A slice of morning sun falls across my face through a slit in the wooden shutters of the tiny room I’m renting at the third best inn in Kirton, making me groan as I stretch awake. I splash my face with the frigid water in the washbasin, sputtering while I stand before the small dresser that holds a few herbalism kits and a healing potion. A small cracked mirror reflects my face back to me as I pause to study myself. The long pointy tips of my ears poke out from my thick black hair, a smattering of freckles falls across my nose. My yellowish skin sets off the green in my large eyes. I throw on my hooded cape and secure it with a jeweled clasp at my sternum. The door creaks open as I make my way out into the hallway, covered in dusty rugs, and down the rickety stairs to the common room where the mistress of the inn is pulling a batch of freshly made biscuits out of the stone oven in the corner. The aroma wafts across the room, beckoning to my hungry stomach. I find a seat at the large, roughhewn table for guests and grab the butter.

After having my fill of biscuits, I grab my scholar’s backpack, containing a book of lore, some writing utensils, and a small knife. I make my way across the busy town, past market booths selling magical potions and adventuring gear next to stands hocking fruits and vegetables and freshly baked bread. The Adventurer’s Guild Hall is a small, dilapidated building, but its familiarity makes it feel like home. I enter the lobby and find six other adventurers gearing up for the day.

My name is Groth. I am a Genie Warlock of the Githrezai race and I’m a character in Dungeons and Dragons.

I—Beth, not Groth—am doing a project where I try forty new things before I turn 40  in October and Dungeons and Dragons was on the list, so I signed up to play DnD at the library this weekend. I’ve never played. My high school friends were nerdy but we were more nerds of the “Let’s watch all of the extended versions of Lord of the Rings in one day” variety. I vaguely understood that role playing games, like Dungeons and Dragons, are a combination of group storytelling and dice-rolling to determine certain actions or outcomes in the game. I was excited to try it in person.

So I showed up to the library on Saturday afternoon and meandered back to a boardroom, where 14 other people were milling about. I was one of four women. A man with beautiful, long, auburn hair was wearing pointy elf ears.

For the rookies, there were premade character sheets. I studied them, but the statistics were meaningless to me. I chose a Genie Warlock because that sounded cool. My race was listed as Githrezai. Perched on my sheet was a little 3-D printed wizard with a pointy hat and a long robe.

I took a seat next to a young woman and dumped out the contents of a little velvet black bag that I’d grabbed next to the character sheets. I studied the six cloudy purple dice. The numerals were printed in gold. Only one was the standard six-sided die. There was a small diamond shaped 4-sided die and a complicated looking 20-sided one. Each die serves a different purpose in the game.  

Setting the dice aside, I turned to my character’s sheet. Down the side were six attributes—Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Widom, and Charisma—with two numbers. A smaller box had a long list of skills, like Sleight of Hand and Deception. My character had zero skills on Animal Handling, Athletics, and Survival. “A zero on survival. Perfect. Good job, rookie,” I thought.

A box labeled Features & Traits said things like:

• S: Gith Psionics
• CI: O. Patron: Dao Genie
• SCI: Genie’s Wrath +2BL

 I have two weapons—a Staff and a cross bow. Next to them are strange formulas like “1d8+10 B”.

On the back of my stat sheet, there was a picture of myself—a female Githrezai holding a staff with a glowing orb—and more narrative about what I can do.  I have a familiar—a tiny owl that has keen hearing and sight.  I’m a genie, but instead of a lamp, my patron has given me a magical ring that I can vanish into. The character sheet elaborates, “The interior of the vessel is an extradimensional space in the shape of a 20-foot-radius cylinder, 20 feet high, and resembles your vessel. The interior is appointed with cushions and low tables and is a comfortable temperature.” There are two more paragraphs about when and how long I can chill in there and the rules about what happens if I die, the vessel gets destroyed, how often I can use it.

While studying this important document, my outward expression was of keen interest and introspection, but inwardly I was freaking out. Okay, we’re starting in four minutes. I have a four-page document with twenty Warlock Spells that lists of data about casting times and range and components. How does one know when to use what spell?  What is this foreign language of letters and numbers? What are Misty Visions? Does it matter that my strength has -1 next to it? I have a 3 in Arcana. Is that good? What the fuck is Arcana? What in the Arms of Hadar have I gotten myself into?

Near the head of the table where I was sitting, a woman had erected a wall of cobbled together binders. Behind it, she was logging onto a laptop, beside a stack of papers and several dice. A large laminated grid sheet, its corners weighed down by DnD books, spread out in front of the binder wall between the rest of my co-adventurers.

Stephen, the librarian who organizes the DnD games, stood up and called us to order. In a soft voice with a lilting accent, he read a short introduction—the storyline about waking up in an inn to the smell of biscuits and going over to the Adventurer’s Guild Hall. At that point, we split the group of twelve into the experienced players and the rookies, each with their own Dungeon Master.

