After what feels like months (because it has been three months since we first started, given that we’ve played about once a month due to holidays and scheduling issues), my The Magical Millennium campaign finally cleared our first dungeon! They even did it without anyone dying or staying unconscious for very long! It was great! There were some close calls and a lot of bad conveyor belt related rolls, but they managed to clear it all in the end. We started the session with a check-in to remind everyone of how much time had passed (and a bit of frantic scrambling from me because D&D Beyond didn’t save the state of my encounter from last session), the party proceeded to kill the remaining clouds of energy, the Paladin beefed it on the conveyor belts repeatedly, the characters emerged from the virtual realm to get some notes from the person overseeing their game, and then they all settled down to sleep for the night before we wrapped up the session a couple hours early. It was nice to be able to bring the dungeon to a close, even if we didn’t play a full session (mostly due to the Super Bowl being that day), so we can hopefully start fresh in a brand new week when we all play again. Our next session will start with a bit of a time skip and a quick conversation about the highlights of what each character did during that time skip, but we’ll be moving on pretty quickly from there. My hope is we’ll be able to start off with homecoming week right away, since that’s a big day for high school students, and I want to get moving a little bit faster than we have been. We’ve been playing for a year now (or will have been, at the time of our next session), and we’ve only covered two in-game weeks! We’re moving so slowly!
Continue readingModern Fantasy
Getting Caught Up In Virtual Reality In The Magical Millennium
After a couple lengthy breaks for the holidays, The Magical Millennium finally met up again! This time, we spent the entire session running through a virtual reality “escape room” type adventuring experience. The party’s goal was to find the four employees stuck in a factory where all the magitech machinery had gone haywire and then safely guide them out of the building. They had gone through a few rounds in the previous session where, thanks to their decision to split up and cover as much ground as possible, they’d found the first three employees AND a safe route to the front of the building. This time, they got an unconscious employee back on his feat, convinced the three employees they’d found that they knew a safe route out through the front door, found the fourth employee, found and fought an electric ghost, lost more faith in adults by uncovering the secrets of the cost-and-safety cutting manager, discovered they could have been shutting down the dangerous machines this whole time, and managed to get all of that done in a touch less than two in-game minutes. It was a pretty wild, busy session as I did my best to ride herd on the group, striking a careful balance between ushering people along and letting everyone have fun since I realized fairly quickly that we probably weren’t going to finish the rest of the virtual reality dungeon in this single session. I think I did a pretty good job of that, getting through twenty busy rounds of a dungeon while keeping the information flowing as the group solved the mysteries of why the factory was going haywire and briefly touched on the last secret of this gamified experience that would let them go wild in the VR Dungeon Sim they were trying to win. After all, this is a timed competition! They need to finish in first place so they can show up all their rivals and haters. At this point, I mostly just hope that they don’t overextend themselves and lose as a result of taking too many risks. They’ve got the time to be careful!
Continue readingThe Magical Millennium’s First (Virtual) Dungeon!
Another wonderful session has come and gone with my players in The Magical Millennium. While we seem to be skipping every-other-session due to holidays, that’s about what I expected (so much so that I did zero preparation for the last session we skipped since I was all but absolutely certain that we would wind up canceling) and I’m very hopeful about things picking up in the new year. We’ll see, of course, but I think we’re finally going to be making some forward progress again. As much as I love all the stuff we’re doing and seeing in this endless Lock-In (which has been going on since October), I’m ready to move on to the next thing. Still, we’ve had a lot of fun in this school-event-turned-adventurous-teen-corral so far and that pattern shows no signs of changing after our latest session. This time around, we had an amazing set of rolls that started off the final match of the dodgeball tournament we began in our previous session, an unexpected downbeat as the time I’d set aside for a drawn-out final match was unexpectedly free that one of my players managed to put to EXCELLENT use, and then our first dungeon! It’s a virtual reality dungeon/escape room adventure experience, but my players took the gentle suggestion that this one would be competitive to absolutely dive in with a level of focus and teamwork that I’ve never seen in them for ANYTHING ever. Seriously. Every time these kids are stuck together, something happens to make them hate each other or deepen the existing fractures in this group and they threw that all aside so they could absolutely wreck this competition. It’s amazing and I’m so excited to continue our game in the new year!
Continue readingThe Magical Millennium Plays Dodgeball
Another weekend down, another session of The Magical Millennium in the bag! As we have been for the last few sessions, we’re still in the middle of the Lock-In at school. This past session covered almost two hours of time, which would mean we’re actually picking up the pace if it weren’t for the fact that we weren’t able to finish up the final match of the dodgeball tournament and so didn’t REALLY get through a whole two-hour period. In the time we did cover, though, we got to see everyone except the Cleric run off to sign up for the “random party” Adventurer Escape Room activity. Only one player got randomly selected for a time slot they’d chosen, unfortunately, but that just means that everyone else will feel a bit more ready when they go to compete in the time trial version with their established party after the dodgeball tournament. We got a little bit of conversation between the Artificer and the Bard, a pair we don’t see much, saw the Cleric almost have a panic attack as they sought out some peace and quiet, and saw a fated confrontation between the Barbarian and Group B’s fighter on the dodgeball court (well, we saw the start of what the Barbarian’s player is describing as a fated confrontation with her character’s foil. I’m pretty sure it’s just some jock-on-jock competition, but we’ll have to see how it goes). After that, we managed to actually end on time since one of the players had to leave right away. Now, we’re looking at some potential scheduling woes as we approach the winter holiday season and must face up to the reality that skipping even one session means going a long time without getting to meet up again.
