After waiting another month, most of my group returned to playing The Magical Millennium. One of the players couldn’t make it again and another one vanished fairly quickly because they lost power about fifteen minutes after they joined the session, so there were only three of us for pretty much the whole session. This made getting through the group’s second day of magical class so much easier, since we only had to deal with three players instead of the original five. It also helped, of course, that we’d already done one day of school and were familiar with how the day would go. We were really set up for success. The only real event of note, since all the players wanted to keep their noses clean after the party just two days prior, was that the founder of the school–who also happened to be their homeroom teacher–introduced them to the concept of The Adventurer’s Guild and informed them that they were all licensed to operate within the guild under the auspices of the school’s membership. After that, the party started doing researching some jobs they could go on, to earn a little money and do their group homework assignment (go on An Adventure), but stopped short of actually picking one. We wanted the whole group to be there when any decision was made, so we opted to wait until the next session, when we’d actually be close to doing one of those adventures and would hopefully have our whole group of players able to attend.

An interesting note that has stayed in the background for now is that almost all of the quests they found had something to do with dealing with the after-effects of many portals to the fiendish planes that had once opened around the city the game takes place in (they’re almost all sealed now, in some form or another). It isn’t a hidden detail since these sealed portals to the hells are a major feature of the city’ and something I make sure to bring up regularly, but the existence of those tears in the material plane and the way the world continues to be warped by them is something I want to emphasize a lot since it is the source of most of the enemies my players will fight in this game. Or at least the ones they can easily fight since most fiends are bound to the hells and killing one outside the hells doesn’t permanently kill it. It just weakens it and sends it home, which means they don’t have to rationalize fighting them or killing devils or demons. And while there are definitely some demons or devils who are just doing their best with their lot in (after)life, most of them are genuinely and willingly bad or else they wouldn’t have wound up becoming devils or demons. I don’t know how much my players will dig into this stuff, but it is fairly easy to always assume that someone making a deal with a fiend is either going to be used to some horrible end by said fiend or is actively a bad person, so I’m pretty confident we can move from slice-of-life stuff to fantastical conflict without too much philosophizing or moralizing when the time comes. We’ll see though, since I still haven’t properly introduced the plot. The first elements have been laid down, but I’ve been working on that since day one and still need to toss out the first major plot beat for everyone to grapple with.

Plot aside, another reason for the closeness of the fiendish realms is that it lets me explore some fun themes, such as the way that fiendish influence lingers even after the original source has been removed (or at least stoppered, as is the case in the game). There’s a lot of stuff going on in the real-world these days that will continue to impact the world for decades and centuries to come, even if we managed to magically fix it all today. We can even see some past events that have continued echoing into the present (one of my favorite examples of one such echo is “low-background steel” which is named thus because it is the only steel left in existence that doesn’t contain any contamination from nuclear fallout and is important for making things like Geiger-counters and sensory equipment for spacecraft that would be fouled up by even modern low levels of background radiation) and I wanted to make the world of this game I’m running consistent with that kind of radical change. Sure, the sudden proliferation of magic and subsequent changes to the underlying rules of the universe that enable it are probably less directly disastrous than nuclear fallout and the extensive nuclear testing that left a nigh-indelible mark on our planet (nuclear waste disposal is an incredibly unsolved issue and even if it is currently more “solved” than it has been before, that doesn’t exactly fix all the horrible things that were done with nuclear waste during the peak of nuclear testing), but it still impacts the world. It still impacts the people who were near to it. Less maliciously, since no one kept opening portals just to see what would happen or how big they could make a portal, but still no less disastrously. It’s not exactly a one-to-one comparison, but the theme I want to consider runs through them both.

Plus, how else am I going to add Dungeons and Dragons storytelling tropes and mechanical structures of a world modeled after modern life? Sure, we don’t have to fight everything, but D&D is primarily a game built to give its players and game masters a common language of rules primarily built around violent conflict, so any game that centers the mechanics of D&D needs must also involve some amount of conflict. The players’ choices on what conflict turns violent and what does not is an interesting additional layer in a world like the one we’ve built where they expect that they will be punished for wanton violence or that they won’t be allowed to take the law into their own hands. Still, though, I have to present them opportunities for those choices to mean something by giving them a variety of potentially violent conflicts, some of which must be incredibly reasonable to solve with violence. Otherwise the choices they make about when and how to employ violence won’t have any real meaning. Plus, they need dungeons. Everyone loves a dungeon, on its own or enjoyed as part of pursuing a greater goal, and having a force out there that might want to build and maintain some kind of dungeonesque structures will be incredibly helpful since I’m not sure how many times I can expect them to buy the idea that this realty’s versions of Escape Rooms are just Dungeon Experiences?

We’ll be meeting again in only a few more days, assuming that everyone is still available, and then hopefully my players will be able to embark on their first adventure. From there, while I’ve got plenty of ideas about how to get the plot ball rolling, I’m holding a lot of it back until I see how they try to engage with the game as we open it up from heavy roleplaying and teen drama to fantasy violence and more typical D&D fare. I should have most of that figured out in another few sessions and then I can set things up with a more clear vision of what the future holds for this group. Which I probably won’t write about before it happens since I know some of them occasionally read posts on this blog, but I’ll definitely hint at it just as much as I hint at it in sessions so anyone reading this can follow along and recognize the reveals as they come. After all, I need to have fun, too.