After months of slowly building (which is the unfortunate reality of running a game for a group that meets every other week), I finally introduced the first piece of narrative tension in my D&D campaign, The Magical Millennium. I built some tables, set up some ideas, hinted at what is to come, rolled some dice, and stayed true to the design sentiment that my players and I agreed on for this campaign. Now, finally, after months of slice-of-life roleplaying with some intermittent bits of modern-fantasy and danger being packed in around that, I’ve finally introduced the first bit of high fantasy tension. What began as a simple job to help (and protect, if need be) an herbalist pick herbs in the area north of the city–close but not too close to the massive barrier that sealed off the hellmouth that threatened to plunge this area into death and chaos back at the start of the titular Magical Millennium–turned into a quick hike back to safety when the barrier cracked and a moment of intense danger when something came blasting out of that barrier to land in front of the party. Casual herb collection and a nice hike through the woods as the group failed to address the inter-party tension was all but forgotten as the booming crack of the barrier flooded the area with infernal energy and the woman they were helping directed them all to follow her down a faster path back to the parking lot. Once they reached safety, after ploughing their way through a Hook Horror (half-dead from being blasted out of hell but more than capable of killing any of them but the barbarian in a single turn), they were debriefed by the emergency response groups, sent home, and eventually collected back up for the planned lock-in that had added “make sure the young adventurers don’t do anything stupid” to its program for the evening. All in all, it was a great session and while I think I could have run it better if I’d been better rested, I’m happy with how it turned out.

The first thing the group had to do once we finally gathered was catch one of the players up on what they, and their character, had missed over the previous two sessions. It had been pretty easy to explain away that character’s absence while the player was busy with other things, since the character was the one at the core of the guardian-teacher conference from three sessions prior. They clearly had a lot on their mind. Sure, having the party’s cleric and main healer around would have definitely helped in the prior session when a couple of unlucky critical hits took out the two people who still had some healing they could do, but the player was busy and the character was dealing with a bit of an existential crisis. So after filling them in, we talked through what the character had been up to over the three in-world days the prior two sessions represented. I had to pump the brakes on what the player wanted, though, because while it made sense that their character would have called in sick and not been as actively communicative with the rest of the party, deciding to disappear for a few days without a word would have drastically altered the events of the days they were gone. Plus, I wanted to capture some of that development and emotional eruption on-screen, so to speak, rather than to have it all happen off-screen and further away. Eventually, we got things settled in a way that the player was happy with and that wouldn’t make the other characters look like people who didn’t care about their friend (which I couldn’t really let happen since the party was so focused on trying to be supportive for their friend who was just starting to disentangle themselves from a cult and I’d want to absolutely handle it in-session if they WEREN’T supportive of or caring towards their friend). From there, we had to figure out how all of these teens were getting to a state park parking lot at eight in the morning for their job. Only one of them wound up being late and it wasn’t any of the ones who had to stare their own mortality in the face the night prior.

From there, I got to introduce the herbalist they would be working for, an older woman named LouLou who had been gathering herbs from the forest here for decades, well before potion-making was possible. She remembered the area from before magic took over, before the hellmouth opened up, before the world had changed so drastically, and seemed sad to be so limited in the area she could inhabit now that the park she liked had closed off the area around the hellmouth. Unfortunately, due to the party’s drama, LouLou didn’t get to talk much about the past. She did teach them all about useful plants, magical and mundane, so they could help gather the supplies she needed by making perception checks as they hiked toward the glade where there was plenty of what she wanted to collect. She also spent a lot of time talking with the player character who hadn’t been around when the fractures had formed in the group, who seemed oblivious to the way the group’s dynamic had shifted, and I was happy to let my players guide the session with their interest. I had plenty going on as it was, after all, what with tracking their perception checks so I could count successes and come up with the bonus they’d get from LouLou for helping her collect herbs on top of merely chaperoning her into an area that could be potentially dangerous. They actually did really well, collecting a total of thirty-nine successes (beating the DC by 5, 10, 15, and so on counted as an additional success while a natural 20 double the final number of successes the total check would have given), which meant they all got paid really well for the job considering how eventually dangerous it was.

