Guest post written by Splinter Effect author Andrew Ludington
Andrew Ludington writes transportive adventure stories intended to make you forget your commute. He graduated from Kenyon College with a BA in English Literature and lives in Evanston, IL where he moonlights as a technologist for Northwestern University. Splinter Effect is his first novel.
About Splinter Effect (out March 18th 2025): In Splinter Effect, an action-packed debut by Andrew Ludington, time traveling archaeologist Rabbit Ward maneuvers through the past to recover a long-lost, precious menorah hidden in ancient Rome.
From what my daughter tells me, playing Dungeons and Dragons no longer carries the teenage social stigma it did in my youth. The show Stranger Things apparently normalized what was always a harmless and creative activity to the point where there are now clubs who openly meet in school libraries to play.
For those born too early or too late, let me tell you, it was not always this way.
I received my first Dungeons and Dragons set when I was in mid-elementary school. The whole “kit” was enclosed in a cardboard box and included a rulebook, a set of dice and a handful of character sheets. Over the years, those would be replaced by hardcover Advanced (ooh!) Dungeons and Dragons books gifted to me at holidays by my grandparents. Although I haven’t cracked their spines in years, I have them to this day.
My family moved frequently as my mother chased jobs around east Michigan. In every new playground, I would delicately ask around to see if anyone at the new school had ever heard of D&D. If I was lucky, I might find one or two. If I was unlucky, the probing would mark me as a weirdo and I might spend the next few months fending off would be bullies who scented nerd blood in the water.
It was worth the risk.
D&D got me interested in two things: telling stories and performing. Right from the beginning, I gravitated to acting as the Dungeon Master, the one who creates the story and guides the players through their tale, improvising all the side characters and narrating the incidentals and descriptions of the environment. For every hour playing with friends, I would spend another two to three carefully laying out the villain’s plot, the motivations of the supporting characters, the politics and religion of the world, the red herrings, the action set pieces.
One thing that drove many of my friends crazy was my lack of adherence to the canonical rules and settings of D&D. I’d create sci-fi stories, horror stories, gothic stories. One that I never managed to get off the ground was a simple concept: the group of players were take on the roles of professional time travelers charged with finding and stealing precious artifacts right before they dropped out of human observation. I thought it was a great conceit to learn about ancient cultures through the storytelling lens.
Alas, after college – as friends moved apart, got jobs, married, had kids – the opportunity to play fell to the wayside. With it went my immersive time-traveling story. Or so I thought.
In 2020, you might remember, the world closed up shop for a while. My wife and I had scheduled a trip to Rome for April of that year which was unceremoniously terminated for obvious reasons. In the weeks that followed, I moped around the house bemoaning the trip that wasn’t. And then one day, as I was wandering through a local graveyard – the one place I could remove my mask outside without worrying about running into anyone – I walked past a gravestone marking the resting place of a man with the unlikely first name, “Rabbit.” That’s when it hit me, I may not be able to go to Rome, but I know who can.
All that stemmed from a simple set of dice and a few, very malleable rules for storytelling. My friends with whom I used to play grew up to become teachers, tech bad asses, a football coach, a fire chief, an environmental activist. I have no doubt every one of them would say D&D contributed something meaningful to their skills and their life.
It sure did to mine.
