Murder, Inc.

High school is the testing ground for our adult selves. It’s a time of hormones, acne, and going through the bureaucratic channels that make up public school education. For me, high school was all about gaming. I couldn't care less about the homework or sports. My high school experience was split between two high schools. I started high school in southern Colorado, where I played Mage Knight, MechWarrior, and Warhammer tabletop games at the local community center or high school or on a friend’s kitchen table. During the spring semester of my freshman year, I started attending school in Dulce, New Mexico. For the first few months, I had little to do to pass my time. To me, Dulce didn’t have much to offer.

Dulce is located on the Jicarilla Apache Reservation. It’s this little no-name place in northern New Mexico, where the Archuleta Mesa towers over a semi-arid mountain valley. The town is centered around the tribal buildings and businesses, which hug Highway 64 like plaque on arterial walls.

What I knew about Dulce came from two sources: Our neighbors, Tom and Pam, found their dog, Dulce, in Dulce, New Mexico. They always retold the story when we visited their B&B. I also remember hearing about Dulce concerning cattle mutilations in the late-1970s. The cattle mutilations were Dulce’s claim to fame. The History Channel aired a documentary on the mutilations when I was younger, with the narrator pronouncing the town’s name as “Dulch-eh, New Mexico.” Locals claimed that UFOs or the government were responsible for cattle being surgically sliced and diced. Conspiracy theorists blamed it on the Dulce Base, a sort of Area 51 military base rumored to be located under Archuleta Mesa.

We moved to Dulce after my parents decided to end their nightmarish take on June and Ward Cleaver. My father kept the house and our animals in southern Colorado. My mother took the three of us kids to Dulce, where she worked as an underpaid math teacher. The first months in Dulce were pretty damned boring. We still went to school in Pagosa Springs. This required that we commuted every morning to Chromo, Colorado to catch a school bus at 6:00 or 6:30. We were back home around 4:30 or 5:00, only to eat, watch some T.V., and finish whatever homework we had before going to bed. This continued until my mother decided it was time to enroll us in school in Dulce.

My siblings loved Dulce. My brother played sports and worked for the school. He later told my mom that playing sports in Dulce kept him from dropping out of high school. My sister played volleyball, hung out with friends, and watched Gilmore Girls every day at 3 p.m. She liked Dulce because it allowed her to be independent of my father, who could be a real hard ass.

For me, Dulce didn’t have the stuff I was used to. My classmates weren’t interested in old-school games. They played Xbox and PlayStation. I preferred dice and paper to television screens and controllers. I spent the better part of two months dinking around the small apartment my mom rented from the school district. I’d come home from school and watch T.V., eating copious amounts of Cheerios and Frosted Flakes with copious amounts of milk.

My taste in extracurricular activities worried my mother. She wasn’t exactly in a stable state of mind when we moved to Dulce. Her marriage of sixteen years was coming to a fiery end, complete with a major custody battle waged by two different states. She pulled extra hours to pay for an apartment, the increased appetite of her children, and a divorce lawyer. Dulce, New Mexico was not home for my mother, who’d grown up in rural North Dakota. North Dakota was the land of nice neighbors and friendly faces. It also happened to be a place where your dollar went further. To my mom, Dulce was the closest place she’d come to living and working in a warzone. Student suicides, crime, and poverty were a permanent staple of Dulce, or so she told us. She wanted to keep her kids away from all of that. She wanted to keep us away from the despair that many locals experienced when living in Dulce.

My mother’s anxieties led her to find outlets for my energy. These included going to afterschool programs or practicing Jiu Jitsu with Mr. B., our family friend, and a high school history teacher. However, these activities weren’t exactly what I was looking for. It took a series of fistfights with my little brother and bending the shit out of a metal door to our apartment before Mr. Boucher told me to meet up with a guy named Howe. He said Howe knew of something that’d interest me.

