Its was a summer night on a Friday, when me and friends got together for another one of our famous Dungeon and Dragons sessions. Vince was our Dungeon Master, the guy who makes up the story for us to play. We all got to Vince's house and started to get our characters ready and everything we needed to play this session like notes, handbooks, and dice. While we were getting ready me, Tim, Garrison, Hunter, and Jordan were all talking about how excited we were to play again. When I think about the story that Vince created, I'm glad that my character's backstory had a huge impact on it. When we started up we left off defending a city called Amalis, I remember feeling so pumped like a little kid on Christmas morning to see what Vince had planned for this session. Most of our characters became Knights of Amalis in an earlier session so it was our job to defend the city. Our characters went to the main gate to defend, and in the distance we could see wizards riding giant squid like monsters with their minions on a carriage like platform atop the monsters. They were out of range so we had to wait to face them. As our characters waited for the enemies to grow near, the tension between the group grew. I used to think there would never be so much tension between us while playing, but I now know that was just the beginning.

Everyone was paying special attention to me since my character was insane by this point and was driven by a bloody vengeance to kill a group of wizards that took his father. That same group was attacking the city. We did the best we could to defend the main gate but in the end we had to flee into the inner city to go and protect the people. As our characters were running down the streets of Amalis, fireballs flew over our characters heads destroying homes and killing civilians right in front of us. Behind us the main gate came screaming down and swords began to clash. It was awesome. We found a safe place for our characters to rest so we can go get some pizza.

We ordered at least four boxes of pizza, three boxes of breadsticks, and brownies. It was crazy. Me and Vince left to go get it from Hungry Howies. When we got there, as a joke we asked them to write on the box a reason to live,

the guy behind the counter said “Uh, I'm sorry but I can't give you one.”

And all three of us started laughing. When we got back we devoured most of the food and started up the session once again.

When we reached the inner city we were told to defend the keep, that held all the people in it, at all cost by the ruler of Amalis. But our party decided to try and flee the city because we thought there was no way of making it out alive. I realized that this was not right and felt a bit bad, but in the end it was just a game right? While we were trying to flee most of our party got captured by the wizards that had taken most of the city, and it was just me and Hunters characters that still remained. We knew that the rest of our friends would not have fun if we didn't save their characters, so we went back in to go and save their characters, which were in the keep, the very place we were running from.

When we got there, we saved their characters and everyone was as happy as a fat cat to get out of there. But then my character heard the voice of his father that was taken in the other room. My character went in there and found out that his father was not captured by them, but he was apart of them. My character felt disgusted and I felt a little disappointed on what happened compared to the happy ending I was hoping for.  I made a very dramatic scene and could see all of my friends grinning, and sitting at the edge of their seats waiting to see what would happen next. Then Pandora's box was opened. My characters father turned him into a giant monster, barely recognisable, and evil. In that moment I realized how attached I was to my character, especially since he was my first character, I felt sad that this was the last time playing him. Now I feel the want to be able to play him again. I remember thinking to myself, darn this will be the last time I get to play him, and why couldn't I have gotten the happy ending I wanted? All my friends were all going crazy after what just happened, we didn't know what to do next.

I realized this wasn't just a game, it taught me something very important. While my character slowly had his descent to madness then into a monster, it was all because he did bad things and let his inner monster out. The monster was always there and he let it out to much that he become the monster. Everyone has this monster inside them, and every day we decide whether it will slowly consume us, or we get rid of the monster piece by piece. In the end it's all up to you, what will you chose?