The woman behind the binder wall passed out some whiteboard nameplates and told us to write our “human name,” character name, and some statistics. I wrote “Beth” and then decided on the name “Groth” for my character. I think I’m pretty good at naming magical characters. A few months ago, Alex and I were farting around on a website where you can design your own miniatures and I created a Dwarf character called Bjorgdorf Snickersnacker. Bjorgdorf carried an axe and took no shit. At the DnD game, the other people in the group had kind of romantic, heroic sounding names—Naviana, Jerard, Evander. The two outliers were Groth and a humanoid cat character named Walter.

When we had all prepared our nameplates, our Dungeon Master, or DM, introduced herself. Mary Margaret is a group therapist by day, Dungeon Master in her free-time. Her hair had a few streaks of blue and colorful tattoos ran up and down her arm. She wore a shirt that said, “Thanks for vibing and keeping it tight” and took sips of a gallon-sized plastic jug that was completely covered in multiple layers of stickers, like a “Freak in the sheets” Microsoft-Excel-themed sticker and one that said, “It’s okay to have Jesus and a therapist too.”

She stood up and said in a powerful voice, “I am Mary Margaret.  Today my character is the All-Knowing, All Powerful She-God. I want you to tell us your name, your character’s name, race, and class, and your character’s deepest fear.”

The middle-aged white guy next to me was a cleric named Granger. He’d looked at the zeros next to some of the listed skills and told us that Granger’s greatest fear was getting sick, as he had a zero next to his Medicine skill.

I was next. I held the little 3D wizard in my hand and said, “I’m Beth. My character is Groth, a Genie Warlock. Groth doesn’t have any animal handling or athletic skill so I’m going to say that Groth’s greatest fears are sheep and running.” Mary Margaret noted our fears in a spiral behind the wall.

The young black woman next to me was a Druid named Naviana. The tall lanky white kid next to her was Jerard, a Paladin—a brave and noble knight. Across the table from them was a father and his teenage daughter who brought with them little cases full of colorful dice. They also had rolling bowls that laid flat in storage, the sides snapped together to contain the dice rolls. Both the dice kits and rolling bowls made me eye them suspiciously, like they should be in the experienced game and not down here with the greenhorns.  The father’s character, Evander, was a Bard who was able to gift us things like an extra roll. His daughter was a Druid named Violet. Next to them was a Walter the person-sized cat, played by a larger Hispanic guy wearing a Nirvana t-shirt who kept lifting his glasses to squint at the small font on his character sheet. Altogether, there were seven of us adventurers.

We started the game in the foyer of the Adventurer’s Guild. Before our eyes, Mary Margaret transformed into Blevins, the only employee at the front desk, who was annoyed by the interruption.              She stuck out her chin and put her eyelids at half-mast, like an unruffled cartoon butler. “What’s the name of your group of adventurers?” she intoned, drawing out her words in a bored affect.

We all kind of looked at each other, waiting for someone to come up with a suggestion. Naviana threw out the name “Mizfitz” and we all agreed. The DM gave us a piece of paper that was printed to look like a bulletin board with different adventure tasks. Each task had a short description of what needed to be done, as well as the reward we would get for completing the task successfully. Walter the cat read them out to us. There was a carnivorous garden that needed to be pruned and a woman who had some sort of pest in her apartment that had already scared off two other pest control people. A magical well that was supposed to have water forever had suddenly dried up. Someone had taken off with a rented magic sword and the owner wanted it returned.

We chose a Level 1 quest. A woman named Uza promised a handmade magical cleanser and 50 gold if we removed the creature infesting her apartment and fed her cats.  As a group, we made our way to Pine Street Apartment 42. The DM narrated the setting, describing the appearance of the old two-story apartment buildings, a large red door and a large cat-shaped door knocker.  “As you approach the door, you feel a heaviness in your spirit, your soul. This heaviness is giving you headaches and just a general feeling of dread,” the she told us.

 When we got to the door, DM made us roll our 20-sided die for a constitution check, which is a measure of our character’s health and stamina. I rolled a 15, which was pretty good, so I remained mostly unaffected by the magical black cloud affecting the rest of the group. Walter the cat suggested we use the key that we’d been given to open the door.

“You put the key in the door and it creaks open. A strong odor of cat urine hits you in the face. The lights are off and air in the room feels stale,” DM narrated. She described the apartment in detail—the elaborate cat tower, the small kitchen, the rickety dining table with one chair. A closed door presumably led to the bedroom. While she described the drab apartment, she leaned over her binder wall and sketched a floor plan on the laminated sheet in front of us. We gathered our little 3-D printed characters in the living room while we decided what to do first.

Evander the Bard cast a spell to intuit if magic was present. He had to roll to see how effective the spell would be. The DM told us that Evander detected strong magic beyond the bedroom door and we decided that the thing we were here to vanquish was probably in there. While we were deciding what to do, a sheep, one of Groth’s unusual fears, showed up and started annoying us, playing on the greatest fears of the players that we had revealed at the beginning of the game. It asked Jerard to do some math and suggested to Naviana that she should take a bath.

 Finally, Granger the cleric bravely kicked open the door to the bedroom and we held our breaths, afraid of the monster that awaited us.

