Roleplaying Games Club

In Roleplaying Games (RPGs), you don’t decide what happens, but what you want to try. Then the randomness (dice, cards, even Jenga blocks) help to decide whether it works or not, before you then work out what you need to do next. It’s all about thinking on your feet and problem-solving your way towards your goal no matter how the road shifts beneath you.

This half term, with a bigger group than ever, Collaborative Storytelling and RPG club split into crews to plan a heist… and then worked out how to deal with the consequences of nothing going according to that plan. Using team discussions, note-taking, debate and a lot of compromise and adjusting plans on the fly (plus a bit of AI imagery to help keep track of the adventure week to week), they got underway trying to steal a key for a mysterious figure.

Working in four teams, they worked to sneak their way into the castle and try to find their way to wherever the key was hidden. To what end? Nobody asked. Yet.

Things went sideways pretty quickly.

Within moments, we had pursuits, captures, rescues, illusions, betrayals and scenes of absolute chaos in the castle as every plan went out of the window and 12 children and 10 guards chased each other through the lobby, up staircases and down corridors. They ended the penultimate session of the half-term with one group facing a nest of traps to get to the key, another confronting a mysterious vault and two more children leading the guards towards them as their latest eager recruits.

In the last session of the half term, as a change of pace and style, the club got out pens, robots and our 20-foot ‘megamap’ to reenact the adventure so far and try to work out where they might want it to go after the holidays.