Lucas Maxwell

Steve Thomas: Lucas, welcome to the podcast.

Lucas Maxwell: Thank you so much for having me. I’m really excited to be here, Steve. Thank you.

Steve Thomas: You’ve got two different books on similar topics, very similar topics. Let’s Roll: a Guide to Setting Up Tabletop Role Playing Games in Your School or Public Library, and then your new one is Roll for Adventure: Tabletop Role Playing Adventures for Your School and Public Library. I can guess, but what came first, your interest in librarianship or your interest in gaming?

Lucas Maxwell: D&D of course was first, but growing up in rural Canada, I found it hard to find a group. So I was one of those kids who I played a little bit, but I was one of the kids who, I can’t remember the dates, but like it would’ve been Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, of course, read the rule books and made my own characters and made my own dungeons and adventures and read everything, and read all the Ed Greenwood books and the R. A. Salvatore. I was always obsessed with it and it always surrounded me, but as a kid I didn’t get to play all that often because I found it really tricky. But at like Christmas time, we would play the like Heroes quest and other games that were kinda like adjacent to D&D but yeah, it was always in my interest, like on the periphery always surrounding me. But I definitely got into D&D and tabletop roleplaying games before being a librarian.

Steve Thomas: What led you into librarianship as your career of choice?

Lucas Maxwell: That’s a good question. It’s kind of, not difficult to answer, but sometimes I get asked that and I always say desperation. I didn’t really know what to do , and I’m so glad that I found it because I really bounced around Nova Scotia a little while after university and did everything that I could imagine, worked on fishing boats, worked in slaughter houses, and just didn’t know what to do with myself, which is not unique really. But then I went to Prague and just first time out of North America to teach English as a foreign language, and it was really mind blowing to go to the Czech Republic and live there for a while. I just loved it. In a city like Prague, which is steeped of course in history and everything, and then i’ll try to make this as succinct as possible for you.

I ended up going to England and then went to Bristol and worked in the Bristol University Library there a little bit and really liked it, and it just got me thinking like, it kind of makes sense. I’ve always been a reader, loved it, and I was like, not that that makes you a librarian, but it was like, oh, this kind of fits my personality. And then I looked up some ways to get into it and I realized that in Nova Scotia there was actually a really good master’s degree at Dalhousie in Nova Scotia, in Halifax. And so, moved back to Nova Scotia for a while and took that and then went immediately into the public library service there, working with what they called at the time “teens at risk.” And there was these for teens at risk of getting involved in gangs, drug dealing. It was an amazing place to be the first job I had as a librarian, because it was more like a community center, but as a librarian, it was amazing. I really felt like I was doing something good for the community. It just felt good and I was just like, well, this is what I want to do. I want to try to be of use to society and be someone who’s involved in reading and promoting literacy. So that was how I got involved, really just no clue what I wanted to do, ended up bouncing around Europe and all that stuff and ended up finally landing on it. It took me a long time though.

Steve Thomas: Well it’s probably because all of that risk you took when you were a child of getting into Satanism because you were playing D&D…

Lucas Maxwell: Oh man. I could talk about that because my mom watched that 60 Minutes, I think it was 60 Minutes, and she was like, “You are not playing this game!” And I was like, “What game?” And all was sudden, “Oh, I need to know what this game is!”

Steve Thomas: It probably did more for their sales than anything!

Lucas Maxwell: Did you experience that as well?

Steve Thomas: No, ’cause I was sort of always adjacent to it. I very much grew up nerdy, geeky, science fiction. Yeah. I’m in the Science Fiction Book club, so I’m getting books in the mail, all this stuff back then, but I never got into gaming partially because I don’t think I had people who I knew were playing, but one friend, one friend of mine played the Marvel Superheroes Roleplaying Game. This was in the eighties ’cause I’m old, but they had that one then, and so we did that a little bit. But then I just found, I don’t like, I guess in my creativity, I don’t like the randomness that comes with roleplaying because like, I love creating characters and creating my own scenarios and things, and it’s like, “Oh, but if I roll bad, then I die, ” which I realize is its own creativity, but like that, that’s not how my creativity works. And so I kind of hit that wall and so I never really got into it but I have friends who are into it totally. And I feel like I’m conversant in that area of “nerdity.”

