Fantasy author Garth Nix isn’t primarily known for his connection to Dungeons & Dragons, but it’s something geeky journalists can’t stop asking him about. Best known as the author of the Old Kingdom YA novels (Sabriel, Lirael, Abhorsen, and more), Nix has also written everything from children’s picture books to adult short fiction — and articles about Dungeons & Dragons. Nix ran a D&D game throughout high school and carried on as a tabletop role-player from there, and it shows in his upcoming middle-grade novel We Do Not Welcome Our Ten-Year-Old Overlord, which follows a group of kids as they multitask between navigating an alien invasion and playing D&D. (An excerpt from the book follows this interview.)
That premise may remind savvy readers of Stranger Things’ obsession with Dungeons & Dragons, and the title may call to mind a certain quote from The Simpsons. In an interview ahead of the book’s Oct. 15 release, Nix told Polygon he didn’t have either of those references in mind when he was writing the book, though he did start out with that title, before he even had a whiff of story attached.
“I actually don’t know where I first heard the phrase,” he says. “It was something that was floating in the aether. […] I’m not a huge Simpsons watcher. I mean, like everyone alive, I’ve seen quite a lot of episodes, but I was never a consistent fan.”
Similarly, he’s never watched a complete season of Stranger Things. But he has watched the ’80s movies the show evokes for inspiration — and lived the “kids on bikes” life that inspired those movies in the first place.
“Of course those subconscious influences have to be there,” he says. “You don’t necessarily know what your subconscious is drawing upon. I mean, it’s also — totally coincidentally, to me — the 50th anniversary of D&D this year, but that never crossed my mind either. […] Mainly, [10-Year-Old Overlord] comes directly from my own life, and my own D&D-playing life, from when I was 12 and started playing the game, and no one else knew about it.”
Image: Maeve Norton/Scholastic Press
The story kicks off in 1975 Canberra, Australia, where Nix grew up. 10-Year-Old Overlord’s central kids — 12-year-old friends Kim and Bennie, and their respective younger siblings, Eila and Madir — find a metal sphere in the shallows of a neighborhood lake, initially thinking it looks like a severed head. It turns out to be an alien artifact that bonds with Eila and begins communicating with her telepathically. The sphere, which Eila names Aster, exhibits some suspicious behavior, from creating mysterious clouds to killing local animals.
“It’s very much a personal story,” Nix says. “It begins with an event that actually happened to myself and several of my friends — we found something in the lake that we thought was a cut-off head for about 15 minutes. And with some debating — ‘Should we go look at it?’ ‘No, I don’t want to go look at it.’ ‘You sure it’s a head?’ — we did go and look at it, and it was, in fact, a stone with lake weed growing around it that looked like hair.”
The book winds up reflecting Nix’s own D&D fandom, with the kids geeking out over the publication of The World of Greyhawk and getting granular about their character builds. Nix even publishes a few pages of maps and notes in the back of the book from his own high school game, all created when he was 15. Where other authors might have replaced D&D in this story with a generic equivalent, Nix says that for him, it had to be the real thing.
“I never even considered making up a game,” he says. “I guess my basic philosophy with fantasy in general is to try and use as much real stuff as you can. If your foundation is as real as possible, then the fantastic elements you put on top will work better. So I didn’t even think about it, to be honest. It’s 1975 — what else would they be playing? I guess in a few years, it could have been Empire of the Petal Throne, or Tunnels & Trolls, or even Traveller, a few years later. But it just seemed to me that those kids at that time — even a slightly alternate time — that’s what they would have been playing.”
Nix still occasionally runs RPGs, when he can find time. “I’ve been running a game set in the world of my book Angel Mage, which is kind of The Three Musketeers with angelic magic, using the Flashing Blades rules, which is another very old game,” he says. “I’ve been running for two players in the U.K., two in Adelaide, one in Melbourne, so necessarily online, and just much more difficult. The scheduling is just an absolute nightmare.”
Much as when he was a teenager, he’s much more likely to be the GM of any given game than a player. He says that as a teenager, he just couldn’t find anyone else willing to run a game — but that dynamic probably helped his career in the end.
