Coming very soon – D&D fiction

I’ve just finished playing in a great D&D 5th Edition campaign. I joined a local group a couple of years back to play Feng Shui 2. One of the group’s number was away at the time, but when he returned and we’d finished the Feng Shui, he volunteered to run an campaign. The setting was Taldera, a world of his own creation but with most of the standard D&D tropes in place.

Apart from one session just after 5th ed at come out, I had not played D&D since my school group had spurned D&D for the “far superior” (as we decided, with all the confidence only a bunch of 12 to 14 year olds can have) systems of Runequest and Traveller. But that one 5th ed session I’d played in had encouraged me to buy the players handbook and I liked what I read, so I was very pleased to participate when he asked me to join.

I have to take a moment here to praise my fellow players, Jase, Tom, Thom and (before he left for university) Ashley and (when she joined for the later chapters) Sophia. You couldn’t ask for a nicer bunch of weirdos-you-only-know-through-your-local-games-shop. Together we played D&D as it should be played, tackling monsters, exploring catacombs, solving puzzles and risking our (characters’) lives with just the right level of silliness. We started off in the traditional manner, using maps and figures. But none of us had the traditional fantasy miniatures (it really hard to find “naked elf barbarian” in any manufacturer’s range), we used everything from tiddlywinks, through sculpted Blu-Tack to Lego. And as the scope and scale of the campaign grew, we dropped the floorplans for more of a “theatre of the mind” style of play. Only two characters survived from beginning to end. I won’t say who, because “spoilers”.

You see, the real star of our little gang was the DM, Jamie Lubbock, who took every decision we made in his stride, and shaped the world and the story around us. It was a great campaign, so good in fact, that its inspired Jamie to fictionalise it. Starting this evening Jamie plans to publish a chapter a week, on this very blog.

These won’t be session reports, but rather a work of fiction, authored by Jamie, inspired by what we did as players, but building on the story, not sticking strictly how the events played out at the table. I’ve had a preview of the first chapter, and I’m excited to see where it goes. Well, I know where it goes of course, I was playing. But I excited to see how it gets there.

So, please welcome Jamie Lubbock, the very first author who isn’t me FictionSuit.