The adventure started like many do—with a band of adventurers stumbling into a tavern, and then being kidnapped to a mystical dreamscape. Sounds like the start to a bad joke.
JB Von Preysing, coordinator of library and tutorial services, Gamers Guild club supervisor, hosted his first-ever Dungeons & Dragons campaign on Aug. 19. Sessions began Wednesdays from 7-9 p.m. The story is original, with loose inspiration from an existing campaign, The Curse of Strahd.
Von Preysing has never dungeon mastered before and is learning how to do it properly.
“One of the problems of DM-ing for the first time is the chaos of the players,” said Von Preysing. “It’s a lot of fun.”
D&D is a cooperative roleplaying, story-based game where players create characters and make decisions in a narrative led by a host, called the dungeon master. The DM tells a story—either one they create or one they adapt from a premade campaign—and players have to navigate through it.
Von Preysing’s session started as almost all of them do: with the creation of the characters. And with that the players make one of the most important decisions of the entire campaign—to make a serious character or a joke character?
The story started with different parties conjoining in a bar where the party meets a strange little man who offers then broth and Meade. The party slept after this, awakening in a forest surrounding a camp fire and finding a man with a black cart that guided them to the next town.
“The campaign that I have designed is designed in a way that people can come and go,” said Von Preysing. “They will just have problems with levels when they come back.”
Normally, students would run these events, with TJ Baker (’25) dungeon mastering the previous long-running D&D campaign. This semester, Von Preysing is leading one of the campaigns.
“I would prefer if these games stayed student-run,” said Von Preysing. “As I think these games are more for students than for us. But I have no problem doing it—I would just prefer if a student DM ran all the games. I would prefer watching students interact with students in this manner.”
Even with that sentiment, students seem to be enjoying the chaos.
“I got one hit,” said Sam Stogner, a first year student.”I love it.”
There are two total campaigns for D&D this semester—Von Preysing is running one, and Kieren Groce, senior and president of the Gamers Guild, is running another on Wednesdays from 7-9 p.m.
The adventure continues—and will continue every Thursday at 7 p.m. in the Stanley Library’s LEaP Studio until the end of the year. The only breaks will be for fall, winter, and spring break.
