We did it! My Dungeons and Dragons group playing a Modern Fantasy “school-aged teen slice of life but with fantasy tensions” game I’m calling The Magical Millennium finally finished our first day of school! We got through a second period of lunch and specialty training, everyone had fun coming up with a bunch of electives, we talked through what everyone did immediately after school, and then I outlined how we’re going to handled the rest of their first week of class. We didn’t have any new social encounters (though I did have updated rules on hand just in case) since the one that seemed likely to happen during the second lunch period was avoided entirely. Neither the Non-Player Character nor the Player Character who might have fought each other did, instead choosing to abruptly look away after their eyes accidentally met across the cafeteria. It was a tense moment that passed quickly, thanks to their complete and total mutual rejection of any social contact. Other than that, we had fun making a Group Chat text channel in our Discord server (which was rapidly used by several players to simulate their chatting throughout the day) and started getting our first look into the world at large. Which, thanks to our decision to place this game in the real world and then tweak it from there, is super fun to place around the Twin Cities in Minnesota. All I have to do is open Google Maps and there is all the information I need to describe the world around them. This is honestly an incredibly fun game to play and I’m not sure I’ve ever had more fun running a tabletop game of any kind.

Since this is a modern world and there needed to be some kind of strife present to allow for adventuring, for ruins to explore, for real-world battles to be fought, I had to come up with something that would turn the relatively safe and comfortable modern world into a place that had the potential to be incredibly dangerous in certain circumstances. Building off our decision to use the old Y2K fears of technological disaster as the point of transition between scientific and computer based technology to magic and alchemy based technology with the standard science and computer stuff in the background (after it had been extensively reworked to account of the Y2K disaster), I figured it made sense for the world to go through a brief Dark Age type event. After all, so much technology failed and so many new elements of life were introduced literally overnight and it would take people and governments time to adapt. Time that many people didn’t have due to everything else that could go on when, suddenly, planar travel, giant fireballs, and the ability to alter the universe with Wish magic became a part of life on Earth. All of that is incredibly dangerous and, as we’ve seen happen–albeit at a much slower pace–governments are slow to regulate a lot of stuff that doesn’t have a historical basis or transparent features that allow for clear understanding. Hell, they’re even bad at regulating that stuff most of the time.

I decided, in light of all this, that the easiest solution was to give the world easy and ample access to the various hells and infernal planes of existence. After all, conquering other planes is exactly the style of devils and causing as much mayhem and chaos as possible is what demons are all about, so it made sense from a mechanical perspective. Dungeons and Dragons is already set up to include that kind of stuff, after all. This way, all of the various fantasy races get to stay as people rather than being reduced to cannon fodder in strange magical wars and we can focus on having fun fights over nefarious but normal hoodlums looking to rip off the local Wendy’s or step away from reality entirely by fighting against virtual sports mascots. Plus, having hellmouths (including, as my players learned last session, one literal hellmouth, complete with teeth) and various portals to other planes scattered around the world and in various locales means that there’s plenty of places for the school to take their students on fieldtrips and that I get to describe ominous glowing lights on the horizon or reflected off the clouds. There’s no downsides.

Coming up for this group, we have the school’s first party, thrown by the popular kid with rich, permissive parents, a week of mundane high school classes for everyone to settle in to, and then the party’s first weekend. For me, this means preparing an entire new collection of NPCs for the other half of the school, coming up with some maps for the party (where there will likely be some physical and social encounters), and figuring out what to bring forward for each player as we run into their week nights and weekends. I need stuff to be happening in their lives, after all, since being a teen is always difficult and I want to make sure that they have plenty of time to build and develop their characters outside of just the contexts of their schools. Sure, the school stuff is going to be the main portion of it, but I can’t just ignore their lives at home or in the dorms. Family stuff is all a part of the drama, after all, more so for some than for others.