The Sunday Read: ‘The Dungeons & Dragons Players of Death Row’

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 8 October 2023

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The first time Tony Ford played Dungeons & Dragons, he was a wiry Black kid who had never seen the inside of a prison. His mother, a police officer in Detroit, had quit the force and moved the family to West Texas. To Ford, it seemed like a different world. Strangers talked funny, and El Paso was half desert. But he could skateboard in all that open space, and he eventually befriended a nerdy white kid with a passion for Dungeons & Dragons. Ford fell in love with the role-playing game right away; it was complex and cerebral, a saga you could lose yourself in. And in the 1980s, everyone seemed to be playing it. The game has since become one of the most popular in the world, celebrated in nostalgic television shows and dramatized in movies. It is played in homes, at large conventions and even in prisons. When Ford, who is now on death row, first overheard the other men playing D.&D., they were engaged in a fast, high-octane version. The gamers were members of the Mexican Mafia, an insular crew that let Ford into their circle after they realized he could draw. The gang’s leader, Spider, pulled some strings, Ford recalls, and got him moved to a neighboring cell to serve as his personal artist. Ford earned some money drawing intricate Aztec designs in ink. He also began to join their D.&D. sessions, eventually becoming a Dungeon Master and running games all over the row.

Transcript

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0:00.0	On a sunny morning in a lush area of Eberon, Arthax Deaconeth was hard at work on a new invention.
0:12.0	Arthax could cast spells to control the elements, manipulate electricity, or send walls of fire
0:20.0	raging across enemy battlefields. He hoped his creation would end the century of war,
0:26.0	but suddenly a green fog swept in. Arthax fired a spell to stop the fog,
0:34.0	but the fog used Arthax's own spell to attack him.
0:38.0	What happened next was completely up to chance, like the odds of a 20-sided die kind of chance,
0:44.0	because Arthax wasn't a real person, obviously.
0:48.0	He was a character in a Dungeons & Dragons campaign, led by a Texas death row prisoner, named Billy Wardlow.
0:58.0	My name's Carrie Blakeinger, and I'm a contributor to the New York Times magazine.
1:02.0	I'm based in Los Angeles, and I write about jails and prisons.
1:06.0	This week's Sunday read is an article I wrote for the magazine about how the man on Texas death row played Dungeons & Dragons,
1:14.0	and how two prisoners used that fantasy game to overcome the extreme isolation of death row,
1:20.0	and forge a friendship in a place built to prevent that.
1:25.0	Texas has almost 200 people on death row. Those are people who were convicted of capital murder and sentenced to be executed.
1:33.0	Since the 1970s, the state has executed more people than any other.
1:38.0	It's often thought of as the sort of capital of capital punishment.
1:42.0	People on death row there wait somewhere around 20 years for execution, and they live in extreme isolation.
1:50.0	During those years, they spend almost their entire days in a cell the size of a large elevator.
1:56.0	Sometimes the men say they don't get to go outside or take showers for days or weeks.
2:01.0	They're not allowed to have jobs in the prison, and the only time that they regularly have physical contact with another human being
2:08.0	is when the guards handcuff them to take them out of their cells.
2:13.0	I started covering Texas death row around 2016.
	...

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