We asked members of the community to share with us their memories of playing Realms with Dave. If you have any you'd like to share on future posts please email them to the editor's desk at je.denar@gmail.com.
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by Robyn Nielsen
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From Sara Jessop:
I was asked to ‘write a short blurb or story about Dave’, but trying to condense Dave down into a ‘short blurb’ is nigh impossible. Zarine is only Zarine because of Dave. I developed her entirely through writing, which never would have happened without his encouragement, so really the fact that I’m a writer who writes too much is his fault.
Years ago I floated the idea of writing a basic bitch column for The View called I Can’t Even. He encouraged me to do it, even though I was nervous, so I wrote a ridiculous article about pumpkin spice. Reading that article now, I hate it. Truth is, it wasn’t great. But Dave encouraged me to keep fucking going. So I did.
Later, when I was going through a particularly rough time, he tried to encourage me not to quit. He pointed out to me ways that I could separate myself from my character.I didn’t want to hear it. But I needed to. He helped me to see that while I was upset because people weren’t considering the person behind my character, I was doing the same thing. Ultimately I decided to take a break, but when I came back I took that advice he’d given me and applied it to my blog. That blog almost didn’t happen either. I was nervous after what had happened, but I went back and read this: ‘I do hope you will find another outlet, though. You're a very talented and entertaining writer.’ I believe he meant that, because Dave did not say things he didn’t mean. So once again, I kept fucking going.
When I got snubbed by the Peacocks I was hurt and angry. He taught me that titles and clubs aren’t what make you great and I wasn’t ‘less than’ because I was rejected. Through every time I was shunned, I remembered he taught me that people aren't always going to like who I am, and those people will be more vocal than the people who do. I could be angry about it or I could keep fucking going. I’ll admit that I embraced the power of ‘and’ in this case, but the fact remains that I’m sure I wouldn’t be in the Order today if it wasn’t for him.
The last message I have from him says, ‘I'm just getting caught up on your recent articles and wanted to drop a quick note to say that I'm glad you're writing again and they were, as always, a pleasure to read.’ I don’t know if he ever realized how much of who I became in the Realms was due to him. How many times I kept fucking going because he encouraged me to. How much he did that for so many people and how much of him is in all of us. How much he meant to individuals and to the community. I can only hope that he did.
Dave was the very best of us. The amount of people who’ve said they wouldn’t be who they are today without him is staggering. He gave us ‘Vawn’s rule of awesome’, encouraged all of us to ‘keep fucking going’ and to ‘be kind to each other’. He was an inspiration in so many ways, but for me the most important was his ability to be honest without cruelty or bias. He’d tell his best friend that they were wrong and his worst enemy (if he had one) that they were right. Doesn’t matter who you are, he’d disagree with you in a way that still made you feel heard and valid. It’s a completely lost art but something that is so necessary for communities to have. I hope that he taught enough of us to be kind, to be understanding, and to listen. I hope enough of us will ‘be the things you loved most about the people who are gone’. I hope there is enough of Dave in all of us to keep fucking going. I hope we make him proud.
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| by Michelle LaPlant |
From Athena Teatum:
Dave Hayden played the best paladin I've ever seen, in any game anywhere. He played the role of the true hero to the hilt, and his character, Sir Vawn, is always going to be synonymous with that in my head.
So. It was my second year in the Realms. I was a newbie at an event run by Carrie, all set in this strange manor, and I was following around a group of older players. They wanted to do a ritual, but there was too much noise and distraction around, so we took over a small side room and shooed out a few other people so we wouldn't be disturbed.
One of those people apparently was upset that we had taken the room, and started spreading rumors that we were doing something evil in there.
This is where Dave's character comes in.
I'm not exactly sure what those people told him but I do distinctly remember opening the door to find myself inches from an angry mob, and, more importantly, the business end of Vawn's pike.
He demanded to know what we were doing, and little baby newbie me barely stammered out "we... we were trying to summon a lich's soul jar to us so we could disenchant it without the lich catching on to what we were doing?"
And Vawn just kind of stared at me for a second before lowering his pike and responding something along the lines of "Oh. Well. That sounds good. Did it work? Do you need any help?"
Meanwhile the butler of the manor, who was secretly the Lich, had overheard our conversation and was bolting out the door. Vawn was on him in a flash.
It was just such a slapstick moment and very and keeping with both of our characters and I think it sums him up to a T. He was unquestionably dedicated to doing what he thought was the right thing, a terrifying force to stand against, but when he was on your side, you knew everything was going to be okay.
