#which is kind of the guiding principal of my pantheon

[cheshire-castle-library]

Happy Tuesday Ask-A-Thon from the @ask-a-thon team! Sorry for the delay in sending out questions while we adjust to the recent moderation changes.

If you could spend a day with one of your OCs, who would it be and why? What would you do?

Happy Tuesday (on a Wednesday x'D)!!

I think Bridgette - and by association Cascade. They fill this roll of connecting tissue for the Many and Varied worlds within Reality in my fiction. No matter what I write, it's all connected - even when "other worlds" are involved because all of Reality exists within the framework of the Black Goddess and the Starburst God.

But that's just explanation to say, it'd be nice to chill and watch time go by in Near-Infinite Worlds from on high - a "heaven" of void and starlight where nothing hurts. Just calm company in the cool of that place outside of Reality that still Exists; though she couldn't help point out the things I need to work on, the ways I'm living that are hurting me, and encourage me to try something else. Cascade would pretend he's not listening, focusing on the music erupting from his mind, either replaying the songs of mortality or composing that beautiful melodic cacophony he's so known for.

Of course neither figure - mercurial in nature - would sit still for long. Though both human in their own ways, they'd get bored or they'd hear something troubling from one of the barely numerable worlds and they'd go down among the mortals, or they'd bring a troubled mortal up there; or - in some occasions - Cascade would pluck his favorite star from the sky below, place them in the gods' realm and discuss the situation, and then that star would fall into whatever world needed a hand of god with agency and choice of their own.

It would be business as usual, I couldn't stay there forever - as much as the Gods cannot - but it would be relaxing for a while, cool and comfortable, and we'd discuss shoes and ships and ceiling wax, and their goals for their future that I'd then pen, lounging within the blessed potential of complete emptiness, to the sound of raucous music and the wishes of near-infinite worlds.

[swanlake1998]

Article: The Black Ballet Celeb Taking On Racism in Dance

Date: June 21, 2021

By: Mary Scott Manning

With a raft of Instagram followers and a modeling contract, the Washington Ballet’s Nardia Boodoo is as close as it gets to a pop celeb in the rarefied world of ballet. Now she’s trying to make that world more fair.

A ballerina, by definition, does not speak—at least not with words. The body is her language, and she spends her life mastering its vocabulary, usually at others’ direction: a casting list on the wall, a choreographer’s instructions, a critic’s review. For dancers of color, this fact has been doubly true.

But last year, after a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd, and organizations across the professional spectrum were called out by people of color for furthering systemic racism, the overwhelmingly white world of ballet wasn’t spared. One of the most influential voices in that conversation was a dancer with the Washington Ballet, 27-year-old Nardia Boodoo.

You may have seen her onstage, one of the company’s five Black dancers, or in the pages of Marie Claire—she’s a model repped by Wilhelmina who has starred in campaigns for Tory Burch, Chanel Beauty, and Nike. She began dancing only 13 years ago, but Boodoo, whose roots are Indo-Trinidadian, has soared into the pantheon of ballet celebrities, the object of teen worship and the subject of fan art (plus at least one look-alike doll).

What was never visible was the racism she endured on the way up. “Despite the fact that I work hard in rehearsal, throw myself into my art form and perform on international stages,” as she put it on Instagram on May 31, 2020, “when I return home”—to Bethesda—”I’m still most likely to be questioned and harassed for walking my dog late at night in an affluent area…that I reside in.”

This month, Boodoo appears in one of the Washington Ballet’s latest productions, choreographed by the renowned Black dancer Silas Farely. Yet some of her most important recent work has occurred behind the scenes over the past year as she pushed the company to own ballet’s history of prejudice and its responsibility to change. “She’s just been a really, really important voice in helping us to galvanize and discuss all very important issues,” says Julie Kent, the company’s artistic director, issues that “haven’t really been addressed previously, and not just at the Washington Ballet but in ballet as an art form.”

