Running Dungeons and Dragons Again

Before I get to the meat of this Article, which I am sure you can gleam from the title is my recent return to the role of DM (Dungeon Master for the uninitiated), I think it best to outline my personal history with my favourite past time.

I discovered DnD during my ill fated first (and only) year at University. A flatmate of mine called Josh pitched running a game for the household and at the time I declined thinking that while I liked a lot of ‘nerdy’ things like video games and fantasy novels and even doing accents and impressions, I wasn’t that kind of nerd.

I have rarely been so wrong.

After what could politely be called a good bit of peer pressure I relented, and rolled up a character for the game. I potted for playing a Dwarf, I have always felt a kindred for the hairy little fellows with charming regional accents for some reason. From there I decided to play a fighter as the magic system in that edition of the game seemed unnecessarily complex. A theory that later editions would prove correct. I called the stout gentleman Ragnar as the name seemed cool and I had just started reading the Icelandic Saga’s and was a little obsessed.

We played three separate campaigns over that year all running concurrently. They were in many ways the Halcion days of my career as a player of DnD and I had fallen deeply and passionately in love with this new hobby of mine. Little did I know that the calamitous adventures of Ragnar Ironfist (amongst others) would lay the foundations of my life from that point forward.

One abandoned university course, 3 years and a rough breakup later I was having dinner with a dear friend of mine, by the name of Paige, in a wonderful Korean restaurant here in Sheffield. It is important to understand that at this time I was at a stage of my life that could best be described as ‘drifting’. I had a job that took me all over the country and lacked a permanent base of operations, sure I had a room at my parent’s house and the sofas of several friends but nothing that could be called Home, not in the Romanticised sense of the word. During this dinner we got talking about DnD and how we both missed it and then my companion leaned across the table and asked the question.

“Hey, do you maybe want to run DnD for me and my friends?”

The question was innocuous enough and at the time I agreed without really thinking about it. The idea sounded fun. In hindsight my response to that question may have been the moment that decided the path my early twenties would take.

I am getting ahead of myself though.

About a month after the dinner, I arrived at their house near the Ponderosa on a sunny spring evening and met the players of this new group for the first time. Aside from my afore mentioned friend I knew one other invitee, the other two were strangers to me. So not a normal start to most DnD games, I felt like a mail order DM in many ways, but I have always thrived in social encounters and got about the business of befriending these people as fast as possible.

I pitched the setting and game I intended to run and helped them roll characters and concoct back stories that evening. The very next day we played our first session, and I am proud to say it was a roaring success. We had bar fights with ghouls along with meaningful roleplay interactions and the beginnings of a very special party of characters. It began a campaign which saw half a dozen more friends dragged into the fold and 18 months of regular games. It might be in the running for the ‘thing I am most proud of creatively’ award. I need a shorter way to say that TIMPC? It was also how I met, inadvertently, my girlfriend Frankie so its fair to say I owe that game a great deal.

That game concluded in 2019 amidst a lot of tears (mostly from me) and I elected to pass the Baton of DMing to Paige and they have since done an outstanding job of running a game of Curse of Strahd for the group. Now however our time in Barovia draws to a close and I am back in the docket for the DM role in 2021.

It has been two years since I ran a serious game and facing the daunting prospect of a successor to that now mythic first campaign, I decided I needed to get in some practice and force the old creative grist mill back into action. Thus, I proposed to my Bubble (two households linked for COVID-19 support purposes) that I run them a little micro campaign over the next few months, partly to keep us all sane in what are hopefully the later days of the pandemic and partly to ‘get my eye in’ with this whole DMing lark.

Returning to the creative process of writing and fleshing out a setting and campaign has been like rediscovering a much-loved coat and realising that despite being a little older and a little less skinny it still fits perfectly. The comfort of sitting up feverishly typing into google docs at 3am because, on the edge of sleep, a plot line arrived in your mind fully formed. The familiar feel of excitement when a player sends me a text starting “So I have been thinking…”.

The whole process has been wonderous to return to and beyond the familiarity and joy there is something else, a creeping realisation that I, as a person and as a writer/DM have changed since I last did this.

Some of that is undoubtably the effects of the pandemic and the indescribable feeling of nostalgic bliss when we engage with anything from ‘the time before’. The larger part however is a symptom of the fact that since I last wrote a campaign I have learned and changed a great deal as a human. Principles and ideals I once held sacrosanct in my process lie abandoned on the cutting room floor and new guiding lights shine through the fog of a blank page.

That was a lot of waffle I am aware, but the real point of this post is to explain that we rarely chart our growth and change as people or creatives and revisiting a style of storytelling after a time away seems to me a novel manner of keeping tabs on that sort of development. The themes and systems we desire to focus on and even the characters one populates the world with can shed a light on the colour of our own souls.

For anyone wondering I have not filled the entire world with a parade of socially starved extroverts and cynical pseudo-intellectuals. Those archetypes do feature though.

I suppose if there is a lesson to had from all this is that I have found it deeply interesting to examine the changes within myself over the last too years and I am very grateful for introspection that it has afforded me.

Jim