Robbie Wheeling starts college at Grant University and soon develops a group of friends, all of whom have personal problems and issues.

Through the course of playing the game, Robbie and Kate begin a romantic relationship; he confides in her that he still has nightmares about his missing brother.

He proposes playing his new game in a disused and condemned cavern, and dismisses the warnings from his friends – who reluctantly agree to participate.

During the actual spelunking, Robbie experiences a psychotic episode involving the last time he saw his brother, and hallucinates that he has slain a monster called a Gorvil.

He sees blood on his knife, then his bloodied clothes in a window, and breaks out of his delusions long enough to call Kate from a payphone.

He then tells his shocked friends of a great evil lurking in the forest across the lake, believing that it threatens the lives of the "innkeeper" and his wife.

[1] Jaffe based the novel on inaccurate newspaper stories about the disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III from Michigan State University in 1979.

Early media accounts overemphasized Egbert's participation in fantasy role playing, speculating that his hobby of Dungeons & Dragons might have been a factor in his disappearance.

Jaffe's account was read by many as a legitimate depiction of role-playing games, as many of her readers had no prior knowledge of the subject.