THE ESCAPE TUNNEL
Role playing gave me an escape tunnel into a world that only I could find & the ability to take my friends into that place with me. I caught the role playing bug hard when I was entering both adolescence & middle school.
With only some books, some paper & some dice I could drag entire, endless worlds around with me. I lived out of my school bag. At that time, I had to cart my most important objects with me between my parent’s houses & middle school.
Time forcibly kicked me out of the predictable safety of childhood. The new age was an unpredictable world of teen hormones, my dangerous & insane school & the disintegration of my parent’s marriage. Role playing gave me a place where I could seek refuge from the seemingly endless waves of chaos that confronted me.
My friends & I would carve out a moment to role play any time we could. During lunch in the library, after school, on long car trips, at sleepovers until five in the morning. It was the perfect way to sort out our lives, give us a respite from the chaos of the real world & build an indomitable strength of vision.
Role playing also gave me the first strong reason to draw & write so that I could flesh out the worlds I was exploring. I was taking explorer’s notes on what I came across. This was especially vivid because almost everything was new to my young mind.
I started off in the simple sword & sorcery of Dungeons & Dragons, but soon I added the street grit, urban hustle & outsider status of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the dystopian hilarity of Paranoia, the medieval grime of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, the occult mystery & cosmic futility of Call of Cthulhu, the space drama & potential of the future of Robotech. While each of those worlds was well developed I always added more, taking things from comic books, movies, novels but mostly from my imagination.
Middle school is a messy time for kids no matter what. The adolescents are sprouting. They are pickles of pimples, pubes, unplanned pregnancies & penitentiary procedures. My middle school had all that plus gangs, drugs, violence & an all-too human staff which were wholly unprepared to deal with the sheer amount of Lord of the Flies insanity that they were in charge of.
In these games I was usually the game master. In retrospect it was a small, safe place to express my desire to make sense of the world & then communicate that to my friends. It is because of this that role playing was never a generic power fantasy, it was a way to make a narrative that made sense to me & luckily, my friends loved it.
I found that I was able to stream endless & fully formed worlds as soon as I opened my mouth, no notes, no nothing. Characters gained voices, everything gained dimension.
I joke about myself that if I were a detective, I would choose ALL on the notable features list. I felt this way especially when I was young. I was especially vulnerable amongst a population that would pick you apart for anything.
Combine that with the humiliation ritual of boys’ gym & taking showers with all-manner of potential opponents… it wasn’t any kind of place I wanted to be & I’m surprised I didn’t just drop out.
I did discover cutting class in the eighth grade… the bowling alley down the street from my school was an oasis of Ghosts n’ Goblins, Altered Beast & Double Dragon. Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough money to dump into the machines & I remember looking for quarters under the couch cushions, on the floor of the car & anywhere else.
Role Playing Games were probably the best thing I could have gotten into at the time. The number of self-destructive roads that exist out there are numerous & terrible. I didn’t start drinking until I was eighteen.
Because of this mix I want LowLife to speak to all these things. It’s an amazing world to escape into when the real chaos of the outside gets to be unbearable. & it’s not just empty escapist brain garbage. I want people to take something back with them. I want people to see LowLife as “the truth”, the way people used to talk about the Clash.