Though we were short a player, there were still enough people available to hold another session of The Magical Millennium. We picked up immediately where we left off last time, with a few notes about how most of the player characters present spent their afternoons and evenings before we launched into the two big events for the session: a guardian-teacher conference (like a parent-teacher conference but for legal guardians who want to avoid the topic of parents) to discuss the uncontrolled magic one of the player characters unknowingly cast on their unsuspecting dorm neighbor and the party’s first adventure in a city park that had an Awakened Bush problem! Everything went well, my players had a great time, and no one was knocked unconscious despite the irritable awakened plants landing two critical hits in a combat session that was almost prevented by good roleplaying (bad rolls and cascading failures are the only reason this didn’t even non-violently). I got to make up some random NPC names, accidentally create a really cool character, and start to trickle in a little bit of information about the retired adventuring party casting its shadow over the city and the player characters. After all, if one of the players is going to make their character the second child of one of the ex-adventurers who saved the world by sealing the rifts into the fiendish planes before they could consume the planet, I’m absolutely going to find a way to do something narratively fun with that. Why wouldn’t I?

It was a lot of fun prompting my players to tell me what their characters were up to and to have three of the four present players tell me that their character was being a good little student by started on their homework assignment immediately. They’d each been tasked with interviewing an adventurer so they could learn about the importance of the adventuring guild, with an option to earn bonus points if they interviewed an adventurer who had been active before the current guild system had first started to take form. All of them, of course, went for the bonus points. Why wouldn’t they? Who wouldn’t want to learn more about how the lack of significant, world-threatening issues for the numerous groups of adventurers to tackle created a lot of inter-adventurer conflict and needless violence? Or about why the guild system job lists not only prevent that not kind of conflict but also the abuse of magical abilities? So much potential for fun storytelling! So much potential for weird NPCs when one of my players failed a research roll! So much potential for a really cool warlock person when one of the players asked a third party for recommendations! And I even got to include a blustery old windbag of a wizard when the scion of the famous ex-adventurer called up her “uncle” to help her out since she wasn’t allowed to interview her dad (who still hasn’t properly appeared on screen yet). We didn’t get into it much, since only the blustery wizard was able to talk immediately and he was more interested in running a draft of part four of his memoirs past his niece than in being properly interviewed, but there’s a lot of excellent potential set up for future sessions! I love a fun bit of lore introduction and this has some definite promise!

Once all that was done, we turned out attention to a Guardian-Teacher conference about the Cleric with Bonus Wild Magic who, as it turns out, is the child of a god rather than someone cursed by one. We got to do a bit of a slow-roll reveal of the character’s major backstory element via the reveal that some of the letters they’d received from their absent mother were magically enchanted to only show their true contents to the player character when they were alone, which took a long time to happen since they were a part of a stuffy religious order that was intent on trying to “teach”–or, failing that, repress–the natural magic out of said player character. There was a fun moment where the other players asked to roll some knowledge checks to see what their characters knew about the religious order the player character had mentioned they belonged to and one of them rolled high enough to realize it was basically a weird cult (I compared it to scientology) and this spawned a new group chat without the player character in question so the group could plan how they’d help extricate their friend from the grasp of the cult (an ice cream party sleepover is on the to-do list for when the player can make a session next). Tons of fun, and all of this was before we even got to the start of the Guardian-Teacher conference to discuss why the player character didn’t have control of their magic and why they’d been told it was an uncurable curse.

Thanks to a bit of groundwork I’d laid via the letters and the player character’s current guardian (the niece of the Archivist who’d been the PC’s guardian back at the church’s main branch since a local guardian who was a citizen of the country where the school was located was needed in case something happened), the PC and player were able to work through some of what was going on in the character’s childhood that they’d maybe never noticed until multiple people helped point it out from a place of love and concern. It was the cult-deprogramming moment I wish I’d had a child or teenager, to be honest, and I got to do a lot of great “wrong and maybe evil but from a place of misguided concern” work, which was my goal for this character and this part of their background. I hit every note I wanted to and my only regret from this excellent bit of roleplaying was that most of my players sat silently and listened for about an hour and a half, with a few interjections here or there. They seemed to mostly enjoy it, though.

After that and a quick break to refresh ourselves, we launched into the first adventure the party had picked on their Adventurers’ Guild app. They went to a city park to deal with a bunch of bushes that had been awakened by an unlicensed Druid Circle’s ritual and begun to attack picnickers in the park for “invading their territory.” The job listing suggested the problem could be solved without violence, but the harried park employee they met didn’t particularly care how they dealt with it so long as the problem was solved, even offering a bonus (pizza and drinks to be delivered to the aggressive bush free park) if the party managed to finish the job by the time their shift ended at five. The party, motivated as all teens are by free food, leapt into action and promptly failed a bunch of rolls in a row. There were a few successes here or there as they tried to learn about why the bushes were attacking people (they took issue with people coming into their “home” and eating salads, which they claimed was incredibly insulting since they’re sentient plants) and what made them so territorial in the first place (they literally didn’t know other places existed and had been told by their “parents” that this patch of the park was their home), but all their attempts to sway the bushes failed such that the difficulty of succeeding eventually passed beyond what they could get with anything short of a natural 20.

Things devolved quickly from there and while the party realized they maybe hadn’t prepared as well as they should have for an adventure, they eventually came out on top–before the deadline for their pizza bonus, too! The barbarian almost went down due to a pair of crits, but the party managed to get through the fight with a bit of relentless attacking (the barbarian was in incredible form, never once doing less than eleven damage) and clever use of oil (which earned an outraged cry from the bushes for turning one of them into a salad, the ultimate humiliation given their grievances) and matches that killed the bushes faster than the bushes could kill them. It was closer than the party would have liked, though, but they got to enjoy some pizza and end the session on a successful note as they talked about keeping a few nights clear for homework.

Which is pretty much what I’ve got planned for the next session. A bit of individual roleplaying follow-up as the player characters all do their homework, a bit of “what did you learn” prompting to see if the players and their characters are thinking about this stuff in the appropriate educational context, and then maybe the next adventure the party has signed up for. Assuming, of course, that I have enough players. One is definitely out and while I can absolutely plan around them being gone (they’re the player of the character who had the Guardian-Teacher conference), I don’t think I can do that for multiple missing players. Plus, two missing puts the group past our two-thirds of players requirement for holding a session. I won’t know if we’ll be able to play until the days just before the session (or if I’ll even be up for it, given the week I know I’ve got coming up right before our next session is supposed to happen), but I hope we can play. This game is still maybe the most fun I’ve had running a game. I’ve learned so much about becoming a better GM over the last few years and I’m excited to put it into practice with a group of players who are more-or-less on the same page as I am.