Playing Dungeons and Dragons on Death Row

By Keri Blakinger

It was somewhere around 2017 – just after I’d started covering the death penalty beat as a fledgling reporter – that I first heard about the Dungeons & Dragons games on death row. At the time, I’d only been living in Texas for about a year, having just recently pulled up my East Coast roots and replanted myself in the Lone Star State. I’d come for a job at the Houston Chronicle, at least temporarily. The entry-level gig was a two-year fellowship through Hearst Corporation’s newspapers division, which in theory meant moving around from one company paper to the next, repeatedly uprooting my life in a way I utterly dreaded. So when the higher-ups at the Houston paper agreed to put me on staff halfway through the program, I was glad to settle down and make the Bayou City my new home.

Until that point, I’d covered breaking news and general assignment stories, bouncing around from trials to floods to comic festivals to car wrecks. But once my editor found out that I’d be staying at the paper as a permanent fixture, she suggested I take on my own beat. And, she said, since the paper’s longtime death row reporter had just retired, covering death row seemed like a natural fit. That probably seems like a weird thing for an editor to say, but I knew what she meant. Unlike any other reporter at the paper, I’d done prison time. In fact, it was the whole reason I was still doing an entry-level fellowship in my early 30s. Before going into journalism, I’d struggled with addiction for nearly a decade, ultimately landing myself behind bars in 2010. I did my time, got out in 2012, and went into journalism, seizing on a career path where I thought I could do some good – and where I hoped my prison record wouldn’t matter.

I had no designs on covering the prison system, and – until the moment my editor suggested it – had never contemplated covering death row. Once I began to dig in, though, I came at it from a different angle than the reporters who’d come before me. Instead of zeroing in only on the appeals and the executions, I also decided to investigate life on death row. And so, sometime late in the summer of 2018, I started regularly driving out to the maximum-security Allan B. Polunsky Unit nestled behind the pine curtain of East Texas, where I would interview whichever of the condemned men I could get to talk to me. A few months in, one of them – a man named Larry – casually mentioned that he liked to play Magic: The Gathering.

I looked up from my notepad and sought to clarify: “The game with the cards?”

“Yeah,” he told me.

I think I must have laughed, completely caught off guard.

Larry grinned, soaking in my surprise.

As it turned out, the game wasn’t even invented until the 1990s – after Larry was already in prison. So he’d never touched a real copy of the game. Every time he’d ever played had been with hand-made materials. In general, prisons don’t tend to allow people to send in things from the outside. Usually books are permitted, and either letters or photocopies of them. Some facilities let people order clothes from specific catalogs, or buy shoes that meet certain requirements. But sending in gaming supplies to an American correctional facility is almost universally a hard no. So when prisoners want to play anything other than the few games provided by the facility – things like checkers, chess and card games – they have to make the materials themselves.

To play Magic, that meant the men had to make their own fantasy cards. The game works by having each player take on the role of a powerful wizard who can summon creatures and cast spells to do battle with other wizards. The outcome of those magical face-offs is determined by the players’ cards, and their skill in playing them. To get cards on death row, Larry and his friends had to ask their friends and supporters to send them letters describing cards they had on the outside. Then, the men on death row could reconstruct them, drawing their best renditions onto thick squares of paper.

Larry explained however that, on death row, Magic wasn’t quite as popular as another even more elaborate game: Dungeons & Dragons. Created in the 1970s, D&D is what’s known as a “table-top roleplaying game” – or TTRPG. Participants create characters to go on quests under the guidance of a Dungeon Master, who takes on a role somewhere between that of a narrator and a referee. It’s part group performance, part choose-your-own-adventure. In the free world, the game’s popularity soared in the 1980s, then fell out of favor a decade later only to see a resurgence in recent years. On Texas death row, it’s been a little more constant: More than a dozen men have been diehard players ever since some guys in the Mexican Mafia started playing in the 1990s.

But, as Larry told me, he’d stopped playing himself and didn’t know much about who was still in the game – or at least not in a way he could describe to me. As it turns out, the men on death row are so isolated that sometimes they can spend years living feet away from someone without ever learning their real name. Most of the time, they go by prison nicknames – so Larry told me that if I wanted to track down the other players, it would require some research.

When I left the prison that day, I called my editor, Dianna, from the car, checking in with a quick debrief before heading south toward Houston rush hour traffic. I told her about the game world, hovering between awe and bemusement.

