Please look for ways to improve the flow and pacing of the text. Thank you!
Traveling for months, we had finally made it to the king’s palace. Once inside, we found
the rooms abandoned, and there was not a soul in sight. We moved deeper into the palace until
we made it to the king’s throne. That is when we saw him, the shadowing figure that has been
taunting us with sand monsters for as long as we can remember. Finally, we had the chance to
end his torture on the kingdom, when suddenly a lion’s mane burst from his mouth. The floor
shook and we were lowered as the wings grew out of his arched back. Soon enough instead of a
man, we were standing before a huge chimera. The battle ensued, and after some strategy and a
couple lucky dice rolls, our ranger sent an arrow straight through the chimera’s exposed heart.
With the end of our epic campaign, Gaufrid gained the fame and riches he looked for, but my
troubles had just begun.
Like the people in the fantasy world fearing the chimera, the real world feared a small but
life-threatening monster in the form of COVID-19. People were forced to wait out the beast in
their homes until a group of heroes was able to engineer a cure for the disease. Our world as we
knew it was flipped upside down, and after a while it seemed impossible to escape. That is when
my friends and I figured it out. The key to escaping, even for just a small moment, was creating
our own imaginary world with a beast that we could take down ourselves instead of waiting
around. Matt was the one who proposed the idea, and in turn was the one who volunteered to be
our first dungeon master. We knew he was working on something big, as he had hardly spoken
to us for a week. Turns out Matt was vigorously studying the rules of Dungeons and Dragons and
writing up a campaign for us along the way. Needing an escape from reality, we agreed and
promptly created our new selves: a wizard, a ranger, a cleric, and a warrior. Thus, we abandoned
our world and set forth on forging our own under Matt’s harsh guidelines.
Despite his world’s rules we were able to slay the mythical chimera, but his exciting
campaign left the group hungry for more fantasy adventures, and the only person Matt trusted to
continue his legacy was me. To this day I do not know what he saw in me compared to the other
talented writers playing, but at that moment I was shocked. How could Matt trust the whole
existence of his world in my hands. Not only did I have the power now to change reality any way
I wanted, but I also had the responsibility of creating an entertaining story for my friends. At
first, I thought it could not be that bad. I had written plenty of stories as a kid and had read and
watched plenty of stories, but this was monumentally different than anything I had seen or done.
When normally drafting a story, you know what your characters will be always doing, what they
will do, and what they want to do, in dungeons and dragons, all that gets thrown out the window.
As a dungeon master, your players are the main characters, and it is up to you to create
entertaining scenarios and challenges that will complement their abilities and backstories. The
players choose what happens, and while you can force their hand as the dungeon master, it
makes for a less entertaining experience. When I realized this, I knew the task ahead of me
would be that much harder.
I started with research. Looking at online guides of the most efficient ways to be a
dungeon master, and the best way to keep track of your characters and possible directions the
story could go in. The absolute wave of information I uncovered was so overwhelming I had to
rethink my role as dungeon master. I had to do it though, everyone was counting on me, and this
was my way of combatting the horrors of the outside world, so I pressed on. My research led me
into a deeper and deeper hole as I quickly realized we had only been playing a simplified version
of Dungeons and Dragons, where there were much less classes and other gears complicating the
machine. After a quick poll, my group decided to increase our dedication with the more
advanced version. Our next session was in five days, and I had barely even started brainstorming
any scenarios. As the desperation slowly creeped inside me, and with much to learn and a story
yet to be conceived, hesitatingly turned to one of my favorite RPG games: Skyrim.
I knew enough about Dungeons and Dragons at the time to know that many of its players
held Skyrim in a poor light compared to traditional tabletop RPGs, but personally I love the
clunky narrative style and glitchy fun Skyrim offers. There I was booting up Skyrim for the first
time in what had felt like ages searching for just a shred of inspiration (and a chance at
procrastination) to get the story started. After a while of slaying dragons and other miscellaneous
creatures, an idea hit me out of nowhere. The story I would create would be a traditional fetch
quest by some long-forgotten wizard, but along the way one of the players would begin to realize
that he was born with a strange curse that plagued him and threatened to turn him against the
other players. The real story would end up being the players finding a cure for the poor player
who was selected to be this evil prokaryote's host. I began writing a simple tale of four men
stumbling upon each other in search of a wizard who had a large bounty above his head when I
ran into another issue, worldbuilding.
In order to make the experience an efficient escape from the real world, I was going to
have to create a new world that felt like some place where people lived and worked and raised
families. Without proper worldbuilding, the players can see right through the mirage of plot and
see the mostly linear path they are being pushed towards. Dungeons and Dragons is about
interacting with the world and its characters, so I was going to need to dedicate time to creating a
world rather than coming up with details along the way. I started with what Matt did for his
world and opened Microsoft Paint and drew a random landmass that could have passed as
Earth’s eighth continent. I researched medieval cities and villages to incorporate a realistic
feeling to the places in the world. I added ruins and other dungeons, and I also created various
terrain to create a good mix of biomes for the players to explore. Once I knew my world, I was
able to imagine where my players would travel, what people they would find there, and how
those people would influence their actions and thus the story. This visual aid acted as a roadmap
for my story, which was completed after a few days of writing (and the addition of challenging
puzzles and awesome monsters). All that was left was to present my masterpiece to the group.
The next day we gathered online, everyone eagerly awaiting a new journey, and so it
began: “You find yourselves in a bustling village square on the trail of a dark-haired vagabond
with a serious case of kleptomania....”