"The tattered stones are a patchwork pattern beneath your feet as you slowly creep along the narrow hall. Mildew stings the nose, the only sound the errant and occasional drip of water from the cracked ceiling above. Just ahead, the hallway splits into a three way path. To the north you hear soft, moaning groans and the shuffling of slow, plodding feet. To the west, a shimmering portal glows, its radiance offset by images of what seems to be a floating city. To the East you see nothing but inky darkness, a yawning emptiness of promise and peril in equal potential. What do you do?"
To the uninitiated, the above may be the premise of a choose your own adventure, but it is my very basic attempt as a description of a character exploring a space in the game of Dungeons and Dragons. Created in the 1970's by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, among others, D&D has evolved over the many decades from a niche "Geek" and "Nerd" hobby into something of a cultural phenomenon.
To describe D&D, it is one part Lord of the Rings, one part theater play, one part math and statistics and one part patience. You as the player create a character from a vast array of races, classes, backgrounds, ideals, flaws, personality traits and bonds. This character is formed from your own imagination, but their attributes and everything they do are determined by rolling various sided dice to determine how well you succeed or how spectacularly you fail.
You as a character do not just stride up to someone to smooze your way through the door, you do so and then roll to persuade, deceptive or something similar. Depending how you roll, maybe that doorman lets you through, maybe they stop you cold and punch you in the gut, or maybe they lift their brows and say "come up and see me sometime" because you were so unbelievably charming.
At the other end of this game is the person known as the Dungeon Master. The DM as they are often called is part god part referee. They play all the non player characters, the monsters, they create the dungeons and they stipulate rules and act as arbitrator for things that happen. The DM is both best friend and mortal enemy all rolled into one.
If we want to use the Lord of the Rings as an example, the riddling with Gollum would be a set of rolls to determine the success or failure of riddles, but the true beauty would be the interaction between the player of Bilbo and the DM as Gollum creating the riddles themselves. It's imagination meets statistical probability and a great deal of luck, and its glorious to watch.
Back in the day, groups of people would gather around a table with dice and sheets of stats and roleplay characters they would create in worlds of fantasy, science fiction and perhaps more than a little pop culture reference thrown in for good measure. Nowadays you can go online and see shows like Critical Role which have exploded with popularity and become entities unto their own, inspiring new content for the game based on the adventures of a group of voice actors in D&D.
For me, the adventure began almost 13 years ago working nights in my job. Back then D&D was still very niche, but I had a group of people I enjoyed watching on Youtube, and I would download podcasts to keep my mind occupied with my work. One of the things that I discovered in this time was their D&D game which was one of the most crazy, off the cuff but remarkable stories I listened to. It was silly most times, but there were serious beats of a fantastic story just as epic as anything Tolkien could write. I sometimes joke that the only way I kept sane for so long was because of their insanity.
I became fascinated, looking up other Youtubers about Dungeons and Dragons stories, rules, settings etc. Over time the want and need to play practical D&D grew in me like dragon fire until I could contain it no longer. I had no practical experience in the game but I tried to go to a local game store to inquire a few times. Unfortunately the in person experience wasn't quite what I wanted, and the store was not a fit for my style, so I went back and tried to find other means to play the game. To that end I found a site called Roll20.
Roll20 is a "virtual" tabletop endorsed by the creators of D&D where one can easily play any tabletop games with people all over the world at any time. It's really a remarkable system and I have had the incredible luck to find a fantastic group to start learning the game. Now, almost two years later I am still very much a novice, but I've found I feel far more confident and creative as a player of the practical game.
Our adventure, known as "Of Long Lost Heroes" takes place on the Sword Coast of Faerun, a popular D&D adventure setting. I play as a bard, which is a very social class that acts as a supporter, slinging spells that affect enemy creatures, heal my allies, and inspire them through story and song. Of course, I am a sucker for strange things, and being the avid bird lover, I honed in on an unusual D&D race known as the Aarakocra.
The Aarakocra are bird people from another plane of existence, and while not a powerful race graced with fantastic stats or awesome magic, they can fly. The thought of me as this bird, flying through the air and singing inspirations or flinging awesome spells from afar was awesome enough in my book. Thus, "Cyrano Starshadow" was born, or "Jay" in short since I based him off a bluejay that visits my garden.
