“Not just Mexican food, dude. I have two words for you: nacho table.”
“I don’t know what those words mean in that order,” Li says.
I give her a quick hug. “It’s a Max thing.”
“Hey!” Nova’s voice calls from the front of the house. “Guess who’s here?”
Nova’s Old English sheepdog comes bounding through into the kitchen and right to my feet, tongue hanging out with a huge smile on his face. He’s the happiest dog I’ve ever met. I scratch him behind the ears and then he moves around the kitchen to get scratches from the others.
“I’m so glad you brought Zoinks with you,” Li says and buries her face in his fur. “I didn’t realize D&D could get better, but I also didn’t realize there could be dogs.”
“Dogs do make everything better,” Nova says.
“As do nachos,” Max says. “It’s time. Let’s put it together.”
We recruit each person for one ingredient: meat, beans, hot nacho cheese, sour cream, and salsa, then circle the table to admire our handiwork.
“This is sick,” Felix says.
“Right?” Li replies and pulls out her phone to take a picture. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Nova holds Zoinks back from the food and reaches out for a chip. Without thinking, I glance at Max in horror.
“Stop! You can’t just…eatthem!” Max says. “We each have to search for the best bite.”
“Huh?” Felix says.
“The perfect nacho,” I explain, while Max nods at my side. “With just the right amount of toppings, but with a chip that’s still crispy and strong enough to hold everything without cracking or collapsing.”
“Top Nacho,” we say together.
“Uh, I’m just going to take all these,” Felix says and pushes a pile onto a paper plate. The others follow his lead, but Max and I take our time, bending over and studying the table like we’re professional golfers scrutinizing the topography of the land before taking a shot.
Finally I find a perfect one, stacked high with meat, cheese, and toppings, and he does the same. I raise mine in the air. “To our new game.”
He gently clinks his chip with mine. “And new beginnings.”
Unlike last session, when I was nervous and wishing I could claim sudden food poisoning, today I’m actually excited. This whole week I’ve been brainstorming and reading and jotting down ideas for encounters. Since they defeated the giant opossum last time and leveled up, it makes sense that they’ll want to figure out what was going on with that. Where did those giant monstrous animals come from, and are there more of them? And that means that when they start exploring the forest, I can lead the group to the opossum’s den, which just happens to connect to underground tunnels. Andthatmeans we can start a dungeoncrawl tonight. Once we do that, it’ll feel like a real D&D game.
“Are we all ready?” I ask when everyone has sat down and Zoinks is settled next to Nova’s chair. I’m practically bouncing in my seat. I already have the space all mapped out in my head (and a rough sketch since I’m not an artist like Li) and I know exactly when they’re going to find the traps, monsters, and loot. It’s going to be so cool. I feel like a real DM—like Mom—instead of a newbie pretending to be a Dungeon Master.
“Actually,” Felix says. “Li and I took your advice and worked on our character backgrounds.”
I sit back. To be honest, I’d kind of forgotten about that with everything else going on. And I’m surprised Li talked to Felix without telling me. “Oh, well, that’s great. What’d you come up with?”
They share a shy look across the table. They look so similar in that moment, with their glasses and fidgety hand gestures, that I do a double take.
“So, we were thinking about the fact that Ellywich is a gardener and how druids really care about the balance and sanctity of nature,” Felix begins.
“And we decided that we didn’t want to be related,” Li adds.
“So, instead we decided we’ll be from two separate families who live in close vicinity to each other, protecting and living off the land. But the reason we’re here now is because a blight destroyed our crops. We can’t survive there anymore, and our families are dispersed, and we don’t even know whereeveryone is. So, we’re here to search for answers to the blight and save our land and bring our families together.”
Felix and Li give each other a little nod of support. I’m still processing.
“Cool backstory,” Nova tells them. “Tragic backstories are always best.”
Tragic backstories are great…except when I didn’t know about them until after I already set up this campaign and have nothing built in about this. I figured they’d just decide to be childhood friends or something, not that they’d create a whole separate mystery that we’d need to solve. I swallow tightly and smile. This will be fine. It’ll just be something to deal with in the future.
