London (LHR) to New York City (JFK)
Sep 20, 2022
I only spent a week in the United Kingdom this time, and this time it was all for fun. Theoretically. Nearly 18 months ago during the height of the lockdowns I booked a spot at D&D in a Castle, and after the traditional round cancellations due to COVID it was rescheduled for last weekend.
I was particularly excited because a friend was coming in to join me for the week. We were going to spend the day in Newcastle, then hop the shuttle to D&D in a Castle, then catch a train up for 24 hours in Edinburgh before going our separate ways.1
It didn’t work out that way. My friend ran into a health emergency the Friday before they were due to fly over. That was close enough that I couldn’t cancel any hotels or train tickets, so I found myself senselessly heading up to Edinburgh then back to Newcastle for the night then down to London for my flight.2
My friend’s absence didn’t ruin the trip but it definitely cast a shadow over things. I was worried for them.3 And with them dropping out it was clear I had built the trip up into something it wasn’t going to be able to be. It’s a delight to discover some place new with a friend. It’s a delight to show someone around a town you know and they don’t. And it’s a delight to spend time with someone you never otherwise see. None of that was going to happen. I tried not to let that color my experience, but it was there.
Right now I’m on the train from Newcastle to London, after which I’m going to have to catch the train to Heathrow and hop a flight to the United States. I’m rarely thrilled to return to the United States for any length of time, and this trip I have a lot of minor crap to deal with. I’ll be there through the end of the month before I fly back to London, and then I’ve got most of October to figure out where I’m supposed to be. I’m never sure, these days.
Let’s get this out of the way: D&D in a Castle is expensive. Really expensive. Galactic Starcruiser expensive.4 I wouldn’t have booked it if we weren’t deep in the heart of the lockdowns when I did, and I halfway justified it to myself because I wanted to know what kind of people attended this sort of thing.5
It’s four nights; the first day you arrive at the castle around 2pm and get taken to a “you meet in a tavern” event where you get to meet all the other players. You hang out there for a while, then you get divided into groups where you meet your GM and talk a little about the campaign you’re going to be in.6 Then you can crash in your room for a little bit7 before there’s a welcome dinner where you get to meet the remaining GMs.
The next three days are where you get to play your campaign. There’s breakfast in the morning, a four-hour session at your table, lunch, another four-hour session, then dinner and evening activities. The first of those nights featured a ball with music and dancing, punctuated by an in-character market where you could negotiate for powerful magic items by giving up things your character valued, from personality traits8 and memories to mechanical things like proficiencies and hit points.9 Later evenings had miniature painting and lectures on adventure design and RPG publishing and board games and one shots run by various of the GMs.10
All this takes place, of course, in the titular castle. The event was held in Lumley Castle, a proper 14th century castle currently operating as a hotel.11 The hotel rooms are comfy and nice, with generous overstuffed mattresses and duvets. And there’s a few fancy bars worth killing time in for a drink after hours.12 It’s a pleasant place to be for a few days.
Another appeal of the experience is the promise of playing with really skilled GMs. During the run I was at you could sign up to play with Mark Meer — the voice of Commander Shepard, along with dozens of other voice credits. I signed up to play at Elisa Teague’s table,13 and Elisa had a heavy focus on story and minis and puzzles, which suited my playstyle just fine.14 The overall tone of the games — our table, and as far as I could tell most of the others — is fun and a little goofy. There are scrolls and potions hidden around the castle for the players to find which are a combination of useful,15 cursed,16 funny,17 and ridiculous.18 Everyone’s chill and having a good time. There’s no doubt it’s an entertaining way to spend four days.
But it’s also undeniable that it attracts an extremely homogeneous player base. My run was a little on the small side, but I’m not sure if there was a single minority among the players, and they were overwhelmingly middle-aged and overwhelmingly male.19 That doesn’t make me particularly comfortable.20 I was also still suffering from the lingering crud I picked up nearly a month ago21 so I sounded like I was dying of consumption. The COVID policy, to the organizer’s credit, was still in place from a year ago: masks everywhere if you weren’t eating. Tables could vote to unmask, but the vote had to be unanimous and the vote was secret.22
So I didn’t get as much out of the experience as I would have, if my friend could have made it and I was feeling 100%. Would I do it again? I’d think about it, if I had friends who really wanted to do it.23 It’s a load of fun. But if I could get five friends together, I can’t help but wonder if we couldn’t pay one of those GMs to fly in to our city and run a custom game for us. Rent a fancy conference room, order fancy takeout and snacks, even book some escape rooms or nice restaurants for evenings. I’d do that in a heartbeat. But I guess if I could get five friends together I’d do just about anything in a heartbeat. As usual, the bane of most D&D campaigns is the scheduling. D&D in a Castle solves that, if nothing else. Maybe that alone makes it worth the money.
