Celebrating our 3rd D&D Festival: DungeonFest: Part 3!

 Today we held our 3rd DungeonFest where students come to the library on a Saturday for a day of Dungeons & Dragons, snacks, music, prizes and more!

We had our largest turnout ever, with 110 students taking part. It was an absolutely amazing day with a lot of laughs.

Here's how it works:

We had 11 groups, each group had between 6-8 players plus a Dungeon Master. 

I recruited staff and more experinced students to be Dungeon Masters. Each group ran the same one-shot (an adventure that can be finished in 3-4 hours). 

Everyone who took part had their name put in a draw for prizes, which I've been slowly gathering since September. 

We were very lucky that a community member happens to be a competitive Warhammer painter, he volunteered his day to set up a station where he put on a Warhammer painting workshop for students who needed a break or who just signed up for the painting. He was extremely busy the entire time.

We also had a celebrity guest, author Alex Foulkes who had done an author visit the day before at the school and kindly visited the library to play in the adventure. 

The event ran from 10-2 and then I drew names out of an envelope to recieve the prizes. 

I had a table of resources that included the Monster Manual, Player's Handbook, dice, pencils and of course character sheets. My amazing colleague in the library made over 80 characters for the event for those students who didn't make their own. 

To have 110 students come to the library and give up their Saturday to take part in this event was really overwhelming for me, they are absolutely dedicated not only to playing D&D but using the library as a safe and welcoming space. 

In addition, to see students, teachers and community members playing together, in some cases the students had a 5-6 year age gap. This is, in my opinion, a very unique atmosphere where students of many different ages come together over the love of this amazing game.

My other observation is how long students stick it out for. They played for over 4 hours because they wanted to see their quests through. Yes, some groups took breaks and yes you could tell some kids were flagging but they were able to watch other tables play, paint Warhammer figures, eat snacks and just chill out in the library. We also had students borrowing books and reading to relax. 

On a basic level, it's also a great way to remove screen-time for kids who plunge into their phones every free second. Throughout the day they do a ton of reading, improvising, teambuilding, problem solving, public speaking, role-playing, crisis management and much more. 

It's brought a ton of new faces to the library and reinforced the fact that the library is like home to many of these students. I've never had a programme match the enthusiasm or dedication of Dungeons and Dragons. 

Everyone seemed to walk away happy, I gave a prize for the most creative death, which was a paladin that got turned into a slice of pineapple pizza. It was an absolute blast, the entire thing, I'm really overwhelmed by how popualr it has become and how great the feedback has been.