One common pastime of us at Lewis and Clark is Dungeons and dragons. Some games are school-sponsored but most are just friends getting together to have fun. It is one of the many things that make LC such a unique and community-oriented campus.
For those who don’t know, dnd is a role-playing game. Players use their imaginations to tell stories in a fantasy setting. Each person plays a character they invent within the structures of the game. They go on adventures, exploring a fantasy land filled with dangers, heartbreak, and victories that we’d never know in the real world. The shaper of this land is the dungeon master. They will describe the world and the actions that will take place. They will also voice and act as the non-player characters (NPC’s)
Dnd has many variations, not just your typical version. If you, like me, find the system of dnd overly complicated, then a more simple variation may be more fun to play. I played a version of dnd recently using playing cards instead of dice, that worked essentially like poker. Some variations just add on to the preexisting infrastructure of dnd. For example, if you want to add flying broomsticks to your campaign you can look up, or write mechanics for how they work.
I am playing two campaigns right now, one with some friends long distance, and one with my pod here at LC. You can play it with people near and far, so it is especially good for covid. While they both use the dnd framework, the gameplay is very different. One campaign is more focused on storytelling with our dungeon master giving us beautiful descriptions of the setting and fully realized NPC’s. The other has more freedom in terms of how the characters can shape the campaign. What we do and where we decide to go completely determines the trajectory of the game.
My friend is designing a campaign right now in a whole new world with new races of creatures, new cultural structures, and new enemies to fight. I have agreed to help him by illustrating some of the characters in his game. Here are some samples I’ve come up with so far:
