A ragtag team of adventurers from across the Forgotten Realms defeated three gelatinous cubes aboard Captain Gill’s pirate ship before it was shattered by a kraken.
The party, which included a half-bird, half-man named Ugluk and a religious gambler called Grimlokk, washed ashore on the Isle of Giants before their allotted time in the Oglethorpe County Library ran out.
These adventurers don’t exist. Neither do the Isle of Giants nor the driftwood remains of Captain Gill’s ship.
They instead came from the imaginations of Trey Miller and six people from Oglethorpe County and surrounding area at the second of three beginner Dungeons & Dragons gaming sessions at the Oglethorpe County Library.
The final session of Miller’s campaign will begin at 11 a.m. Saturday, July 20.
Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) is a table-top roleplaying game usually set in a “The Lord of the Rings”-type fantasy world in which players create characters to play. They, with the aid of a rules arbiter and storyteller called a dungeon master, imagine fantastical adventures in campaigns that can last from one hour to one decade.
“You’re just playing pretend with a bunch of adults,” said Miller, dungeon master for the Oglethorpe County Library campaign. “It’s just like poker night. You can get as into it as you want and it brings people together.”
D&D has a rulebook that eclipses 300 pages, but it serves mostly as a basic framework and is not necessary to read or own to play in the library — or any — sessions.
“The rules are there to just prevent arguments,” said John Lombardi, one of the players at the library.
“I just love watching people resonate with letting go of the seriousness and playing pretend,” Miller said, “because we get told we’re not supposed to.”
Seven players of varied experience participated in the first two sessions the first two weeks in June. Lombardi and Jessie Bennett have played with Miller for years, and Yonah Johnson is a younger player with a wealth of knowledge that at times exceeded Miller’s.
“Yonah, he’s the target audience of this campaign,” Miller said. “We really want to get younger people into the game.”
But the sessions, as the name indicates, are not only for experienced players.
Pam Mitchell remembers when D&D was first published in 1974, but had never played until these library sessions.
“As much as I wanted to get into it (in high school),” Mitchell said, “I knew nobody else, except for the ones in school that everybody avoided.”
Miller shared a similar experience.
“I missed it all throughout high school and middle school,” he said. “I was a little nerdy myself, I was always heavyset, and I was like, ‘If I do that, nobody’s going to hang out with me.’ … It’s absurd the way the culture has changed on this so that it’s so socially accepted now.”
As Miller explained his background, Lombardi interjected that in recent years “nerd became cool.”