For the first time in maybe the whole campaign, we had an extended roleplaying scene between one of the player characters, the party’s Artificer, and one of the teachers at the magical high school (Adak’s Academy Of Magic). This happened a couple hours into the lock-in, as the rest of the party sifted through the aftermath of their previous encounter with the brother of one of the other player characters (the party’s Bard) and then moved to join the screening of Shrek. Rather than join them in doing something they felt was pointless, the Artificer snuck off to work on a personal project in one of the magic item fabrication labs and was found out by a teacher who proved to be more sympathetic and understanding than maybe the Artificer had expected. Once the two of them had talked it out, the Artificer rejoined the rest of the players in the gym since the party had left the Shrek-themed movie room when Shrek had finished to playing volleyball against some of their classmates in the open gym. They played another game of volleyball and we wrapped up our session with a bit of chitchat afterwards. Other notable events include a quick but momentous B-plot during the “catch the Artificer up on what had happened during the previous session and then talk about the revelation that the Bard’s brother had been part of the group that had accidentally started the growing anti-magic movement” segment, a quick hack of volleyball rules that wound up taking much longer than expected, and a long post-game discussion of whether or not the Group B party was there to play the part of character-opposites that the party (Group A) would need to eventually kill. It was a pretty great game and the first time I felt like I was absolutely at the top of my game since early August. In short, it was another great session with this group.

Despite what my players initially assumed, the whole anti-magic movement I’ve been introducing isn’t actually modeled after the anti-vax movement. I’ve actually modeled it after the Flat Earth Theory movement. The big difference between these two reality-denying movements is that the anti-vax movement was started via some incredibly bad medical malpractice in an effort to justify a link between two entirely unrelated things as part of shoring up someone’s objectively awful worldview. The Flat Earth movement was actually started as a satirical conspiracy theory Facebook Group that most of the first few hundred users were in on which, as seems to happen so often these days, quickly spiraled out of control once it started gaining attention in a broader social media sphere. Flat Earth Theory is a joke gone wrong and has grown because of credible idiots refusing to question what they find online and trolls with too much time on their hands finding satisfaction in feeling superior to others they deem unintelligent. This anti-magic movement, that the party now knows was started by a bunch of teens just coming into their magical powers putting signs in people’s yards over the summer thanks to the investigative reporting done by the party’s Bard, has gone the same way. The initial incidents were pervasive enough that the idea tapped into a part of society that had been silent up to that point, who then used this two-month-long campaign of INCREDIBLY minor vandalism to start voicing the idea that maybe all of the societal change due to the introduction of magic at the turn of the millennium was actually a bad thing. The reasons people might do something like this are varied enough that the movement can’t really have a single motive that can be addressed and, like the Flat Earth or Anti-Vax movements, the whole thing moved online quickly enough that it can no longer be stopped.

I’ve been working on this idea, this background misinformation campaign and associated conspiracy theories, since the very beginning of the campaign. I was delighted that it finally came up in the previous session and happy to continue expanding on it today as the party started talking through what their characters knew about it and how they felt about it. Since all of the party save the Cleric is local, they all had very different perspectives on it that had to do with its impact on their lives. The Barbarian had missed it, since she was isolated from the physical part of the movement by wealth and the social or online parts of it by her busy athletic calendar. The Paladin’s family had been hit by the vandals, so she had Feelings about it. The Bard’s brother had been a part of it and she exposed it, so it caused a rift in her family. The Artificer felt frustrated and exasperated by it, considering the benefits of magic in both protecting and advancing society. The Cleric, though, had only seen it as a fringe theory expressed by some of the darkest and least credible parts of the social internet, so they didn’t take it very seriously even after learning about its pervasiveness in the area they were now calling their home. It was probably the first time the party ever dealt with a topic that they’d all feel so differently about, which made for some fun roleplaying.

Since the Barbarian wasn’t particularly interested in this discussion, her player had her get summoned to the bathroom by a gaggle of other teens so they could do a classic Lock-In Activity: die someone’s hair in the bathroom sink. Thanks to a lucky natural 20 on her Hair Dyeing check, the group of them was not only able to successfully cut and dye their friend’s hair, but leave the bathroom spotless AND avoid making mustard gas by combining too many heavy-duty cleaning chemicals. All of which meant that we got to narrate a bunch of jocks scurrying around the background of the cafeteria conspiracy-discussing scene as they collected supplies and cleaning chemicals. Once all that was done and the party had caught back up, they went to watch Shrek and the Artificer left because they felt like they should be spending their time on something more productive, like the armor they were making for themselves during the magic item fabrication classes, parts of which they’d been allowed to bring into the school by the educator who was doing the bag check. That professor, the one who actually taught most of the fabrication and crafting classes that the Artificer was taking, proved sympathetic and knew enough about the Artificer’s project to be able to tell that none of that stuff could be fashioned into a weapon anyhow. Because the Artificer rolled so poorly on their stealth check, though, another teacher found out about their personal project time and followed them into the workshop after the Artificer had picked the lock and let themselves inside.

