Preview: Dungeon Masters - The Players Handbook | Episode 1

August 19, 2024·37 min·3 clips

Dallas Egbert's hidden message — written backward in a Dungeons and Dragons handbook — asks that his body be cremated if found.

The episode opens with a Dungeon Master addressing the listener as William Charles Deere: a real-life Fort Worth, Texas private investigator with an 18 charisma and a 5 wisdom, already famous enough to have been on Johnny Carson and BJ and the Bear. Deere returns home from solving a kidnapping case only to find his wife Betsy and son Bill Junior both frustrated by his persistent unavailability. Bill Junior is heading to a chess tournament he expects his father to miss. A call comes in on the satellite phone and Deere takes it, prompting the DM to roll for resistance — Deere rolls a two, and the phone wins. A second framing device allows the DM to assess dice outcomes that directly parallel Deere's personality flaws. In East Lansing, Deere meets James and Hannah Egbert at a diner. They describe their son Dallas — 16, a self-taught computer programmer who built his own games, a full scholarship student at Michigan State — as having no enemies, no car, no reason to run. Deere holds a press conference, fields questions from reporters, and explains the Deer Method: inhabiting the mental state of the missing subject. Journalist Thelma James quotes a criminal lawyer who calls him more style than substance. Deere deflects but concedes the case is genuinely unusual. He arrives at Dallas's dormitory in Case Hall, talking his way past a receptionist who recognises him from television. A hall neighbour describes Dallas as a quiet loner who kept to himself and was younger than everyone around him. In room 101, Deere finds the room unusually tidy — folded clothes, no food waste — and notes specific items: Star Trek and Joy Division posters, a blacklight dragon poster with Tiamat Must Die written on it, and books including The Hobbit, I Robot, and an Advanced Dungeons and Dragons handbook. He employs the Deer Method, imagining himself as Dallas: a lonely genius who cannot sleep, surrounded by fantasy, isolated by age. Under a ceiling tile he finds drugs. Inside the D&D handbook he finds a note with burned edges written backward, revealed by a mirror to be a cremation request. The Dungeon Master closes by suggesting that whoever left the clues is themselves an expert game-player — a dungeon master.

As heard by us

A tabletop noir opener that treats every clue like a scene change.

The episode opens in tabletop-noir mode, with a hardboiled private investigator at the center, and the fun comes from how often the game mechanics and the performance trade places in the spotlight.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want a detective story where dice rolls can steer the scene.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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