“I do think I love being a storyteller,” he says. “I love the whole process of creating a cooperative story in role-playing, and it was undeniably a great apprenticeship for being a writer. So I should be grateful to them, perhaps, that they kind of forced me to be the GM.”
Below, read a chapter from We Do Not Welcome Our Ten-Year-Old Overlord. At this point in the story, Eila is spending more and more time with the alien sphere, Aster, and her brother Kim and his best friend Bennie are worried. The other members of their D&D group, Theo and Tamara, haven’t been let in on the secret yet.
Image: Maeve Norton/Scholastic Press
The rest of the week passed in a blur for Kim. He hardly spoke to Bennie, something that had never happened before. He did his schoolwork, did his chores at home, did all his homework himself. He didn’t sleep well, and several times woke up to hear Eila going out in the middle of the night. But he didn’t follow her.
All the adults talked about the cloud more and more. His parents, the teachers, the scientists who came to the farm, everyone. But they all still accepted it as a bizarre natural phenomenon and expected it to eventually dissipate or blow away.
Kim expected it to get thicker and more widespread. So he was astonished when he went out on Friday morning to go to school and saw the sun shining in an almost entirely blue sky. There was only a small remnant of the cloud, lurking directly above the mountain. It was about one-tenth the size it had been the night before, and it was coming apart, wisps trailing off and blowing away.
Eila was already outside, with her bike. She was looking up at the sky.
“Something go wrong?” asked Kim. Eila turned her head to look at him.
“With the cloud,” Kim continued. “Aster was doing that, wasn’t she?”
Eila nodded slowly. “An experiment I wanted her to try. But it was getting too much attention. And we learned what we need to know. Nothing for you to worry about, Kim.”
Kim felt cursed to have a younger sister who treated him like he was five years old. It was infuriating.
“I am worried!” he shouted. “Why does Aster need it to be cloudy? Why can’t she come out in the sun? She’s like a vampire or something.”
“Aster is nothing like a vampire,” said Eila, her voice running as cold as Kim’s ran hot. “There are no such things as vampires.”
“So what’s her problem with sunshine?”
Eila looked back up at the sky. “Aster has no problem with sunshine.”
“Why don’t you go get her, then?” asked Kim. “Bring her out. I’ve never seen her in the sun. You two always sneak around at night.”
Eila sighed and returned her gaze to her brother. He didn’t find it comfortable. Eila looked at him the same way she looked at the weeds she had to pull out of the carrot beds. “We have to go to school. Forget about Aster. You really don’t have to worry about her, Kim.”
“I wish I could forget her,” grumbled Kim. “Can’t you please, please get rid of her?”
“She’s my friend,” said Eila. “I’m helping her learn. When she’s learned enough, I’m going to get her to help us.”
“Eila! Why not just check with some grown-ups about what you want to do? Talk to the scientists, tell them about Aster. How about Professor Lowton? You like her—”
“No,” said Eila. “Aster doesn’t want anyone to know about her, particularly adults. You really need to stop worrying, Kim. Aster is studying our world, that’s all. We’ve learned all we need to know about the weather. The cloud won’t come back.”
“And the ants, and the kangaroo, and the guinea pigs—”
“We’ll be late. You need to get going.”
“I’ll go after you. I don’t care if I’m late.”
“Don’t try and do anything to Aster,” warned Eila. “She is perfectly harmless, unless you do something that makes her defend herself.”
“I’m not going to try anything. I really am going to school!” protested Kim. “I’m just letting you leave first.”
Kim always left first. Eila followed a bit later. That’s how it had always been.
“Bennie will be waiting for you,” Eila pointed out.
“She can wait,” Kim replied bitterly. “Go!”
Eila shrugged, got on her bike, and rode away.
Kim stood by his own bike, just holding the handlebars, looking up at the sky again. Maybe the fact that it had cleared was a good sign. He wished there was something he could do. He wished that Bennie would help him, or that he could make things be normal again.
His father came into the shed from the other side, carrying a tray of seedlings that would be picked up and taken by car to the university or the government laboratories.