When Boodoo started training at 14, Misty Copeland was making history as American Ballet Theatre’s first Black soloist in two decades, following trailblazing Black ballerinas such as Lauren Anderson and Raven Wilkinson. Boodoo’s peers at the Baltimore School for the Arts, meanwhile, were majority-African American, a “strong base,” she says, for a young artist of color. Boodoo earned a scholarship to Chicago’s Joffrey Ballet, then landed a coveted sport in the Washington Ballet’s studio company while still a teenager.

Leaving home, though, occasioned her first experiences with racial bias in ballet. “I’ve had someone who holds power say to me, ‘Well, because you stick out so much in the corps, you have to work so much harder, because everyone’s going to be looking at you,'” she says. “That’s not my fault that you only have one Black girl in the corps.”

It was the classic conundrum of a second generation. She wasn’t the one who broke down the door. But she still had to contend with an environment that was less than welcoming. And the pressure to fit a stereotype needled her. Virtually every professional Black dancer feels it: having to straighten curly hair, receiving costumes with mesh that doesn’t match their skin tone, wearing the pink tights that make light-skinned dancers look lithe but appear to chop inches off those with darker complexions. Sometimes Boodoo’s colleagues would make hurtful comments. “Stupid things,” she recalls, “like ‘Your hair smells like Black-girl hair.'”

Rachael Parini, a friend and the only other Black dancer when Boodoo joined the company, remembers when they were asked to wear white powder in Giselle, a tradition in the ballet but a loaded proposition for Black performers. At a rehearsal, the stager hollered over the loudspeaker: “Rachael and Nardia, why are you blue?” The powder apparently had turned their brown skin another hue under the cool stage lights.

Parini describes her friend as a force—”not one to back down from a fight.” But back then, the women endured the routine microaggression quietly. For all its glamour, a ballet company is a workplace like any other, governed by hierarchies and unwritten social codes. With one big difference: There’s usually no formal human-resources department. “You sort of get this vibe that this is how it is,” says Boodoo. “The more subservient you are…the better and the more instruction you’ll receive…the further your career will go on.”

After starting to model, Boodoo met a photographer who was perplexed by her acquiescence. He described how the New York dancers he knew were much more assertive. It was a revelation: Boodoo’s confidence and following grew. She became an apprentice at the Pennsylvania Ballet, then returned to DC, becoming a full company member in 2019.

By the time the country was protesting for racial justice and dancers of color began organizing over Zoom, she was ready to speak out. “To all the dancers that don’t feel supported by their companies,” she posted to Instagram on June 1, 2020, “I think it’s time to make some changes and to hold them accountable.” Andrea Long-Naidu, a former New York ballet star and a past teacher of Boodoo’s, looked on with pride: “When I had her at Dance Theatre of Harlem, she wasn’t aware of her powers yet.”

Seeing her staff in pain after George Floyd’s Killing, Kent convened an all-company Zoom. Voice cracking, Boodoo recounted her experiences, explaining that the bias often presented itself as overtly as it did implicitly: The problem wasn’t simply getting passed over for a role but also being told her face looked “too ethnic” for the part.

Kent, who is white, listened on the other side of the screen, distinctly aware of the vulnerability on display among her dancers. A former principal dancer with American Ballet Theatre, she performed on global stages and had a part in the beloved 2000 movie Center Stage. “I have a unique role and responsibility in order to move [the art form] forward,” she says, “and allow for the kind of career and love that I had to be possible for as many people as possible.”

Kent inherited one of the country’s most diverse companies from her predecessor, Septime Webre, who had recruited worldwide and electrified the institution’s cultural cachet. She had added 16 dancers to the corps, almost half of whom identify as BIPOC—and now they were hurting. There’s also the matter of competition. The Ballet has to compete with bigger acts imported by the Kennedy Center. In some ways, its relevance hinges on broadening ballet’s historically older, white audience with admirers whose woke-ness won’t tolerate notions of “diversity” that predate Black Lives Matter—or that feel performative.

Kent formed a working group with members from every department to tackle issues of inclusion and equity, and an outside consultant has been guiding their monthly meetings and homework. Boodoo, who represents the performers along with Oscar Sanchez, a Cuban dancer, had expected pushback. But her fan base and platform—a social-media audience that, at nearly 50,000 on Instagram, is within striking distance of some top New York ballerinas’—would have been tough for the company to ignore.