It was fun watching my players keep themselves to their little groups, even if two of the people in the groups hadn’t really picked sides but just sort of got drawn in by the person they’d spent the most time with. While there weren’t any overt confrontations, there was one attempt at listening-in on a private conversation, there was the casual avoidance of proximity, and the exhausted artificer just trying to get the job done. It was a rough time, emotionally, for these poor teens, as their status as an adventuring party and this job forced them into close proximity with little chance for escape since they all needed to stay near each other in the woods in case something happened (I was rolling for encounters the whole time and, surprisingly, rolled middle-of-the-road the entire time, which is rare for me since I tend to roll extremes more than statistics suggests I should), but they got through it without any flare-ups or in-fighting. It was interesting to watch the undertones of barely-avoided conflict bubbling away until the instant things started to go bad. Once there was an external threat and the real possibility of danger reared its head, the party focused up, helped each other out, and only barely let their feelings influence how they fought together once there was some horrible creature for them to battle. Thanks to the Barbarian’s resilience, due to halving damage and being able to stay at one hit point instead of being knocked unconscious once per day, only she got attacked and the monstrous hook horror was quickly taken out by a one-two combo of the bard healing the barbarian for a max-hp roll on a healing word, a critical hit with a heavy crossbow (that she’d been trained to use by the barbarian), and then a max damage roll on that critical hit. It was quite the end to the fight.

Since it was already time to end the session by then, I wrapped things up quickly, moving through the encounter with emergency services quickly (who noticed that the artificer had caught a wasting disease from the rat swarms the day before and healing them of that illness) and into the lock-in as quickly as I could. I wanted to set up the situation for next time and impress on the players that this school event was not only still happening, but meant to corral all the low-level adventuring students in one place where their elders could keep an eye on them. It would be horrible if any of them ran off and got themselves killed or damned as a result of whatever was going on at the barrier around the hellmouth. I wish I’d done a better job of setting things up, but given how tired I was and how long we’d been going at that point, I was happy to be able to do alright with that setup. I mean, I wasn’t so tired that I think I should have cancelled the session or anything–I wanted to play just as much as, if not more than, my players–but it was a real struggle to keep my focus during some of the parts of the hike and I wasn’t as eloquent or as descriptive as I normally am. It’s difficult to know how diminished my abilities were, but it’s not like I didn’t try to sleep. I’m just still failing to get more than four to six hours every night. At least I was still alert enough to walk everyone through the sort of things that they’d all know about, living in such close proximity to the barrier. I had friends growing up whose father was a nuclear engineer who worked at one of the nuclear power plants in Illinois, so I’m familiar with all of the informational pamphlets and whatnot that get passed around to people who live near a nuclear facility. It was an easy leap to make and, I hope, really drove home how our modern fantastical world really felt about these barriers and the hellmouths contained within them.

Currently, we’re planning another session in this upcoming weekend (as of this being posted, anyway. Me writing this still has almost two weeks to wait). I hope it’ll happen since there’s definitely a ton of interesting roleplaying that is queued up for the lock-in. I’m also hoping to introduce some non-player characters and focus on getting the player characters some outside friends that they can bounce ideas and thoughts off of without needing to necessarily navigate the inter-party turmoil every step of the way. Plus, it’s good to give the players other people (well, other people I’m pretending to be) to bounce off instead of just each other all the time. I mean, I love sitting back and watching my players go, but it’s useful to provide outside perspective and what are foils for if I don’t get to use them or have them interact with the player characters ever? I gave them all homework, to come up with a friendly and an unfriendly NPC each, so I’m looking forward to that, too. I love filling out the world with my players’ input. Only five more days! I can’t wait!