Living in Another World
The process of getting immersed in a fantasy world when playing Dungeons and Dragons
Persephone D’Andrea sits behind a table full of the tools she uses to run her Dungeons and Dragons campaign. The tools feature a box of hand-painted miniatures, a set of rulebooks, a map of Taihallow, her laptop, and a hoard of dice.
Story by Joshua Grambo
A sprawling Victorian-style metropolis with smoky industrial hubs, cramped slums and high-class residential housing. Permeating every corner of the city is the Haze, an eerie green mist that fills the air. You can’t see the sun in the city of Taihallow; all that gets through is a sickly green light. Expose yourself to too much Haze? The result is insanity. Those who die inside the Haze suffer a worse fate, they rise again as undead monsters, their personalities, memories and hopes all washed away. The water surrounding the island city is also infused with it — swimming is not a lighthearted activity here.
Once a week, Persephone D’Andrea and four players gather to play Dungeons and Dragons. Each player guides a character through the world D’Andrea has created. Their party is a rather motley crew. A robotic worker, freed from manual labor aboard a submarine, an old half-giant fisherman and monster-fighter, an idealistic elf who hopes to clear the Haze from the sky, and an undead, one of the lucky few whose personality wasn’t destroyed by the Haze.
Their current goal? To find a missing friend who’d infiltrated the ranks of the tyrannical Ossuary knights — soldiers dedicated to guarding the city from the undead, even the few undead who retain their minds, by any means necessary. With dice, snacks, her laptop, a grid mat to measure combat space and a box full of hand-painted miniatures, D’Andrea is set up to run her game. Things never really go as expected, though.
“The plan they came up with was frankly insane. And it’s more insane that it worked,” she said. This particular part of their adventure started with a simple mission: their friend might have been held captive in an Ossuary Knight guardhouse, and they needed to find him. The first step of their scheme? A quick dive into a dirty cesspit filled with every bit of waste you could dream of — the city sewers.
The Ossuary knights arrest any undead they find. To infiltrate their guardhouse, the party decided that one of them should pretend to be undead and get arrested — so they decided to stuff a zombie rat inside the robot, truly a foolproof disguise. A quick toss of the dice added a bonus with the highest possible roll — a natural 20. They found an undead rat king, dozens of dead rodents, their decaying flesh melded together into a revolting mob of necrotic animals. Plus a few individual, equally disgusting, rats — as a present.
The group quickly went ahead with a new plan: one rat stuffed inside the robot and a leash around the rat king. They climbed back to the surface and began to parade their new pet in front of the guards. Ten minutes later, they had one arrested robot, one incinerated rat king, and a stuck rat that the guards weren’t able to remove.
“This rat fiasco is honestly one of the weirdest things my players have done in years,” said D’Andrea. “Usually it’s like, weird, but the setting is weird so sure, aaaaand then sometimes there’s the rat thing.”
A book, movie or TV show can’t cater to the person consuming it, but Dungeons and Dragons is a cooperative effort.
“There’s a whole ward of the city that’s only there because of my backstory reasons,” said Isaac Albrecht, who plays the undead member of the party.
Albrecht’s character, Salem, became undead far away from Taihallow — until the island he died on rose up from the sea nearby. How did the island appear? Why now? Both are questions that Albrecht can’t answer yet — though D’Andrea could.
Running a campaign requires a lot of work — building a world, designing a story, and, in D’Andrea’s case, practicing voices and mimicking the body language of the characters in the story. During a particularly intense mission of information-gathering, the party had kidnapped a corrupt doctor; to scare him into talking, they carried him out onto open water — water that, you may recall, is corrupted by the Haze.
“During that whole interrogation moment, she had her arm as if it was chained to a boat,” said Indigo Singleton, who plays the elf in the party. “Those little body movement acting things help a lot with the feeling of immersion — like you’re actually talking to the character.”
The party dumped their prisoner into the ocean afterwards. “In a whole they’ve been a much more destructive party than I thought” said D’Andrea.
Dungeons and Dragons is a cooperative game, where an unexpected dice roll or a player with a “genius” rat-related plan can shift things in the most unexpected directions. But beyond just a game, it offers a unique medium for storytelling, a cooperative one where you can build a unique world with just as much detail as any book or movie — one where you and your friends can tell whatever story you like.