As wider discussions started, though, it became clear that white privilege was a new concept to some. Boodoo was dismayed that some colleagues were unfamiliar with certain civil-rights leaders, so she helped organize a remote study of the book The New Jim Crow. To prod management, she and fellow colleagues of color met privately to hash out ideas for the company at large. It’s been exhausting to divide her energy between institutional matters and the rigors of performing: “You want to just focus on your art form, you just want to focus on being beautiful, being a strong dancer, and contributing to the task at hand.”

Partly because of Covid limits on gatherings and partly because they had to start with building a shared vocabulary, the working group’s progress has felt slow. But they’re in the process of finalizing recommendations to address the places where inequity creeps in. Money, donors, time, and institutional commitment, meanwhile, all could limit their progress. The group, for instance, envisions a Nutcracker free of racist tropes—in particular, the traditional Arabian and Chinese dances, which play up offensive cultural stereotypes. But ticket sales help fund the annual budget. Will the public support changes to the beloved show? Can the company handle that financial risk?

The stakes—Black dancers continually being overlooked or leaving ballet—feel higher now that the work has begun. Still, Boodoo says she feels hopeful that the company will evolve. “She’ll be someone,” says Long-Naidu, “that’ll go down in the history books of Black ballerinas.” An artist who championed a new act for the ballet, or at least one who tried.

[gibsongirlselections]

Saagar Enjeti Rising

It’s about power, man,” Saagar Enjeti relays about an hour into a decathlon, Corona-spring phone call. 

It’s May, and I’m scrambling to interview the nationalist co-host of Rising with Krystal & Saagar, presented by the television arm of The Hill. Our conversation takes as many pit stops as Enjeti’s nascent, but impactful career: from Aggie country—he’s a son of Texas A&M faculty—to George Washington University to Georgetown to Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller to celebrated pundit before 30. Like his putative mentor, Enjeti has attracted some rubbernecking by insiders: for shifting his views. I think it’s going around, as you are reading an issue of a magazine titled “What is American Conservatism?” Or as Carlson told Elaina Plott (then of The Atlantic) last December: “I’ve made a complete break mentally with the world I used to live in.”

As for me, I am at least breaking one of my own rules. That is: I am writing a profile of a principal I haven’t seen in person in months. But I’m not going social-distance from a good story. 

Because he’s a social conservative who isn’t religious. Because he’s a foreign policy hawk who actually concedes the country’s recent mistakes. Because he’s launched a slightly absurd crusade against cannabis. Because he dresses like Alex P. Keaton, only he’s renounced Reaganism. Because Saagar Enjeti has, indeed, become kind of powerful.

Enjeti forms a duo with Krystal Ball—a former congressional candidate and MSNBC star. At 38, she is—as Jacobin magazine pointed out—the Millennial answer to Rachel Maddow. Therein lies the most glaring distinction between the two, by all appearances close friends. Ball is an antagonist of the liberal pantheon. Enjeti though—while no stenographer—is broadly at peace with the present trajectory of the Right. Ball has bashed Maddow. Enjeti loves Carlson.

Ball’s cri de coeur is for generational change. That’s a project pitifully on hold, as the donkey attempts to install the oldest president on record. She actually preferred an even older model—that traitor to his generation Bernie Sanders—before he withdrew from the race in a blaze of anonymity this spring. That landscape contrasts with the Right, where an outsider president is still dominant and fresh projects seeking to tear down the old religion—such as the Enjeti-aligned American Compass (“great work”) —bloom promiscuously. Enjeti thinks the movement to mint a populism with polish is right on track (and they two have a book to sell seeking to prove that). But Enjeti had tough words for Senator Sanders, who he characterized as a tragically inflexible figure in a chosen profession where to be limber is to live another day. 

I actually met Ms. Ball first—10 years ago—when she ran a quixotic campaign for Congress in the district of my alma mater in southern Virginia. The Tea Party juggernaut that year—combined with a frivolous, overhyped personal scandal from Ball’s well-spent youth (there aren’t that many trained accountant pundits)—doomed Ball’s bid in the already salmon-colored first district of the Old Dominion. She hiked over to The Atlantic and NBC cable but was an awkward fit for a liberal establishment licking its chops for a Hillary Clinton presidency. Like many women of our shared generation, she wasn’t quite ready for Hillary even if she was told to be.

