My very first Dungeons and Dragons campaign

In December 2024, I did something that I had never done before: I participated in a short (~6 hours) Dungeons and Dragons campaign.

It was the nerdiest thing ever, and I loved it!

The setting

After another day of keeping a critical production service up, the whole team met up at Kvest to play Dungeons and Dragons, as a team event.

The game room was small but cozy, with ambient lighting, music and countless figurines on shelves setting the mood, and situated in the basement of the building, adding to the whole nerdy/geeky vibe. I guess that you could say that it, too, was a dungeon of sorts.

The lights and music matched the events of the campaign. Enter a cave? The room gets dimmer, quieter. Fight starts? Boss music!

After an introduction to D&D, character sheets, character creation and some good pizza, we got started.

The experience

Before I write about the recollections of the story and my character, I want to summarize the experience of the D&D campaign itself.

Before this experience, I only knew about D&D from Stranger Things, as a thing that the main characters were into. I didn’t really get the appeal of it.

During the campaign, I got it.

The group I was with (my teammates from work) ended up working together very well.¹ There was no shortage of humorous situations, and knowing who we were and what our personalities are outside the campaign made some situations even more fun.

Looking back, the way our group approached situations had a lot of parallels with how we approach challenges at work. We took our time, investigated, asked questions, and were very suspicious of anything that behaved in a way that we could not understand, just like with that one critical production service that we all try to keep alive.

Personally, the highlight was the fact that my imagination and creativity started working again. I can still picture the scenes and situations we were in during the campaign. I have not felt like that since the time I read Harry Potter books as a teenager.

Doing a campaign like this after a long workday was perhaps not ideal, but the experience as a whole was still worth it.

The campaign

Now, the campaign. It was not a very long campaign, but at times it sure felt like one, largely because of how we operated as a group.

We each got to pick a character class, and I ended up being a High Elf Warlock. Dumbfounded, I actually had to ask what that sequence of letters actually meant, which resulted in my team learning that I have never watched Lord of the Rings.² Eventually I vaguely understood what I was, and came up with my character.

Meet Borkus McDorkus, a high elf warlock. Borkus was a happy fellow, often accompanied with a cloudy smoke and a positive attitude. He would often end up being a bit slow to react to things. Borkus wore a black top hat, which was how the McDorkus family dressed, and had a distinct plant with multiple green leaves attached to the side of it, for good luck. Borkus sported a black trenchcoat and boots, which was the style at the time.

This is the part where our dungeon master got started, referred to as the DM moving forward. The DM described the setting, and we ended up being split into two groups.

We were brave knights that had trained under the wing of a local lord, and had recently started out lives on our own. After a few months, we would all end up at a local bar in a village, and got off to socializing with the other half of the group. Our group would end up screwing around at the bar, eating awful porridge, asking about a mysterious end-of-workday chime that was unexpectedly heard during the middle of the day, and stealing some coins from the money box to pay the barkeeper for the horrible porridge.

After a local miner stormed in screaming and running away, we would end up investigating and walking towards the center of the village, where we met up with the head of the village. Apparently there was an accident at a local mine and they needed help. One member from our group asked about other work that may need to get done, things like killing dragons or saving orphans, multiple times. We got informed that there are no dragons to kill and orphanages to save, repeatedly. After that, the group was very eager to get working and started moving toward the mine.

Our walk towards the mine took us to a big wooden boat, where we heard some knocking and banging, with tools. What followed was half an hour of trying to convince the boat captain to take us to the mine since we were hesitant to pay the price of 8 silver coins. Borkus (that’s me!) used some trickery to convince the captain that we were going to pay him one gold coin instead of the 8 silver coins they had asked for because they were such a good guy (and we had failed with threatening the captain multiple times before).³ Just one thing: this coin is special, it would only materialize once the captain kept their word and brought us to the mine. The captain was hesitant, but agreed to the deal. The coin would end up not materializing, as it was an illusion.

We arrived in a mountainous place, got off the boat that apparently had big legs on it to traverse the swampy area, and started walking on a path. When presented with a choice of going forward or taking a left turn towards what looked like an abandoned mine, we of course went left, broke in and went down the increasingly darker and colder mineshaft.

It took us a long time, but eventually we got to a small room where there had seemingly been a mining accident. The strongest members of the group started throwing rocks out of the way, until one of us found a hand that had been ripped off from the body. That didn’t seem to scare anyone, and eventually we got to the point where we saw a door on the other side of the rubble.

The door was special. It illuminated in a very mysterious way and had some scribbles on it that we could not understand. We approached this door very carefully, discussing the next steps. One of us ended up trying to open it, and in a flash they were gone!

What followed was about half an hour of testing the door.

What happens if you throw a rock at the door? Nothing.

Throwing rocks at the handle? Nothing.

What if we touch the door handle with the ripped off hand that we found earlier? Flash, and it was gone.

Okay, what if we use a rope to try to pull the door handle? Nothing.

What if we agree that one of us touches the handle, and wherever we end up in, we try to bang on the walls as hard as possible to signal that we got to the other side in one piece? Nope, another member of the group was gone in a flash and the remaining ones did not hear anything.

After lengthy discussions between the rest of us, we ended up all touching the door handle and going away, somewhere.

Meanwhile, in that somewhere, the first member of the group flashed in to a room with paintings, chairs and chests full of valuables. There was also this one guy frozen in place with a terrified look.

Flash. The ripped off hand popped in.

Flash, flash, flash. The whole group eventually popped in to this room, and we began investigating it. Some of us sat on the chairs, and they ended up seemingly falling to sleep, followed by certain paintings changing in the room.

At one point, something happened: monsters! Also, those from our group that sat on the chairs and seemingly fell asleep, sprung back into action, but they were now evil!

At this point in the campaign, the DM brought out a small miniature that represented the room we were in, and we placed our miniature characters on it based on where we were positioned in our minds.

We now got to roll for initiative, which determined our order of attacking, and got fighting! Borkus was first, but ended up rolling really damn poorly, so any magic and crossbow attacks were very ineffective. Damnit, Borkus.

Luckily, others in the group did better and we eventually defeated the evil creatures. Unfortunately, we took casualties (RIP barbarian).

With the room calm, there was one chair that was empty. Borkus, who had become sober during the fight, knew what he was destined to do (and definitely not because I was physically exhausted myself), and sat on that chair.

Roll the credits!

Closing thoughts

Huge shout-out to:

• our DM, who did a genuinely good job getting us immersed in the campaign and guiding us through playing it
• Karoliine, our engineering manager, who set up this team event for us
• the team, who made this experience special with our sense of humor, ingenuity and creativity shining throughout the campaign

I was exhausted after the campaign. I regret nothing.

If I wasn’t time-deficient, I would do it all over again. Borkus must be avenged!