploitation-of-james-dallas-egbert-iii/ 

• From Mazes & Monsters, Rona Jaffe, 1981: In the spring of 1980 a bright, gifted student at Grant University in Pequod, Pennsylvania, mysteriously disappeared. Vanishing students were not unheard of, particularly during the stressful period before final exam time, but when the police were finally called in, it was revealed that the missing student was one of a group at Grant who were involved in a fantasy roleplaying game called Mazes and Monsters. Played with nothing more than a vivid imagination, dice, pencils, graph paper, and an instruction manual, Mazes and Monsters is a war game with a medieval background, in which each player creates a character who may be a fearless Fighter, a treasurehunting Sprite, a magic-using Holy Man, or a wily Charlatan. The point of the game is to amass a fortune and keep from getting killed. The characters are plunged into an adventure in a series of mazes, tunnels, and secret rooms filled with frightful and violent dangers— monsters who can kill, maim, paralyze, and enchant the players. But if the players can kill, maim, trick, or stop their assailants they can take home fabulous treasure. What made the student’s disappearance so ominous was that the police discovered this particular group of players had begun to act out their fantasies in a real environment, taking the game to the underground caverns near the university campus.

• Last year the four of them had been perfect. Daniel had been the Maze Controller because he was a computer genius with a wild imagination. Also Daniel was calm, and he was never arbitrary. If he said the King of the Gray Rats had bitten off your arm, he was indisputably right. Kate, Michael, and Jay Jay had been the players. Kate was the bravest, Jay Jay the cleverest, and Michael— well, forget him, he was scooping ice cream at Baskin-Robbins now. At the end of last year they had decided that this year they would all get single rooms, but Michael would room with Daniel and they would use the extra room just to play the game. It would be sacred. Every room had a lock on its door. They would have their own fantasy world just for themselves and no one would know. But the dummy had been so involved in the game that he stopped going to classes, stopped studying, and blew it. Kate was small and tough and fearless and independent. It was typical that when they chose which characters they would be, Kate had made herself Glacia the Fighter. Jay Jay had been Freelik the Frenetic of Glossamir, a Sprite, with his flighty but wily ways, the scamp, the trickster. But secretly Jay Jay knew that he and Kate were just the same. For under that armor she wore for the world, he had seen what no one else had been able to see: seen it and loved it and loved her for it— her frightened, vulnerable, wildly beating heart.

• “A half day’s walk from a small town there is a wasteland of gnarled hills, covered with withered trees and dried grass. Beneath these hills is the entrance to the forbidden caves of the Jinnorak. As long as anyone can remember, no one has entered these caves, and it is rumored that within them lives a mutated people, once human, now changed from generations in the foul depths to creatures unrecognizable and vicious. But perhaps that is just a rumor. But it is also known that there are wondrous things within, for those brave and clever enough to take them. Shall you enter?” Kate felt herself entering the landscape of the game now, and her heart began to pound. It was dangerous to light her lantern in case there was a monster in the room who would then be able to see them and attack them. But darkness frightened her more. Darkness was one of the most terrible things she knew, with the sound of breathing; the thing that had happened that night . . . but she wouldn’t think about it now. Now there was only the game, where she would take revenge and kill, and conquer. There was writing on the doors; Daniel rolled an 8. “Pardieu will be able to decipher the language, but the message will be garbled.” Kate said, “If it’s running water behind one of these doors it might be magic water and we don’t want to let it out. “She threw the dice; a 12. “You can open one of them,” Daniel said.

• They were only dimly aware of how much the game had taken over their lives already. All they knew was that nothing else, not even this special party with its atmosphere of affection and luxury and celebration, was as real to them as the game. And each of them felt, in some secret, guilty way, that they wanted to get the party over with so they could go into Daniel’s room and enter their world. “You have found the talking sword of Lothia,” Daniel said. He held the dice in his hand and looked at the three eager faces of Glacia, Freelik, and Pardieu. The dice he held were both chance and power. As he surveyed the underground perils he had laid out so carefully, he wondered whether all of these adventurers would still be alive at the end of this night. He didn’t want them to die. He was as excited as they were as they fought their way deeper and deeper into the maze, winning battles with strength and wits, amassing plunder. He knew he had to be objective in order to be an effective M.C., but he wanted them to find the treasure. It didn’t belong to him–it belonged to the evil king of the Jinnorak. “You have found tht walking sword of Lothia,” Daniel declared. Glacia grasped the talking sword and gazed into its polished surface. The light of her lantern glanced off it, gold and silver, and her heart turned over with fear. But this was her sword, no one else’s, and it would obey her commands. It would kill her enemies and it would speak to her of secrets none of them yet knew. “What lies beyond that door?” she demanded. “Wait,” Pardieu said. “Talking swords have been known to tell lies. How do we know this is a truthful sword? We must test it.”

• Long before she was Kate’s mother, Meg Porter had grown up as a perfect child of the Fifties. She fervently believed every movie she’d ever seen, and when life did not turn out like the movies she never questioned the movies; she thought something was wrong with life. She was a cheerleader in college, leaping around with pom-poms, and she was also an honors student. She was a mischief-maker who never did anything really bad, so she didn’t get in trouble. People thought she was cute. When she was at college her friends used to say: “I have to get married before all the good ones are taken.” Surrounded by the “good ones,” popular and secure, Meg waited for her own special Mr. Right. She knew when he came along she’d know it immediately, just like in the movies.Mr. Right was Alan Finch. She found his name romantic and English. He was a veteran, a former lieutenant. They were always lieutenants in the movies. He even looked like an actor; the nice one who got the girl at the end. He was four years older than she was and seemed experienced and sophisticated. She met him on a blind date in Senior year, and they were married right after she graduated. She pictured the two of them growing old together. by the time he told her they had already grown old together she was shocked. What did he want her to be? He said he was bored, sad, disappointed. She had never been bored. How could he be disappointed when they had everything they’d dreamed about? He tossed her and the children away as if they were biodegradable.

• On the commuter train to New York from a suburb not far from where Robbie and his family lived, a man named James Herman looked at Robbie’s picture in the newspaper and his jaw tightened in anger. He felt a little fear too, and a great sense of irony. His shoulder still hurt from where he had been stabbed, and even though the stitches were out there was an ugly fresh red scar. He was lucky he hadn’t been killed. It was hard to tell from a newspaper photo, and it had been a while, but he was positive this “nice” Robbie Wheeling was the hustler who’d tried to kill him the night he’d been cruising. No wonder the kid wouldn’t talk about where he’d been and what he’d been doing. Wouldn’t that be a shock for the parents! James Herman sighed and tried to relax. Life was shit, and there wasn’t much left you could believe in. He had two kids of his own, teenagers, and he hoped he was bringing them up well. He had a responsible, well-paying job in a big company, a bright wife, a comfortable home complete with swimming pool. There was also a dark side to his nature— the compulsion to seek out young men in degrading places for sex–but no one knew. No one ever would. He didn’t know what had turned him into the kind of man he was: a respectable, well-meaning citizen with one fatal flaw. He didn’t know what had turned that privileged college student into a knife-wielding junkie. He worried about his own children. He worried about the whole damn world.