The Great Game Continues!
So today was Corwin's first full session as DM for our intermittent gaming group. :-)
Must back up slightly. We've been getting together with friends for...oh, my, *years* now--to play D&D, mostly, one or two weekends a month during the school year, and maybe one or two weekends as well every summer. We started our first campaign in 4th Edition and ran the whole story arc from level 1 through level 30, over the course of four and a half years. When we started, Corwin was 13, and his sister Peregrine was 11. Now he's seventeen, closing in RAPIDLY on his 18th birthday; she's fifteen; and I'm... uh, however old I need to be, in order to be their dad...
So the previous campaign was, frankly, amazing. The party gelled by third level, evoking just the right mix of laser-like focus and screaming-weasel craziness, and aged like a fine cheese for the next 27 levels, from our first big fight with an evilly persuasive local guardsman/lich in the little town of Silverdale, right through our grand finale as we saved the known universe (again) in a final fateful battle against the Prince of the Underworld in the restored Temple at Argent. Ah, the stories these dice could tell... Anyway, it was great. The kids and I loved telling the story together, and half the fun was re-hashing the weekend's events on the long drive back to their mom's house, re-choreographing the fight scenes, talking out dialogue for the NPCs, and setting the events to music so that we could "see" the story as it would properly be rendered as a five-part theatrical movie series.
And frankly, we were all a little scared to move ahead after the end of that campaign. It had gone *so* well, and been such a huge event/activity spanning so many real-world life changes as well, that we all felt that we just couldn't possibly do all that again or even come close to it. Corwin had enthusiastically volunteered to be the next DM as soon as we'd started kicking around the idea of "the next campaign" somewhere around 23rd or 24th level, but following Dale as DM would have been a challenge for anybody regardless of their level of experience, and Corwin had never DM'd *anything*... So there was a certain amount of trepidation, a cautiousness, that grew and grew as the Argent campaign built to its (literally) earth-shattering crescendo, and we collectively realized that we'd caught lightning in a bottle, and how could *anybody* follow after that..?
So Corwin was understandably a bit unsettled. We, the player characters, did our best to encourage and reassure him that we weren't looking for a replay of Dale's DMing style, but just a chance to roll up some new characters, gnaw on some new scenery, and tell a new story. And so Corwin took a deep breath, and so did everybody else, and today we all collectively leaped straight into A Whole New World...
And he did a *great* job! Our perennially-cursed band of theatrical performers ("Bill RattleJavelin's Players," or the "RattleJavelinas") showed up at yet another gig in yet another backwater town, FINALLY caught a break with an audience that appreciated our artistry AT LAST, and then wound up fighting a rearguard action to get those groundlings to safety when an earthquake split the city district right down the main street and released a horde of zombies (wreathed in mysterious bluish vapors) to wreak havoc on our performance. We managed to not-quite burn down the inn, wandered into mysterious plots, suspected foul sorcery, and zombified an un-named (and previously deceased) housecat. And *Corwin* DM'd the whole thing, with a mixture of creativity, good humor, and utter ruthlessness that would have done proud to a DM with twenty years of experience.
Parenting is a process that defies measurement and metrics. You do the best you can. You screw up more often than you'd like to admit. You hope and pray that you got the big things right, that you taught the lessons that mattered, and that your kids will ultimately thrive and soar when they launch themselves out of the nest and dive into the great wide world. Being able to DM a good campaign is not on any lists of essential life skills I've ever run across, and having kids who can tell great stories (from both sides of the DM's screen) isn't generally regarded as One Of Those Things You Must Ensure Your Kids Have Learned. But it seemed to me as though we passed some sort of invisible parenting milepost today, as Corwin (in the role of the city's Guard Captain) congratulated our party on getting our audience-members to safety, invited us to solve the mystery of the zombie plague, and set us on the path to a new story of heroism, teamwork, and undead cats.
So I'm calling today a Really Good Day. Hope yours was likewise!