Earlier this month, I released The Last Hunt for the Jabberwock, a Dungeons & Dragons adventure in ecologic succession. This campaign is an expression of my two favorite things: being giant nerd going on strange journeys with an odd assortment of friends and helping students of all ages learn about their world through experiential education. There are few greater joys than giving people the tools they need to explore their world and then watching them discover something new. This commitment to experiential education is why I’ve spent so much time developing the OpenCTD and building a functional curriculum around the principle that the tools of ocean exploration should be accessible to everyone. The OpenCTD is a tool and a skillset that reveals so many new pathways to ocean discovery.
In a weird sort of way, the OpenCTD is experiential education on easy mode. The tools itself is so compelling and (forgive me for a moment of shameless self-promotion here) the guides and curricula have been developed, polished, and refined enough that we know how to deliver it to students. The OpenCTD is a niche program for people already interested enough in ocean science to know what a CTD is and why they might want it in their classroom. When I lead students through an OpenCTD workshop, they already come to me with that connection to nature and the ocean.
Jacques Cousteau famously said that “the sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever.” These students are already held that net of wonder.
That’s always been the big contradiction with experiential education, especially outdoor ed, where the majority of my formal training lies. You have to start with students who want to get lost in the woods or are willing to try something new that pushes them (safely) out of their comfort zone. There’s nothing wrong with reaching for those students. Experiential education to broaden and deepen existing connections to nature is how we train the next generation of naturalists. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t also strive to find the future naturalists that get left behind and explore new ways to reach them, too.
The greater challenge is to to reach students who have not yet found themselves held in Cousteau’s net of wonder, whether that wonder be for the sea or the forest or desert or bog or bayou or savannah or steppe, but could be.
An awful lot has be written about the idea of a “nature deficit disorder”. Some arguments for why kids spend less time outside than in previous generations are fairly compelling. Many are not so compelling, rehashing a variety of phenomenon whose impacts, oddly enough, tend to align closely with the political ideology of whoever happens to be trying to convince you that video games or tablets or irrationally paranoid parents or justifiably paranoid parents, or whatever is making the pundit rounds this week, is the reason for society’s ills. Drones, I guess?
There has been a genuine and gradual creep away from outdoor recreation in childhood. I’m sure that someone has framed the perfect argument for why my personal beliefs about why kids aren’t going outside are the right ones, but beyond any one reason or easy answer, I think the underlying problem is that in a lot of this country, kids don’t always have access to wild places where they can just explore and discover and be, uninterrupted.
Unrestricted access to wild places is increasingly limited to the privileged few in America and the kids who are denied that access become disconnected from the natural world.
How then can we, as experiential educators, create opportunities for students to interact with and think about natural systems that they aren’t able to directly connect to. How do we help students get lost in the woods when they have no woods to get lost in.
Perhaps one way is through roleplaying games.
You knew this was coming. This is a post about the Dungeons & Dragons campaign I just published, which includes a series of lesson plans about ecologic succession and human impact on ecosystems (as well as one on Lewis Carol’s Jabberwocky, since you can’t have a Jabberwock adventure without understanding the Jabberwock). And to head off the inevitable and predictable: this is a fun activity that will click with some students, not a panacea for all deficits in nature-based learning. There are no perfect solutions.
There are a million different ways to describe tabletop roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons, but the one that I’ve found useful for experiential educators is that these games are guided, collaborative storytelling in which dice introduce random and uncontrollable elements into a shared narrative. Thinking about it through this lens, roleplaying games are powerful tools for creating experiences that are shared and meaningful.
I’m an ecologist. Ecology is how I tell stories about the world. The Last Hunt for the Jabberwock began out as a New Years Eve campaign. Over the course of a delightful long weekend, several of us ventured through the Feywild, to solving the mystery of a dying forest while fighting legendary monsters, to save a town full of Rabbitfolk. By the end of the weekend, with the Jabberwock slain and the real villain unmasked, it was clear that with few changes, this little campaign could be a fun and immersive way to tell stories about ecology.
The adventure comes first. That’s a fundamental principle in wilderness-based experiential education and I think that’s part of what makes Jabberwock a strong D&D campaign while still remaining true to the goal of creating space to learn about ecology. The adventure isn’t forced to fit a specific lesson plan nor were the lessons tacked on to an otherwise unconnected adventure. The lessons were developed in response to the arc of the adventure, used to illustrate and inform a critical set of decisions that the players must make during the campaign. The three included lesson plans aren’t just an aside, they are an integral part of the narrative that adds richness and depth to the story.
I’m trying not to give away too much of the plot here, since that discovery is at the heart of the journey, but there is a dam and there is a fire-dominated ecosystem and along the way, players will have to learn about both, in the game and out of the game, to make a series of choices that could forever change the people they’ve met and the places they’re exploring. Along the way, they’ll learn about shifting baseline syndrome and invasive species and migration, and, for some reason, how to make soap. All of which flow, narratively from the campaign. You’ll meet a conservation necromancer pursuing a perhaps misguided quest to de-extinct legendary creatures from across the Forgotten Realms. And you’ll discover that, in the Feywild, nothing is ever quite as it seems.
I’ve play tested the campaign, in whole as well as piece by piece with my regular Library D&D crew, to make sure it’s fun. I’ve worked with teachers to make sure the lesson plans are suitable for middle and high school students. The art by Erin Anderson is a delight. It plays well as a standalone campaign without any of the extra coursework, if you just want to have an adventure in the Feywild.
I’ve done what I can to bring The Last Hunt for the Jabberwock to life. The rest of the adventure is up to you.
The Last Hunt for the Jabberwock is available on DMsGuild and DriveThroughRPG. A supplemental map pack containing scaled and high-resolution maps for wooden and silicon tabletops is also available.
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