Students explore fantasy worlds in new Dungeons and Dragons Club.
Dice used in Dungeons and Dragons. Photo: Drew Adamczyk
January 6, 2022
Dungeons and Dragons, also known as D&D, is a fantasy role-playing game first published in 1974. Now, nearly fifty years later, the activity has found a place at BHS with the Dungeons and Dragons Club, founded this fall by Drew Adamczyk.
The club offers a space for experienced and inexperienced students alike to play the game with peers. Adamczyk, who has been playing Dungeons and Dragons since he was eight years old, volunteered to run the club after hearing from interested students.
“It’s been a ton of fun,” Adamczyk said. “It’s been a good chance to sort of get back to basics with it: the thing that I’ve been doing for a long time.”
In Dungeons and Dragons, participants design their own characters, who they play as throughout the game. The players then form a party, accomplish quests and go on adventures within a storyline, or a “campaign.” The game itself comes with pre-designed campaigns for the players, but these can also be created by the Dungeon Master. The person in this role acts as the referee and organizes and narrates each quest.
Currently, a gothic horror story called “The Curse of Strahd” is one of the club’s ongoing campaigns. In it, The players are tasked with solving a town’s various problems.
“[The players’] solution was to, more or less, burn the town down,” Adamczyk said. “So, not exactly the best solution, and things got out of hand, as they do in D&D. You never know what’s going to happen.”
The Curse of Strahd is one of the premade campaigns. Although it may not be the players’ first time playing it, their party’s decisions create infinite ways for the story to unfold.
“Even though we’re doing some adventures that we’ve maybe done before, it’s brand new every time,” Adamczyk said. “So it’s always going to be cool.”
Certain groups within the club have strayed from the premade campaigns, instead choosing to play campaigns designed by their Dungeon Masters.
Sophia Chant ‘23, who has been playing Dungeons and Dragons with her dad since she was seven, is one of these Masters. She described her current campaign as similar to stories by H.P. Lovecraft, a famed fantasy horror author from the early 20th century.
“It’s like extra-dimensional creatures, kind of that genre,” Chant said. “We’ve been investigating the sort of high society of this town and the connections to it. And that’s been through a series of odd jobs for this one person, specifically.”
Chant is experienced as both a player and a Dungeon Master but has no preference between the two.
“I like both,” Chant said. “I do like dungeon mastering, because I get to write the story. And so that’s kind of fun. A lot of people do pre-written, but I prefer to [write my own].”
The club is not open for drop-in members as it is difficult to incorporate new participants half-way through a campaign. However, the club is always looking for new members when a new one begins.
“Dungeons and Dragons is a super fun way to explore your imagination and hang out with other people, while also becoming part of the thing that people have been doing for 40 plus years,” Adamczyk said. “It’s a worldwide community, and it’s a thing you can do for the rest of your life.”
If you are interested in joining the Dungeons and Dragons Club, contact Drew Adamczyk ([email protected]).