Cyrano is not like other Aarakocra, he was raised by elves who found his egg in the wilds and became inspired to seek his own destiny after hearing tales of great adventure. Thus he traveled to Waterdeep, an enormous city on the Sword Coast and became a part of the Bard's College of New Olamn. Cyrano would have been content to just be "that blue jay" at the college, if not for a strange invitation inviting him to join a guild called "Sword's Edge."
Cyrano is joined by a vast cast of nonplayer characters, allies and enemies played by our DM, Justin Acala, who writes science fiction/fantasy. Then we have the other players:
To the uninitiated, the above may be the premise of a choose your own adventure, but it is my very basic attempt as a description of a character exploring a space in the game of Dungeons and Dragons. Created in the 1970's by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, among others, D&D has evolved over the many decades from a niche "Geek" and "Nerd" hobby into something of a cultural phenomenon.
To describe D&D, it is one part Lord of the Rings, one part theater play, one part math and statistics and one part patience. You as the player create a character from a vast array of races, classes, backgrounds, ideals, flaws, personality traits and bonds. This character is formed from your own imagination, but their attributes and everything they do are determined by rolling various sided dice to determine how well you succeed or how spectacularly you fail.
You as a character do not just stride up to someone to smooze your way through the door, you do so and then roll to persuade, deceptive or something similar. Depending how you roll, maybe that doorman lets you through, maybe they stop you cold and punch you in the gut, or maybe they lift their brows and say "come up and see me sometime" because you were so unbelievably charming.
At the other end of this game is the person known as the Dungeon Master. The DM as they are often called is part god part referee. They play all the non player characters, the monsters, they create the dungeons and they stipulate rules and act as arbitrator for things that happen. The DM is both best friend and mortal enemy all rolled into one.
If we want to use the Lord of the Rings as an example, the riddling with Gollum would be a set of rolls to determine the success or failure of riddles, but the true beauty would be the interaction between the player of Bilbo and the DM as Gollum creating the riddles themselves. It's imagination meets statistical probability and a great deal of luck, and its glorious to watch.
Back in the day, groups of people would gather around a table with dice and sheets of stats and roleplay characters they would create in worlds of fantasy, science fiction and perhaps more than a little pop culture reference thrown in for good measure. Nowadays you can go online and see shows like Critical Role which have exploded with popularity and become entities unto their own, inspiring new content for the game based on the adventures of a group of voice actors in D&D.
For me, the adventure began almost 13 years ago working nights in my job. Back then D&D was still very niche, but I had a group of people I enjoyed watching on Youtube, and I would download podcasts to keep my mind occupied with my work. One of the things that I discovered in this time was their D&D game which was one of the most crazy, off the cuff but remarkable stories I listened to. It was silly most times, but there were serious beats of a fantastic story just as epic as anything Tolkien could write. I sometimes joke that the only way I kept sane for so long was because of their insanity.
I became fascinated, looking up other Youtubers about Dungeons and Dragons stories, rules, settings etc. Over time the want and need to play practical D&D grew in me like dragon fire until I could contain it no longer. I had no practical experience in the game but I tried to go to a local game store to inquire a few times. Unfortunately the in person experience wasn't quite what I wanted, and the store was not a fit for my style, so I went back and tried to find other means to play the game. To that end I found a site called Roll20.
Roll20 is a "virtual" tabletop endorsed by the creators of D&D where one can easily play any tabletop games with people all over the world at any time. It's really a remarkable system and I have had the incredible luck to find a fantastic group to start learning the game. Now, almost two years later I am still very much a novice, but I've found I feel far more confident and creative as a player of the practical game.
Our adventure, known as "Of Long Lost Heroes" takes place on the Sword Coast of Faerun, a popular D&D adventure setting. I play as a bard, which is a very social class that acts as a supporter, slinging spells that affect enemy creatures, heal my allies, and inspire them through story and song. Of course, I am a sucker for strange things, and being the avid bird lover, I honed in on an unusual D&D race known as the Aarakocra.
The Aarakocra are bird people from another plane of existence, and while not a powerful race graced with fantastic stats or awesome magic, they can fly. The thought of me as this bird, flying through the air and singing inspirations or flinging awesome spells from afar was awesome enough in my book. Thus, "Cyrano Starshadow" was born, or "Jay" in short since I based him off a bluejay that visits my garden.
