urban@trwspp.UUCP (07/16/84)
The Fantasy Association (a mostly-dormant fantasy fan
organization) has received the following book announcement from
the Houghton Mifflin Company. All grammatical errors are
reproduced as they appear in the announcement (printed on red
paper), so no flames to me.
Re: DUNGEON MASTER: The Disappearance of James Dallas Egbert,III
Publication Date: October 23, 1984.
When James Dallas Egbert,III disappeared from Michigan State
University in 1979, it was no ordinary college-boy drop out.
Egbert was a computer genius at sixteen, a boy with an I.Q. of
180-plus, and an extravagant imagination. Dallas was a fanatic
Dungeons and Dragons player -- before the game was widely known
and he and his friends played a live version in a weird
labyrinth of tunnels and rooms that ran beneath the university.
These secret passages even ran within the walls. After Egbert
disappeared there were rumors of suicide, witch cults, drug
rings, and homosexuality to try and explain the mystery.
When the police search came to a dead end, the Egbert family
called in one of the most colorful and well-known private
investigators of our era, William C. Dear, of Dallas.
Dear's adventures and search for Dallas read like a sensational
novel, but every fact and detail is true. Dear crawled into
baking hot tunnels, flew over the university campus in a
helicopter, and played D&D with a real Dungeon Master; he
called into play every intuition he could muster to try to
out-psych and out-play the brilliant game-plaing mind of Dallas
Egbert.
In the end, he did. The story of the torturous search, the
discovery of the boy, his return to his parents -- and the
final tragedy -- is told here for the first time.
DUNGEON MASTER will be of particular interest to parents,
educators, psychologoists, and other role-playing game players.
Those involved in the high-tech field and have experimented
with D&D on their own computers will be especially fascinated
by this exciting story.