The pair’s shared production is genuinely pathbreaking—for several reasons. 

It’s an internet television show that works. Rising is actually rising. The dominant media trend when I entered the industry was the vaunted switch to tablets. But that mindset was soon shown the door. It was spring cleaning all around—those middle 2010s, the same time the Republican Party chucked its “libertarian moment”—both utter fads. And America would soon give the heave-ho to much more. 

In 2016—as the country anointed its first cable news president—for industry captains, the conclusion was clear: more television—and let’s open new frontiers. For those seeking to court conservatives, streaming, internet television was considered a ruby-red, low-hanging fruit. Harvested right and you could even infringe on the primacy of Fox News. More broadly—especially on the Right—there had been rumors of elaborate new, “new media” ventures for years. The most legendary rumor (a plot which was actually real) was of a motley assembly: Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Roger Ailes, and then-White House chief strategist Steve Bannon would open up their own shop. This was still the early days of the Trump administration. But to the haters, a satanic quartet was forming.  

But in our desert of the real, only one oasis has been founded. Roger Ailes is dead, and Hill.TV is not.

But it was no fait accompli. Enjeti has a predecessor: the affable Buck Sexton, a CIA alum and a regular on both Fox and the not-so-underground drinking circuit at D.C.’s Trump Hotel. But after a year the organization passed on the Buck and signed Saagar. 

Sadly for Sexton, it’s been liftoff ever since. But as with Elon Musk, there have been a few questionable judgment calls. In particular, there was a strange interview a summer ago with Rudolph Giuliani—the president’s personal lawyer—that had nothing to do with that work. Rather, Enjeti interviewed America’s mayor on his work with the deeply controversial National Council for the Resistance of Iran—the American front porch of the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, or more notoriously, the MEK. Mayor Giuliani has been paid lavishly for his association, as have other leading Republican figures responsible—centrally, former national security advisor John Bolton—for the country’s imprudent war footing toward Iran’s regime. But the interview appears to have been part nine (!) of a series initiated and otherwise hosted by Sexton, as Enjeti was sliding into the job. The series is marked “sponsored content,” which isn’t a nice look. Most of foreign policy journalism has had brushes with the MEK, but it bears repeating the general view is that they’re emphatically fringe.

Not fringe: the show’s appeal with younger, online-first audiences. America’s anchor—the popular podcaster Joe Rogan—said on air that he follows Saagar and Krystal for his news. For the uninitiated, Rogan gets 190 million downloads per month and between 5-7 million listeners per day, which on some days is double even Tucker Carlson’s formidable traffic.  

“I just cover whatever I want,” Enjeti told me. That omnivorous attitude suits the clientele, who favor outside-the-box politicians with sweeping societal criticisms. The audience loves Tulsi Gabbard, Andrew Yang, Bernie Sanders, maybe Donald Trump, and apparently no one else. As my fellow guest Colin Rogero—of The Hill’s infamous “Most Beautiful” list, and who could honestly pass for Colin Farrell—learned when I appeared with him on the program in January: sorry, no one likes Pete Buttigieg.  

The show’s butterfly knife approach can produce a viewer experience as oscillatory as the 2020 campaign itself. Which is the point. In a news cycle that’s now truly unyielding—a depression, a pandemic, and mass rioting—Rising rises above. Like Kissigner and 50 Cent, Enjeti says he’s a stone-cold realist in a grinding turf war. “It’s about power, man,” Enjeti says. “This is about the fact that there’s actually a heterodox TV thing that exists, that is watched by actual people—and that’s the most important part. The donors don’t control this.” Enjeti gives away the secret sauce—telling me essentially that on YouTube it’s kingmaking to be what Jeff Bezos almost named Amazon but should have: relentless. Constant content must be produced or the axe falls from the hard-hearted algorithm.