Cyrano is not like other Aarakocra, he was raised by elves who found his egg in the wilds and became inspired to seek his own destiny after hearing tales of great adventure. Thus he traveled to Waterdeep, an enormous city on the Sword Coast and became a part of the Bard's College of New Olamn. Cyrano would have been content to just be "that blue jay" at the college, if not for a strange invitation inviting him to join a guild called "Sword's Edge."
Cyrano is joined by a vast cast of nonplayer characters, allies and enemies played by our DM, Justin Acala, who writes science fiction/fantasy. Then we have the other players:
- DC, who plays Nazir, our stalwart Paladin of Joy, a ladies and gent's man who rides a horse that is literally made of the night sky.
- Lewis, who plays Naivara, a snarky and often sardonic sorceress of the elemental arts, who seems to have a habit of running into assassins that want to kill her.
- Jadon, who plays Korax, a great beast of a man based on Maori warriors, the last of his people in another plane and who wears a mask to conceal his face.
- Kristi, our archer of keen eye. Her character Selitae is quiet and reserved, but she yearns to break free of that and come into her own.
- Cyrano (Myself), an Aarakocra Bard initially only yearned to entertain others and explore, but he has found himself as a secret James Bond style agent with an Ancient Green Dragon vying for a particular musical instrument he now holds.
Over the course of many sessions we have all changed a great deal, learned a lot about each other's dreams and fears, and we've become pretty good friends in and out of character. Sometimes we clash just as friends do, and we've seen other players come and go. Ultimately though, this is our story, and we all look forward to playing each week.
My part in all this? Well I am the resident Bard, so being the writer struggling a bit with proverbial block, I have taken talon to paper as the group's storyteller. Cyrano has detailed his adventures in a set of journals that has over a thousand views on our game forums. I don't know all of who is reading these journals, letters home as I have written them, but its fun to look back and see the various pitfalls and triumphs we all had. I've had to wrestle with moral quandries, sieges of fortifications, eyeballs that shoot death, and a vast underground dungeon built by a crazy mage just for the amusement of seeing people get lost in it.
We are closing in on the last parts of the game, and while our adventure might be coming to a close, it is my hope that we will continue to play together. D&D groups can be flippant and fluid, but a good group like this hopefully can find other adventures. Until then, there are dungeons to delve, dragons to slay and Cyrano's story to unfold. There are many questions he still seeks answers to, and much that even the freedom of flight cannot help him to escape.
How will his story end? Only the dice, our DM and a bit of luck will know for certain. Until then, dear traveler, safe travails. And should you find yourself in Waterdeep, seek out the Songbird of Sword's Edge. Who knows. Perhaps we can share a meal and song before plunging into the world together as allies.
(If you would like to see Cyrano's Journals you can click either of the above links in this post or look here: https://app.roll20.net/forum/post/6689112/the-letters-of-cyrano-starshadow)
(Image Courtesy of: https://cdn.pixabay.com/photo/2017/08/31/04/01/d20-2699387_960_720.png)
My part in all this? Well I am the resident Bard, so being the writer struggling a bit with proverbial block, I have taken talon to paper as the group's storyteller. Cyrano has detailed his adventures in a set of journals that has over a thousand views on our game forums. I don't know all of who is reading these journals, letters home as I have written them, but its fun to look back and see the various pitfalls and triumphs we all had. I've had to wrestle with moral quandries, sieges of fortifications, eyeballs that shoot death, and a vast underground dungeon built by a crazy mage just for the amusement of seeing people get lost in it.
We are closing in on the last parts of the game, and while our adventure might be coming to a close, it is my hope that we will continue to play together. D&D groups can be flippant and fluid, but a good group like this hopefully can find other adventures. Until then, there are dungeons to delve, dragons to slay and Cyrano's story to unfold. There are many questions he still seeks answers to, and much that even the freedom of flight cannot help him to escape.
How will his story end? Only the dice, our DM and a bit of luck will know for certain. Until then, dear traveler, safe travails. And should you find yourself in Waterdeep, seek out the Songbird of Sword's Edge. Who knows. Perhaps we can share a meal and song before plunging into the world together as allies.
(If you would like to see Cyrano's Journals you can click either of the above links in this post or look here: https://app.roll20.net/forum/post/6689112/the-letters-of-cyrano-starshadow)
(Image Courtesy of: https://cdn.pixabay.com/photo/2017/08/31/04/01/d20-2699387_960_720.png)
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