Lucas Maxwell: I should have mentioned as well, like we had an old a Tandy 1000. It was called an old Tandy 1000 SX computer, and we had a game called Champions of Krynn, which was Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, and it was all like “To Hit Armor Class Zero”, all those complicated rules, and I would like to talk to the people who created that game because I was like, were you trying to make a game that was like literally impossible to do, like impossible? You kind of think like, oh, I’m a really bad gamer, but then you realize maybe they’re just like out of their minds, these people who made these games because it was, it was impossible. You reminded me of it like, oh, if you roll bad, you die. On this game, every turn of the corner we got killed. I don’t know how you do it. I should like YouTube a walkthrough of it or something because we never finished it, never finished it. But anyway, yeah, I loved it, but it was like anxiety inducing ’cause I was like, “Oh, here we go!”

Steve Thomas: I feel like if there was an alternate universe where instead of a fantasy world there was a science fiction, then that’s how it came up that way, I feel like I might’ve connected with it more. I mean, I liked Lord of the Rings, but I never really gotten into anything else, some stuff here and there, but I don’t wanna read 14 books of Robert Jordan.

Lucas Maxwell: I’m on book five of the Robert Jordan and a colleague of mine’s just finished book 12 and I was like, I can’t, I’m trying, but I just dunno if I can do it. I love them, but I just dunno.

Steve Thomas: I think I would have to do it as audio, but even then it would just take forever, not saying they’re bad, just the length. Even some of those Stephen Kings I can’t read either ’cause they’re just bricks So how were you first able to meld your love of D&D and tabletop gaming with your library work?

Lucas Maxwell: So Stranger Things came about and many librarians I think will empathize with this because kids started to ask, what’s this game? Kids probably who are too young maybe to watch Stranger Things are coming in, but they would ask, ” What is that game on Stranger Things? Do you know it?” And that made me watch Stranger Things. I wasn’t really one of those people who was salivating over that show, which is fine. I think it was a good show, but when I watched it, it was like, “Oh, that’s cool.” It was very nostalgic and I remember that like going down in a basement. The first few times I did get to play, my brother brought me to a house and we went down in a basement and I saw these posters for bands that I hadn’t heard of before and older kids like smoking and they were playing this game and it was crazy. And it reminded me of that. And it kind of made sense, like, I guess I thought I didn’t know if we had the time to do it ’cause it’s very tricky in a library. And I guess I said I’ll give it a shot.

They had just released the new starter set with the Phandelver. It was called Lost Mines of Phandelver, which is an amazing little adventure. And they had pre-done sheets. You had like a little condensed rule book, and I was new to the new rules, the new 5e stuff. I hadn’t played it for years really , still always in the periphery. There was a kid who was like, ” I know how to do it and I’ll run it.” I just let ’em do that. And it was really popular. They played every Tuesday after school and they would play for like an hour and a half and they wanted more and more of it. And I was like, I don’t have time to learn it right now. It was just so hectic.

And then that student, he stopped and I took it up. And then almost immediately after taking up we went into lockdown for COVID. I had just been running it a little bit and I was just getting, like, “Oh, this is actually really good.” And I had bought a module called Storm King’s Thunder, which is like set in like the basic world, the big world of Faerûn and all that stuff. It’s just massive and it’s really cool. And first few weeks of lockdown was like, I’m really liking how they’ve written this one, et cetera.

How our lockdown worked here, I was still expected to teach library lessons online via Microsoft Teams. Students would be on without cameras. And they would just listen to me run a library lesson, which was very tricky on Teams. And I would read, I would do activities, but anyway. I had this idea, like, to reach out to the group, they were probably 13 years old, there was about six of them. And I was like, ” Do you guys want to play at lunch over Teams? No cameras. We’ll just roll electronically. I’ll describe. It was all theater of the mind.” They did not miss a session ever, and we would do it almost every day. We did it over holidays and stuff, even. It was wild. And I was like, oh, they really love this and rely on this as much as I do.

