Blessed Are the Legend-Makers: Experimentation as Edification in Dungeons & Dragons

The twenty-first century has seen speculative fiction surge ever more vigorously into the mainstream, among which must be reckoned the remarkable renaissance of tabletop roleplaying games (Dungeons & Dragons especially), which generate fictional narratives through collaborative, improvisational, rule-constrained storytelling. D&D, this article argues, not only contains a remarkable array of politically and theologically implicative contents (such as agonistic cosmologies and racial hierarchies) but also entails and incentivizes theopolitically significant social practices on the part of participants - most significantly, narrating player-characters into and through moral dilemmas. Attending to players' testimonies of personal renewal and political resistance, we find that D&D is an arena for what I theorize as edification: an enrichment of one's subjectivity that is experienced as beneficial, transformational, or even salvific (that is, as effecting rescue or liberation from ruinous ways of life), even as it proves culturally contested and socially divisive.