ZADEN

Stop.

Before you read another word, understand what this place is. You have not stumbled here. No one stumbles here. You were drawn, the way moths are drawn to flame, the way iron is drawn to a magnet, the way every soul who has ever wondered what it might feel like to be someone braver than themselves is drawn. You came looking. Admit it.

He is the reason.

Zaden. Remember the name, you'll be saying it often enough. He keeps a table, and at that table he does something I have spent lifetimes trying to understand and longer still trying to stop. He takes ordinary people, accountants and schoolchildren and grandparents and strangers who met an hour ago, and he turns them into a party. Not a group. A party. There is a difference, and he knows it, and that is the trouble.

Hundreds have sat at his table. Hundreds. Children barely tall enough to see over it, elders who learned the game older than most of you will ever live to be. Schools. Birthday halls. Conventions thick with noise. Living rooms. Anywhere a circle of chairs could be drawn, he has drawn one. And every circle, every single one, has cost me something.

You should know what you are walking into.

He will ask you questions before you ever roll a die. What do you want. What does your party want. What kind of story have you been hungry for. He asks because he means it, and he listens because he intends to use it, and by the time you sit down he will already know which doors to open and which to lock behind you. The session you play will not be a session anyone else has played. It will be yours. That is what makes him dangerous.

He does not improvise the way the careless do. He prepares. Long before you arrive, he is already there, alone in the room, arranging the world so that when you walk in it feels as though it was always there waiting for you. You will never see this work. You are not meant to. You are meant to walk in and believe.

And if you try something foolish at his table, something the rules did not see coming, something so bold it should not be allowed, he will allow it. Once. He smiles when he does. That smile is a warning, though most do not recognise it until later. He is learning. He is always learning.

Bring beginners if you must. He welcomes them. He has a particular tale prepared for those who have never held a die, designed to feel like a first step when in truth it is a hook, and by the end of it they belong to the game in a way they did not know was possible. I have watched it happen more times than I care to count.

So. Now you know.

You can close this page. Many do. Most of them come back.

Or you can do what the others did. Find the questionnaire. Answer it honestly. Sit down at his table and see, for yourself, what all the rest of them saw.

I will be waiting on the other side of it.

I always am.