Then when we came outta lockdown, it just exploded with popularity at the school. I was running it. Now we’ve got like so many splinter groups. We’ve probably got about 50 or 60 kids in total running it. And we’ve done some really cool stuff with it. Those kids who were 13 in what we call year nine, it was kinda like grade nine or grade eight. They stayed. We played every Wednesday and Friday at lunch until they left school in year 13. So it was like five years. I think we did hundreds of hours and we did it whenever we could. Those kids became like this core group, but then it just exploded from out there.

I just found like it was, I started to like keep track of as like an armchair psychologist. Like, some of these kids really rely on it. I would get letters from parents, emails from parents saying, you know, D&D’s the only reason my child would go to school. I’ve had cards from kids who’ve left school saying that it was lifesaving for them. They found their friendship groups and stuff like that, and I could see that it was meaning a lot to people. It meant a lot to me. I could see it was building their confidence and things like that. I know I’m rambling here, but it was really life changing in a way. I couldn’t believe the impact it had.

I had kids who would, like, they have to write a dissertation when they’re in year 12, like a 6,000 word dissertation, I had multiple kids write it on D&D and how important it was in the library and like the mental health aspects. So then I started to contact mental health professionals mainly in the US and Canada who were using it as a form of therapy, especially during lockdown and things like that for people who struggled. I just did it on my own initiative. I just thought it was interesting and I was just collecting information and then the ALA and Facet Publishing were looking for ideas or something they put on Twitter at the time and they were like, we’re looking for new publishing ideas. So I just said, “Hey, what about this?” And the guy who was in charge of it was a huge D&D fan I guess, and he was like, “Let’s do it.” I was, “Okay!” So that’s how the first book came about.

We got contacted by the British Library, which is one of the biggest libraries in the world. It’s huge. It’s like the Library of Congress version in the UK. Every book that’s published in the UK gets put in that in this library. It looks like they’ve designed it to look like a giant ship. It’s in central London, it’s massive. I’m always on social media talking about the benefits of it, taking photos of the dice and stuff like that, and artwork that kids were making and they contacted us and said, ” Look, we’re running this fantasy exhibit, we’ve got Tolkien’s notes. We’ve got CS Lewis’s maps and notes. We’ve got Terry Pratchett’s maps and handwritten notes. We’ve got props from the Lord of the Rings. Do you guys wanna run a D&D event for neurodivergent kids in the British Library?” And I was like, “Yes, absolutely!”

It was a free event, but it booked solid in like an hour. Our kids wrote it. It was all based around, of course, different famous fantasy characters and stuff like that. It was a three and a half hour event, open to the general public, but aimed at neurodivergent youth in their families. It was amazing to see them running the game in and amongst like Tolkien’s notes that were on display. It was the first time the British Library had ever run anything in the exhibit ’cause they’re super worried that somebody’s gonna like, break something or smash this. We had all these rules, no pens, no food, which just makes sense. We were allowed pencils . It was one of the highlights of my career to be honest. We were set up all around different locations and I just wandered around, make sure everything was running smoothly. And then we’ve done it three years in a row now for different exhibits, but that was the first one. We had people who said, “Well, we’ve come from Pennsylvania and this is like the highlight of our trip.” It is just crazy feedback from people and again, it’s just steamrolled from there to be honest, and on and on.

Steve Thomas: If people are listening and they’re like, “Well, I was thinking of starting one, but wow, that sounds like a lot!” Coming at it from people who maybe aren’t in this world at all but they are hearing from the teens that this would be something that they would come in to do. How do you suggest that they get started?

Lucas Maxwell: What I did was like, I reached out, ’cause again, I started out with like, loving the idea of it, but really no knowledge of the new rules. And they’ve kind of tweaked the rules again, but you don’t need to worry about that. If you’re in a school reach out to your staff and your older students ’cause what you’ll find is, especially with staff, I have found about seven or eight hidden D&D nerds in the teaching staff who come and they take part in all sorts of cool stuff that we do help out. We do like a Saturday dungeon crawl, where we just do a Saturday of six or seven different tables running the same one-shot, and we just kinda compare notes and I give prizes for like the most creative death and stuff like that, but teachers come out in droves who love it and wanna play. So like, reach out because being the librarian can be quite isolating in general and if you are like sitting there going, “I would love to try, but I don’t know how to do it,” just put the feelers out there and you might get some help. You might get some people who, like, I had people who donated books and stuff like that. It’s amazing ’cause the stuff’s not cheap either. It’s something to keep in mind.

