Earlier this week, I decided to take the plunge and join up with a local roleplaying group halfway through a run of the Pathfinder RPG. This diary will chart my experience as a new player and the many misadventures of my first ever characters.

As a fan of numerous roleplaying broadcasts on Twitch and YouTube, I was eager to delve into the world of table-tops and to experience the feeling of a real RPG around a real table. With this in mind, I started to look for local groups that would facilitate my incessant questioning and awful attempts at cross-table banter. Luckily, my local student group seemed the perfect fit. I excitedly printed off my character sheet and spent far too long thinking of what kind of character I could create that could help me to break the ice with all these new people. Eventually, I settled on a Halfling Paladin named Callan, the Faithless.

Later that day, I set off to my local, feeling similarly to how I felt on my first day of secondary school, with the nagging feeling that maybe a Halfling Paladin wasn’t the best idea I’d ever had. However, after a brief and welcoming introduction from my fellow players and our dungeon master, I realised that my trepidations over my character were unnecessary as a lanky 6’9 bloke roleplaying a Halfling was in fact as funny as I had imagined the hours previous.

With the ice-breaking and introductions over with, I sat down with the group and was helped to flesh out our new Halfling friend with shiny new stats, weapons and ringses, Gollum. As the story was in-progress upon my arrival, Callan was immediately boosted to level three to match the other players and conveniently mask my incompetence. With that, my first roleplaying campaign was under way.

After a short description of our current setting and quest for the day, I quickly realised that I was soon to be thrown into the deep end of the roleplaying swimming pool, as our party had previously decided to hide out in an inn, dubbed the ‘party hut’ in a city devoted to Asmodeus, the… well, the devil. Devils aside, I was asked to introduce my character in further detail and explain how it was that Callan came into contact with the other player characters and their current quest: to gain access to the mansion of Devil Town’s Mayor by performing in a battle play to garner respect from the citizens and the Mayor alike.

Strangely, I hadn’t prepared for this, so I had to make something up on the spot. Luckily though, my expert roleplaying of a faithless Paladin allowed me to whip up a seamless story about Callan’s desire to keep his Paladin-ness a secret by legally changing his last name to ‘the Faithless’ so as to avoid the scathing looks of the lovely folk of Devil Town. Being a Halfling is hard enough as it is.

Introduction over with, we set out to the Mayor’s place and met the director of the battle play; a bloke whose name I forget. After a string of terrible auditions, the director was ready to quit. That was until he saw the confident swagger of Callan, the Faithless barge through his door with party in tow. After succeeding a persuade roll to convince the bloke that we were top actors and skilled fighters to boot, he gave us the parts and we set about learning the script. An actual script. The dungeon master reached into his bag and pulled out six copies of a ten page script for us to read from. After a week of rehearsals and palling up to various divas and rich folk, we took to the stage for the big performance, met by a crowd of devil worshipping, frankly bloodthirsty spectators.

The script was an interesting read. Our group was to be tried for crimes against Asmodeus by way of six deadly trials to win back his favour, or die trying. Pretty standard stuff. The trials consisted of various un-pleasantries; you know, eating parasitic eggs, barfing out their hatchlings, then fighting the six beasts that formed from our pools of aforementioned barf. It only got better, as our characters were forced to let Rockworms bury under our skin, followed by a ritual removal of said Rockworms by way of butter knifing our own arms open, all the while pretending to be aroused by the whole situation. The varying levels of mock grunts of arousal from around the room showed me that I was in fact not the most uncomfortable person at the table. So there’s that.

In our final trial, we were met by two skeletal trolls and I experienced my first meaty combat encounter in Pathfinder. After a ten minute fight and an unconscious party member, we dealt with the skeletons and were met with raucous cheers and general merriment from the bra slinging, pitchfork wielding devil folk, who we had evidently sated with our fine acting. With the Mayor pleased and the quest complete, our adventurers retired back to the party hut and did some levelling up and other such good stuff. Callan had finally proven himself, his faith restored; if not in the gods, then at least in the power of interpretative dance. Faithless our Halfling friend remains, but only in name.

And thus concludes the first entry in The Misadventures of Callan, the Faithless. As a new role player, I had an absolute blast creating my character, meeting my fellow players and acting out our ridiculous escapades in an environment that allowed me to be a complete idiot around a group of people I had never met. I heartily recommend finding a local role play group and joining up if you’re a person with any kind of interest in the Dungeons and Dragons formula, general Fantasy fun, or just all round nerd stuff.