I'll miss you, Dave. I'll miss LARPing alongside you and going to Ani DiFranco concerts with you. Please consider this my best attempt to sing you into the Summerlands.
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by Casey Lemay
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From Sarah Fournier:
I’ve only had a few interactions with Dave Hayden, but every single one of them was pleasant. The very first time I met him was at Queen of Hearts 1018. It was a month after my dad, Decion had his stroke. I was still in a haze. We were standing under the awning of the gun club, looking out at the Chess field. He introduced himself to me, with tears in his eyes, and said something highly complimentary of my dad. I don’t remember exactly, but I think he said that my dad is one of the best men he’s ever known. At this point in time, I had recently shed 100 gallons of tears and was too numb to cry more.
I smiled woefully and thanked him, and he gave me a warm hug. He said that he wanted to do something for my family, treat us to dinner at our favorite restaurant or anything to take a bit of the burden away. I didn’t know at the time that he understood exactly the pain we were going through. I wish that I had had the capacity to cry in that moment, because knowing what I know now, he would have been safe to cry with, and mourning with someone who knew my dad would have really helped me. I was so numb to everything then, and I wished I had been able to react better because I could tell Dave was a truly caring man.
After Queen of Hearts, I’d see Dave at my occasional visits to Lowell fight practice. He was always kind, genuine, and helpful. I wish I could have the honor of practicing with him for years to come. I am so grateful for the few interactions I have had with him. Reading everyone’s beautiful stories has even further shown me how lucky I was to have those moments with him. He is the pinnacle of a Good Man, and he has truly inspired me, and The Realms, to be better.
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| by Dustin Mack |
From Ethan Goldman:
I met Dave Hayden waaay back in October 14, 2014, I know this date exactly because it was my birthday! Oh boy howdy. And I was gonna spend it playing video games and eating at a restaurant.
I was in school heading from the library to my Introduction to Public Health class. For some reason there were these 3 losers dressed up in armor in the middle of the south campus Gazebo wearing ponchos. "Well, what's this", I thought, so I went to check it out.
They were selling Cider for the Realms! 1 dollar for a cup. "What's the Realms?" I asked the three, who I found out were Swoop, Steve Anthony, and Vawn. "You see the realms is a LARP." Well whats a larp?
"Its kinda like DnD but you can do this?" He picks up a sort of toothpick and poked Anthony with it, who dropped dead instantly. And that was AMAZING to me, I mean I basically dropped out of the DnD club the week before and I needed something to do, and it was REAL. Kinda, it felt more real. "Wow that's amazing." I said, repeating myself. "You know it's my birthday today."
So Vawn, knight that he is, said "you know what, you can have some cider for free. We have practice every Tuesday, so we will be in that creepy building over there tonight!"
So I drank my cider and latter that day I WENT HOME! It was my birthday after all, I had plans. But the next week, ho boy, I showed up.
And I was bad! Really bad, so bad that my first event in just a few weeks later I got kidnapped! Not only did I not know they could do that, I'VE NEVER SEEN ANYONE ELSE GET KIDNAPPED ;n;
But Vawn said, "Ya know what, it's difficult just to show up, so lets celebrate your first event with SWORD MAKING" and I learned how to make swords. (And I immediately forgot, If i don't have the instructions in my face I forgot how to do anything, thats why you have to check in spell books).
So flash forward several years to the ECHOES OF RAGNAROK. Allow me to explain, EOR is a quest series created by Jason Rosa with a simple plot. Sure you guys destroyed Bedlam but what about the SOCIOECONOMIC PLANNING? YOU GOTTA BUILD INFRASTRUCTURE BOYS WE ARE VIKINGS NOT PIRATES!
And Vawn said "Wow I love laws, but man I remember having a nation, I should ask some of my friends to join me." So somehow I got asked to make a Eagle's rook alt. I don't think Dave asked me directly, he has a sense of self preservation, but I was asked and that genie left the bottle in the first Aladdin movie.
So naturally I, being 2015's greatest newbie, had the perfect plan for a character, I just needed the rubber stamp. So I go to Vawn and go "Hey I got a character idea, for my Eagle's rook Alt, but first I gotta get something confirmed. You know how Eagle's rook a police state, right?"
And he said "No."
But you have to understand my confusion. I come from Neden, a land where the first, second and third autocratic despots have each said "Rules are meant to be broken", we aren't a civilization we are a perpetual frat party about drinking and partying. In fact if you think about it, all of the North is like that. Neden likes drinking and hates structure, Grimloch likes drinking and hating the undead.
And Invictus likes drinking and hating Grimloch.
