Actual Play: converting work colleagues to the cause

I was geas'ed to run D&D for one of my colleagues. They ambushed me at the office Christmas party and asked could I do it. This was a fair bit into the party so I filed it away as 'reconfirm later' - and when I was heading back to London I did check and lo, they were actually interested. I rounded up a few of the folk I *had* actually previously discussed D&D with, the geas-er roping in one of their pals too for a table of four.

I was honestly shocked at this level of interest among... ordinary folk? I mean, never mind the fact that I cosplay high corporate every day, I am still surprised that people have heard of it and are interested enough to try. These are folk who had not played Baldurs Gate 3, not seen the D&D movie, nor Stranger Things. The closest they had as a reference was some episode of Community (which I had never seen).

So with a certain sense of responsibility, I decided to book the Arcanists Tavern for some initial wow factor. Billed as "London's first immersive tabletop gaming cafe" near Hoxton, I have been in and run games there before but this was the first time I went full hog, booked a booth etc.

Facilities in general were great, booth big enough for the table, benches for the players and a seat for me all closed off with a curtain. We could tell the other tables were there but noise levels were better than a busy night at my usual Friday night venue. The tables were cool with baize pits in the center for all the dice rolling which kept things from getting lost. We got food and drink there, tasty toasties and a few beers - fairly abstemious compared to a typical work night out truth be told, practically a visit to the gym. Cost is value for what you get, I will be using it again.

Setup for the session

I generated a set of character from Fast Character - mostly because it is quick and easy button mashing and gets you most of what you need. Very good for martials or partial casters, not great for casters because it just names the spells, no info or stats, but it was good enough to get started.

I decided I was going to run a 'Splinters of Hope' session - planar scavenger hunt for wood from a now-dead world to save dying elves - and start in medias-re to really get things going.

I cooked up the session up as a classic 'quest' - sneak into a place, get a thing. Recycled setting by having the objective be set on the edge of my Hexcrawl25 map, so I knew all the factions, background activity and just used that. Decided to drop in 'thinky' challenges more than raw combat crunch. Threw in some good old Goblinpunch non-Euclidean weirdness. Decide it would be full of skeletons on 'automated rotas' so they could potentially sneak through them all if they figured that out.

Talked through all this to a transcription app while doing laundry then grabbed an envelope and blocked out the session linearly which became my session sheet.

Session Report: The Templars Villa

On getting everyone sitting around the table I had them share their names (since we had one 'stranger') then I described them tumbling out of a portal onto the roof of a city under attack. They see undead cavalry charge down the street below them to crash into a war-party of tundra-orcs in the plaza beyond. The see a house across the street with a door with a big sigil - then I called them back with 'but previously' and we got to character intros.

I had great good luck that the backstories thrown out hooked neatly into the quest - they had been given one bit of prep - "Why do you owe the elven temple a marker (which they are now calling in)" - one was a scholar researching in the libraries, one had a sick sister being treated. This was incredible good luck because the scholar was third around the table - and got to have helped with the research into why they need this off-world wood to rekindle a spirit tree in Arvandor - and the sister was last so they got to have a sister who was in fact dying of the very spirit affliction that the temple was trying to fix. Party motivations aligned to quest perfectly.

After character intros, the temple priest formally asked their favour in fetching back an old wooden armour stand from the house of an elven knight and said they would cycle a gate twice - now and in eight hours to get them back. This gave a clock to keep things moving and got us right to 'the dungeon entrance' to start. I threw in a bit of flavour of having the teleport circle cycle and a group of heavily armour paladins return, bloodied and battered, to hand over some other piece of recovered wood. After a quick pass by the temple acolytes to mop up the blood, they teleported away and we were back to the rooftop, now knowing they needed to get into the building across the street and retrieve an armour stand while the templar knight who lived there was wearing the armour and fighting tundra orcs.

