To quote D&D’s official website, “In Dungeons & Dragons, the players form an adventuring party who explore fantasy worlds together as they embark on epic quests and level up in experience. There’s no winning or losing in D&D—at least, not in the conventional way.

At its heart, D&D is a game that focuses on storytelling. The dice just help you along. Everything is your decision, from what you look like, to how you act, to what happens next.

The collective creativity in your D&D game builds stories that you’ll tell again and again—ranging from the stuff of legend to absurd incidents that’ll make you laugh years later.” We here at The Quest don’t own D&D, but we love it fiercely and believe in its value as a mental health tool and the most fun you can have with a twenty-sided die!

Each game session is usually 3 hours long, and has a max of 4-5 Players. Each game session is run by a Therapeutic Game Master (T-GM!), a game master who has the experience needed to make your roleplaying experience enriching and your growth a reality.

Typically, the first 10-ish minutes of the session will be catching up on the events of a prior session or the world at large, making sure everyone is ready for the game to come, or perhaps hearing a brief bit about how group members used their skills throughout the prior week. Then, for the rest of the session the game is played and players have the chance to interact with the world, the story, and the other characters in the world by utilizing chances to act in ways they would want to behave or act outside of the game. In the last 10 to 15 minutes of the session, Players and their T-GM debrief and review things we liked about our actions, things we wish had gone differently, and support each other by encouraging group members who did well that session.

After a session there will be a recommended journaling prompt area in the Discord; this is an opportunity to recount the events of the game in first person (speaking as your character!). This not only serves as a chance to keep track of your adventure, but also a chance for you to take your time and explore why you act the way you do in-character, and how you’ll tackle the problems ahead of you using the skills your character has that we want to embody. It allows for other characters who are part of your Guild to bear witness to your mighty deeds, as well as provides you a point of Inspiration for your next adventure!

Most of our games will feature our West Marches-style campaign setting, “The Expedition of Atollamu”. This is an original world setting that you can learn more about HERE.

The defining features of a West Marches campaign include irregular session times (meaning that sessions are scheduled by players and game masters based on their availability, not regularly-kept “strict” weekly scheduling), an irregular party (characters involved in each session are drawn from available player characters and also by character level) and involve player choice (i.e., if a player does not like the idea of hunting giant mutant rats in the settlement sewers, they can skip that mission and choose to play in a different game where your characters are tasked with mapping out an ancient fortress! Variety is the spice of life.~)

Beyond these, West Marches games tend to include the following:

• Session reports and other information about experiences are always shared between every participant in the campaign, whether they were present in a specific session or not. This keeps people informed about changes in the game world and lets any combination of players follow up on new quests and story hooks via in-character journals. Players who post first-person journals from their character’s perspective begin their next game session with a point of Inspiration (a free re-roll of a d20).

• There is a shared geographical map that the players are mapping, discovering, and establishing in each session played. the world changes for every character, even if they were not part of the group that made the discovery/change.

Absolutely not! Our groups are very beginner friendly, and there will be time before, during, and after Session 1 to learn how to play, how to create a character sheet, how to interact with a virtual game board, and how to engage with the mechanics of the game.