‘Demons’ and ‘Sprites’ Uncover Life’s Lessons in Pasadena Basement

Lane McCullough is one of the young regulars who hang out at the Gaming House to hone their survival skills and to kill and kill again.

On any given evening--it doesn’t matter if it’s a school night or a Saturday--a group of young men gather in the darkened basement of the Pasadena store, trying to keep warriors, demons and sprites from meeting their death in myriad unpleasant ways.

“It’s a way to learn to get along in life,” said 20-year-old McCullough, who stops by frequently. “You create a character and try to keep him in food and money and armor. If you fail, you die.”

It’s a lot like real life.

A visitor gets into the basement of the Gaming House only if he knows someone. There’s never a charge, but as a matter of honor, he should buy games and equipment at the Gaming House when it’s open.

It’s after the store closes that hard-core game players--mostly high school youths with a sprinkling of college students--take turns putting mythical characters through their paces in contests like the infamous Dungeons and Dragons.

A few years ago, Dungeons and Dragons captured media attention when conservative Christian ministers charged that it provided demonic fodder for young, impressionable minds. Some parents also objected to their children’s spending their spare time pretending to be demons and magicians.

Today, those charges have not evaporated, but they are less strident, and D&D; now shares the shelves with dozens of other and newer role-playing games upstairs at the Gaming House.

The format of role-playing games rarely deviates. Each player must create a character and assume that character’s persona. One player becomes a moderator--a Dungeon Master in D&D--who; spins an imaginary scene for the other player-characters; this can be as simple as entering a room and describing its interior.

Once inside the imaginary setting, the player-character must decide what his next step will be, eventually choosing a series of paths that might lead to conflict or death (all imaginary, of course). The success or failure of any endeavor is decided by a combination of factors--a roll of the dice, the persona of the player-character and the whim of the moderator.

“Some of these D&D; characters have been alive for 10 years,” McCullough said, “in real years.” Veteran game-players are always careful to distinguish between reality and imagination when talking about role-playing games.

Most of the games have a medieval theme, and some take place in an imaginary outer space or in the future, like Starship Troopers, based on the classic novel by Robert A. Heinlein.

Some even take place in the dirt. There’s a sandbox downstairs at the Gaming House, amid empty Coke containers, other teen-age detritus and a few sticks of sagging furniture. The sand isn’t for cats, but for tanks.

“There are a few war games that you can play in this,” McCullough said recently on a slow night at the Gaming House. Huge boards painted with hundreds of six-sided geometric figures provide the battleground for players to restage famous military skirmishes.

Thirteen-year-old Patrick Hickham of Pasadena agrees that real life holds many parallels to the elaborate make-believe worlds created by people who manage to wangle an invitation to the after-hours world of the Gaming House.

But, unlike many literal-minded adults, he sees nothing demonic about the mock battles waged in minds and sand and on paper. “Some people just take this too seriously,” he said.