As the teen guide at Anythink Huron Street, my favorite part of my job is to lead programs at the branch for any and all teens who want to come. One of the programs I am most excited for is called “Snacks and Spells.” We meet every other week to play Dungeons and Dragons together and eat snacks.

We have four players currently and are always welcoming more. So far, our party is made up of:

• Naria Thayder, a human bard whose band broke up on their first tour leaving her stranded in an unfamiliar land,
• Soren Arketrath, an elven wizard who has travelled across continents to unravel the secrets of a mysterious heirloom,
• Doominator, a dragonborn fighter fleeing his past as a warrior and the memories that haunt him, and
• Giovanni Mountaincrest, a human monk who has been cast out from his monastery after mistakenly summoning an evil spirit and stealing sacred texts.

Our adventurers currently reside within the great walled fortress known as Candlekeep. It is a library with no equal, striving to catalog and collect a copy of any work that is in danger of being lost or not a part of its monumental collection already. The price of admission to this magical trove is a copy of a work not currently housed in the library. After admission, our heroes managed to find employment as interns of the newly founded Candlekeep Investigators Assembly. A magical fortress filled with mysterious and rare books from around the world is no stranger to oddities and inexplicable occurrences. This burgeoning group has been tasked with investigating these strange happenings.

For those of you looking for some “behind the scenes” context, we are playing Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition. Each Dungeons and Dragons campaign is unique. Often, the campaigns are original creations written by the games Dungeon Master, but they can also be prewritten adventures published by Wizards of the Coast, the company that publishes the games. Some games even incorporate a mix of the two, or move from one to the other. The group at Anythink Huron Street is playing through some of these published adventures, with the majority of our game sourced from “Candlekeep Mysteries” by Chris Perkins, Derek Ruiz and Sarah Madsen. This is a book of disconnected adventures that can be played in one or two sessions.

On a recent trip to a thrift shop, I found a bunch of old Dungeons and Dragons Second Edition modules, so every now and then we will be sprinkling in some retro fun with some old school 1990s fantasy. If our group grows much more, we may need to split off and make a second game. If we do this, or if you feel inspired to start your own game, we might need to check out some other prewritten Dungeons and Dragons adventures:

• Tomb of Annihilation
• Dragonlance
• The Wild Beyond the Witchlight
• Call of the Netherdeep
• Spelljammer Adventures in Space
• Ghosts of Saltmarsh
• Mythic Odysseys of Theros

If you are more comfortable with Spanish, we have all the books you need to write your own adventures in our collection too! 

It has been interesting to see nerd culture become so prominent over the last decade. I admit I was a late arrival to the world of tabletop role-playing games (RPGs), but with the growing popularity of groups broadcasting their games and media portrayals like "Stranger Things" and the "Dungeons and Dragons" movie, I am excited for others to learn about how varied this genre of gaming can be. I hope to see some of you at our table, or that some of you take this as an opportunity to start games of your own.