Do Not Listen to Dan

in memory of Daniel Wolf Roemele (1977-2026)

“And the mountains they tried to fall on old Peachy, but he was quite safe because Daniel walked before him. And Daniel never let go of Peachy's hand and Peachy never let go of Daniel's head.” - The Man Who Would Be King¹

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Dan Roemele was my friend. As I discovered in the days since his death, he had lots of friends, more than I knew.

Dan was loud, large, opinionated, and kind, generous, selfless, hard to deal with and easy to talk to. His laugh was large and loud, too, and it came naturally. He laughed a lot and people around him laughed, too.

Dan was extremely private, so private that nobody really knows what his last days were like. From what we have learned, he died peacefully in his sleep. One of us in closer contact with him recalls a series of ailments and small calamities that preceded the terrible quiet that too many of us can recognize, a 21st century silence of unanswered calls and unread texts. Is he busy? In a bad mood? Mad at me? The worst case scenario is unthinkable except in hindsight. Now it feels inevitable.

I Remember the Day I Met Dan

I had just started dating Becky. She was the first girl I ever dated. I moved in with her and she pulled me into her life and I went along happily. She said that her friend was starting a role playing campaign and there was space for us in it.

I have been a TTRPG gamer for most of my life. I specifically loved a system called GURPS and played it a lot with my friends in college. I had tons of sourcebooks and many many hours of game mastering and creating scenarios and worlds for my friends to play characters in. I was almost always the GM of those games and I was excited to find out how other people game mastered.

Dan was living with roommates in a house on Mount Washington. The back of the house was wide open with huge windows overlooking the city below. That house always felt precarious, like it was about to fall into the valley. It creaked and shuddered in the stiff, constant wind.

Dan was tall. He could loom better than anybody I know. He had long hair for the entire time I knew him, but the giant beard came later. He spoke gently and delicately, with a surprising softness. But when it was time for the game, he was on mission and in the lead, confidently at the head of the table with a head full of ideas.

I told him I had a lot of experience playing GURPS and he said “Ugh, I hate GURPS.” I never found out why. He actually played it with me a few times over the years, because he would overlook grudges with a game system if it meant a good time around the table. With Dan, it almost always was that: a good time.

Those first few games were difficult for me! Dan had an adversarial approach to leading a game. While my games tend to be set ups for the players to show off and spend time in the spotlight, Dan was a big believer in consequences. There were no easy answers and no simple solutions.

Dan’s campaigns were like life — if you and your reprobate friends robbed a gangster, then you’d better be ready to spend the rest of the campaign running from him. Our characters never really succeeded at much, but we could take a breather once in a while between calamities that we caused.

The first game I played with Dan was the Wheel of Time RPG — similar to Dungeons and Dragons but set in Robert Jordan’s enormous book series. I hadn’t read the books so the setting was alien to me, but fantasy is fantasy — you can always make a big guy with a big club (or “crub” as Dan would say).

It didn’t matter what character you made, not really — Dan would find a way to stymie their plans, throw mud in their eyes, and make their lives miserable. Most of the time, we made everything worse despite our best attempts. Dan loved giving his players impossible choices and slowly unveiling the next disaster to come out of them.

Star Wars Without Stormtroopers

We played many games with Dan — board games, role playing games, video games — but the games I will most fondly remember are his Star Wars games. The heading of this section will always be my shorthand description of Dan’s Star Wars campaigns.

He set his campaigns in a familiar universe but dropped the characters we made into blisteringly original scenarios that nobody had ever considered for Star Wars, like a space station run by competing groups of criminals, haunted by a medical droid obsessed with experimenting on humans.

Over many years of playing Star Wars campaigns with Dan, I don’t remember our characters ever encountering a stormtrooper. The Empire was an implacable, fascist meatgrinder, not a bunch of bumbling, mustache-twirling Snidely Whiplashes. Our characters never encountered stormtroopers because Dan’s stormtroopers were elite soldiers reserved for important and difficult threats. Our characters were never a threat. They were the smallest of the small timers, barely making a dent and barely surviving.

