After a month that felt so much longer than a month, we’re finally back to playing The Magical Millennium! I’ve missed this group a lot, even though I’ve managed to find ways to stay busy, so I’m glad we had enough people still available to meet. One player, a doctoral student in the middle of probably the busiest part of her doctoral program, hasn’t been able to make it for the last two sessions, but I mostly just feel bad that she’s so busy and swamped with her work that she doesn’t have the time to relax and do things like playing Dungeons and Dragons. I’m sure she’ll free up eventually, but I definitely missed her presence during the last two games. We’ll have to figure out what her character was up to at the party while everyone else handled their first party of the year with what has mostly amounted to success. Sure, there were some flubbed rolls in there, but I’m always looking for ways to let my players fail forward and it was pretty easy to do here. This time, my players tried to sneakily follow some of their peers, jumped off a roof into a pool, made some friends, and even had a fun mix of inter-team conflict and bonding. It was a really great session, even setting aside how happy I was just to be back playing this game again.

Last time, we left off about an hour into the party. We’d gotten some music references (which one player expanded on even further), descriptions of everyone’s outfits, and the moment they entered the party. We also got a longer roleplaying scene with one of the player characters and the older brother of a different player character as an ambitious second-year student member of the Junior Student Government (The Paladin player character) met with the intimidating power-behind-the-throne VP of the full Student Government (the elder brother of the party’s Barbarian) who was also the person nominally hosting the party and absolutely presiding over it. It was a lot of fun that really set the tone, especially when the player character in the scene, the aforementioned Paladin, made eye contact with her former best friend who had just entered the party with her new best friend. This drama, as we picked up the game a month later, set the stage for what happened next. Two of the players tried to stealthily follow the ex best friend NPC as she collected other people from her school group, but one of them rolled a natural 1 and so they got spotted by this other group at the worst possible moment, leading to a few new friendships forming as the player characters spent some time interacting with these NPCs but also two awkward situations since part of the group of NPCs (Team B in their class of adventurers) realized that the player characters had been trying to follow them and one of them, the ex best friend, wound up spotting the Paladin sitting in a chair by herself, pretending to watch the party and eat a couple snacks, which led to a fun scene where the player character wound up being the one to lash out rather than the NPC.

After that situation ended, the party carried on as normal until the player characters noticed a car drive up to the main house, where the Barbarian’s parents were, and then her older brother–the Student Government VP and Party Presider–got her to distract the entire party by doing her usual trick of jumping off the pool house’s roof into the deep end of the pool. She rolled great, her brother disappeared, and only one of the player characters, the Artificer, noticed but they chose not to do anything. After that, the Cleric tried to make friends with Team B and the new best friend of the Paladin’s ex best friend, the Paladin and the Artificer bonded over the strange events they were witnessing, and the Barbarian did popular sports player stuff until the party started to wind down and everyone went their separate ways. Eventually.

Throughout all of that, I was surprised by a few things I genuinely didn’t expect, which always makes for a fun session on my part. The biggest one is that no one tried to follow the popular kids as they snuck off while the party was distracted by the Barbarian’s antics. The Artificer watched them go, but didn’t do anything with the information until later and even then, all they did was talk to the rest of their group about it. Even when the popular kids came back, no one went upstairs to try confronting them or learning about why they disappeared. I expected my players to be a bit more nosy than they are, which just means I get to keep bringing this stuff up as we continue playing and I love that. After all, the leader of the popular kids, the VP ruling the Student Government from behind the President, is a lot of fun for me to roleplay, especially during these early days when no one knows who he really is yet. I mean, they’re all accusing him of running a shadow government and my statements that he’s just running the actual government don’t seem to be landing much. Which is fine, since that means I get to do all sort of skullduggery with him in the mean time.

I was also surprised that, despite all the ample opportunities for it, there was no drama started aside from the Paladin being kind of nasty to her ex best friend. Even that didn’t really cause much in the way of active drama so much as send the ex best friend packing to rejoin her group of friends and, eventually, leave the party early. Which isn’t really drama. After that, though, we had the least expected thing of all: the Paladin and the Artificer bonded over the two strange things they experienced at the party. The Paladin felt deeply suspicious that the VP of the Student Government had access to the ledger that showed the financial crimes of the last treasurer of the Junior Student Government and handed it over in exchange for a favor rather than turn it in to the school or authorities himself. The Artificer saw this guy, with his coterie of close friends, magically vanish into the shadows as they headed toward the main house and was deeply suspicious of why he’d leave the party. The two of them bonded from there over their conspiracy theories about shadow governments and the way that the party Barbarian wouldn’t countenance any kind of implications that her brother was up to no good. The Artificer even wound up giving the Paladin a ride home after they left the party so the two of them could talk more. It was great.

The things I’m most excited about for the next few sessions include introducing the main plot in probably the next session and continuing to play these “villainous” NPCs as we get to cross back and forth over the line of whose behavior is actually villainous. Or at least incredibly rude. After all, I can’t confidently set up an NPC’s attempt to reach a hand out to someone they are on bad terms with and have the player character slap it aside so the desired tension can continue to grow in most of my tabletop gaming groups. While this is my first time running a game for this player, she’s been very clear about what she wants and what her character is about, so it was great to see all of our preparation pay off so we could continue to ride the ambiguity of what happened in their mutual past to cause the rift between these two best friends and whether or not the source of this divide is just the mundane problems of teen life or if there is something more magical and sinister at hand. Only time will tell and I can’t wait to see where this all goes!