In the basement of a Silver Spring corner shop, you could explore a new world. Start a barroom brawl. Maybe haggle your way into parenting a baby dragon.

Well, at least that’s what my team of adventurers did over more than two hours playing Dungeons & Dragons earlier this month at Pure Panic Comics & Games.

Folks of all ages, stripes and interests come to Pure Panic to rummage through bins of Pokémon or Magic: The Gathering cards and then stay — sometimes for hours. They chat about comics or play tabletop games such as D&D.

The space at 8317 Fenton St. has been home to a few iterations of comic book store. This latest edition started in April, when Alaa Alaeddin became a partner in the business.

He had spent plenty of time online with other geeks, but he felt a disconnect and a desire to stake out a physical spot near his home to build a community.

“To me, it’s more valuable that someone is a member of my community than a customer,” Alaeddin said, pointing toward people shooting the breeze at the rear of the store.

“It’s like family in the sense that we bicker here together and hang out and everyone has their role.”

Alaeddin, 36, grew up in Bethlehem, in the West Bank, and immigrated to the United States when he was 12. The Silver Spring resident works in financial services, but he spent spare time collecting Pokémon cards and flipping them online.

That hobby was lucrative, he said, but the time negotiating with faceless buyers with insatiable trading-card appetites drained him.

The shop now does the opposite, he said — an inclusive, in-person gathering spot that reflects his regulars and his heritage. Pure Panic proudly displays a Pride flag and a Palestinian flag in its front window.

“The Pride flag wasn’t always displayed so high up. And the Palestinian flag was hidden — it wasn’t so obvious,” he said. “I did it this way to show there’s no ambiguity where we stand and the idea of propping up marginalized voices is central to what I’m hoping to do always.”

D&D therapy

More than 200 Pure Panic patrons communicate on Discord, an online messaging platform, to organize in-person or virtual games — or just schmooze.

Dungeons & Dragons draws one of the store’s larger communities. I had never played the famous game, created in 1974, despite seeming and looking very much like a guy who knows chaotic good from chaotic evil. (That was a D&D joke. Not sure I landed it.)

But D&D seems ever more intertwined with pop culture. “Stranger Things,” another cultural property I’ve never engaged with, uses the narrative framework of a D&D campaign in a coming-of-age tale. And the 2023 film “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves,” starring Chris Pine, is an underrated comedy gem.

My Banner colleague Rondez Green is something of a celebrity in the D&D world, so I recruited him to be my guide through this realm. He recruited Ryan Mossbarger, a Hyattsville resident and fellow D&D personality who frequents Pure Panic, to be our group’s dungeon master — the person who dreams up the fantastical scenarios. And we were matched with a new pal from Pure Panic’s Discord, John Virak, 21, of Hyattsville.

Mossbarger, 33, started playing the game in his rural North Carolina hometown when he was 6, but his otherwise artistic-leaning parents told him there would be “no devil worship in the house,” he said. He concocted his own games to play throughout his childhood, which he said were effectively D&D knockoffs, and didn’t pick the real thing back up until he graduated from D.C.’s George Washington University.

During the pandemic, the game made the move with him and his now-wife to Texas, where it was a life raft of social contact, said Mossbarger, an engineer for the Navy. But the whole time he played online, Mossbarger was itching to get back to a place like Pure Panic to play in person with friends.

“That’s why [D&D] resonates with a lot of people, because it is a social tool,” Mossbarger said. “It’s not like necessarily group therapy, but it’s a good opportunity to get like a group of people together — you can talk about yourself — and like if you are working through something, you can make a character that maybe is going through the same thing.

“In your day-to-day life, you can’t take down some evil figure that is keeping you down. You have to wait for laws and courts and stuff like that to stop climate change or crazy billionaires that ruin the world. But in a game like this, you can do it yourself.”

Avoiding apocalypse

The quest that Mossbarger guided our group through in Pure Panic’s subterranean storage-turned-play-space was nominally about traversing caves for mysterious treasures.

Virak was a wise cleric who ensured the spirits were behind us. Green was a brave fighter who could take on any foe. I chose a dastardly rogue character who wanted to stir things up just for the hell of it.

But the bulk of our time was spent doing improvisational comedy through these loose premises, which Green and Mossbarger assured me was par for the course.

We negotiated with an impish being who seemed to hint at the end of the world. We barely made it through one of several caves by sneaking, fighting and sweet-talking. We thought about whether we had plans to continue the game in the days ahead.

If we did, we’d know where to go.