Enjeti denies to me what I assumed was his goal: get this baby bought. In an era of the Frightful Five on America’s technology coast, the operating procedure of most new businesses is mere ambition to get sold. But Enjeti says he’s not waiting for a call up to the majors. He’s starting his own league. Television habits have been convulsed in the era of the smartphone—especially among the young (“our age is the number one demographic for the show, 25-35”)—and the thinking goes that cable news is the province of yesterday’s men, though that includes the sitting president of the United States. If the media short-sellers like Enjeti are right that cable news is at its peak, next up could be one giant, Boomer supernova. 

I agree,” Enjeti says as I rant about how the Middle East is no longer relevant to this country’s national interest. He and I got into foreign policy for a shared reason before Trump’s ascension: “Domestic politics was just boring. Second term Obama, there was just nothing happening.”  

There are signs of Enjeti’s true sympathies. For instance, Jake Mercier—the research assistant for his and Ball’s book (The Populist’s Guide to 2020) worked for Gabbard, perhaps the most restraint-minded Democratic presidential candidate in a generation. But he picks his spots. In January, for instance, he took an equivocal tone toward the risky assassination of Qassem Soleimani, a figure in Iran perhaps only second in prestige to the theocracy’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. On the third day of the decade, the guest Ball and Enjeti summoned to Monday morning quarterback the move was an official from the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, the home of D.C.’s most effective operatives for regime change. Enjeti countered that perhaps it would have been wiser to have taken Soleimani out earlier, in 2007—not firmly the stuff of a restrainer who sees de-escalation with a third-rate power in a tortured part of the planet as imperative.  

But despite that Blob-y national security degree from Georgetown, Enjeti shows he’s not uncomfortable thinking for himself. His ascent has been astonishing—and facilitated by outsider outfits. It was as White House correspondent at the Daily Caller that Enjeti got his break, but also where he began enterprising his way into the limelight. 

It was at the Caller that Enjeti first met the president, who he described to me as entertainer par excellence. But Enjeti began cutting away from the sometimes derivatively conservative nature of the site—he cultivated a more intellectual online persona and went all in on the age of realignment. That’s what he’s named his podcast—“The Realignment”—hosted by the Hudson Institute, a cornerstone of conservative Washington. 

Enjeti is an unabashed champion of anti-monopoly politics—he thinks the American state should step in to guarantee a baseline level of hard industry in this country, and he thinks gratuitous economic concentration is unstable. With his roots in foreign policy, he has his eye on rising China. Of South Asian descent, he lends powerful credibility to the argument that the United States should consider a cool-down period in immigration for reasons of national cohesion. In this regard, he joins the esteemed company of Reihan Salam, president of the Manhattan Institute, as well as the centrist writer Janan Ganesh of the Financial Times. 

Other views are more eclectic. He’s issued a semi-facetious fatwa against cannabis. He’s joined other figures with a right-wing audience—such as Ann Coulter, Peter Hitchens, and the ex-New York Times writer Alex Berenson—in slamming the assumption of the age that pot is harmless. Mr. Enjeti’s pronounced social conservatism is perhaps more interesting because he’s openly irreligious, something he shares with a constituency lacking belief in the Holy Spirit but suffering from spiritual ennui.

“They cheered on rioting—and looting—and crime,” an indignant Enjeti told Carlson on his show in early June, as heinous riots swept America. It’s the only show he likes to do besides his own. “I think you put it together perfectly earlier today on your show…the first uprising against the working class.”

What is American conservatism? Well, you could certainly do worse than tuning into the talented Mr. Enjeti in the morning to try to find out.

  Related: Introducing the TAC Symposium: What Is American Conservatism?

See all the articles published in the symposium, here.

The post Saagar Enjeti Rising appeared first on The American Conservative.

[yeskraim]

Dungeons & Dragons had fallen on ‘troubled times.’ The role-playing game’s fifth edition changed everything

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Nathan Stewart had a tall task ahead of him when he and others first looked to revamp Dungeons & Dragons. A tarrasque-sized challenge, indeed.

Nearly eight years ago, the game’s accessibility had come into question ahead of the release of the fifth edition, its current iteration. When Stewart joined D&D publisher Wizards of the Coast, the strategy was to “reinvigorate the tabletop game.”

