Sketches in Memorandum | "A Wizard Named Randall"

© Vera Gentinetta, 2007

Recently, my brother and I were invited to an all-day game of Dungeons & Dragons at our local library. We’ve both been playing Pathfinder with some friends from church for some time, now, but until then we hadn’t really had the opportunity to play the original; and after bingeing on Stranger Things and The Mighty Nein, I’d been dying to play the “real deal,” so to speak.

When the event came to our attention, we both agreed to take Harry—one of our younger sister’s theatre friends, and our unofficial little brother—to play with us. His experience with the game thus far had been limited to the role of Dungeon Master, so this was his first time on the other side of the DM screen. He was unsure what kind of character he wanted to create, and while he had come with a few character sheets, he hadn’t actually prepared a character like the rest of us had.

I asked him which class was his favorite.

“Wizard,” he replied, and I was unable to resist saying “You’re a wizard, Harry,” in response to this.

He scanned the core race list, and decided to go with good ol’ versatile human. Harry and the DM began rolling his character’s stats, selecting spells, equipment, and what-have-you, until he had everything he needed to play—except for one thing: He hadn’t named his character. Having just finished watching Infinity Train, I immediately remembered one of my favorite side characters, and suggested Harry name his wizard “Randall.” A few other suggestions that I don’t remember were thrown around, but ultimately—and to my delight—he selected Randall.

So, Hymnal the tabaxi bard (me), Jarl the dwarf ranger (my brother), and Randall the human wizard were thusly prepared to go questing with whoever decided to join us at our table. We ended up with three other players, and the campaign started.

Our characters traveled together to a tavern, in pursuit of a mysterious, high-reward quest that none before us had succeeded at or returned from alive. After being transported to an otherworldly farmhouse attic, we looked out a window and saw an enormous barn—twenty-five stories tall, according to the DM. I remarked in character that they must keep really tall cows in there. We later learned from the farmhouse’s tenants that there was indeed a magical cow in the barn, whose milk gave its drinkers the ability to see through the glamours that hide magical creatures from mortal eyes.

“But how big is it?” I—or, rather, Hymnal—said in response to this.

We kept describing to each other out-of-character what the magic-milk cow probably looked like, so Harry made a rough sketch in his notebook of a regular-sized cow with comically long legs which drew quite a few laughs from everyone at the table. When our characters finally got to meet the cow, the DM described how it took up the entire barn, and had to be milked by a stone golem using methods apparently too complicated to be explained to us. Maira the aasimar (I don’t remember what her class was), played by a young woman named Alissa, flew Randall and Jarl up to the outsize cow’s head and back so they could pet it and do snow-angels in its hair, while Hymnal went outside to compose songs about gargantuan bovines. A few of us even had an extended discussion about a heist to steal the magic cow, free it from the demiplane we were in, and then hide it somewhere in Hell until (ironically) the metaphorical heat died down.

The party spent the rest of the day riding centaurs while our tiefling warlock mildly tormented the farm owners’ grandchildren; supposedly to gain them as apprentices.

An out-of-character discussion about our characters’ alignments led us to realize that Randall had neither an alignment nor a backstory. We ended up agreeing that his alignment was a very specific kind of True Neutral—he was of the True Randall alignment. What of his backstory?

“I don’t know, I’m just Randall,” became the answer for just about any question directed his way.

As the game progressed, the Randall joke got worse. We started asking him to make Randall checks on all his skills. When we asked what school of wizardry he had studied under, we decided it wasn’t anything boring like the schools of Illusion or Transmutation—it was the most powerful school of all, the School of Randall. He spoke the almighty Word of Power (I don’t think I have to tell you what it is) that turned men to dust and dust to dragons.

At one point, my side of the table managed to sidetrack the campaign for a full ten minutes making Randall jokes before we annoyed the DM so much he said “No more Randall talk!”

Of, course, we didn’t listen.

Not for a little bit, anyway.

The warlock asked a new NPC what his favorite color was. Thinking the question was directed at me (or maybe I just hadn’t been paying attention because we were all giggling too much), I replied in a fit of laughter that my favorite color was Randall. Another Randall joke was made not minutes later, but I don’t remember what provoked it. I drew a little four-panel comic where a DM asked a player what he had rolled, and when the player looked at the D20, he realized with great confusion that he had rolled a natural Randall.

We made sure to get a few more in when the DM left the table for a minute or two, then we all shut up when he returned like a rowdy class of grade-schoolers when the teacher walks in. Needless to say, we never finished the campaign that day.

What does the future hold for Randall the wizard?

I, for one, can’t wait to find out.