But the other thing I would say is start small and don’t worry about the rules, and what I mean by that is the rules are there as a framework and you are there to just make sure everyone’s having fun and it’s feeling safe. So two things: I really would suggest purchasing the starter set. They just put out a new one. But you could find an older one be, and the reason for that is it comes with pre-made character sheets and that is a huge thing. It comes with a pre-made adventure. Read it through, it’s quite thin. If you have some time, read it on your own time. I can’t stress that enough, just read it through and then it comes with like a little slim version of the rule book on how to do what when. Read all that through.

Again, I know we’re talking about my books and stuff. That is why I wrote that second book because just that question. I had a lot of librarians saying, look, I don’t know how to do this at all. So I wrote a bunch of adventures aimed at someone who’s never played the game and literally says, “Say this here, roll this here.” Yes, your players are gonna derail your story. And that’s the way it goes. But I’ve kinda like put in like, “If they do this, try this. If they do this, try this.” But the thing is, don’t railroad them, which if you’re unsure of that term, it just means if you have like a set goal in mind, you will be disappointed because they’re not gonna do it.

I have an adventure in that book where the idea is that they are investigating a magical cursed recipe from a bakery, everything went wrong. It’s supposed to be very lighthearted, these ones, and it like creates this mass ’cause we’re in England, a magical scone that eats people. And I just like start it in a tavern, in an inn, just like every D&D adventure. I wrote it and then I was like, “Oh, actually, I need to actually run this and see if this works.” And I ran it with a bunch of 11 year olds, and we never left the inn for like two hours after, and that’s fine. They never did the scone thing. I stupidly maybe put it in like a magical lute that if you play it right, roll right, it summons these pigeons that you can like control and like they’ll do battle for you. And this kid stole it and then rolled a nat 20 on the performance to play it. So I let him summon all these pigeons and he just attacked the town with pigeons and they just didn’t really leave the inn and they just loved it for like an hour and a half!

You just have to just go with it. And that is what I always try to tell people. Don’t get worried that, “Oh, I told them to roll the wrong thing!” It doesn’t matter. As long as they’re having fun and as long as everyone feels safe.

And that’s another thing that I always stress, there are safety tools that you can put in place, and they’re really basic. You don’t have to get too in the weeds with them. But it’s basically to give them, without spoiling an idea of what they might come across, and I tried to write the adventures so there wouldn’t be any real threat. I’ve had it in my experience where I had a student who really, really didn’t want to me to describe falling from heights, and I was like, that’s fine. I won’t put it in there, but it’s good to know this kind of thing beforehand, and you can just check, you can do it generally. You don’t need to make it like into a big production. You can just say like, “These are the kinds of things you might be dealing with.” And I just made sure that that character didn’t have that threat and they just didn’t want to think about that. And that is fine. It’s just little things to keep in mind.

And the other thing we do, especially when we do it at the British Library and other places, we have little signs that hang over the DM screen that just says, if you need to take a break, please do ’cause sometimes they’ll feel pressure, ” Oh, I can’t leave this table.” I make sure everyone knows, if you need to get up and wander around, please do and they do and that’s also fine.

Steve Thomas: That’s making it more inclusive too, especially if you’re doing it like the thing you did at the British Library where it’s for neurodiverse kids. Sometimes they need to get up and just walk around just to clear their head or just physically need to get up and walk around. Or even if you’re neurotypical, sometimes you just need to get up and walk around. You just had a two hour thing where you’re sitting there, you need to get up and stretch.

Lucas Maxwell: And I try to just stress it with everyone that asks about it , there are rules that you have to follow, quote unquote to make it fair for everyone. But generally it’s just a framework and if you make a mistake, just admit it and move on, then we’ll fix it next time. It’s no big deal.

