Llamas and my stegosaurus

It was raining hard enough to make the basement windows look subaqueous. We had the card table out, and on it: pencils bitten to the ferrule, a two-liter bottle gone warm, orange dust from chips stippling the cleric’s character sheet. Jeff had drawn the dungeon on blue-lined graph paper, each ten-foot square numbered with sacerdotal care. He kept his dice in a Crown Royal bag. My fighter was called Aranth, which seemed to me, at twelve, both euphonious and severe. I had written brown hair and hates injustice in the little blanks, then bought rope, torches, spikes, a mirror, oil, chalk, and one silver bell We had already lost Jim’s thief to a needle in a lock. His saving throw failed with a modest plastic click. Jim said bullshit, then fell quiet, and sorted the dead man’s coins in denominations beside his knee. Past the cistern room, past the fresco of the seven hooded kings, we found the door with no handle. A greenish light seeped out from under it, and from the other side came a sou...