It took a year and a quarter (from December of 2022 to March 2024), but I finally managed to run another session of a Dungeons and Dragons campaign I started back in 2022 to give my DM and friend a way to rest between running his own sessions without having as much downtime for our group. That wound up not working as well as I would have hoped since we only played this campaign six or seven times total, including a few sessions of playing The Ground Itself to build a new home area for our Player Characters, but now we’re back at it! At least once, anyway. We’ll see if we can keep up our “every other week” schedule. Which, you know, I get the appeal of that for a lot of people, given the general demands on everyone’s time nowadays, but I really miss my weekly games. I miss having that dependability and repetition. I miss knowing what I’m going to be doing every week. The consistency was nice, even when it was only ever me running weekly games (or, in more recent years, trying to run weekly games and ending up in the “monthly at best” zone), but every-other-week is way better than “not at all” and probably a lot easier for most people to consistently attend. Regardless, I’m glad to be back at this game I was super excited to be playing in 2022, that I wrote about multiple times (since all but the latest of my GM Suggestions posts were about creating this world and I posted the introductory short story I wrote for it), and that I had to set aside for a while. I wound up bringing back an altered form of it last year, for my Heart: The City Beneath game, but that version of the world changed pretty significantly to reflect the mechanics of Heart: The City Beneath and never quite felt the same as my first version of it did.

It feels good to be back, complex feelings about Dungeons and Dragons 5e and Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro aside, and I was finally able to pay off something I’ve been silently sitting on for almost two years. It was something that came up during character creation for one of the Player Characters (we used the rules for Heroic Chronicles from the Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount to juice up our small party of three PCs so they’d be more likely to survive) and the player completely forgot about it. There was so much already going on that it seemed like it would make sense to ignore this one little detail that didn’t seem related to what was going on in the first few sessions, but I had it at the front of my mind from the moment it came up in character creation. I’ve literally been keeping it a secret since I first hinted at it a year and a quarter ago, just in case we ever went back to this campaign. I kept my mouth shut and resigned myself to keeping this secret until I was too old for it to matter anymore, but I was finally able to spill all the details in a dream sequence as the player character met the baby god that had saved her life once upon a time. The question of “why” still remains, since the player character never asked and the god never provided that information, so I’ve still got plenty of secrets (about this and so much more) left in the tank, but this big one that I was super excited about is finally out.

One of my favorite things to play with in D&D is the provenance of the gods and what it means to be a powerful deity in a world with as much structure and deific limitation as most D&D worlds have. I set up this world as being abandoned by the prime deities and their followers, emphasizing that all those people and those incredibly powerful beings still existed, just elsewhere. They’d moved on once it became clear that the place once known as the Material Plane was slowly being consumed by negative energy and depopulated by the ferocious beasts and the odd, decay-oriented curse that plagued it, abandoning everyone who couldn’t (or wouldn’t) leave the plane to their fates and turning a blind ear to the prayers of those they left behind. Of course something new would arrive in the void they created, a being that reflected the space it was given (the material plane) and the lingering faith of those who had been abandoned but continued to pray anyway, calling out to anyone for help now that the specific names they knew were no longer listening. And so a nameless god, younger than even more than a few living mortals, emerged and came to occupy the first glimmers of the place that would eventually become her home. And her first miracle on the plane was to absolutely fuck up the moon and trap the world in a brief time loop. After all, most of what kept the other gods from intervening in the material plane was the threat of the other gods doing the same and the mutually assured destruction that would follow. If there’s only one god left, she can do whatever she wants. For now.

Now, as the players grapple with this SIGNIFICANT interference in their lives (being trapped in perpetual night that seems to be some kind of weird loop of subsequent nights without their corresponding days), they still have to solve the problem of the careful balance in their new home being knocked off kilter by the ripples of someone introducing extractive capitalism into their largely socialist utopia. They managed to expel the capitalist (who was planning to do more than attempt to introduce the “free market” into this natural setting) before too long, but the damage was done and our game of The Ground Itself was pretty intent on making that a problem our player characters would need to solve once we returned to D&D. They (the players and their characters) have a plan in mind, but things are not entirely what they seem (this is going up the day before our next session, so forgive my vagaries) and I’m interested to see what they decide to do once the extent of the situation becomes known to them. Which, honestly, probably describes my view on all of the games I’ve run. I just set things up, shuffle them around, and present them to my players all so I can find out what they do. I’m a simple person who just loves storytelling and I’m super excited that I’m getting more of it back in my life at a pace that has not yet begun to take a toll on me.