And the other thing I mean this may be getting a little too in the weeds, but the other thing that helps , especially the younger players, ’cause in my school, in the UK a high school is actually ages 11 to like 19. There’s no real junior high or middle school in the UK. I have a group on Monday lunchtime where it’s like, it’s all 11 year olds and they’re excited and they want treasure and they want to kill stuff and all that stuff… So in D&D, if you get into combat, that’s when you work out what turn order people take, but I actually have a turn order, when they’re in a shop, because they just talk over each other sometimes. They’re excited, they’re all want to be there, which is amazing. But when I talk to like new Dungeon Masters, I say just have a turn order, even if you go clockwise around the table. Or if you wanna get them to roll, that’s fine, but when they’re interacting and you can keep it throughout the whole time they’re in the town, keep that turn order. It literally is like a lifesaver to me ’cause they will follow it and they will take it seriously.

Those are the things like this kinda like disruptions that can like cause anxiety on new DMs or maybe like, “Oh, I’m losing control!” It’s like, “No, it’s fine. You’ll be fine. Just rein it in, get some turn orders going.” The other thing that I do is I don’t allow player versus player unless it’s called for in the story ’cause they love the idea, especially the younger ones, of beating up on each other. It always ends up hurt feelings, and I make it clear from second one, this is the wrong game for you, unfortunately, if this is what you think you’re gonna do. We’re not gonna do that in this game. You are working together. I am also not here to kill you.

That’s the other thing that new DMs forget. They think that their job is to kill the players. And it’s not. You might get some kids, I’ve had some kids who were like, if their character died, they would be literally devastated. And I don’t do that with the young kids. There’s always threats and things like that , and it might be just common sense, but your job as a DM is just to present challenges and to cheer them on as they move through them, not to kill them in horrible ways.

Those are the things I just try to get new DMs to understand, because when I started, I was panicking as well, like, “Oh, I’ve done this wrong!” The other thing I suggest is like, listen or watch some D&D podcasts on YouTube. Watch them, but don’t expect to be… like, I first watched Critical Role and I was like, “Oh, this is cool, but I’ll never be that guy!” They’re like professional voice actors. They are professionals. They do it for a living. They make a lot of money and this is not going to be you and not gonna be me, but you can learn a little bit from them, like the flow of it . I learned a lot about combat and also about like what to ask to roll when they were doing certain things, which is very useful. So I would suggest listening. Not Another D&D Podcast is good. Critical Role is good. There’s a ton of them. There’s so many of them.

Steve Thomas: And it’s the kind of thing that probably when you were young, if podcasts existed, would’ve been wonderful for you because like you said, you didn’t have people to play with!

Lucas Maxwell: Absolutely. Would’ve been great. Yeah.

Steve Thomas: I know I would appreciate as somebody, if I came into this as somebody with not any knowledge about this, the glossary you have at the front would be so… ’cause there are so many terms.

Lucas Maxwell: I know. It is something that people take for granted. I try to do a little thing with the kids, like to show ’em the dice. At the beginning, we do like Session Zero, which I talk about, which is basically just the first session where you don’t necessarily play, you might do, but you basically, you might make characters or you just go over what you’re gonna talk about. And I just show them the dice and like, they love of course playing with the dice, but it’s like, this is what these are, and if they don’t remember, that’s fine. But the more they play, of course, the more they catch on.

The other thing I hope is useful, ’cause I find these useful, I have like a hundred things that you can get if you pickpocket ’cause kids are pickpocketing in our school constantly. With the game, not in real life, but they want to pickpocket every character that comes along. So I have this table of a hundred different things that they could find in someone’s pockets and different potions because I like just coming up with silly stuff ’cause they love it, like a potion that makes their hair fall out or turns them blue or something, which is funny to me. It’s just funny.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, you have a whole bunch of appendices at the end listing all this stuff. Again, really helpful, not only to a new person, but just somebody looking for new ideas.

You mentioned before of getting the starter kit or getting some of the books. D&D is not made by some fringe, I mean, it’s a main publisher. You can get their books through Ingram, whatever book distributor you use, they’re very easily bought. But yes, they’re not cheap either. So if you’re on a budget, you may not be able to afford them, but if you can, you can just get one. Like, you don’t have to get one for every player. They can just have, like we have, I think, several copies throughout our whole system, but I mean, they’re in the collection but it can be hard. And I’m glad they have that starter kit. I think they even have little deals every once in a while for librarians and educators to send them free stuff.

