Though it possibly seems, two decades into the new millennium, a relic of ye olden times to imagine hysterical Christians praying for the depraved players of a game brought to the Earth for the sole purpose of luring innocent children into the hands of the devil, in the 1980s and even into the early 1990s there remained a significant stigma attached to Dungeons & Dragons.

The four-sided die, or d4 for short, is an attractive little tetrahedron which doesn’t roll well but sits consistently on any table thanks largely to the geometry of its construction.

One of the early motivating factors for my personal interest in Dungeons & Dragons was a cousin of mine, ten years older than I am, who owned most of the original hardcover books—by which I mean Advanced D&D, before the onset of editions.

Badly wounded and barely alive, Epikk was taken in by a human priest, Galen Stronhyr, who recognised his half-human heredity and sought to protect it from the base instincts of the warriors who had sacked the village.

Afterward, I try to forget the smouldering corpses, the stink of burning skin, the charred wounds across the walls, the terrified faces of those who have seen my power and lived.