Howe worked for the Jicarilla Apache Department of Education (JADE) and wore clothes that fit the likes of a Mormon missionary rather than a day-in and day-out video tech guy. He filmed official tribal events and lectures for the tribal government. Howe occasionally worked on the odd bits of computer and film equipment that he stashed away in his JADE office. Howe’s office in the JADE building was about the same square footage as a small dorm room. The office was filled to maximum capacity with computers, video equipment, shelves, and milk crates holding Howe’s gaming books. There was no organizing principle behind the clutter of computers, cables, and cameras. It was like a squirrel’s stashed-out nut collection, with odd pieces stashed behind cabinets or stacked on top of bloating shelves. He lived on the Reservation as well; he was married to a Jicarilla Apache woman and had a son who went to school in Dulce. Howe also belonged to an earlier generation of roleplaying gamers. His generation started playing socially conservative games like Dungeons & Dragons, escalating their gaming fix to the hardcore, morally ambiguous stuff such as Shadowrun, Vampire the Requiem, Werewolf, and Paranoia.

It was through Howe’s influence that I discovered the seedy underworld of old-school roleplaying games. They were the kinds of games my father warned me about. My father saw Dungeons & Dragons as a portal of evil that could possess impressionable minds. I have no idea where he got this idea. I am sure this opinion was lifted from the pages of some Chick comic, where evil Dungeon Masters corrupt the souls of innocent children. I ignored my old man’s warnings and decided to jump into the world of roleplaying games. I had nothing else better to do. Little did I know, I was giving up every afternoon to commit murder, armed robbery, and aggravated assault while having fun with it all.

The first game I played with Howe and his coworker, Dylan, was a homebrew version of Shadowrun. The game was a blank spot in my mind. I’d never heard of it, nor had I heard about things like cyberpunks and corporatocracies that filled the game’s rulebook. I wasn’t used to the game mechanics either. I spent the better part of two and a half hours creating my character from scratch, rolling dice, answering questions, and choosing traits, quirks, flaws, etc. This was not due to some overly elaborate character creation system imposed by the game’s rulebook. Howe liked modifying his roleplaying games, adding bits here and there, and stealing from online forums and fan websites. The final character sheet consisted of intricate formulas, lists, and spreadsheets that Howe used in his role as Game Master, a sort of storyteller with god-like authority over the game world.

There are two types of Game Masters. There are those Game Masters who take pity on their players and offer a helping hand. Story, all-around fun, and leisurely gameplay are key to these Game Masters’ modus operandi. Then there are those Game Masters who view their players as mere mortal playthings, who are to be bound and beaten in every imaginable way. Howe belonged to the second Game Master archetype. Howe’s gamemastering technique took a page from the “Monkey’s Paw.” Be careful what you wish for. He had a way of making fate, gravity, and the dice come crashing down on our party. His thugs were better equipped. The police were always a step ahead of us. Bullets hurt and so did explosions. Being captured or arrested meant brutal interrogations bordering on torture. Every roll of the dice brought silent prayers and paranoia-induced mutterings. High rolls were met with hollering—all-around jubilation and high-fiving. Low rolls brought pale faces and globs of sweat and hope that our characters hadn’t stumbled into the starry beyond.

The first gaming session started simply: Dylan and I were hired to steal some corporate tech for a faceless, nameless client of the shadows. However, this heist led to an accidental kidnapping and death, which precipitated several gun battles with corporate guns and police organizations. In turn, this led to higher body counts and more enemies.

As we moved across the post-apocalyptic United States, the bodies piled up like cordwood. Thousands died. Dylan and I were like a two-man meat grinder. People came in one end and bullet-riddled or mutilated flesh came out the other. It gave me a certain high that couldn’t be matched anywhere else. I kept going to JADE to get my fix of mayhem and destruction. On days we couldn’t meet, I felt like I was going through withdrawals. I needed to roll dice and kick ass.

We’d snuffed out a group of homeless with a one-two combination of foam grenade with an incendiary chaser. The people frozen in the foam didn’t have a chance. After killing off a group of homeless people, we’d stumbled into a fight with corporate security goons. The incident ended with our arrest and subsequent interrogation. The interrogation lasted half a gaming session and included various methods of torture conjured up by Howe. Based on that session alone, I can only conclude that Howe must have been an ex-Stasi or KBG agent in a former life. Again, it was his way of bringing down every force imaginable on our heads.