Their efforts have paid off in almost unimaginable ways. D&D’s fifth edition, released in 2014, isn’t just a success. It’s revivified the franchise, with 2018 and 2019 – the 45th anniversary of the game – consecutively marking the best years for D&D sales. 

That’s not all.

“Beyond the sales, there’s a lot of other ways to look at it, too,” Stewart told USA TODAY. “I think we’re seeing more players than ever. We’re seeing more mainstream mentions and more exposure, impressions, if you will, in terms of the number of references and times D&D comes up in a pop culture TV show or movie, or even just someone’s Twitter. 

“It used to be, ‘Oh hey, cool, D&D got mentioned.’ Now it’s like, ‘Yeah. It’s a weekday.’”

In an age where screen time is synonymous with free time, tabletop gaming surrounded by friends is making a comeback. 

At the forefront is D&D. Thanks to live-streaming services, celebrity endorsements, frequent pop culture references and – above all else – an accessible game, the D&D community is thriving and eager to roll initiative again. 

Dungeons & Dragons: Go on an adventure in a ‘safe, controlled space’

Dungeons & Dragons certainly isn’t new. The game’s first edition launched in 1974, and groups of friends have been led through adventures by storytelling Dungeon Masters (DMs) ever since.

At its heart, D&D is simple. DMs create and guide players through worlds filled with monsters, treasure and intrigue, with dice rolls deciding key outcomes. 

Some tables take on psychic fish-monsters from the dawn of time. Others prefer political debates.

Coming in 2020: ‘Dark Alliance’ video game features iconic Dungeons & Dragons characters, location

But, at its core, D&D is about collaborative storytelling with friends. That spirit was captured in the creation of the fifth edition following a slump brought on by previous editions that led to in-community fighting, Stewart said.

This time, he said, the team focused on cutting out “complexity for complexity’s sake.”

“I think everybody who works here at Dungeons and Dragons take the role of steward really seriously,” Stewart said. “It was such an old, beloved brand at the time, and it was kind of falling on some troubled times.”

Rules were added and scrapped and tweaked to make sure the game was approachable for newcomers but also engaging for longtime players. 

“Every time you put in a rule that took away from friends getting together and telling stories, we were kind of going against the core ethos,” Stewart said. “We play-tested the hell out of it and, also, when we were looking at things, we said, ‘Is this really making it more fun for everybody or this just for one group?’ 

“Whenever it was just for one group, we tried to find a better way to do it.”

D&D’s principal story designer Chris Perkins said D&D allows people to tap into the “human need to escape the confines of our reality and experience other worlds in a safe, controlled space.” D&D’s universe is vast, with pantheons of gods, devils and demons, established villains and heroes. 

And there are always DMs willing to create their own worlds while taking cues from D&D’s preexisting library. 

“The game allows us to be ourselves and someone else at the same time,” Perkins said in an email. “D&D is also a great creative outlet, allowing us to craft our own fictional characters, worlds, and adventures, and that’s very appealing when the real world is quickly burning to a cinder.”

Still, despite streamlining, D&D can be intimidating for new players. It’s not easy to pick up the fifth edition’s “Monster Manual” – a book that has a monstrous floating eye with teeth on its cover – and simply dive into the game. Not everyone can pick up the Player’s Handbook and immediately choose if they’re going to be a barbarian or a sorcerer, either.

That’s where the established community comes in. 

A ‘diverse’ community of players bolsters Dungeons & Dragons

D&D’s community is multifaceted.

There are new players and players who grew up with the game. Young players and old players. Parents teaching their children. Children teaching their classes. The list is endless.

Satine Phoenix, a storytelling consultant and founder of collaborative art studio Gilding Light in Los Angeles and a host of a popular series that provided tips for Dungeon Masters, said the community is more diverse than ever. She’s been playing D&D since 1988, when she found a beginner’s box in her parents’ basement at 8 years old.  

Phoenix is writing a book about how D&D helped her through PTSD and childhood trauma. 

“Throughout that trauma, I held on to my character, I held on to these stories, so D&D is in my veins,” Phoenix said. “It helps me understand the world differently. It helps me escape. It helps me attack problems.”