Lucas Maxwell: Yeah. The Player’s Handbook is the best one to get ’cause you can create characters, you can learn some spells and just get started. Really, I would say if you just bought one , I would do that. And then if you can get the starter set, great. But you can always, the other thing I’ll plug, I use it all the time, the DM’s Guild it’s called, it’s a website, because you can find like $1 adventures that have been written that are two hours long. They get permission to upload them and some are more expensive, but you can find free ones. I would start with one, like there’s a free one out there, a PDF called Wild Sheep Chase, which is hilarious and great for kids. Grammy’s Country Apple Pie is another one is free. They’re just people who just put them up there. They’re free to use and they’re really nice and they’re fun and they’re, they’re also great intros to the game.

Steve Thomas: And you have a number in your book, in Roll for Adventure that people can get started with as well.

Lucas Maxwell: Yeah. I should plug my own book actually. Yeah.

Steve Thomas: No, go to this website instead!

Lucas Maxwell: Don’t read my book. There’s, yeah, five adventures that are just, the way I wrote them, they have different, some have combat, some are more performative where they have to put on a play, some you’re doing a little investigating and things like that. They’re very lighthearted. I tried to make them funny. One of them has a donkey race where you ride donkeys and race them. And there’s different weird effects that happen and those are really fun ’cause they get quite chaotic, but yeah, like they’re there for, like you said, anybody could run them, experienced and new. But in my head, I was thinking when I was writing them, I was like, I want this to be accessible to someone who is like, “I don’t have a lot of time, I don’t have a lot of knowledge of this game. Can I just get started?” And hopefully that’s what I’ve achieved with it. But yeah, I think they’re fun. I enjoyed writing them anyway.

Steve Thomas: I believe you said you wrote them to be done in around an hour or two, right? So it’s a good one-off kind of thing. Not a ” now let’s start this 13 month adventure!”

Lucas Maxwell: Oh man. Yeah. That’s the thing, as we know, librarians, the time is your enemy. Because if you’re playing with adults or whatever, it could be four hours or six hours even, and you don’t have that. Our lunch time is like 50 minutes which is a good chunk of time, but by the time everyone gets settled in, you’re looking at like 40 minutes, 45 minutes. Sometimes I will do continuations of things if it’s the same players, but often they just wanna fight something and I’ll just set up a combat scenario. If they get off the rails, then that’s fine, but if you were to follow it through, it should be able to be done in an hour.

Steve Thomas: Well, and like you said, sometimes going off the rails is the fun part.

Lucas Maxwell: It is. It’s really fun. Yeah. Yeah.

Steve Thomas: And we talked about cost. You don’t have to make this really expensive either outside of even the books ’cause you mentioned the term “theater of the mind.” You don’t need to have really anything except your imagination to make it happen!

Lucas Maxwell: When I was running it during lockdown, as I mentioned, on Microsoft Teams, it was completely theater of the mind. If you allow tablets and things like that, they can roll electronically. You don’t even need the dice. The dice are fun and they love the dice, but you don’t need to spend tons of money. You don’t need battle maps or miniatures. Really all you need is pencil, paper, seats, and chairs. To be honest, you can make your own Dungeons Master screen if you need to. You really don’t need anything. And because like I said, you could find adventures for free. It’s just people and time really is all you need and your imagination.

That’s also the beauty of it. And that’s what a lot of the positive feedback I got from the British Library event, like, all the parents going, “Look, they’ve been three, four hours, they’ve never looked at a screen.” And to me it’s very important because as anyone works with youth knows, their attention spans and our attention spans are being frayed away. And I don’t know, it’s something that. Kind of combats that because it does take a lot of concentration and a lot of time and a lot of mental energy.

