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Hey there! As you can tell, I really struggled with deciding what the first placeholder post would be. This month, or rather this day might be the best place to start. I’m writing this on the day, a year ago, my friends and I agreed to start another Dungeons and Dragons campaign. 

D&D has been in my life since 2017. Back then a friend in my high school was interested in playing, so they asked me to be their Dungeon Master. At this point I was loosely familiar with tabletop roleplaying games, but nothing beyond the surface level. Nonetheless, I agreed. If you’d asked me at that time, I wouldn’t have known that I’d be IMMEDIATELY consumed. I followed the familiar pipeline we’ve come to expect: I watched actual plays like Critical Role and Dimension 20, bought hordes of dice, and invited far too many people to the first session. After about two months of prep, we started playing. 

Like many DMs just starting out, it was messy. I was running The Wealthy Merchant, a module about a trader looking for mercenaries to guard cargo he was delivering to the next town over. I ambitiously overplanned his backstory and he was murdered in the party’s first encounter. Our table also had 10 people at it, who constantly talked over each other and derailed progress to pick fights with strangers or disrupt the peace in the town square. To top it all off, I barely absorbed the rules in my two month planning period. Despite all of that though, that was some of the most fun I’ve ever had with my friends. 

The improvised tangents that our group created suddenly morphed into a coherent story that everyone contributed to each week. Although we were only there for an hour after school, that was an hour spent on the continent of Terabithia. That was an hour spent in the sewers beneath the city Firebug, where my friends stealthily tailed a group of nefarious bandits. That was an hour my friends and I were vulnerable with one another, playing pretend and living out fantasies dictated by paper and dice. 

Seven years would go by before I got back into D&D. I’d play it here and there throughout college, but after I graduated I completely fell off the hobby. Throughout the years, it became difficult to get sessions at the rate we would in high school. And like anyone growing up, people change and drift apart. Friends change and drift apart. Even still, I wanted to enter that space again. So I hit up two of my closest friends, bought a new module (Critical Role’s Call of the Netherdeep), and started planning.

This time around, planning had been less intimidating. Luckily, the module did most of the work and I wasn’t trying to balance the spotlight between ten people. Due to the significantly reduced player count, I found myself significantly more motivated to DM. There were less variables to account for, so I found myself coming up with new ways to challenge my players. We were also really fond of the role playing aspect too, so we got to take our time fleshing out the player characters during character creation. Another great benefit of running the game for a smaller party is the ease of scheduling. We would consistently meet every week and gingerly progressed through the module. Then, a year ago, we asked more friends to join us.

Our group now consists of five players and we meet (or try to) twice a month. It’s been a wild ride so far. We’ve completely departed from the story of the module into a new narrative, more focused on each character’s backstory. In all honesty, I couldn’t ask for a better party. Each member of the group is so creative and it is a treat seeing them become their alternate identity each week. We enter the fictitious world of Exandria to solve mysteries, to rob casinos in the name of helping someone in need, to delve into ancient ruins, to fight monsters, and just have fun. 

In an increasingly stressful world where it’s easy to feel powerless to factors beyond your control, it feels good to be in a space of boundless freedoms. It is a third space in every sense of the term. D&D will always be a great escape for myself and my friends, one where we can creatively challenge one another and get closer in the process.

Until next session,

Alfred