by Miller C. Lashbrook
I thought that a fun series of posts could be to talk about the silly adventures that my friends and I go on while playing Dungeons and Dragons. Let me begin with my journey playing the game first. I have always been a board and card game person since I was little, so being the nerd that I am, it was only a matter of time before I found DnD. My first exposure to the game was my cousin who owned the basic books for 3.5. He showed me the classes and races in the player handbook and explain how the game worked. I was utterly flabbergasted at the fact that this game could exist completely in the players minds without any board, figures, or maps, just dice and sheets.
After that I was awhile before I actually played a campaign. My freshmen year of college I played a couple one shots and had a campaign with my friends. We played fourth edition. My character was Callisto Roselia a pink-haired, bisexual, paladin that was secretly a princess. This campaign set the tone for how I to this day tend to like my DnD campaigns, a mix of whimsy and casual fun. After that campaign I kind of fell off of playing DnD.
Flash forward then to my first year teaching when I met my partner, Zach, and one of the first things that we bonded over was our interest in DnD and table top games in general. Within the first month of us dating I had joined a fifth edition campaign with him and his friends. Since then we have been a part of a few campaigns, some home brew and some module based.
All these times I had been a player and loved going on adventures, but was thinking about how much fun it would be, especially being a writer, to be the Dungeon Master myself. In August of last year I finally got the opportunity to DM for our group of friends. The story idea I had floating around was what if a wizard had a Willy Wonka type competition where heroes could find “golden scrolls” in potion bottles. If they found them they would be entered into a universe hopping competition in a team with other random heroes. My friends loved the idea and how it left a lot open for crazy hijinks and traveling to homebrew worlds based on pop culture franchises.
Future entries in this series of blog posts will follow a retelling of the adventures and hijinks that my friends and I have been on in our Dungeons and Dragons campaigns. I hope you enjoy.
Pop Culture Fae 