Ethan Gilsdorf, Author, Occasional Knight

Princeton’s a big town. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

Case in point – if you weren’t at Trinity Church Monday evening, like we were, you never would have heard this comment:

Man: Yeah, I really need to put some sleeves on my chain mail. Maybe that’s my project for the winter.

The occasion? Journalist Ethan Gilsdorf, author of, Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks, was doing a reading and book signing. And the audience, if not large, was seriously colorful.

A full rundown after the jump!

Gilsdorf, a journalist, traveled around the world, trying to figure out what makes fantasy and role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons so appealing to their players.

Gilsdorf himself played D&D as a teenager, but gave the game up in college. But the recent release of the Lord of the Rings movie reignited his passion for fantasy, and he decided to figure out why the genre has such a draw for him and others.

Our favorite new term for the night was “LARPing,” which means Live Action Role Playing. As it was described to us by an excited man in the audience, you run around a battlefield, hitting opponents with weapons made of PVC pipe covered in insulation and wrapped up with duct tape. Which actually sounds sort of fun. If uber-geeky.

And that was sort of the point. If being a dungeon master or LARPing your ass off floats your boat, Gilsdorf said go for it. And we’re inclined to agree. Wave that Geek flag. Let it fly.