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. The Dungeon Master (or Game Master, DM or GM, etc. ) is the game's referee and storyteller. 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 clinical mental health experience and the training needed to make your roleplaying experience therapeutic and amazing for your mental health!

Typically the first roughly 10 minutes of the session will be catching up on the events of the last session or 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 where you play as an adventurer who has joined the Expeditioner’s Guild, a group dedicated to exploring, mapping, and defending the brave new continent of Atollamu in an ever-changing and evolving frontier. It has been tailored to put emphasis on individual players’ choices, room for growth, and maintaining an intrepid spirit and adventurous tone.

Depending on the availability of our Therapeutic Game Masters and the demand for it, we will also periodically offer a Campaign! A Campaign is an ongoing adventure where the party members are the same, and may be from an official D&D adventure module, or a Quest Therapy-exclusive adventure not necessarily set in the Atollamu setting.

Some of these groups will be specifically for special populations like neurodivergent, military, women-only groups, etc. based on demand and availability. If you’re interested in one of our Therapeutic Game Masters running a campaign for you and/or your friends, family, or others in your special population, let us know! We’d love to hear what our Players want to see, and more growth to witness when you get to drive the story that you want to tell.

The term “West Marches” to describe a type of D&D game was created and publicized by a game master named Ben Robbins, based on a campaign he ran of the same name. 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.

Your choices as players will define the continent of Atollamu and its history going forward! Expect personal narratives, ongoing and varied adventures in the same setting and over-arching “seasons” of the game with their own unique themes and villains to overcome! Think of it almost as the TTRPG equivalent to a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) like World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy 14; a concurrent and ongoing world where your actions and that of other players define the fate of the realm.

Each Expedition game is an opportunity for a party of 4 players to run through an Expeditioner’s Guild quest, on a first-come/first-served basis. Expedition Quests are organized according to character level with appropriate challenges for characters of that level. Any Quest Player with their consent forms on file who has completed our Session Zero training can sign up to play in any of these adventures a ’la carte.

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 the virtual game board, and how to engage with the mechanics of the game.

The D&D Beyond system we will be using incorporates automatic formulas into the dice rolling that make the game very streamlined, and we emphasize a spirit of patience for other players who are learning the game, as well as an expectation of helpfulness from players who may have more experience and can lead by example. Please let your Game Master know if you’re having any difficulty with the mechanics of the game, we’re more than happy to help!