There was some good initial thinking, slinging a rope over the street to the rooftop across and then climbing along it until the scholar balked at attempting anything physical and decided to just dash across the street and infiltrate through the back-rooms of the ground floor shops of the villa before they met up again in the courtyard. The party on the roof found a skeleton below the roof hatch and we had our first short combat encounter with a mightily flung javelin leading to a one-shot kill.

[DM commentary: this being their first big point of player agency I tried to be very 'all things are possible, what do you want to try' and give no suggestion about what was high probability or not. This was where they learned about ability checks, started rolling dice for the first time and there was a brief fascinated pause as everyone encountered non-d6 dice for the first time. After they split party on the first challenge I massaged coincidence to get both groups arriving at the first internal courtyard together in short order.]

They trotted around and a few skeletons were mugged as they probed their way deeper into the villa. They were looking at but not poking much at various shrines - they stayed quite on-task. The first major strangeness they ran into was an escher-staircase type non-euclidian gravity room, where the "stairs" were mosaic paths on the walls. They got into a ranged fight with some skeletal archers and after figuring out the gravity, used that to their advantage with some teamwork.

[DM commentary: I was deliberately generous with flashy swashbuckling moves - standing leaps into shifting gravity, flinging rocks tied to ropes to pull themselves up - to encourage creativity more than just "character sheet driving".]

They worked their way onwards, climbing into the gravity inverted upper floor, finding their first talking householder, a withered old elven housekeeper and after realising there was no point threatening someone who worships a goddess of undeath they decided to cautiously act on their directions and moved on.

[DM commentary: players very suspicious of the NPCs, even though I made them all sincere, if varyingly helpful - all the living had been trapped in service of this templar for centuries for whom they had little love and were indifferent to the activities of various intruders. ]

They worked past another obstacle - a bubble-pool with skeletons in it that they needed to use to swim up to a door without getting pulled down and drowned. Beyond they found their destination and a skulking commoner masquerading as a skeleton servant. They questioned them then used them as a stalking horse to get into the armoury. The most glorious but subtle roll of the night was the rogue sneaking through a bead current on a nat 20 without drawing attention.

Unspotted, they snuck up on and ambushed the guardian - the templars valet - then barricaded themselves within against the skeleton guards outside. After negotiating with the valet to take only the "worthless" wooden armour rack they took the valet hostage were able to avoid fighting their way out in return for taking no treasures.

They dashed back out and across the street to await the summoning portals return on the eighth hour before returning in success and glory through the portal.

[DM commentary: good use of terrain (barricading the door) and leverage (hostage taking, forgoing treasure) got them out with minimum combat - I think a successful instilling of 'combat as war' mentality. Once they got back across the street were were out of time at the venue so I skipped any 'siege' or further encounters and wrapped things up rapidly. ]

Session report ends

Lessons learned

For in medias re - have your 'mid-action start' be very early on so people rapidly 're-sync' with their mysterious glimpse of the future. I did this very deliberately, in the past I fumbled this and it just fizzles. It worked well here to flagpost 'there will be action soon' and whet interest, one just needs to be sure to pay off on that promise fairly rapidly.

With more time I would have thrown in some more static hazards - classic traps to be detected and disarmed, in particular using the 'click' approach of they find it by stepping on it then have to decide how to mitigate the consequences.

The whole thing was revelatory to me on D&D penetration of mass market awareness - when I asked everyone what they knew of D&D their only reference (among all of them) was not Crit Role or some actual play, not Stranger Things, not the recent D&D movie, not Baldurs Gate 3, not even that Dexters Lab episode. No, turns out the reference they had was that episode of Community from way back. I was both shocked they were interested enough to ask me to run a game but also got to the point of asking without any of (what I thought were) the basic cultural references. I have to wonder if they may have soaked up some awareness of D&D from tik-toks and the like but still, it was a lesson to me that I need to check my assumption that the most likely reaction is still 'ew, D&D' like it was when I got into things.

Sum up

Feedback was good, all of them wanted to do it again so four more converts for the cause. This was relatively combat-light but I was happy with the sense of hazard throughout.