Dungeons and Dragons: The Reconjunctioning
This morning I woke with the secret to revitalizing D&D. What's keeping us down is that pompous, tired old co-ordinating conjunction and that sits in the middle of the name of the game. I mean, it likes to strut around wearing an ampersand, for Gruumsh sake, like some fancy lad fresh out of charm school. Do we really need "and" to dictate to us a style of play in which dungeons and dragons must receive equal consideration? First, Monte Cook assumes we like to play on a grid, then this.
I did a little poking around and found out that many co-ordinating and subordinating conjunctions were used early on in various homebrews in the Twin Cities area, including:
- Dungeons, then Dragons
- Dungeons or Dragons
- Dungeons for Dragons
- Dungeons after Dragons
It was only later that the game was codified and the more familar "and" was selected as the "right" choice for everyone. Soon the conjunction police were sticking their fingers into every pie. The original title of "Keep on the Borderlands" was "Keep Off the Borderlands!" which sounds far more foreboding. So please, for DNDNext, change it to "D n D", in which n can stand for any conjunction.
Dungeons without Dragons was amongst the most controversial of all the homebrew campaigns, due to its overt rejection of what was an iconic monster. That schism caused a several month delay in the final publication of D "&" D..
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