Two Nights at the Library

The Folger Shakespeare Library has been many things since its inception in 1932: a center of research; a valuable archive; a home for theatre, music, and poetry; an educational nexus for learners of all ages; and more. This week, it celebrated its first ever events rooted in tabletop roleplaying games and the unique brand of storytelling this form can create and capture. It’s a surprisingly easy crossover, seeing as theatre kids young and old have long found an offstage outlet in these kinds of games, where players collaboratively tell a story through shared imagination and rolls of the dice. But at the heart of these two days of events, there’s a commonality at work between the spirit of roleplaying games as an action and a form, and of the Folger itself. This mission was articulated on behalf of games by actor and avid roleplayer Luis Carazo, the Folger’s guest this week who spoke at a special Cocktails and Conversation event on Thursday night.

Photo by Peggy Ryan.

Before a small but mighty crowd (limited only by the size of the room itself), Carazo spoke from the heart about the ways in which playing games like Dungeons & Dragons as a young person opened up his own world, but that these games likewise carry the capacity for everyone to do the same. “There is a place at the table for all of us,” he repeated throughout the night, and urged the audience to remember both the primal urge for storytelling we all possess, and that by actively telling these stories of heroism through playing the hero ourselves, we also open up our own lives in parallel to the imagined worlds we share. Every human being has the same capacity for imagination and creativity that tabletop roleplaying encourages, and we discredit ourselves and each other if we don’t acknowledge that shared ability and its power. Carazo ended his talk with a call to arms to share the table, one with “our imaginations as swords, and each other as shields.”

The second and more widespread arm of this foray into tabletop roleplaying came with the launch of A Night at the Library, an adventure written for Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition by Logan Hughes and Ashley Buchanan. This is the first in a series of adventures called the Folger Foe-lios, designed to be played in a single session of a few hours. A Night at the Library takes a classic of the genre—the dungeon crawl—and uses the Folger itself for the setting, as adventurers explore its rooms and encounter creatures drawn from both Shakespeare and objects taken directly from the Folger’s archive. As a one-shot, the adventure is drawn simply, with one ordained path through the Folger for players to follow and focusing on three primary encounters. It makes sense as both an introduction to D&D for new players, and a taste of some of what the Folger has to offer. As the start of a series of further scenarios to come, I find it an intriguing beginning and am curious about what further collaboration might look like.

The game night was produced in partnership with Labyrinth, a beloved local game and puzzle shop, who provided volunteer Dungeon Masters to run multiple tables for dozens of participants, a mix of newcomers to the game alongside experienced players. As an event, there was a tradeoff in play throughout—there wasn’t time to linger in any room or encounter as players might at home and the adventure was deliberately shortened and simplified to fit within two hours of playing time, but there’s a special magic in playing within the actual room being described, and drawing on both players’ knowledge of the space and being able to use real world objects like a visitor’s map of the Folger to help give the sense of the path being traveled beyond the Reading Room. For myself, it was a thrill to see a character sheet for a level 5 rogue named Hal Princeton and see how my favorite Shakespearean royal with daddy issues was translated into a game system I knew very well. I never anticipated a world where even though I never got to use the Reading Room as a scholar, having long ago left academia, I did get to roll a natural 20 at one of its tables in an attempt to cheer up Hamlet by doing a perfect backflip.

If there is a place at a games table for everyone, not just the self-proclaimed theatre kids and fantasy nerds, there’s a second argument being made implicitly by these events: the Folger Shakespeare Library is also for everyone, not just the scholars and self-proclaimed Shakespeare fans. The collaborative storytelling of tabletop roleplaying games is a form where all are welcome to come and create a world with a place for everyone, and the Folger offers us Shakespeare as a fertile ground for that imagination to run wild so that anyone can create something unique. It’s a roll of the dice, but I think time will tell it's a success.

A Night at the Library can be downloaded for free, with more information available here at the Folger's website.