Dan’s Star Wars games were not about larger-than-life heroes blowing up death stars and fighting with lightsabers. If you ever found a lightsaber, your character wouldn’t know what to do with it and would probably lose a limb. I remember a near total party wipe on a slippery ladder. It was maddening! But it was also so idiosyncratically Dan-specific that it’s impossible not to love it.

When faced with a dilemma or fork in the road during a game, Dan would offer what seemed like sound options. From a different GM, you would think “oh this is what he wants me to do.” Sometimes that was true and it is exactly what Dan wants you do to, but under no circumstances should you do it. We started holding up this sign for the other players when Dan’s suggestions seemed reasonable and one of us seemed about to make a terrible decision.

Dan had a little tic that I will always think about when I think about him. Whenever he was game mastering, and he was about to narrate the next scene of the game, he would pause for a moment to consider what to say, and then make a little throat-clearing noise before unleashing the booming, authoritative declaratives of a dungeon master. I will miss that.

A man of contradictions, he was quiet and reserved in social functions. He hovered at the edges, swaying back and forth on his feet, as far away as possible from the hubbub of a party. He left early if he decided to come at all. At the little celebration of his life last night, we all agreed that he would never have come to it.

He was in his element when he game mastered, like we were seeing the true him. I have only recently learned that I probably wasn’t seeing the true him even then.

The Parable of the Elephant

I’m sure you’ve heard the parable of the blind men and the elephant, the lesson being: you can’t understand something properly if you only ever consider it from a single perspective.

At the celebration of his life, we assembled a picture of our friend Dan from a dozen different perspectives like the blind men in the parable. He revealed one part of himself to some, and another part of himself to others. Maybe everybody is like this, but as we talked and caught up with each other last night, I don’t think any of us really knew Dan. What was the “real Dan?” Only he will ever know, I suppose.

I don’t know if I knew the real Dan, but I know I knew my Dan, and I loved him. He was hard to love sometimes, and stubborn and certain about everything. He was a singular being. He was a bright, blazing light, full of love and overflowing with kindness. Abrasive, yes, but soft. He was always the first to help you move and the last helper to leave.

Sometime in the last few years I had to leave a game early because of some emergency or other, and Dan said “We game tonight in the missing man formation.” It sounds ridiculous and cringe but Dan didn’t care and probably didn’t even notice. It was just the way he talked.

I miss that voice. The world is a colder place without Dan’s warmth in it.

I am sorry that you never got to meet him.

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I’m not the only one who shared his memories of Dan Roemele. I’m going to link to them here as I learn about them. I don’t think Dan had an official obituary so these tributes from his found family shall suffice.

Pierce: Something like a memorial.

Abby: This isn’t enough , but it’s what I have right now.

Shaun Scott: We All Surrender to Tock

Becky (this is taken from her Facebook page, and posted with permission):
It’s been 8 days since I found out you passed away. I haven’t been able to find the words to describe how I’m feeling. You’ve been my best friend for most of my adult life. 17 years now. Your sudden passing has shattered my reality. You’re my rock. My foundation. My support.

You’re the friend who got me my cat Madeline so I’d never be lonely. The friend who brought me food 10 mins before visiting hours were over at the hospital just so I had my favorite pizza after giving birth. You’re the most kind thoughtful person I’ve ever known. I’ve always come to you about everything. Whether it was advice for board games, books or on relationships. You’re the brother I was always meant to have. You’ve been with me through my darkest days and my brightest moments.

My children absolutely adore “Danny” and playing squishy face with you. They don’t understand where you are. They’ve never gone this long without seeing you. I keep reaching for the phone but you’re not there. How can we move forward without you? Our family dinners, Thanksgiving, our late night board games, our silly rifftrax…all these moments you belong.

I’m so grateful that I took so many photos of you. I know you hated it but as long as you were with the kids you tolerated me doing it. We love you so much Daniel Wolf Roemele. With your kindness and love I’ll make sure my children never forget you, because I never will.

1. Dan had a poster of the cover of this movie on his wall when I first met him. I was astonished that anybody even knew about that movie, one that I had loved since I was a kid. It was the first sign to me that Dan was somebody I was going to like.