- The Presh Fuckos (from left to right): Wolfe (tiefling cleric), Felix (half-elf warlock), Ileana (eladrin druid), Mora (human fighter), Katy (DM), Lyric (tiefling bard), Reynard (canitaur gunslinger/paladin), Ophelia (high elf ranger/arcane archer), and Dorash (black dragonborn assassin). [art by nimfeemos]
This wasn’t supposed to be my first blog entry after ages away, but sometimes that’s how things pan out. Things happen beyond our control and all that. Anyway.
Dungeons and Dragons is something that has been a part of my life for the better part of two decades. My parents played it when they were in college, and then once they felt my brother and were old enough (we were both elementary/primary school aged), my dad started teaching us. He actually helped us build our characters in 2nd edition, but 3rd edition came out around the same time, so he ended up converting our sheets and teaching us using that (while also teaching himself the differences). It became a thing that we would play as a family, with my dad DMing, and my brother, mom, and I playing with a couple of NPCs to round things out (even in those days, our respect for party composition was low). When I moved up into high school we both started teaching our friends how to play and there were a lot of monstrous parties. I played in various parties even up through towards the end of college, when I dropped out of a few campaigns due to grad school application stress.
After that, I didn’t play for years, and it was hard to find groups who could stay together. Even my old ones had a hard time – we’d all ignored the release of 4th edition, but we were also now all adults and separated by a lot of distance.
It wasn’t until late 2017 that some of my friends online coaxed me into trying out 5th edition, which had been out for like three years by that point. It was after a few false starts that in early 2018, I joined up with a large group DM’d by my friend, Katy, and created my second (third if you count a one-shot I tried out with the group ahead of time) 5e character, using – true to form for me, regardless of edition – a great deal of homebrew content.
The product of this was Reynard des Gilead, a canitaur gunslinger who drew a lot of inspiration from my childhood (ish – I was close to 10 when I read the first book, so it counts) obsession with the Dark Tower series.
Things were a little bumpy for me at first – the group had been together for a while already, and I was worried about being an outsider, and in a way my anxieties played into my presentation of Reynard, but in the broader scheme of things, my worries were unfounded. It was a big group (eight of us altogether), but tight-knit, and for all Reynard stood apart in many ways, I didn’t have to. We talked a lot, and shared ideas and jokes, ran one-shots for each other and shared advice and ideas for other campaigns we were running – hell, we’ve even done a Secret Santa two years running. Another time, we did a higher-level battle-royale stream to help raise money for a better desk chair for Katy so that she could work on the things she loved without hurting her back more. It was all fun and there was just so much love between people who had originally not known each other. Well. We hadn’t all known each other, but we all had common threads before this – one person and I had even passed each other like ships in the night on the internet multiple times without actually meeting somehow. And now we’re all friends.
The reason I’m talking about all this sooner rather than later, as I think I had planned to, is because this particular campaign has just ended. Not by coming to the end of the campaign, as we had hoped – though shoutout to this for being the closest I’ve ever come to finishing one – level ten is nothing to smirk at.
Am I heartbroken? In some ways, yes. There’s something gutting about not making it all the way – especially after coming so far. But I also know that Katy made the right decision for herself, and I respect that. I would rather end a campaign early than trudge onward knowing that my DM – or any fellow player for that matter – was forcing themselves to continue with something that was no longer a joy to them, and at the end of the day, my fellow players are my friends, and I care far more about their well-being than about closure for a character I made up, because no matter how much energy I put into them, it’s my friends who are there at the end of the campaign.
I don’t know where we go from here yet. Will one of us offer to DM a game? Will I? Will we try to find another game that can accommodate eight players? I don’t know, but I hope that we stay together as a group, that we play a little Jackbox or something every so often. Because at the end of the day, I love this group of people and I don’t want to lose what we have together.
And as for Reynard, he’s retired now, I suppose. So to him:
“Go on. There are other worlds than these.”
Some Other Fun Things Related to the Fuckos Over the Years:
Gin and Bitterness 