Dungeons & Dragons at Fairhaven School: An Introduction
A few weeks ago I was in the Old Building cleaning up from room to room at the end of a long school day. As is typical, the building was mostly empty with a couple students needing to be reminded that it was after closing time while a couple other students did their cleaning jobs. When I went into the AV Room, there was a teenager on the couch speedily typing on her laptop. As I reminded her of closing time, she said, “Please, just five more minutes?”
“What are you working on?”, I asked. She explained to me that she was working on the backstory for one of her D&D characters, and that she had been working on it for a long time and would be finished soon. Since she had never had an issue with being out of the Old Building on time before, I let her finish up while I cleaned up the rest of the building with the student cleaners.
What is D&D? Here’s a great video to get you up to speed!
It got me thinking a lot about how engaged many of our students have been with D&D lately. It has always been popular with at least one group of students at Fairhaven, but with the worldwide rise of popularity, so too has the game grown at school over the past few years. There are currently several campaigns that are taking place, each with their own group of students. Especially in the last couple months, it is hard to go around the school and not find somebody involved in some kind of D&D activity. In addition to playing the game itself, here are just a few of the activities related to D&D I’ve seen around campus recently:
- Sewing a costume based off of a D&D character from the hit streaming series Critical Role in the Meeting Room.
- Printing character sheets in the Office.
- Drafting world maps in the Sonora Room.
- Drawing elves, dwarves, fighters, wizards, and all sorts of monsters in the Art Room.
- Designing a mobile farm for their characters on a tablet in the Cubby Room.
- Rolling dice for character creation in the Circle Room.
- Reading the Players Handbook and various other supplemental D&D books in the Quiet Room.
I was introduced to the game several years ago by a student who has since graduated from Fairhaven and now works as a 3D modeler at a video game studio in New York. I’m thankful to him for getting me into the game, as it has become one of my favorite hobbies. I’ve been a game master at Fairhaven for students of all ages, and I’ve gained a lot of interesting perspectives while playing with students that I would like to share over time.
There are frankly so many things to write about that I’ve decided to write a series of posts in order to adequately cover the numerous aspects of how I feel D&D relates to life at Fairhaven School. I invite you to subscribe to our blog (form at bottom of page) to stay up-to-date on all our posts, including future posts in this series.
Richard Morris
Fairhaven Staff
