There be dungeon masters, warlords and oversized feet when you forsake reality to visit these enchanted realms.

Who hasn’t in a moment of adolescent alienation (or, OK, midlife alienation) longed for a world of dragons, swords, green hills, taverns and (depending upon one’s orientation) maidens spilling out of dirndls, or Mr Orlando Bloom and his well-strung bow. In the past, such bucolic reveries, though heart-warming, have hardly been considered appropriate fodder for grown-up conversations, but as the 21st century meanders along prosaically it looks as if this might be set to change. Whether it’s the explosion of magical young adult fiction in the wake of Ms JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series, the long-overdue big-screen adaptation of Mr JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings in the noughties or the nation-sweeping craze that is HBO’s Game of Thrones (which is currently grimly romping its way into a fifth season), there’s obviously something about fantasy that, in this bleakly digital world, has become immensely appealing – in 2015, there’s no escaping the escapists. So, to avoid being pitilessly ostracised by this jolly, mead-swilling bunch, you could do worse than boning up on the following five tribes, running the full gamut of fantasy fans, from the elders to the initiates. Nod sagely, and read on.

The elves sing of a time (sheesh, they’re always singing), infuriatingly non-specific, tantalisingly magnificent, in which a great darkness – possibly a metaphor for industrialisation – fell over the world. (Which, leafy, hilly, green is a bit like Britain in the years before Pret A Manger.) In the midst of this darkness, a great lord (pipe-smoking Oxford academic Mr JRR Tolkien) forged the Tomes of Power. First came The Hobbit. Then The Silmarillion (which wasn’t as good, and remained unpublished until later). But the third, and final tome The Lord of the Rings, of course, was destined to be the One Book To Rule Them All. It was given to our hero, an “imaginative sort” (as his parents put it), in his early tweens, and came with a terrible burden: an infinite, overwhelming supply of unconquerable fantasy clichés. Orcs; wizards; rousing sing-alongs; male bonding – it’s all in there. Bewitched by a series of enchanting footnotes, he sank deeper into the lore of the tome, discussing finer points at the meetings of his local Smial (or branch) of the Tolkien Society, to the point at which his quest became not just a mind trip up Mount Doom, but an academic pursuit. He’s no longer a Ringer but a Tolkienist, which means, as well as secretly wishing he had long blonde hair and played a medieval instrument, he’s read Mr Tolkien’s translation of S_ir Gawain and the Green Knight_. His quest, to convince the world that The Lord of the Rings is, in fact, the literary keystone of the 20th century, is a pre-internet cause, but with the possibilities of the digital age it erupts in screen names with lots of italics and apostrophes and angry blog posts titled “No I don’t speak Elvish, and actually, there are two types of Elvish so the question doesn’t make sense.” Make sure never to say the word “Narnia” in his presence – Mr Tolkien was not a fan.

Welcome to the world of Dungeons and Dragons, the role-playing game, invented by Messrs Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in 1974, whose only real boundaries are marked by the human imagination! And, yes, the ability to remember how exactly you play the damn thing. Broadly speaking, we start with an adventurer: by day he’s probably a nice enough fellow, kind to animals, generally well-liked at work, but once he pops open a tube of Pringles, unsheathes that imaginary sword and enters into what is known as a “dungeon” (key to the D&D world is that there’s an Escher-like subterranean labyrinth under almost every rock), the claws come out. He’s no longer a human but a drow (faintly worrying white-haired black-skinned elf) with an alignment of “chaotic evil”. This means that at any given moment he’s liable to douse his friends in a “nightmarish bubbling potion” (you roll dice for some reason here) or drop an “occult leech” (frantically try to look this up in a 1,000-page “bestiary” book) down one of his party’s “hard leather jerkins” (too exhausted to work out what these actually do). “I’m not doing it on purpose,” he’ll say, sour cream and chive dust dancing round his mad, mad eyes, “I’m just being true to my alignment.” His friends, rifling through sheets of notes (“how can I have minus hit points?”), have no choice but to comply. At long last, he gives up trying to conceal his destructive tendencies and announces, for next week’s game, he’ll be Dungeon Master. Several people make excuses, and don’t turn up. The rest feel the power of his might (roll some more dice), via the slow reveal of a series of horrific half-trolls (presumably the traumatised product of a messy mountain divorce), swinging sawblades (should be exciting, but it’s actually – you guessed it – just another excuse for dice) and unearthly emanations (these don’t appear to be in the rulebook – that got thrown out the window long ago). In days of yore, this character’s peculiar talents might have been put to good use by amiable chaps such as Ivan the Terrible or, perhaps, that fun old gang at the Spanish Inquisition. In 2015 though, this is the only way he can exercise his megalomaniacal urges.