And the other thing that I always say every time I talk about this, I mentioned this the other day to someone. We had kids come in the library. I opened the library up at my school really early, around 7:15. And there was about five or six boys who came in. And I knew them because they were from, they’re from the D&D club, but they just came in early and they just immediately went to the D&D cupboard, which has all the stuff. They took out the Players Handbooks, the Monster Manuals, and the sheets, and they just wanted to make some of them like to make characters just for fun, and they were creating a little backstory and stuff like that. And they stayed there from 7:15 till 8:30 when the bell rang. I know these kids now quite well. And it’s like, if you were to stop them randomly in the corridor and say, “What do you think about like, reading?” they would say, “That sucks!” Like they don’t read books from the library, but they have been reading for an hour and 15 minutes in this library on the Player’s Handbook. I mean, it seems obvious, but it is a lot of reading and it’s a lot of thinking critically. It’s team building, it’s frustration management. It’s all these things that come together with it. There’s a lot of strategy involved. They realize that they have to put others before themselves, which is hard to do when you’re 11 years old, and it’s interesting to watch them mature that way through the game. But yeah, it has all these great benefits that I just constantly see year after year. I’ve been running it seven or eight years now.

Steve Thomas: Can you elaborate a little bit on those educational and developmental benefits? ‘Cause I’m thinking in terms of like, the kinds of things you’re gonna need in your back pocket if you say, “I wanna do this program.” When you’re presenting this to your manager or to your administration, like, what can you say? It’s not just playing games!

Lucas Maxwell: So the first thing that kept coming up when I started to speak to mental health professionals in the US and Canada, was that, for them, it was something they called behavioral activation. This was something that was very important for people over lockdown and then getting out of lockdown. And what we see now in, I’m sure it’s similar in the US schools, but in the UK schools, the lockdown and COVID still has these huge impacts on kids’ mental health. We’re seeing it all still. It’s really sad to see and it’s really, I don’t know, just mind boggling to me. I think we’ll be studying for decades what happened to people’s brains during lockdown.

But anyway, behavioral activation is like a fancy way of saying they have something to look forward to, and the impact of that can’t really be diminished because when I started to track it. I didn’t have any problems with senior leadership saying you shouldn’t be running this game or any parental pushback, which I’m very grateful for, but I understand that you might get that in certain places, which is fine. It’s tragic, but it’s fine. But the idea that I’ve been running this, I’ve been running teen programs now for 15 years and I’ve never seen a program have the retention magnitude as Dungeons and Dragons. Like I said, those kids who went from year eight to year thirteen without really missing. If they were sick, they would Zoom in and play during lunch ill from home. I would send email updates about the campaign. If somebody missed something, I would give them recaps and things like that. So this idea that they have something to look forward to that is building lifelong friendships, I have direct evidence of it and of kids who have come back to the school to volunteer to help with different things, and they still maintain those friendships that they developed six, seven years ago. So there’s that.

And then there is the idea that they can be themselves in a safe place without any fear of ridicule or anxiety. Two things on that. So we have students who, I can tell, are kind of like acting out their anxieties and frustrations through their characters and they’re doing it in a very safe environment. It’s interesting to watch them. You can tell when a student’s had a bad day, they just want to like destroy everything, and if you just let them do that, then it’s fine, because everything’s imaginary, and as long as they’re not hurting the feelings of other players, that’s fine. It is this kinda like frustration management system.

It’s also a kinda moral training ground for youth in many ways. We had a situation, only one time in seven years where one player who was quite like chaotic, a little bit disruptive, but I was making really big strides with them, but this one player kinda like brought up the idea of they had captured this NPC who had betrayed them, and he floated the idea of torturing them. Now I was immediately going to shut it down, but I didn’t need to because the four other players shut it down. It was interesting to me to see that these 13 year olds who were at the time were like, “We’re not doing that” and they kind of like made a pact that they weren’t gonna ever do that again. It was just very heartening to see, ’cause if I had let it, you know, it could have gone really off the rails and as you said, you gotta rein them in, but I didn’t have to in that moment because they did it themselves.

So there’s this idea that they are working together for a common goal. As long as they know what the goal is, they will build these friendships within the group, but also friendships outside of the group, and they start to stick up for each other outside of the group. And to me, this idea of wellbeing, and it’s an act of of mindfulness even coming to the library, putting on a new role, putting on the shoes of someone else, developing empathy even for a character who might be a different race, of course, or a different colored skin or anything, and experiencing things that are different to their own has a huge impact in the safe environment.

