The Escape From Red Scar Plains

Tonight my D&D party finally completed an adventure that we started over a year ago. The campaign goes on (the characters are only level 8 at this point) but for now, this group of weirdos have defeated Kagrok the Apocalyptian, leaving behind the Court of Flames, Red Scar Plains, and the Shadowlands behind them.

We're taking a break for one of the other people in the group to DM, meaning I get to play my own character.

It's actually a bit emotional, for reasons that might get a little more personal than I've been on this blog before:

Last year my mother died of cancer. I went to visit her in the spring, and during the two months I spent with her, I started putting together this adventure. I returned when it seemed that the crisis she had been in had passed, but we only had one session - depositing the players in a region of the Shadowlands (my hybrid Shadofel/Dark World from Link to the Past/End World from the Dark Tower series) known as Red Scar Plains (an inside joke with one of the players, but also a pretty good name for something in a fantasy setting) - before I got a call from my sister telling me that the cancer had spread to her liver and they were ceasing chemo because there was no hope of beating the disease.

I flew back to Boston the next day - my mom's last birthday, actually - and spent the next couple weeks with her. Those weeks were pretty bad, though I wouldn't trade them for the world.

But the previous trip - two months hanging out with my mom in the den of my childhood home (I still call it the playroom, even though it hasn't been littered with toys for over two decades now) and chatting while working on a D&D adventure (it's also when Acquisitions Incorporated: The "C" Team started, so I was watching that too) was some of the last real quality time I had with my mom.

I would basically spend every day except for a 5-mile walk that took a couple hours chilling in there with her. Frankly, other than the dread of her disease, it was a pretty pleasant time.

The first anniversary of my mom's death was earlier this month. It's been surreal to think that it's been a whole year.

And now, here's another milestone passed. The imaginary heroes (some with big question marks after that word) have made it out of their imaginary predicament, and are ready for new terrible things to happen and monsters to kill. After all the crazy things that have happened in Red Scar Plains, they're moving on.

It's not really that important. It's not even directly tied to my grieving process, though it certainly is tangentially. I'm just recognizing that the feeling of surprise that it has been over a year since I lost my mom is oddly similar to the sense of surprise that this adventure I've been running all this time is actually finished.