Today: Mar 18, 2024

Students participate in fantasy world with D&D campaign

Ali FernandFeatures Editor

There is a fantasy world in the Adanti Student Center Room 308 with artificers, warlocks and monks. Students enter this world through their own creative storytelling.  

Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) is a fantasy roleplay game that is guided by the decisions and characters that the players create. Tabletop Club at the university hosts several of these stories, called “campaigns,” every Tuesday night.  

“That’s everything I like about D&D, making a story with other people,” said Co-president of Tabletop Club and studio art major Sara Lareau, a junior.  

Students create their own fantasy characters. Their abilities are split up by classes. According to D&D Beyond, a few of the classes are artificer, barbarian, fighter, rogue and monk.  

Lareau’s character is named Rose and her class is a classical artificer.  

“An artificer is essentially a fantasy engineer that uses magic to make mechanical things,” Lareau said.  

In addition to their magical abilities, artificers have robot arms and are talented with swords. There were 6 other students who attended this session of D&D: Parker Fitzgerald, a freshman, who plays a Rogue named Mango, Spenser Trella, a senior, plays a human ranger named Jeremy Crowe, Cassie Kryger, a senior, who plays a monk named Piper Copperpot and Allison Miller who plays a findal artificer. 

The sixth person Persephone Sands, a freshman, took the role of the “Dungeon Master (DM).” The job of the DM is to guide the story of the campaign. 

“My way of running D&D is having the absolute bare bone of what’s going to happen,” Sands said.  

Sands created an outline of what the session will look like before she arrived. There was a plan of what was going to happen, but the decisions that characters make can change where that plan goes.  

DMs can create their own story, use books or find story ideas online. Since the players create their own characters, sometimes stories need to adjust to better cater to the characters.  

“The story is malleable; it will change with the characters,” Sands said.   

On Tuesday Nov. 1, students each sat around a table to continue the story of the “raven queen.” In the session before, they had found out that the queen had been murdered. This session, they were trying to find out who was the one who murdered the raven queen.  

Having a space to explore fantasy ideas is the appeal of D&D. Many students can come to a campaign session to be creative and be in a world unlike the one they live in.  

“I can go into another world, it’s very freeing,” Trella said.  

Even though the DM is the main person telling the story, the other players still are included. They make decisions when they run into issues. Players can also get in fights with monsters and make decisions that affect the other players.  

“My whole thing is I just love storytelling, it’s like writing your own book over and over again,” Lareau said.   

D&D also involves a group of people who meet consistently. In that way, the players begin to learn more about each other. Each game develops its own dynamic based on who is playing and where the story goes.  

“I love my friends, and I love telling stories with my friends,” Sands said.   

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