After weeks of thinking about it and planning (a number of weeks coincidentally similar to the number of weeks since I last got to run a game of Heart: The City Beneath due to outages and everyone being super stressed out), I finally got to hold my Session 0 for what has solidified into a Modern Fantasy game of D&D. Which, for us, involves a school for gifted youths that is basically like what if high school and college became a single thing that also included classes on how to use your Adventurer Powers as a Useful Member of Society, how to handle being in an adventuring party for those that want it, and how to control/use the powers that just awoke within you/finally reached potency worthy of recognition. It’s a pretty fun concept, taking all the ideas we talked through for what our Modern Fantasy setting might be (the same as our world but there were always fantasy races that chose science a long time ago which worked out great until Y2K caught everyone unprepared and brought magic back into the power vacuum created while all computer based technology was offline, resulting in what is essentially modern levels of technology except its powered by magic with science-y stuff lingering in the background) and throwing a bunch of high schoolers of various ages into the mix. It took a bit of work to get everyone’s ideas to mesh since we had a player who really wanted to be a first-year student while literally everyone else wanted to be at least a second-year student, but I figured it out. Now we’re all set to start playing in about a week (from when you’re reading this, anyway, though poor Writer-Me has to wait two whole weeks to play this game) and I’m incredibly excited to see where we go from here.

We wound up deciding to play a game that’s a bit more slice-of-life than Dungeons and Dragons 5e would allow, but I’ve been working on how to set up a few parallel non-battle encounters so that we can include non-violent tension. I know exactly how to handle social encounters and I’ve been working on ways to handle academic encounters that don’t incorporate as much random chance into their results as “roll to see if you pass your test.” I can modify the social encounter system to work for things like group projects or anything that involves multiple people working together, but I’m still working through how a bunch of people doing the same task could be worked out in a way that will be satisfying to my players. I plan to keep the usual “learn about math, magi-tech/science, literature, etc.” normal school subjects separate from the adventuring stuff, so I don’t need to worry too much about whether my players pass or fail their normal-teen/young adult classes, but it would be fun to find a way to incentivize studying or to make my players choose between doing something adventure-y and something more mundane. I’d really like to find a way to ride this balance as the group goes through stuff like yearly orientation, school dances, homecoming week, various holidays, and finals week. All I’ve got in the D&D system is some stuff they’ve come up with for the Strixhaven book a while back, but that’s not nearly enough for what I want to be doing. I might look at some other games that are a bit more geared toward simulating a school experience, but I might also just run some numbers on my own and create a hack to handle test-taking. I do have some ideas, after all, so I might as well try them.

The most exciting part–right now, anyway–is that this setting and game style is the one that fits the villain I wrote about two weeks ago. I’ve already started fleshing them out a bit more to fit the setting and playstyle we’ve picked, but only in small ways. Running a Session 0 took a lot out of me and I’m writing this the day after it happened, so I haven’t had much time to do anything since we wrapped up [nor have I had time since then, thanks to a very busy week]. I have, of course, been idly thinking through things and the instant I have time to actually create a prep document and get that ball rolling I will be able to just zip through most of the prep I’ll need for day 1. Since this is going to be a very NPC-heavy game, I’ll need to have plenty of work done, but I’m pretty good at this whole GMing thing so I’m confident I can at least make it feel fleshed out even if I head into the first full session with little more than a bare wire framework and a list of names. The fun bit is that we’re doing something that’s essentially the real-world but it has been non-magically Fantasy the whole time, so I get to have weird fantasy names like Gethgrum Jaelnk and Jane Thompson right next to each other. I’m very excited to mix and match the mundane and the fantastical, and not just in naming conventions, either! All those internal combustion engines and whatnot still exist, as does all the scientific knowledge of the past. It’s just been largely replaced by a different system as corporations and governments pivoted to this new, widely-available force in the world. Hell, most people on the planet remember a time before magic, so there’s a lot of adjusting going on, still.

I think that is what excites me the most about this setting and game we’ll be playing. As someone born in the early nineties, as the world began to shift dramatically, I remember a time before cell phones were commonplace, when the future still looked bright, and when going on the internet was a special treat that required no one else in the house use the phone (thought that last period didn’t last long in my parents’ house since they got a separate line installed pretty quickly). I live in a world that bears little resemblance to the world of my childhood and yet I have met people who can legally drink and yet weren’t even born when the terrorist attacks of 2001 happened. It is a strange place to be, living your life on the edge of this massive change as it is happening, caught between the world full of people who remember a time before all this and people who remember nothing but this. I’m sure this is a feeling that’s familiar to a lot of people of many generations since millennials don’t have a monopoly on complex feelings about the changing of the era, but it’s one that I don’t really get to explore much beyond my lived reality. I’d like to explore it from either side of my current position and this game seems like a fun way to do it. Hopefully, two weeks from now, I’ll be able to write another post about this gaming group and gush all about how everyone had a great time on their first day of class. I could really use the enthusiasm and passion these days…