Another week and another Dungeons and Dragons session in the bag! This week, I got to run The Magical Millennium again. Our last session involved a Parent/Guardian-Teacher Conference and the party’s first adventure (which only included four of the group’s five players, unfortunately) and this one started off with a little bit of back-tracking for the player who couldn’t be there for the last session. After all, her character needed an opportunity to start on her homework (to interview an experienced adventurer, with bonus points if the adventurer was active before the Adventurers’ Guild began operating). From there, we moved into spending some time going through the finances of the previous year’s Junior Student Government (discovering conclusive proof of the previously suspected embezzlement along the way), more interviews and homework, an incredible bit of Player-versus-Player roleplaying, and then some wrap up as the players moved to establish individual emotional connections over group ones while also trying to finish putting together the lock-in they’d dreamed up as a way to help their absent player character eventually escape the cult they’re a part of. Just normal teen things, you know? It was a lot of fun to preside over a session like this, largely filling in the blanks, keeping tensions between the player characters and not the players (which was not much work, since they’re all good roleplayers, even if this group is still relatively new to playing together), and finding ways to keep the story rolling forward even as the difficult social dynamics of high school students from very different backgrounds threaten to slowly rip the group apart. This game continues to be a blast and I am eager for the next session, even if I still have to wait two weeks (as of writing this, anyway).
Most of the homework the group did was stuff I tried to move past pretty quickly. After all, we can’t do a deep dive into everything that happens without making the game run at a snail’s pace and while that could be fun, it really isn’t what our group is looking for. I had the players roll to find or recall connections, with good rolls resulting in potential connections to bonus point adventurers and bad rolls connecting them to a motley assortment of characters I’d make up on the spot, most of which were only recent adventurers. From there, they needed to roll something to represent the interview itself, or even just the establishment of an interview since plenty of people won’t need to be convinced to talk once they’ve agreed to sit down for an interview. One player rolled poorly on a couple related checks and while she had a decent chance to find contact information, most of her rolls to actually schedule the interview didn’t go well, so she was almost out of options until a connection she’d made in an earlier session, someone she’d met at the Start-Of-Year Party, offered to help her with the homework assignment (and rolled SUPER well).
The only important details of the interviews were the lessons the players could learn from the people they contacted. For the first one, she learned that institutions have sprung up to support all kinds of adventurers, some of which have somewhat cultish behavior in their zeal to fulfill what they see as their primary purpose. Another, the paladin, failed the interview roll and learned nothing beyond the satisfactory contents of their interview. The third learned that one of the greatest dangers to the general population from the time before the Adventurers’ Guild was actually from the adventurers themselves. The other two haven’t rolled their interviews yet, but one is cued up and the other is for the player who wasn’t present and hasn’t rolled anything yet. Hopefully they’ll be around during the next session so their characters can do their homework!
Mixed into all of this was the party trying to navigate the difficult social situations in which they’ve found themselves. Their group was assembled not based on some level of personal compatibility but based on creating a functional adventuring party. There’s nothing saying they all have to get along or even that this group has to stay together from one semester to the next. One of the player characters, sensing the distance growing between the player characters as they deal with the drama mixing itself into their lives through the connections they’re forming as a party, tried to start a conversation about what everyone’s goals are. She’s an athlete kid, coming from a rich family with a storied history of adventuring (the local Hellmouth was sealed by her father’s adventuring party), and is used to having a very clear vision of her future and the path she’s on to get to that future. The rest of the party, save the player character who isn’t present, don’t necessarily have that. One of them, the party’s Artificer, has a clear vision and hopes for the future, but their goals are pretty open-ended. The Bard and Paladin, though, are still figuring that stuff out beyond the general impulses they have as young and bright but naive teens.
As the group started to make some progress, though, the Paladin said something snide in response to a hockey metaphor from the Sports Kid (who is a hockey player) and the Barbarian hockey player decided she didn’t want to be there anymore. Which was a little awkward since the group was supposed to be meeting to work on plans for the lock-in I mentioned. They’d pivoted to this plan at the Barbarian’s suggestion, actually, since it would give the player character in a cult, the Cleric, a larger network of people they could fall back on when they finally get out of their cult. Instead, the remaining three player characters worked on planning this lock-in that they’d decided was going to involve a lot of Adventuring Party activities while the Barbarian fled to the rink and did suicides (the exercise that involves rapidly skating up and down the rink) until she was sweating pure gatorade.
Throughout all of this was a lot of really good one-on-one scenes. The Bard and the Barbarian bonded following the altercation between the Barbarian and the Paladin, each of them having a moment to explain where they’re at and what they believe is going on here. The Bard made some good points about everyone not having their lives as figured out as the Barbarian does and the Barbarian made some good points about how needlessly nasty the Paladin had been. In another scene, the Paladin and the Artificer poured over the Junior Student Government ledgers from the previous year, comparing the cooked book to the actual book the previous treasurer had kept, and talking about what the Paladin (who is the current Jr. Student Government Treasurer) plans to do with this information now that she has it. There was also a fun phone call between the Paladin and the Barbarian, before things broke bad between them, but it seemed to be laying the groundwork for the inter-character tension rather than relieving it.
Which was a lot of fun! Being able to play this kind of conflict out is an important part of this game we’re playing since the official thematic direction of it is “slice-of-life but with fantasy tensions” and boy howdy do we have tons of slice-of-life tensions building up right as I’m preparing to introduce the first fantasy tensions! I’ve begun to hint at it, slowly and carefully, through the homework assignments the players characters are given as part of their adventuring classes, but there’s something big coming. I’ve already rolled to determine when it will happen and what it will be (tables are fun!), but it hasn’t begun yet. Sometime in the next one-to-three sessions, I expect, based on how long it takes the group to go through the events we already have planned (which include a shift standing guard against critters and varmints as a warehouse is emptied and sealed against future varmint intrusion and taking a local herbalist into lands that COULD be dangerous but probably won’t be to gather some herbs). Though, knowing this group and our tendency to get mired into some fun drama, I could be very wrong about how long it’ll take… Still! I’m incredibly excited! It’s all so much fun!