In a low spooky voice, DM revealed, “On the bed is an undulating creature with purple ooze dripping off of it. It has a thin narrow body, like the stalk of a plant with a large circular head and a giant mouth. Even though it doesn’t have eyes, you feel its attention on you. The heaviness that you felt when you entered the apartment is now almost choking you.” She made us roll another constitution check. Mine was the highest so I took the first turn.

I looked at the stack of papers spread out before me and shrugged. “I have no idea what to do,” I admitted as DM made her way over to help me look at my available options. I had the Staff and the Crossbow. I also had a secondary document with twenty different spells. I could choose “Tasha’s Hideous Laughter,” a 1^st level enchantment that makes two creatures within my eyesight laugh hysterically, incapacitating them. DM told me that the Eldritch Blast spell was a bread-and-butter spell for warlocks. I could cast it once during my turn and it could affect anything within 120 feet.

Decision made, I rolled my 20-sided die first to see if my magical Eldritch Blast would hit the monster. I then rolled a 6-sided die to determine how hard I hit it. I had good rolls and so I shot a powerful hit of fiery blue magic at the enchanted Venus Fly Trap and made a direct hit.  We went around the circle and people threw spells and weapons at it, rolling to decide how much damage they were going to do to the monster. The DM had a character sheet for the monster that had similar stats and she kept track of its health points during the onslaught. We killed the creature before it could attack us.  We celebrated our victory, clapping and laughing as the monster’s ooze slowly dissipated from the bed.

Then, we looked back at the original assignment, which had also included an order to feed the cats. Walter the cat walked to the pantry on the northside of the apartment and opened the door. Sixteen glowing eyes looked out at him, frozen for a moment, and then eight cats escaped the pantry and ran roughshod around the apartment, alarmed by our band of adventurers. Violet the young druid cast a spell so she could talk to the cats to get them to calm down. Once the cats had been fed, we made our way back to the Adventurer’s Guild. Blevins gave us our reward—a handmade magical cleanser and 50 gold pieces in a little sack. Walter the cat held on to the gold for us. When Naviana the druid next to me asked him about splitting the reward, he laughed and said, “It’s safe in my satchel.”

Our second adventure was breaking into a potion lab to steal back a recipe for an employee who had been fired. Mary Margaret perfectly embodied the humanoid turtle Nina, who was the receptionist. She stuck her neck out and responded to us so slowly that she’d answer questions we had asked forty-five seconds ago. This adventure was a little more complicated with magical security systems and multiple bad guys. Our solution involved some subterfuge for a fact-finding mission and the Druids turning into spiders and sneaking into the building via the crumbling chimney. The villain died, we brought him back to life, and then contemplated killing him again. But we completed the mission successfully.

Groth finished the day with 50 extra gold and 1 new lucky potion.

I walked away from the game table with a deeper sense of appreciation for DnD. For one, I was blown away by Mary Margaret’s ability to switch between Non-Player Characters, like Blevins or Nina, and bring the DnD universe to life for us. She knew a little more than we did, but she didn’t know the future. No one knew how the die would roll. She had to pivot and react to whatever we decided to do.

 I was also struck at how easy it was to find camaraderie among a group of seven strangers. We all brought something different to the table. While deciding what to do, we’d ask across the table, “Don’t you have a cloak of invisibility? Who has the Sanctuary spell?” The brainstorming was natural and easy. We needed each other to vanquish the monsters and complete the tasks at hand.

I think the world could use a little more Dungeons and Dragons.

The last couple of nights, I haven’t slept well. I’m perplexed by the people who think that what’s happening is good. I’m scared for the vulnerable people around me. I’m worried that we won’t take the threat to our democracy seriously until it’s too late. I’m petrified that this will all end in violence. Last night, while laying awake at 3am, staring blankly towards the ceiling in the darkness, I thought back to 2016, when I felt powerless and scared in almost the same way. Needing to do something, I signed up as a volunteer with Faith in Texas, a multi-faith non-profit that works towards racial, social, and economic justice for all people. At my first meeting, much like my first brush with DnD, I had no fucking clue. None. I’m just a boring white lady from the suburbs. What can I do about mass incarceration?

 Just like the Dungeon Master, the lead organizer at Faith in Texas had a better lay of the land. She didn’t know everything but she knew enough to get us started. Other people in the room had some ideas too. So, we took stock of what we had and what we needed. The other group members helped me see that I had valuable organizational and research skills. We studied our monster and we came up with a plan. Together.

For several years, I sat at the feet of people who knew more than I did about injustice. They taught me about the importance of community and joy in trying to topple massive systems of inequality. We celebrated job promotions and new grandbabies. We laughed and we cried. And we felt less alone in facing the unfair world around us. Just like in DnD, we found our way to one another in the struggle.

None of us accomplishes anything alone. Maybe you feel overwhelmed and impotent. You might think that you have nothing to offer, but that’s not true. This quest is already in motion and we’ve no time to dilly-dally. There’s work to be done and we need you. So, stay focused on what’s important, find your people, and get on with it. We have monsters to vanquish.