FINALLY, after nearly a year of actual real-world time, we’ve made it to our first time jump. We wrapped up the lingering moments of the previous session’s lock-in, tackled through what a time skip would mean for the player characters, and then started skipping forward. We tackled about what everyone got up to during the four weeks we skipped, who they spent their time with, and dipped into little scenes here or there as we went, taking up almost the entire session’s allotted time even with only four of the group’s normal set of five players. It was a lot of fun even if it did really drive home the point that we’re never going to do anything quickly with this group. That’s not a bad thing, of course. I love my roleplayers and how enthusiastic they are to talk to each other and play in the world we’ve made. I just really need to work on pacing and plotting on my side of things so I can meeting my players where they’re at. I don’t think I’ve ever once accurately guessed how long something was going to take to start, wrap up, or do in its entirety. I’ve been so far off every single time that I might just give up trying to figure out how much stuff I need to have prepped for every session and just make sure I’m enough steps ahead that I can’t run out. Which probably won’t ever be a problem given that we have only ever taken more time than I expected, not less.

Most of the recap of our last session and the two little things players wanted to hit with the player who wasn’t there last time took only a few minutes. I kept up moving pretty quickly, since I originally hoped to wrap up the time skip in half an hour to an hour of game time, but we wound up floundering as we hit the first week and started playing out the scenes my players described. The format I’d given them all for the time skip was that, for each of the four weeks we’d be skipping, they’d get to tell me what project their character worked on, what Player Character they spent the most time with, and what NPC they’d like to draw a connection (or scene, as it wound up being) with. We started moving through projects quickly for maybe the first person, but then people started wrapping their projects into their connections with other PCs, which turned everything into little scenes. Excellent little scenes that did a great job of showing the way the group was evolving and shifting following their division during the week leading up to the lock-in and their reunification during the lock-in itself (turns out there’s nothing to help a group get over their problems quite like competing alongside each other to beat everyone else). I also had a few questions I wanted them to consider, one of which was exactly that: how did their flawless if somewhat scary teamwork make them feel about each other given how often they wound up working together over the course of that very long day (that started with a mission to help an old lady pick some herbs, included an encounter with some kind of devil or demon, and then concluded in spending most of the lock-in together playing volleyball on the same team and absolutely winning the hell out of the timed adventuring/escape room event).

Most of the player characters continued working on projects they’d started previously, but a few of them took the time to deepen their bonds with each other. By the end, all of the characters were at least on neutral terms with each other, which is a decent place to be for a bunch of teens lumped into an adventuring party together by their school’s party-building system. We got to see some sports happen (the Barbarian is a hockey jock), see the school paper’s Star Reporter Bard put out an article that generated a lot of buzz, have the artificer move their project along, and saw the party’s Righteous Paladin start down what might wind up being a dark path (or a Righteous one, if her conspiracies prove true). We also had our first tests using the system I’d homebrewed a year ago. It took a little bit of work to remember how the system was supposed to work and we had to adjust some results, but it was funny to see the party’s biggest nerd and most Serious Student get the lowest grade because of some unfortunately bad rolls. Everyone but the Paladin (so far, since the Cleric’s player was absent and I wasn’t going to run this for them) got an A and the Paladin got a solid B. Which isn’t a bad grade mind you, but it was just kind of funny that she got out performed by everyone, including the Barbarian.

There were a lot of great little moments with other player characters as we saw study sessions, meetings of the Jr. Student Government, game day for the hockey team, a group trip to the mall, and even some expanding friendships as the player characters reached out to the people around them. The most notable one, though, was a meeting the artificer had with the school’s founder, president, and everyone’s homeroom teacher, Adak Ziegler. During that meeting, nominally about opportunities for the students to get involved in the developing situation with the broken barrier about the Hellmouth to the north of the city, the Artificer picked up on something Adak said, rolled an Insight check, and discovered that there was something going on with Adak. All of the Adaks they’d met had been real, solid people, but Adak was too many places at once, which involved some pretty powerful magic that they suddenly knew Adak was incapable of casting. It was an intense moment that made all of the corkboard conspiracies of the Paladin seem much more possible to the Artificer as they lost a little more faith in the adults in their life, despite remaining in contact with the one adult who’d been solid and helpful up to that point. I’m excited to see how this little tidbit grows as we continue to play, since I hadn’t planned to reveal something this portentous this early in the game, but I love a good twist and a natural twenty was the perfect excuse to indulge myself. I can’t believe I have to wait another week for us to play again!