So I was in a bit of a pickle so I say "Okay but hear me out."
And Vawn, despite his better judgement did.
"See you guys hate undead and stuff, and you got these prisons, so I got a idea for a character who is like the Iron Mask yeah? Hes a prisoner locked away for his dangerous crimes and is just referred to as a number, but hes allowed out on parole work, like saving someone elses planet.
And it took a bit but me and Janna convinced him that the character was worth running. Thus entered Prisoner 37, a hard man doing hard times.
And im minding my business, enjoying the crisp Norlund air and i meet Chimeron. And Kovaks, curious about the strange man in irons, wanted to know just what I was doing penance for.
So I answered. 37's crime... Serial Jaywalking.
You see there was a rotary and thats like 6 different roads so when you just run across it, well what can they do?
So after a bit of socializing and Prisoner 37 learning his tattoo was on backwards cause he did it in the mirror, Kovaks ends up talking to Vawn "Hey did you really just give this guy life imprisonment for Jaywalking."
And Vawn, who was never super into the idea, responded with the tired patience of people who dont get into winter drama. "Well you know." He shrugged.
"Jay walking is dangerous. He could've gotten someone hurt."
And Vawn didn't need to play into a bit done at his nations expense just for someone else's joke, but he did it anyway.
And on a side note, if I was never handed a glass of free cider i would have never learned what LARP was, and I wouldnt have met any one I hang out with now, my entire social interactions are precipitated on that one random ad campaign. So thats a fun tidbit.
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From Greg Falconer:
I think my favorite story of Dave would be a past feast of Leviathan. We were doing a Viking themed thing for Torolf and Dave was wearing very dark makeup around his eyes. Dave set everything up and the fight went perfectly. However, after this he had to play Vawn and the make up didn’t fully come off his eyes. I had switched back to Daekara and went to talk to him. I asked him how great the fights were in the summerlands where he got two blackeyes. Dave got this silly smile and just started poking me in the stomach for the rest of the event telling me to stop being a wise guy. He looked so happy in that moment that I want to remember him looking like that.
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| by Cal Marsden |
From Jason Rosa:
I think a notable hallmark of Dave's character, Vawn, was that he was so much of a "good guy" that it often brought out the cracks in other people's "good guy" personas. There are probably a hundred examples of this but one always comes to mind.
In the early 2000s, a few years after we started playing, it somehow became very in vogue to throw plots that had a lot of moral ambiguity. In fact, Dave had lost his first character, Kethrellen the Red, because of how he tried to do what he thought was best in a very morally ambiguous moment and I have to believe that a lot of the reasons behind his conception of Vawn were because he wanted to be in a position where he could always know he was doing the right thing.
When I came up with the idea for the What Lurks Beneath plot I really wanted to avoid moral ambiguity. It was a very simple - there are trolls worshiping an eldritch horror demon thing under ground and you, the heroes, need to just get rid of all of that nonsense. Dave remarked to me on a couple of occasions how much he enjoyed having a plot that drew the good-guy-bad-guy line so clearly.
Well, that was until the third event in the series, where things sort of went awry. Don't get me wrong, there was nothing morally ambiguous about how I WROTE the event but the PCs managed to invent their own conception of what was happening. They thought that they specifically had to unleash an evil demon onto the Realms in order to kill it. That, in fact, was not the plot at all but there was no way of telling them that.
Vawn, who had reached that same erroneous conclusion along with everyone else, decided to be resolute and tell the questing party that they were all going to stop and that they were not going to be allowed to continue to release this (completely fabricated) demon. Of course no one wanted to straight up challenge Vawn but they did want to continue the quest because that's what questers do, regardless of the questionable outcome.
So instead of fighting him on it, one of the party's spell casters that had a lot of divination (I remember who it is but I'm not going to throw them under the bus) grabbed me and walked me over to the side. They told me that they were going to pretend to cast a divination spell but not ACTUALLY cast a divination spell and calling me over was part of the ruse. After a little prop-work and hocus pocus they marched back over to the questing party and confidently announced that their divinations had told them that releasing the demon was the right thing to do and that Vawn had to suck it up and help. He begrudgingly went along with it.
The ironic thing is, of course, if that caster had actually used the spell then I could have just used that opportunity to tell them that their assumption was way off in the first place.
After the event Dave expressed his frustration with me that I would have written such a plot twist into an event series that I had touted would not have those kinds of moral issues. I know I should have kept the OOC secret but I just couldn't handle his cold, judgmental stare. I explained to him that he was tricked and that that divination spell was never actually cast. I don't think that made him any happier though.
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| by Angie Gray |
