After a little bit over two months, I finally had all of my players back together again for The Magical Millennium and we not only got to catch up on what one of the characters was doing in the background of every scene previously discussed by the other players, but get through the entirety of the second day of school for all of the players who couldn’t be there last time. My players also picked out their first quests, discussed their homework, and dealt with the small revelations that came from catching up the other player (and worked on catching her up on the small revelations that come from everyone else’s scenes). We also got to have a few discussions that had been put off because one of the required players wasn’t there. It was a great time, even if we started half an hour late and spent most of the session focused on catching up rather than doing something wholly new. I’d have preferred to get some completely new stuff into the game, but there were a few scenes that came up that needed time and attention for reasons I’ll be keeping to myself for now (though I’ve already revealed to one of my players that something important happened that their character only really noticed in retrospect). Fully caught up, now, I’m excited for us to continue forward with a sort of parent-teacher conference to discuss one student’s accidental spellcasting, one or more new adventures, and the eventual introduction of the first threads of the larger plot I’ve been cooking up.
Continue readingMagical High School
Party Plot Twists In The Magical Millennium
After a month that felt so much longer than a month, we’re finally back to playing The Magical Millennium! I’ve missed this group a lot, even though I’ve managed to find ways to stay busy, so I’m glad we had enough people still available to meet. One player, a doctoral student in the middle of probably the busiest part of her doctoral program, hasn’t been able to make it for the last two sessions, but I mostly just feel bad that she’s so busy and swamped with her work that she doesn’t have the time to relax and do things like playing Dungeons and Dragons. I’m sure she’ll free up eventually, but I definitely missed her presence during the last two games. We’ll have to figure out what her character was up to at the party while everyone else handled their first party of the year with what has mostly amounted to success. Sure, there were some flubbed rolls in there, but I’m always looking for ways to let my players fail forward and it was pretty easy to do here. This time, my players tried to sneakily follow some of their peers, jumped off a roof into a pool, made some friends, and even had a fun mix of inter-team conflict and bonding. It was a really great session, even setting aside how happy I was just to be back playing this game again.
Continue readingStarting To Party With The Party In The Magical Millennium
After two skipped sessions, we finally returned to playing The Magical Millennium. When last we left our beleaguered students, it was their first day of magical classes and they’d survived a harrowing encounter in the lunchroom. They’d breezed through their first day of classes–aside from that one disastrous lunch period–even earning a commendation from the teacher of their Adventuring Class for a stellar performance, and then went their separate ways at the end of the day, united by their experiences, the assignment that they perform as a party, and the single group chat one of them put together. It took three sessions, but we’d finally finished the first day of school!
Continue readingThe Magical Millennium Finished Their First Day of School
We did it! My Dungeons and Dragons group playing a Modern Fantasy “school-aged teen slice of life but with fantasy tensions” game I’m calling The Magical Millennium finally finished our first day of school! We got through a second period of lunch and specialty training, everyone had fun coming up with a bunch of electives, we talked through what everyone did immediately after school, and then I outlined how we’re going to handled the rest of their first week of class. We didn’t have any new social encounters (though I did have updated rules on hand just in case) since the one that seemed likely to happen during the second lunch period was avoided entirely. Neither the Non-Player Character nor the Player Character who might have fought each other did, instead choosing to abruptly look away after their eyes accidentally met across the cafeteria. It was a tense moment that passed quickly, thanks to their complete and total mutual rejection of any social contact. Other than that, we had fun making a Group Chat text channel in our Discord server (which was rapidly used by several players to simulate their chatting throughout the day) and started getting our first look into the world at large. Which, thanks to our decision to place this game in the real world and then tweak it from there, is super fun to place around the Twin Cities in Minnesota. All I have to do is open Google Maps and there is all the information I need to describe the world around them. This is honestly an incredibly fun game to play and I’m not sure I’ve ever had more fun running a tabletop game of any kind.
Continue readingFinally Halfway Through The School Day In The Magical Millennium
This past Sunday, we held our second session of the Dungeons & Dragons game I’ve titled The Magical Millennium. This is the modern fantasy D&D game I’ve mentioned previously, featuring high school students in a bit of a genre mash-up I’ve taken to describing as “slice-of-life but with fantasy tensions,” and so far our first two 3+ hour sessions have involved going through the first four periods of the first day of school in a new year. Last time, we covered character introductions, a few notable NPCs, terminology they’d all need to know, and establishing some of the background drama the second-year students were coming into the game with. It was a lot of fun, especially as it ended with a Illusory/virtual reality fight the players absolutely dominated. This time, since the fight I’d planned to start with had been unceremoniously ended by a hefty expenditure of limited resources, we focused on what the students did with the latter half of their homeroom period, a bit of background on how magic works in the world, their class schedules, and how classes were going to be formatted through their days. Also when they had lunch period, which wound up being the battleground for our first social encounter when a bit of incredibly forward flirting was misinterpreted by an NPC. We got to go all-in on new systems and high school drama, which felt like a lot of fun to me, even if we only made it through another two and a half periods of their eight-period day.
Continue readingReturning To Dungeons & Dragons With The Strongest Session 1 Of My Life
After over a year, I finally ran a session of Dungeons and Dragons 5e again. Two, actually, in quick succession (which in this case means one on Sunday and one on Monday). It was like settling back into an old, familiar chair that, despite feeling exactly the way you remember it, is sitting in a room that only looks like the place it used to be. It was familiar and everything worked exactly how I thought it would, but everything also felt a little off. Like there was some detail that I was missing that would explain why the desk was slightly further from the chair than I thought and that the sunlight was in my eyes more than it used to be. Which can pretty much be chalked up to that year being my longest break from running some kind of Dungeons and Dragons game since I started playing it in 2010, coupled with my still-settling feelings about returning to a game that has as troubled a history as D&D does thanks to the shit Hasbro has tried to pull as the owners of Wizards of the Coast. Still, I was able to work through those feelings and, despite the frenetic pace of my prep during the forty-eight hours prior to the first of the aforementioned games and the twelve hours prior to the second of said games, run what felt like a pair of good sessions.
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