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overthinking entertainment
Book: A Conventional Boy
Derek Reilly, a teenage roleplaying game dungeon master caught in a 1984 raid by a secret government agency tasked with suppressing magical intrusions, is now middle-aged and institutionalized at Camp Sunshine, a center for deprogramming captured Elder God cultists. He's considered safe enough for postal privileges, which he uses to run a play-by-mail game. After 25 years, Derek finally has reason to escape: a nearby D&D convention. While Derek's RPGs were full of fictional elder gods and world-ending threats, the con's keynote LARP is a mass sacrifice ritual to summon a real Elder God—and it's up to Derek and his postal players to stop it! Includes the Bob Howard novelettes Overtime and Down on the Farm.
MeFi's Own Charles Stross describes this as a low-commitment entry point into the series and says: "Derek Reilly is the unanticipated. Aged fourteen when he is first drawn to [the Laundry's] attention, he's over the minimum age of criminal responsibility in English law but equally clearly he's not an adult: he shouldn't be interned in an adult detention center, but in the middle of a moral panic or a terrorist alert normal rules fall by the wayside in the name of institutional convenience (as we saw with the child detainees in the terrorism detention camps at Guantánamo Bay). Derek hadn't actually done anything wrong—but, again, being innocent is no protection against anonymous denunciations, which are particularly common during witch hunts. Dungeons and Dragons was sufficiently obscure in the UK at the start of the 1980s that most people had not heard of it, and it would inevitably take some time to evaluate it for risk potential, because board games had not hitherto been something the organization worried about, and how they handled D&D would of course set a precedent. Finally, the discovery that Derek had some aptitude for magic (of the sort with which the Laundry was legitimately concerned) was obviously problematic. Like a teenager mistakenly shipped to Guantánamo and detained at Camp Iguana, he had been exposed to dangerous people and ideas and might present a real risk if released. Better to simply ignore the problem and hope it goes away. And in due time it does indeed cease to be a problem for the people who made that decision, because they've all retired."
Crib sheet for the novel A Conventional Boy
posted by infinitewindow on Nov 25, 2025 at 6:08 AM
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Are we in spoiler territory for the Laundry Files? Spoilers? This story has possibly the most audacious get-out-of-jail-free card I've ever seen. Is the overall series plot stuck in a corner where the good guys can't possibly win? Well, years ago there was this RPG nerd, in an unremarked corner of the universe, and one day he rolled up a campaign... It's D&D ex machina, which is insane and I love it.
Also, there's a gratuitous swipe at Nothing Bundt Cakes, and I am completely on board with that.
posted by ormondsacker at 11:43 AM
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ormondsacker, Derek and his dice can definitely predict/influence the future very, VERY well, far better than Forecasting Ops's usual track record—we are talking about a division of the Laundry that occasionally forecasts events so grave that they retroactively decide not to exist in the first place. But even a series of nat 20s all in a row still might not get you the best ending to a scenario if they are in service to the wrong decision. Let's leave it at that for now.
posted by infinitewindow at 3:11 PM
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And a really good read! Great fun in most unexpected ways. Begs the question, when is Stross going to produce some amazing musical theater?
posted by sammyo at 4:44 PM
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