And myself into a storyteller

This is a story from the beginning of 5e of DND, and to date myself, back when I was in highschool.

At that age, and at that time, most players coming to DND were coming from a background of video games. 

Playing only video games, especially back then, well before the likes of BG3, gave my players the case of Murder Hobo Syndrome. Going from place to place, looking for loot, and not necessarily caring for NPCs outside of what they have to offer you was normal to them. That’s how games like skyrim or fallout worked, you had a quest, you ran through the map towards the marker, killing anything in the way. Sometimes the games snuck a story in that was impactful and meant something in the teenage boy mind, and sometimes you spent an hour trying to put buckets on people’s heads. That is fine in a video game, but it doesn’t translate exactly to a TTRPG story, especially when you remember that there are multiple players. 

How, with a group like that, do I tell a story within a larger world? How do I impart a theme? 

As a big lord of the rings fan I wanted to try something. In the dungeon crawl of this short campaign I hid an insanely overpowered weapon in a place they would certainly find. It could realistically be used by any one of their characters and was tied into the wider world of the story in a way that even talking about it gave it a feeling of importance.

Thus the legend of the black sword is born. It’s intentionally hilariously, ludicrously overpowered, a +5 longsword with the finesse keyword. Every attack also activates the Vampiric Touch spell. There’s other magic attached and It gives a bonus to spell save DC. Immediately everyone in the party is fighting over it, except the monk, who is arguably the most lawful good of them. 

That is the other key, while all of them are coming from a video game background they are playing a TTRPG because in part they want to be in character- even if they do not necessarily know how to do it yet. (My DM-ing skills were certainly not developed yet either.) I remember how their eyes lit up when they found it- how it fit within the framework of looting the dungeon they came to the game with. There was greed there. Little did we know how it would affect them. 

I didn’t know anything about psychology yet, about how the understanding of ownership and value is interior and subjective, which is why people are willing to spend far more money on skins inside a videogame than it would cost to buy whole entire new games. Those ideas were not known to me, but I discovered them in real time. 

The Paladin ends up with the sword, in part because the party is trying to figure out how to deal with this obviously evil weapon. The barbarian tries to take it in the middle of the night, gets blasted away by the wizard and the monk, has to go on a bit of a solo arc where they discover a vampire spawn hidden away in the dungeon and free it, before coming to rejoin the party later. (That vampire spawn character ends up being a PC in a later short campaign.) 

The players continue through the dungeon, get hints at how this sword is part of the wider world, a relic of an ancient necromancer, how it was used to reanimate a long dead elf queen and turn her evil, and of course, they fight the elf queen as the BBEG. It’s a simple story, but it was fun and it was new to us at the time. 

After the fight the players escape the dungeon and then we have a stunning epilogue. The pull of the sword is just too much. There is a dramatic fight where the barbarian tries to go for the blade once more and in the fight he and the wizard are killed. The intervening years cloud my memory and I don’t remember the specifics of what happened, but I do remember watching greed and excitement over a make-believe sword grow in my friend’s eyes. I remember how it made me and all the players feel, how the players of the characters who were killed felt, how we created a story that could not be felt the same way from any other medium. 

This was before DND had taken over the internet. Before the second critical role campaign and stranger things set off the DND renaissance. We had not done a session 0, or discussed if PVP was what we were ok or what we wanted, it more or less happened through peer pressure. But that moment, that understanding of player/character greed to behave like Boromir at the end of Fellowship, and the way everyone felt afterwards is what sealed my interest in DND. 

We all understood then, the power of TTRPGs, the power of what having character relationships does, how much stronger that feeling from sitting around a table and telling a story with friends will be greater than anything a solo computer RPG can bring. 

The black sword went on to feature in 2 different multi-year campaigns, and multiple short campaigns, all with different players. I wrote together my own connected universe of characters from different campaigns as the marvel movies were doing the same. This whole world came together as I grew up through high school and college. The final campaign, the final story, ended at the end of that real-life journey, during the depths of COVID after graduation.

While the world outside was shuttered, a group of adventurers, aided by former player characters and NPC’s from years and years of campaigns, faced down the great necromancer, re-armed with his Black Sword. The very continents of the world, which turned out to be the bodies of long dead great giants, had been reanimated. Armed with the Sigil, a combination of the four creative forces of the Fey, they faced him and his dracolich down. Some of the players were from that original game where the Black Sword was first introduced. 

What started as an experiment, and attempt to write a compelling narrative for a bunch of highschoolers by turning them all into Gollum, created something grand, a story that to me, is very precious. 

Many moons ago, one of my early creative endeavors was to try and make a comic book out of the original adventure. I had this great plan that I was going to partner with an artist and build it through Kickstarter. I wrote a script, doing my best to adapt a story from a game into something that reads better in narrative, found an artist- but the project didn’t get the funding it needed. I had no internet presence, and then as now, did not know how to market myself. 

One of these days I’d like to revisit that project. I still have a story to tell.