A huge, menacing dragon looms above you and your comrades. It is Tiamat, the goddess of dragons. The first instinct is to cower in fear, but you and your party stand strong, locking arms, ready to fight the beast and challenge your lives. Rolling the die to make your first attack, you land a 20, and everyone cheers for your success. You land the first blow to the dragon, knocking it back and sealing your fate. This is Dungeons & Dragons. Dungeons & Dragons is a tabletop role playing game where the players form an adventuring party and explore a fantasy world told through the stories of their DM (Dungeon Master). The adventures are full of completing quests, following a main story line, and fighting monsters along the way to gain experience so that you can eventually level up. The game allows each person to create their own character, make a backstory for them, and essentially become them when in-game. D&D originated in 1974, created by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. Until now, Fredericksburg High School has never had a D&D club, but in 2022 Aaron Thomas started up our very own club which began playing D&D every Wednesday after school. The club, while not officially sponsored at our school yet, is working on getting a teacher sponsorship and a spot in the 2023-2024 yearbook. “I had been wanting to start or join a D&D club since like 8th-grade year,” D&D Club President Kenny Baker said. “I just never really had the time, but when Aaron and I started making the club my sophomore year, I went to Aaron with a list of people, and we combined both of our lists to make the club.” “D&D is different for every person I guess, because for the DM it usually consists of making a story and making sure everyone’s character fits well with the story,” Baker said. “For the players, it’s really just creating a character, and making sure it works for you, and it’s the best cohesive thing for the party and the story.” Dungeons and Dragons also takes a lot of work to keep it running. Members have to be dedicated to the group and show up for most if not all meetings. If someone is unexpectedly absent, it creates more work for the DM to work around an absence and creates stress on the party to fill in and survive in the game. Dungeons and Dragons has become more popular in recent years due to the appearance of the game on the Netflix original, Stranger Things. The characters in the show are shown playing the game together at various times and are often represented as weird and nerdy. “Most people think it is just a bunch of nerds sitting at a table,” a D&D club member said. “But it’s actually very complicated and immersive as a story.” All types of people can play D&D. There’s a class for everyone. Overall it’s an exhilarating game, and players really learn to work as a team and build good relationships with the other players. For many, it is an outlet to be yourself. “It definitely brought me closer to a lot of people, and it gave me something to look forward to every week,” senior Elizabeth Dobbins said. ”It’s really nice because I love everyone in it, and I feel like I’m not being judged. It’s one of the few places I get to be myself.”