Blogocentric Formulations

Halfway There

Tonight we officially start the second half of the Dungeons & Dragons campaign that I've been playing with a new group for over a year!

A couple of acquaintances from my last church approached me in January 2024 about potentially joining their weekly(ish) game nights every Thursday. All of them enjoyed playing D&D but everyone at the table either didn't like (or wasn't very good at) running the game as the Dungeon Master (which is the thing I actually enjoy most), so they asked if I might be interested in giving it a try for a little while.

That was 15 months, 34 game sessions, and 10 character levels ago.

We just wrapped up a nearly month-long, three-part "season finale" to the campaign; the midpoint where everything that's been building for several months finally came to a head. I've written more than 200 pages of adventure narrative and other campaign materials (hey, maybe I can write novel-length fiction after all! ), and the last three weeks was a crazy large battle that brought in characters and story elements that I've been building for weeks or even months, waiting to pay off.

For those readers who haven't played D&D before, there are all kinds of ways you can play but assuming you're using a traditional structure, characters begin at 1st Level (newbie adventurers) and undertake a campaign (a series of adventures, either interconnected or not) until they reach 20th Level (world-changing heroes of legend). The players just hit 11th Level, which coincides with the fact that they just hit the "midpoint twist" of the campaign, which has spun things off in an entirely new (and more dangerous!) direction that will propel them through the remaining levels and allow us to conclude the campaign after they reach 20th Level.

This is actually the longest running campaign I've ever had (by number of sessions and character development). I've played D&D off and on over the years, and the longest running campaign I've had up until this new one was several years ago where I ran 23 game sessions for characters that were 9th Level at the time. That campaign ran for three and a half years and met no more than once monthly (still my longest running campaign by time spent), so getting into the later stages of a campaign is something that's new and exciting for me.

I'm really enjoying the process of developing characters and storylines again. The malleable nature of a D&D campaign speaks to my love for connection and adaptation. It's so much fun to take a small thing that one of the players does and incorporate it into a campaign such that, when it comes back around again, they're surprised and excited to see how their player choices affect the world around them. But it's also really reignited by love for storytelling and character development in general, which is something that I've really struggled with over the past several years. I've managed to write stories here and there, of course, but I haven't felt like a real writer in years. I feel like I'm starting to get that spark back, and it's largely due to being part of a D&D gaming group again.

I have a couple more hours to finish up this week's adventure, where the players are going to pick up the pieces after the enormous battle that just took place, and figure out where to go from here. I can't wait to see what we're able to build together from here.