Spoilers are coming. Because – know this – the Game of Thrones fandom is a land divided by warring clans. To the north, freezing, unpleasant, brutal, ridiculously raunchy, the House of Killjoy (who read the books first) lives a stoic existence, standing around in the snow, looking serious, pretending the works of their treasured god Gurm (Mr George RR Martin – “RR” being the best-practice middle initials for fantasy trailblazers), haven’t been completely chewed up by HBO and turned into a mode of mass entertainment for people who made fun of them at school. But, sigh, they have. Which explains the presence, in the south, of House Box-Set-Marathon, who watched the show first, can’t really be bothered reading the books and have difficulty remembering the names of most of the characters (who all look pretty much the same naked). Time for a feast? Sure! (Insert here a long list of inedible-sounding medieval food and a few random homicides.) Anyway, back to what passes for a story here: the North and the South are pretty riled at each other and each wants to prove whose is the best and most devoted fandom. The symbol of this conflict – recreated at home in various awful DIY home décor projects – is the Iron Throne, a sort of spiky chair that looks like a large Parker Knoll wingback crossed with a porcupine. You can imagine what happens next. Well, actually, you’re going to have to, because Gurm has not quite worked out all the details of how this is going to pan out, and he’s a little behind on the next book. Season six of the TV show will be up soon and there’s no story left to adapt, which is a little worrying. There’s some dragons kicking about on the other side of the world, so something will probably happen there but, well, who knows? Perhaps the House Killjoy and House Box-Set-Marathon will figure it out between themselves on the bloody, grim (yes, everything is bloody and grim) battlefields of the internet (forums), where they dissect a series of exceptionally vague Gurmish prophecies concerning “the fire” and “shadows”. This is where the great threat to all, the Spoilers (we told you) loom, corpse-like and immortal, threatening to destroy everyone’s Sunday evenings in front of the TV forever. Will the North tell the South what happens in the books before it happens on TV? Will everyone be able to cope when their favourite character gets killed off, again? Will the plot ever actually go anywhere, or is this essentially a medieval, 2010s version of Neighbours? Only Gurm knows. And he’s not telling.

This guy, let’s call him Bodric Digglesley or something so he fits in, realised at a young age that he was somehow special, but couldn’t quite work out why. With his quiet sense of wistful superiority he was thrilled to discover the existence of Hogwarts, a school for special people like him, inexplicably named after a porcine STD, where they learn magic (point at things) and play Quidditch (something to do with flying balls). He became reassured by this new wonderful world, in which everything comes with wings, or is invisible, or floats, chiefly because it posits the idea being brave (saying exactly what you think at all times, like people do on Big Brother) is pretty much all you need to get through life. In reality, he’s a little confused by people’s motives, so he also likes the way that, at Hogwarts, all the baddies are quite clearly given their own bunking space, in House Slytherin. They also tend to be posh and rich – qualities he naturally finds somewhat suspicious. Of course, as he grows older, re-reads the books, re-watches all the films, posts numerous heartbreaking images of his favourite HP moments on Tumblr (this one spends a lot of time on Tumblr, could it be somehow enchanted, like the Mirror of Erised?) and delves into the exhaustive online library of Harry Potter fanfic (which features a lot of weird Harry on Draco action) his dreams of one day having his own adventure somewhat dwindle. School’s out – Harry and Ron and Hermione are obviously off somewhere, like him, sitting behind a computer terminal, updating Google Docs (the Hogwarts gang probably call them “Goblin Docs” or something kerazy like that), just, you know, living their lives. But then she-who-must-not-be-named (Ms JK Rowling) makes a public appearance and adds another random bit to the story that he loves and cherishes. Dumbledore’s gay. Hagrid has a secret S&M dungeon. Hogwarts puts all its money through Switzerland. The Ministry of Magic wants out of Europe. And so on and so on. He sighs, defeated, but wiser in the following knowledge: the biggest threat to every fandom is the author.

As far as it goes with war-torn, monster-plagued lands in which the forces of good and evil are constantly hanging in the balance (is this sounding familiar by now?) Azeroth, the setting of terrifying multiplayer game World of Warcraft (it’s sort of like Tolkien reimagined by the creators of My Little Pony) seems to be doing rather well for tourism. Since it was launched by dark corporate entity Blizzard Entertainment in 2004 it’s enticed more than 10 million people to its polygonal shores and between them, they’ve frittered away the equivalent of 5.93 million years in playtime. To put that in perspective, the former number is larger than the population of Hungary. The latter timespan is the age of the human race. And your typical inhabitant, despite what you might think from that episode of South Park, is not an unreasonable guy. He just wants to do what any normal person would want to do in real life – work hard, progress, maybe meet a nice girl, even get married some day. But he wants to do that in World of Warcraft. He also wants to do what any normal person would want to do in World of Warcraft – dress up in ridiculously oversized armour, wield massive, glowing axes, hang out with sexy night-elf babes dressed in see-through negligées – but in real life. Seriously, it happens. The only issue for him, really, is the tricky matter of working out just what is, in fact, World of Warcraft, and what is real life – given that, in the game, you spend real money for goods and chat up real girls for companionship, this is harder than you might think. This can have some unpleasant side effects, like death. And imprisonment. But on the plus side, he’s undoubtedly having the most immersive and ever-evolving fantasy experience out there. Only when your meatspace social life is well and truly in danger, it seems, can you really feel like a hero.