“I guess you didn’t play that in prison in New York,” she said with a chuckle.

She wasn’t wrong. Where I did my time, we’d loosely played a variety of low-stakes games using materials provided by the facility, but nothing as intense or all-consuming as the fantasy games I’d – until then – mostly associated with the math nerds I remembered from recess in elementary school. That men on death row were playing somehow surprised me, even though I could readily see the attraction: escapism, distraction, a sense of human connection.

At Polunsky, the last of those is particularly hard to come by. The death row there is one of the nation’s harshest. For most of the past three decades, condemned prisoners have lived almost entirely in solitary confinement, hemmed in by four gray walls with peeling paint, a window and a steel door. The toilet is only a foot or two from the bed, in cells so small that if you stand in the middle and hold out your arms, you can touch the walls. Unlike in some other states, death row prisoners at Polunsky typically don’t have jobs or school classes or counseling programs. They get one phone call every 90 days, and see all their visitors through thick security glass. A few of the men who arrived there particularly young have spent more time living in solitary confinement than they ever spent in the free world.

Out here, it is easy to live a whole life without understanding what that sort of isolation does to you. But if you ask someone who’s done a lot of time, they might tell you: As humans, we define ourselves in relation to the world around us, and the people in it. In solitary, that world is barren, and there are no people — only echoing voices on the other side of a steel door.

For prisoners striving to hang on to their humanity, the options are limited. But what their dark version of reality cannot offer them, the fantasy world can. As wizards and elves, the men can rewrite their own stories and imagine other lives for themselves – lives in which they can save the world and be heroes.

Learning exactly how that was done took me years. As with Magic, the logistics of Dungeons & Dragons take a little more effort on death row. The game typically requires maps, iconic polyhedral dice and richly illustrated gaming books. The colorful tomes can be pricey, but at least it’s possible to get them sent in. When it comes to the maps and dice, though, the men have to make these for themselves, drawing out their worlds on graph paper and constructing spinners out of typewriter parts and paper. Ideally, they’d set those on a table and sit around them to play together. But in solitary that’s usually not possible – so they call out their moves from cell-to-cell, pass notes, or rely on other clandestine forms of communication.

When they’re playing, the game might go a little like this: One of the men will shout out a square on the map – say A-21. Suddenly, instead of sitting alone on their bunks, the men see themselves together, walking through the doorway of a dark, foreboding dungeon. They know that gleaming treasure lies beneath, if only they follow the right path.

Suddenly, a purple monster rises from the gloom, its mouth dripping with acid.

From a few cells over, the Dungeon Master asks Larry: “What do you do?”

Larry decides to take a spin to find out what kind of creature the monster is – and what it will take to kill it. The Dungeon Master consults a reference book, and Larry and the rest of his raiding party get their spinners and wage battle.

The monster charges towards them, headed straight for Larry. Another prisoner intervenes, whipping out his battle ax and taking a swing. He flicks the spinner to figure out whether his blow has landed. If it’s a hit, the monster will roar in pain, and the men will keep taking turns trying to defeat it. If it’s a miss, the player could be wounded – or worse.

The games can go on for months or years, though the number of men in the raiding party gets smaller and smaller over time. Sometimes the men leave for court dates in far-off counties, or are released after a hard-won exoneration. There are also transfers and illnesses – but mostly there are executions. However, D&D is a story, so characters can’t just disappear with no explanation. They have to be written out.

Christopher was a former gang member in San Antonio who was sentenced to death at 20 for a botched convenience store robbery. Years later, he said that death row saved his life. It’s where he found God, and found himself. Even the guards agreed he was a role model for younger, newer prisoners. Not long after the state set his execution date in 2018, his victim’s son forgave him - and begged the parole board to show mercy and to commute Chris’s sentence.

It didn’t work. Chris died under the beige straps of the Huntsville gurney a little after 6 o’clock one evening that summer. But a few days before that, his friends gave him a different ending when they wrote his character out of the game. They let Chris, a silver dragon, achieve godhood. Then they said goodbye.

It was almost a year after that that I said my goodbyes to Larry. By that point, I’d spent almost two years trying to learn about the gaming world he first told me about – even though he never played again. The reason he gave was one I’d heard from a handful of other former players: The state had killed too many of his friends. Even in the wilds of Eberron, the real world kept calling.