Another incident involved a brief gun battle with hospital security—and to this day I still have no idea what we were doing in the hospital. My character was attempting to toss a flash bang into the hospital waiting room, when Howe made me roll a handful of six-sided (D6) dice. My dice roll was low. Howe smiled and rolled a few dice of his own. He chuckled. Rolled twice more in secret. The whole thing ended with my character tossing an incendiary grenade into a nearby oxygen storage room. The hospital was leveled along with a nearby nursing home. Somehow our characters managed to escape without a scratch.

Our tour of death and destruction changed settings, as I grew bored of cyberpunk and asked Howe about moving on to something more exciting. This prompted Howe to change the storyline, tweaking it in a way to fit our demented gaming style. Our characters were kidnapped by aliens, who’d heard about our earthly exploits. They needed some Terran muscle to move in on their enemies. They wanted to capitalize on our ability to turn living beings into pounds of mutilated flesh.

The new setting was borrowed from a little-known game called Star Frontiers. Star Frontiers was TSR’s (creator and publisher of Dungeons & Dragons) failed attempt to create a serious space adventure. For us, Star Frontiers offered several new killing fields. New alien worlds became our shooting galleries, our explosive-laden playgrounds. Our intergalactic debauchery destroyed a dozen worlds, with each world destroyed in some unique, almost artistic way. One world was wiped out by a flesh-eating plague. Another obliterated by its sun. A planet consumed by supermassive colonies of nanite cells. Entire species were scratched out of existence. We stole spaceships and jettisoned crew members out of airlocks and into the hard vacuum of space. Mayhem, murder, and outright plunder became the name of the game. We were the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, coming to wreak havoc on mortal souls everywhere. We were the Devourers of Worlds, galactic meat grinders traveling between the stars.

The summer following my high school graduation put a damper on the daily game sessions at JADE. I knew was I going to start college in August. The college I was going to was some three hundred miles away, making it too far for regular gaming commutes. Something told me that the group needed to end the game with a bang—a campaign to end all gaming campaigns. I wanted a campaign that ended in a total party kill (TPK).

I told Howe about my idea. A TPK was in line with Howe’s sadistic gamemastering sensibilities. Thus, he agreed to end the campaign with a real blowout of a TPK. He began plotting out the new campaign’s general structure. This led to our characters being brought back to Earth in a stolen spaceship. It was the Welcome Home Tour. Our intergalactic shenanigans followed in tow. A coalition of vengeful aliens began an invasion of Earth, threatening to wipe out all humans. This was payback for our intergalactic killing spree.

With our weapons locked and loaded, we stole an alien capital ship that was about ten kilometers in length. This required a little finesse that was well beyond our usual method of greasing opponents or taking over enemy ships. We vented the ship’s air supply. This took longer than we had hoped. The alien invasion was successfully sterilizing entire continents of human beings and turning the Earth’s surface into molten glass. This prompted a last-minute decision to go out with a real bang. We steered the capital ship toward the Earth’s atmosphere, blowing away alien warships left and right. The ship’s systems started going critical. “Core containment breached.” We were leaking radiation like an old Russian submarine. “Critical core conditions imminent.”

Then boom. Nothing but a white searing light. A million-gigaton explosion obliterated the Earth’s atmosphere and everything on the surface.

When I started college in August, I couldn’t help but wonder how I was going to satisfy my gaming fix. I was in a new town and hundreds of miles away from the cramped JADE office, where I had spent countless hours gaming. I was surprised to find that others had the same interests. Some of my fellow students had the same needs for buffoonery and destruction.

I started a gaming group in my dorm hall by setting up shop in empty common areas. The group was a big hit. Four gamers turned out for the first gaming sessions. We were traveling across the galaxy, fighting the Wrath in our homebrew Stargate roleplaying game. We fought as guerrillas in a post-apocalyptic landscape. The bodies were stacked like cordwood. The blood ran in the streets. The dice clattered on top of tables, with silent prayers or mutterings under the breath of each player. I was transported back to that day when I came to Howe’s office in JADE. It was a euphoria I didn’t understand, nor did I care to. There was something about butchering imaginary people and destroying peaceful alien worlds.