Continue readingPlaying The Adults In A Campaign About Teens In The Magical Millennium
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.
Continue readingUncorking Emotions In The Magical Millennium
One of my favorite parts of my The Magical Millennium campaign is that all of my players are willing to go all-in on roleplaying in a way that I can rarely predict. Sometimes people escalate when I didn’t expect to provoke a response or wind up digging into something I assumed was going to be passed over quickly, and I absolutely love the feeling of needing to scramble in order to continue the scene without breaking stride. This last session, as the party started the Lock-In they’d been planning as they dealt with the local emergency in the background (they all kept their cell phones since the barrier around the Hellmouth broke and while all the parents absolutely agreed that keeping all of their burgeoning adventurer children under close supervision by much more powerful adventurers and trained educators was a great idea, they still wanted to be able to get ahold of them if something else happened. Which means these teens also have access to outside information and that’s definitely never going to come up even a little bit), I got to see my players in fine form.
Continue readingIntroducing New Tension Into The Magical Millennium
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.
Continue readingNear-Death Experiences In The Magical Millennium
Things took a turn for the intense during my group’s latest session of The Magical Millennium. What was supposed to be an easy job standing guard for a few hours outside a warehouse while it was cleaned up so some pests couldn’t get back inside turned into an intense and almost deadly combat encounter. The general framing for this was that the party, all first-level characters and in their first semester of Magical Ability school, signed up as guild members sponsored by the school as part of their second week of class. They were tasked with going on an adventure as a group, spent some time picking out a few from the Magical Ability Level 1 group, and then tried to fit in their other homework and social activities between the three jobs they’d taken. For reference, all “class” powers in the D&D system use, in this world, either woven magic (spellcasting) or ambient magic (everything else), so their school teaches them how to harness their powers as the students figure out the extent of their powers and their willingness to live a life relying on said powers. This adventure and the interviews I’ve covered extensively in past posts, were meant to get the characters (and the players) to appreciate the guild system. The idea was that they would learn about the protections it affords to both magical and non-magical people, the way it helps people find an appropriate tier of labor for whatever job needs doing, and provides the guild members with a means of ensuring no one swoops in to steal work out from underneath them. Unbeknownst to my players, they picked the one job of the six on offer that was build in as a cautionary tale about blindly trusting in the system they’re buying into. Thankfully, though, they all escaped with their lives even if the group feels even more fractured than it did after the last session (which is saying something since at least one player made a back-up character after that one).
Continue readingPlayer Versus Player Roleplaying In The Magical Millennium
Another week and another Dungeons and Dragons session in the bag! This week, I got to run The Magical Millennium again. Our last session involved a Parent/Guardian-Teacher Conference and the party’s first adventure (which only included four of the group’s five players, unfortunately) and this one started off with a little bit of back-tracking for the player who couldn’t be there for the last session. After all, her character needed an opportunity to start on her homework (to interview an experienced adventurer, with bonus points if the adventurer was active before the Adventurers’ Guild began operating). From there, we moved into spending some time going through the finances of the previous year’s Junior Student Government (discovering conclusive proof of the previously suspected embezzlement along the way), more interviews and homework, an incredible bit of Player-versus-Player roleplaying, and then some wrap up as the players moved to establish individual emotional connections over group ones while also trying to finish putting together the lock-in they’d dreamed up as a way to help their absent player character eventually escape the cult they’re a part of. Just normal teen things, you know? It was a lot of fun to preside over a session like this, largely filling in the blanks, keeping tensions between the player characters and not the players (which was not much work, since they’re all good roleplayers, even if this group is still relatively new to playing together), and finding ways to keep the story rolling forward even as the difficult social dynamics of high school students from very different backgrounds threaten to slowly rip the group apart. This game continues to be a blast and I am eager for the next session, even if I still have to wait two weeks (as of writing this, anyway).
Continue readingGuardian-Teacher Conferences And First Adventures In The Magical Millennium
Though we were short a player, there were still enough people available to hold another session of The Magical Millennium. We picked up immediately where we left off last time, with a few notes about how most of the player characters present spent their afternoons and evenings before we launched into the two big events for the session: a guardian-teacher conference (like a parent-teacher conference but for legal guardians who want to avoid the topic of parents) to discuss the uncontrolled magic one of the player characters unknowingly cast on their unsuspecting dorm neighbor and the party’s first adventure in a city park that had an Awakened Bush problem! Everything went well, my players had a great time, and no one was knocked unconscious despite the irritable awakened plants landing two critical hits in a combat session that was almost prevented by good roleplaying (bad rolls and cascading failures are the only reason this didn’t even non-violently). I got to make up some random NPC names, accidentally create a really cool character, and start to trickle in a little bit of information about the retired adventuring party casting its shadow over the city and the player characters. After all, if one of the players is going to make their character the second child of one of the ex-adventurers who saved the world by sealing the rifts into the fiendish planes before they could consume the planet, I’m absolutely going to find a way to do something narratively fun with that. Why wouldn’t I?
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