The teacher–Professor Redford, who teaches Paladin classes along with a few other non-magical things in the more typical school part of the campus–proved to be the first supportive and sympathetic ear that the Artificer had. I knew, as I brought that professor in, that he would be supportive, so I rolled a d20 to see how good he’d be at giving the Artificer what they needed. I had a base level in mind since Redford is pretty good at this kind of thing (he’s an actually good Paladin, who wants to help people above all else, and has trained to be able to do that in a myriad of ways), but I rolled a natural 20 and got to bring every bit of understanding, sympathy, and clarity I had in my person to bear in that moment. It was a great extended roleplaying scene between the Artificer–who’d, up to that point, had mostly negative interactions with adults and almost exclusively roleplayed scenes with other players–and the NPC Redford as Redford offered the Artificer what they needed most: genuine and positive support that respected the boundaries and autonomy of a full, self-actualized person who’d had a bunch of negative interactions with adults who where keen to either exploit their powers or didn’t respect their autonomy. Redford was also the first adult to promise to look into what had happened a few sessions ago (and only about twenty-four in-game hours ago) with the job listing that had been trying to exploit low-level adventurers from the school so that someone wouldn’t have to pay for appropriately powerful workers to do the job that actually needed doing. The genuine emotion expressed by the professor seemed to reassure the Artificer as they relayed what they’d been going through and discovered that this adult, at least, did not know everything that had been going on. Finally, to show that he meant it when he told them that they could ask him for helped if they ever needed it, Redford gave the Artificer his phone number and told them to call him Red outside the classroom.

It was a pretty hefty roleplaying scene with a lot of emotional weight, but it felt great to run through it all and it have it land the way I wanted it to. Even the other players, who had to sit quietly for half an hour or so while the scene unfolded, got caught up in it. I doubt I could have done a scene like that in any of the prior sessions, at least until we got back into early August or July when I wasn’t so sleep-deprived, so I was glad to feel ready for–and capable of–something like that this week. Sure, I could have still gotten the point across by talking around it and explaining that the teacher had rolled really well on his “provide this student with the emotional support they need” check, but it felt so much better to roleplay through it and then unwind during the last bit of the session with some fun volleyball in the open gym portion of the lock-in. The PCs just barely lost the first match as the two teams tied until well into overtime, but then they won handily in the second, once the Artificer had returned to the group. It was a pretty simple competition, taking the average Athletics result for the teams and comparing them. Then, when they wound up the same in the first match, having both teams make constitution saving throws to see which team could stay in the game longer. Nice and easy.

After all that was done and we’d finally made it to about ten in the evening (which is four hours into the lock-in), I wrapped up the session fifteen minutes early and gave the group time to talk and decompress a little bit since one of the players had (jokingly) sent a comment into the group chat expressing how sad she’ll be when her character has to kill the jock on the other team (who was the NPC she’d identified as her PC’s opposite). That sparked a whole discussion that lasted almost half an hour and consisted mostly of me expressing overdramatic shock that they all assumed these NPCs, this Group B, were all opposites that were going to try to kill them all one day. Two of them absolutely knew that nothing I did would be so cut and dried, but the rest of them admitted that they’d all been operating on that assumption, even after I pointed out that only two of those non-player characters had ties to party members’ backstories and another one had just been the first person a player character had talked to. It was a lot of wild assumptions and me trying in vain to convince them that they weren’t necessarily going to face off against these other NPCs. I mean, I know EXACTLY what those NPCs are there for and it isn’t that reason. Sure, it might wind up going that way someday, but there’s a lot of other options still on the table and I’m unwilling to commit to any particular outcome. Hell, I’ve even been trying to drop subtle metatextual hints about one of those NPCs and no one seems to have picked up on them. Anything is still possible and I’m still excited to find out what way it all goes when we eventually work our way there. Probably at least a couple years from now, at the rate we’re going. We’re not even two full (in-game) weeks into this game!