“Kim! Why are you still here? You’ll be late!”
“I know! I know!” Kim didn’t know why he felt so angry. Angry and helpless. He got on his bike and rode off, with Darwin Basalt staring after him.
Bennie was still waiting for him, outside her house. Eila and Madir were already almost out of sight.
“Hey! You’re late,” said Bennie. “We’ll have to race.”
Kim grunted but did not speed up. Bennie rode around him in a circle.
“Come on!” she said. “It’s assembly morning. You know you’ll have to see the Skull if we get there after nine.”
The Skull was their name for the deputy principal, who had a very thin face and never smiled. All the kids were frightened of him, entirely based on how he looked. As far as Kim knew, he never actually did anything except loom up unexpectedly.
“You go,” he said miserably. “I don’t care if I have to see the Skull.”
“Come on, Kim. Look up! The sky’s blue, it’s a beautiful day. Also I’ve got a surprise for you. A present.”
Interest flickered through Kim’s gloom. “A present? It isn’t my birthday.”
“Yeah, well, it’s kind of a present for me too.” Bennie circled again and matched speed with Kim, but immediately started to speed up again. Instinctively, he did too. “And for Theo and Tamara.”
“The D and D group?” asked Kim, now really interested. “What is it?”
“You’ll see,” said Bennie, speeding up again. “Lunchtime.”
“Wait! What is it?” yelled Kim, standing up to pedal harder. It was always difficult for him to keep up on his heavy old bike when Bennie really went for it on her ten-speed.
They got to school at two minutes before nine, rushing in just in time for morning assembly, under the watchful gaze of the Skull.
All through the morning, Bennie refused to talk about whatever it was she’d got for Kim. Kim kept asking her about it, and before long they were talking together just like they always did, even getting into trouble from Mrs. Thompson, who made them move seats. Even at recess, Bennie wouldn’t reveal what was coming, laughing at Kim’s guesses of new dice, a practice sword, a wizard’s hat, or the metal figurines they knew existed but had never seen.
Finally, at lunchtime, Bennie gathered Theo and Tamara, who from their smiles already knew what was coming. The four of them clustered under one of the big oak trees at the far end of the oval, where only the sixth graders were allowed to go.
Bennie produced a big manilla envelope and handed it to Kim.
“This is for all of us,” she said. “But you’ll look after it, Kim.”
Kim knew instantly that it was D&D related. He could feel the shape of a book inside, the same size as the original rule books. But it was thicker. The flap of the envelope wasn’t stuck down, so he flicked it back, reached in, and pulled out the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.
Greyhawk. A supplement to Dungeons & Dragons!
Image via Mcfearless/Ebay
“I got it yesterday afternoon,” said Bennie. “I went to the games shop after my dentist appointment and it was just there.”
Kim flicked through the pages.
“There’s a new kind of fighter called a paladin,” he said, marveling. “And a thief class!”
“I read through it last night,” said Bennie. “There are a ton of new monsters. And magic items. And spells.”
“What’s this thing on the cover?” asked Kim. “The floating globe with the tentacles?”
“They’re not tentacles,” Bennie explained. “They’re eyes on stalks. Each eye can cast a different spell. It’s called a Beholder.”
Kim flicked through the book to find the entry.
“‘Also called a Sphere of Many Eyes,’” he read. “‘Or Eye Tyrant.’ Like Aster, but with eyes…”
“Aster?” asked Theo.
“Oh, nothing,” said Kim hurriedly, with a swift glance at Bennie. “Something in a story. This is amazing! Magic users have new spells, up to ninth level!”
“Let me see that!” exclaimed Theo, craning in closer.
“You don’t get any ninth-level spells until you’re level eighteen,” cautioned Bennie.
“Wow, at the rate we’ve advanced so far, that’s going to take, let’s see…” Theo started to calculate but Tamara was quicker.
“Six years, playing forty out of fifty-two Sundays every year,” she said. “We’ll be in the last year of high school by then!”
“If we’re still playing,” said Kim. What he really meant was, If Aster doesn’t destroy us first.