Footnotes
1 My friend’s never been to Edinburgh, and it seemed a shame to fly all the way over here and not visit, seeing how close it is.
2 Edinburgh’s lovely but I’ve been a number of times, and had I known I was going to be alone I’d have stayed in Newcastle an extra day and headed to Heathrow early rather than risk any train disruption.
3 They’re doing fine.
4 It’s actually more, per person, but it’s four days rather than two, so all-in-all they’re roughly comparable.
5 I did figure it out.
6 Player introductions, character introductions, discussions of play style, topics you find uncomfortable or triggering, etc.
7 Critical for those who’ve just flown in from the US that morning.
8 The merchants were particularly interested in my character’s arrogance which, to be fair, was extraordinary.
9 I ultimately traded away one of my death saves in exchange for an amulet that gave me advantage on Perception checks and let me gain True Sight for a round, ten times a day.
10 One of the absolute highlights of the weekend for me was the one-shot run by T. Alexander Stangroom, the COO at Kobold Press.
11 Reportedly one of the most haunted places in Durham, although I certainly didn’t see anything paranormal.
12 Or even before hours. If you wanted to kick off an afternoon session with beer or wine, you can get that delivered to your table.
13 Elisa’s written for over 100 published games, including writing the puzzle chapter in Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything.
14 One criticism I have is that, when you’re signing up for a table, you know whose table you’re signing up for, but you don’t know anything about the campaign you’re joining. I understand why that is — you’re often signing up a year before you’re sitting down to play, and the GM probably hasn’t even thought about what they’d like to run — but it’d be nice to know if you were playing a serious, creepy dungeon delve or a grand, rollicking world-spanning quest before you committed.
As it stands, it’s entirely up to your GM how much you know about what they’ve got planned when they set up character creation, usually a month or two before the game. In our case, we didn’t get any hints about the adventure before the first session, which worked out fine but I can imagine ways in which it wouldn’t.
15 “This scroll entitles you to one free reroll.”
16 “Show this to your GM, take 3d6 necrotic damage, then hide this scroll somewhere else in the castle for someone else to find.”
17 “You find a Mace + 1. Literally, just two maces.”
18 One of my party members found a Wand of Pantomime. Three charges per day. For one charge you could turn two adjacent humans into a horse, or a horse into two adjacent humans, or summon a bear behind someone if you immediately made them aware of it by yelling “It’s right behind you!”
If there’s a shortcoming here, it’s not that these kind of items are unbalanced — although they’re certainly capable of being abused, as written — so much as they’re underwritten. The Wand of Pantomime doesn’t mention anything about saving throws or duration whether the horse retains the intelligence or abilities of the original targets, which is a problem if, say, one member of the party decides to target two of the other members of the party and then refuses to turn them back. Not that I could ever imagine that happening and no it wasn’t me.
19 Yes, exactly like me. I know.
20 I have a rule not to play RPGs at any tables that don’t have any women playing, and with the absence of my friend this game would have violated that. To the organizer’s credit, they do an excellent job recruiting women to GM, and I had made a point of choosing Eliza as a GM, so that felt okay.
I’m guessing the organizers are trying to recruit minorities as well, with decidedly more limited success. It’s a really white hobby, y’all.
21 Or maybe I picked up something minor on top of it at KP, which just made everything annoyingly worse? I tested regularly. It’s still not COVID.
22 It was still whiplash coming from KP, where very few people chose to mask up (and there was the predictable outbreak afterwards). I think the reasoning was this is what they had promised people when they bought their tickets 18 months ago, and they were going to fulfill that promise even if they wouldn’t have made that commitment today. I can’t argue with that at all.
23 This is notably different than the Galactic Starcruiser, which I honestly feel like I got everything out of the first time around.