From Barbie to Matchbox cars: Here’s every toy in the Museum of Play’s Toy Hall of Fame

Eventually, Phoenix started a D&D group at Meltdown Comics, an iconic L.A. comic shop that closed in 2018. 

“People came out that I didn’t expect,” she said. “There were women and there were professionals. The fascinating thing was they thanked me for providing a space. Suddenly, we had Sundays with six tables and six to 10 people at each table. There wasn’t a space and, suddenly, there were people like me in all the major cities going, ‘I’m going to make a space,’ and people just flocked to it.” 

Humans are social creatures, Stewart said. D&D just provides an excuse to come together – like a poker game or a movie night, only with dice and maybe a few kobolds.

“These stories are the ones that stick with us,” Stewart said. “When you think about some of your best friends, at least in my world, half the people tell the story about their best friend and they met them playing D&D.”

David Price, store manager at Game Theory in Raleigh, North Carolina, told USA TODAY that D&D’s popularity has surged in the five years he’s been managing the store. There was a time when there are only two tables reserved each week for D&D.

Now, he said, there are “at least 15 to 20.” 

“If I had to pick a community that is the most diverse, it’s the role-playing community in general, and the D&D community specifically,” said Price, 47. “We have kids 10 years old and up, all the way to people who are close to retirement age – actually, we probably do have a few retirees.” 

The digital age has helped ‘demystify’ Dungeons & Dragons for new players

Some of the most recognizable players in D&D put their faces alongside the game on a regular basis. 

According to a D&D fact sheet, more than 7,500 unique broadcasters streamed live games for more than 475,000,000 minutes watched in 2017. And, D&D’s official Twitch channel streamed about 50 hours of content weekly. 

Shows like “Critical Role” – which recently raised more than $11 million on Kickstarter to back an animated television show – draw thousands of viewers per week. 

“What all of those are showing people is this game is for you,” Stewart said. “I look like you. My group is made up like you.”

The online shows – and in some cases, live shows played in front of sold-out theaters – lower the barrier of entry for D&D, Stewart said. Interested viewers get a chance to see what a game is like in real time – a table of friends goofing around – instead of worrying about the game’s complexities. 

“Technology has helped demystify the game by showing that you don’t need to be a rules expert to have a good time,” Perkins said, and added, “All you need are some dice, a good imagination and some friends.”

Outside of live broadcasts, the digital age has provided new ways for players to get involved with D&D. Meetup.com is a good place to start for anyone looking to join a game. DND Beyond is D&D’s web-based service that provides digital rulebooks and can even create a character for free. Looking for new content? Try the Dungeon Master’s Guild. 

What’s next for Dungeon & Dragons?

So, after back-to-back years of top-tier sales, what comes next? How does the D&D franchise build on its momentum? 

“I think if you just ask people what they want, you’re never going to get an answer that leads to the next product or the next popularity wave,” Stewart said. 

“But, if you’re asking all of the people and you’re really listening and you’re really triangulating in terms of the different ways they’re getting their opinions out there, whether it be on Reddit or Twitter or different surveys … then you can kind of stay ahead of the curve that way.”

“Dark Alliance,” a video game featuring one of the series’ most popular characters that’s set to launch this year on PC and consoles, is one project deemed integral to D&D’s future strategy.

Why?

“When someone comes in through a film or a video game or through a YA novel, they’re getting an experience of D&D, that whets their appetite and then they want to go search out more of the gaming experiences we have,” Stewart said.

This week, D&D also announced a new sourcebook in collaboration with “Critical Role,” which is set to release in March. 

“Dungeons & Dragons has had such a massive, positive impact on nearly my entire life, and I am ever inspired by the endless creativity I see it spark in so many others across the world,” Matt Mercer, DM for “Critical Role,” said in a press release.

Whatever comes next, the storytelling consultant Phoenix is excited for it. 

“Over the past 10 years, America has just embraced Dungeons & Dragons,” she said. “Over the past couple years, Europe has and so has Asia-Pacific, and it’s really going to make a huge difference when we can get all over the world playing together.

“That’s going to be one of the next big, positive changes, is going global and going global together.” 

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