After a bit of a break from sessions, my Dungeons and Dragons campaigns have finally begun to happen again. This past weekend (as I’m writing this and two weekends ago as you’re reading it), the campaign I’ve been calling The Rotten came together to do a little more labyrinth exploration, which involved making their way into their first proper hallways, finding some faded text carved into some large stone tiles, finding more faded text carved into smaller stone tiles, avoiding a few traps, fighting some undead that had been animated by the ambient magic just outside this part of the labyrinth, fighting some local raiders who were half-starved but who still nearly took down the party, AND discovered signs pointing them toward some long-forgotten religion! What a fun little session it was! We also talked about adding a few more players to the game–to help pad things out a bit when people can’t make it to a session–started inviting people, got three immediate “yes” responses, and then talked about what it would look like to have three more players. I’m still fairly confident that we’ll rarely have six players at the same time, but it’s bound to happen a few times, other than our next session when I’m hoping to bring them together to handle new character introductions and whatnot. If it happens too often, it might be difficult for some people to participate, what with all the extra faces and voices, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. I’ve got a lot of experience running a bigger group, so I have some ideas to help keep people engaged and interacting if it comes to that.
Continue readingTabletop Gaming
The Treasure I’ve Sought For Years: A Stable Gaming Group
Over the years, I’ve been a part of a lot of groups. Friend groups, D&D groups, Overwatch groups, fighting groups, so on and so forth. They’ve always been a great way of collecting people for various purposes and I’ve enjoyed my memberships, even when I haven’t exactly been interested in the purpose of the group (like how I’ve pretty much only played Magic: The Gathering in order to participate in my friends’ activity). The only group I’ve never really been a part of that feels like an actual lack in my life is a “gaming” group. Not a video game group. A tabletop gaming group. Or board gaming. Or both, which is what I think of when it comes to this undefined type of “gaming.” I’ve almost always had a Dungeons and Dragons group, even a few that met weekly, and I’ve been a been a part of an unfortunately short-lived Tabletop Gaming group, but I’ve never had a group that would, as I’d define it anyway, get together on a regular schedule to play whatever games we’ve got. Tabletop games, board games, card games, or whatever. Any kind of game, really. I’ve been a part of groups that have talked about becoming gaming groups, but even the ones that eventually met up never made it through the first game, much less into a second game. At this point in my life, though, as I think about my ever-growing collecting of tabletop roleplaying games and board games, I find myself wanting a group that can just get together to play whatever. I have so much whatever and I’d really like to play it all some day, which isn’t really a pitch I’ve been able to sell any of my local gaming friends on so far.
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 readingTaking The Rotten Into A Lively Dungeon
This post is a little late in coming. VERY late, technically speaking, since I seem to have forgotten to write about the first full session with my The Rotten group in the shuffle of moving the blog. And then last week, I started writing about the group’s dungeon experience and wound up writing about dungeons in general rather than the Dungeons and Dragons session that the dungeon featured it! Which means I’m a little behind when it comes to session recaps about The Rotten and we actually did quite a bit with the last two! We introduced our characters, established narrative connections, discussed the kind of game we were about to play, worked through details of what it meant to travel such a dangerous world, met some strangers along the road that bore a dire warning of what lay ahead, and spent the party’s first night camping outside beneath the stars. In our second game, we started down into a canyon the player characters were warned was dangerous, spent some time wandering around in the fog, discovered an eerie world within that fog, solved some puzzles, navigated through a maze based on vibes along, rolled a lot of natural 20s in an incredibly short period of time, survived our first combat encounter, and played around with some traps! It was a great time and only one of my players nearly died! Well, technically did die to the first attack roll in the game, but we all decided that was bullshit and we’d just not have it be a crit. Chaos then ensued, the party emerged victorious, and they learned a lot about the difference between rolling for something and working their way through a puzzle free of rolls. It was a good session! Not that the first one wasn’t good, mind you, it was just a lot of settling in and figuring things out rather than focused play. And, ridiculous string of natural 20s from this latest session aside, I’m just happy I got to start running my first proper, DEEP dungeon in a long time! And I’m definitely not stressed about it and how old patterns (which I mentioned in last week’s blog post about dungeons) seem to be repeating despite this being an easy-mode dungeon I haven’t even finished building yet!
Continue readingBuilding A Dungeon All My Own
For the first time in what feels like YEARS (and is definitely at least “years” if not “YEARS”), I started running an actual dungeon in one of my Dungeons and Dragons games. For a long while now, as I’ve tried to explore more expansive storytelling and dealt with groups more interested in narrative than mechanics, I’ve avoided putting my players in what one might consider a stereotypical dungeon. I’ve had some dungeons, sure! I had my players run through a dungeon-esque wizard’s tower that was actually a testing site for traps and puzzles to be used in other dungeons. I trapped my players in a nightmare realm where they had an “ever-renewing” eighteen hour period to solve the puzzle of this time-and-space-locked demiplane. I’ve even made proper dungeons that wound up not getting explored by my players because they chose a different route forward. I think the last time I had a proper dungeon was back in 2019 or 2020, the last time I had a “classic” Dungeons and Dragons group with a “classic” mix of characters played by players who were interested in what it meant to be a D&D Party and to play their classes, specifically. Which is a bit funny to admit because, once upon a time, I loved nothing more than a good dungeon. I was scattering those things every which way. You’d think that would have still happened even in my more expansive play style now, if it was something I cared about, right?
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.
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