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Nerdarchy > Dungeons & Dragons  > One Journey: Escape of the Prisoner, or Flight of the Deserter?

One Journey: Escape of the Prisoner, or Flight of the Deserter?

The Wheel Of The Year With Dungeons and Dragons
Minor magical items for your 5e D&D game
es·cap·ism
əˈskāpˌizəm/
noun; the tendency to seek distraction and relief from unpleasant realities, especially by seeking entertainment or engaging in fantasy.

escapeEscaping has been my specialty for most of my life, starting with my younger years being raised by a large cultist/religious family in the middle of the northern Idaho woods on up into my more adult years as a minor living in a small town in the middle of Utah. A very big chunk of my earlier years was left to my wondering mind, the magic of nature and my only true friends, my animals, the sun, the moon, the trees and the long hours spent up on my roof staring off into the night’s starry sky, dreaming or imagining.

I remember being given a Brian Froud book on faeries when I was about 12 and I remember feeling like I already knew these fay creatures in a way; in a sense I had sort of always invited these characters into my life as a way of dealing with the large emotional and traumatic realities I was facing constantly as a child. My family was broken by a divorce when I was seven years of age after many years of struggling to “literally survive,” after my parents decided to live in a cabin in the middle of the woods with only the bare minimum to rely on and no civilization closer than an hour’s drive, no technology, no books, no outside sources. I bathed in trash bins with my brother from water my mother boiled on the stove. We used a generator for everything and the fireplace was our source of heat. My parents were not the best of friends, lack of money and comfort being a huge struggle, and I remember many times in my youth where I simply “disappeared,” you could say, into a reality that was my only escape from pain or traumatic experience. I remember my “friends” from those days, imaginary animals or creatures that followed me wherever I went. escapeFaeries dancing in the lights of the Christmas tree filled with laughter, toys with souls and personalities, the moon whose gentle light touching my skin fed my longing hungers for mother’s tender embrace, a lovely faun and lion that stayed with me and followed along-side every car ride or journey, these are the creations that gave me life and purpose. I remember many a times where I would be sitting in a car ride in tears and I could look out and talk to my friends who would tell me to stay strong, or they would speak courage and kindness when I felt anxiety would end my racing heart.

journey

A personal copy drawn at the age of 12 from a book by Brian Froud.

As the years drastically threw me into new situations and new places, constant changes and wracking life events, I dare say I stopped turning to my escapes for escape. Instead, I let anger fill me, tears blind my eyes, anxieties consume my thoughts, guilts and regrets rob my passion, and death my only hope or vision for the future. There was a great span of time after my childhood was taken from me at the age of eight where I had no will to live, to play, or to dream. My first form of expression from sadness began with writing poetry, drawing and reading on fantasy at the age of 12 after happening on some books from a friend who read something other than the book of Mormon (I was not allowed to read anything other than scriptures or school books). Faery tales (specifically Brian Froud’s art and literature on faeries), dark fantasy (Forgotten Realms books), Greek mythology, RPGs and the like, really became something that made sense, and it felt good to be in this “realm” again, as I like to call it. This bubble in time and space holds you and lets you go off the deep end into ideas and endless possibilities. It would take me until the age of 16, after the defiance and resistance of my current “family” and lifestyle situation, to begin my journey back into the world I once left behind with imagination and RPG escapism (specifically D&D). As the brilliant and wonderful author J.R.R Tolkien states so wonderfully:

 Tolkien“If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape? . . . If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can! I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which “Escape” is now so often used: a tone for which the uses of the word outside literary criticism give no warrant at all. In what the misusers are fond of calling “Real Life”, Escape is evidently as a rule very practical, and may even be heroic. In real life it is difficult to blame it, unless it fails; in criticism it would seem to be the worse the better it succeeds. Evidently we are faced by a misuse of words, and also by a confusion of thought. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter.”-Tolkien

Be where you choose to be, my fellow friends, and stay nerdy!

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Samantha Karr

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