One of my favorite things about film festivals is the chance you’ll have at seeing something that you’d probably never come across otherwise when you visit the multiplex or browse your rental queue. When the Toronto International Film Festival schedule was released last month and I saw Keven McMcAlester’s documentary about Dungeons & Dragons gamemasters, The Dungeon Masters, listed, I knew I had to see it. It wasn’t that I’d seen Keven’s earlier documentary about Roky Erickson, You’re Gonna Miss Me, and wanted to see this, nor did I want to see what fine cinematography Lee Daniel had crafted for the movie. No, I wanted to see this one for the geek in me. Heck, it even made Karina’s list of Films We’re Betting On for TIFF, and she doesn’t dole out the nerd love lightly.
Although Dungeons & Dragons came out in 1974, the game is still played across the world, and has directly contributed to the creation and success of online sword and sorcery games like World of Warcraft and EverQuest. Almost everyone you as about the game knows that there’s a certain nerdy/geeky vibe associated with it, although most people probably couldn’t tell you anything else about it. The Dungeons Masters attempts to show you the personalities behind the dice-rolling by taking intimate looks inside the lives of three different dungeon masters who, in effect, become the game themselves.
Dungeons & Dragons isn’t like Monopoly or Scrabble in the way that you play until you win. The game relies on a clever dungeon master to create roles, make up stories, plan encounters, and basically run the game as long as people want to keep playing. At face value, you’re role-playing in this game, telling the dungeon master what your character is doing at each step along the way. I’ll never forget when I was in junior high school and my best friend handed me a set of poorly photocopied instruction manuals for the game. I was instantly hooked in the lore of the game, but never became much of a player. Keven McAlester was lucky enough to find people who make running these games a big part of their lives.
The three subjects of the film are Richard, Scott, and Elizabeth and at face value, they all seem to be cut from the stereotypical images of D&D players. Richard and Scott seem like clones of the Comic Book Guy on The Simpsons, while Elizabeth is bit closer to Thora Birch in Ghost World with a few extra doses of geek thrown into the mix. Although they are spread out in California, Lousiana and Florida, they share similar experiences.
If you break them down to the simplest levels, Elizabeth is the heroine of the story, going from an abusive relationship to one that doesn’t work, to yet another one by the end of the film. By her own admission, “I don’t want to date children anymore, I just want to be happy.” She uses gaming as an outlet by playing (and dressing up as) a female Drow elf, because in their society women have all the power and can have men executed if they desire. Besides dungeon mastering, she also LARPs (live action role plays) as her elf character
Richard portrays the antagonist’s role, and even has a villainous mustache to match. He relishes destroying and killing his players, and you can see the naked glee on his face as he begins picking them apart. He’s also serving in the U.S. Army reserves, has a family he served as a father figure for that he’s now somewhat alienated from, and is married to a woman who doesn’t have a problem with his gaming, as long as she doesn’t know anything about it. “That’s just one of the things we do… separately.”
Scott serves as the tragic figure: an unemployed self-described writer who can’t find work as a hypnotherapist, and who realized you had to have money to make money as a financial advisor. He suffered a blow when he was a geeky kid at a new school and realized he could reinvent himself, and told the teacher he wanted to be called Sherlock. “My social life didn’t recover for a very long time.” Although he seemingly lays around the house all day, sometimes tinkering with his novel and playing video games rather than looking for work or helping his wife with their apartment manager position, you still pull for him to succeed.
Each time Scott meets with his literary agent, you hope she’ll tell him the book has sold, and when Scott starts writing and starring in a public cable access show called “Uncle Drac’s Magical Clubhouse,” you actually want something to happen with it. Despite everything else, Scott’s a gifted storyteller in search of an outlet, which is why he says “If I could do anything, I’d want to be a paid game master.”
The film could have easily taken these characters and just made fun of them, but once you get past the geek factor, it remains a portrait of three very different individuals, and you get an intimate look into their lives. The gaming almost becomes peripheral as you find out who these people are and what drives they are like at home, at work, and in their own worlds. The cinematography by Lee Daniel is, as expected, extremely beautiful. Blonde Redhead provides a musical score that is at times sad and melancholy, and other times is grand and cinematic, which is often juxtaposed by what you see on screen.
Coming on the heels of a year of geek films behind Second Skin, Nerdcore Rising, Reformat the Planet, and We Are Wizards, The Dungeon Masters is a well-crafted film that peeks behind the curtain of role-playing games and gives you an unflinching look at three people who have made gaming one of their creative outlets.
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