This is the other thing that I forgot to mention which I always talk about when you get the question about like pitching it to people and talking to senior leadership. We might have six people playing, six or seven people playing in the game, in the little groups all around the library, but we might have 10 to 15 people watching. And I always ask them like, “Do you guys wanna get involved and start your own group? We’ll get it going.” And they always say no. They just wanna watch , which is also interesting. It’s like a community event and it’s very unique and it creates this shared unique experience where they’re like cheering on their friends when they’re in a battle and things like that.

And we had a student who, this was quite a few years ago now, who just wanted to watch and this person only communicated via whiteboard and dry erase marker and would just write a few things down, getting lots and lots of support from the school, but they would just sit and watch and eventually, when one of the characters, one of the teens in in the group decided that their character was like an expert in origami, so they brought origami to the table and I was like, “That’s awesome!” They created an origami swan or whatever. That piqued the interest of this other student who was not really very communicative and we just wanted to watch and they wrote down, “Can I sit closer to the table and play?” And it was like, absolutely, gave them a character sheet. They eventually ended up making their own, everyone welcomed them in.

Cut to like three years later, this person is running an event at the Barnes Literary Festival with us, which is like the largest literary festival in the UK I think even in Europe, and we ran a few for them, which was amazing. And, I mean, of course they had tons of support from home and the school, but when they wrote their dissertation on Dungeons & Dragons, and their parents talked to me, they credit playing with that group, giving them the confidence to come outta their shell, start speaking naturally and in a more regular way. The confidence that it gave them because they knew that if they messed up, it wasn’t the life or death. We constantly tell kids, ” You gotta fail, failing is important, et cetera.” But then on the other side of our tongue, we’ll say “Failing is the worst thing that can happen because of exams.” Like here in the UK, exams are everything. They just, they’re so stressed about exams. D&D, you can fail. Failing is what makes it funny. Failing can be what makes the story amazing. Rolling a natural one is like the most hilarious thing if you’ve got the right Dungeon Master.

I know that was a very long rambling answer, but there’s like, there’s so many benefits to it. It’s really hard to pin them all down and it’s hard to put them in a pie chart for people in suits, but it’s also, you have all this concrete evidence that is extremely important.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. It’s good that that research is being done, so we can at least point at that and say, “Look, there’s studies that show this is good too!”

Before we wrap up, I wanted to ask about one other book. It’s a little book called A Million Tiny Missiles All At Once. Would you wanna tell listeners about that book?

Lucas Maxwell: Thank you very much. Yeah. That’s amazing. I didn’t expect that. It’s really nice. A Million Tiny Missiles All At Once is my debut YA, but honestly, as a librarian, I would give it to a 12-year-old, easily. There’s nothing in it that, it’s not too crazy. It’s gonna be published with Chicken House Books in the UK. Might be some more news regarding the US on that, but I’m not allowed to talk about that yet, but it’s basically the story, it’s based on my life really growing up in Nova Scotia, but it is a fictionalized version. It’s about a boy named Elias who is neurodivergent and all he wants to do is win the school talent show ’cause he believes the prize, which is like a family pizza dinner at the new Pizza Hut, will kind of like bring things together and help his frayed family, which is kind of falling apart because of his brother’s behavior and other other things. It took me a long time to write it, but I’m very proud of it, and it’ll be out on April 9th if anyone’s interested. Yeah. Thank you very much.

Steve Thomas: You’re welcome, and hopefully the US audience and outside of the UK will be able to get ahold of it. And I used to work at Pizza Hut in high school, so Yay, Pizza Hut, bringing people together.

Lucas Maxwell: How was that? How was working at Pizza Hut?

Steve Thomas: The good thing of working at Pizza Hut as a teenage boy is that at the end of the night when there were pizzas left over that nobody picked up, they just say, “take those home.” So I would go home and I would eat an entire pizza at 11 o’clock at night when I got home from work, because I’m a 16-year-old boy and that I can do that without gaining any weight.

Lucas Maxwell: As a teen, that’s perfect food. And they’re all closing here in the UK, all the Pizza Huts are closing. It’s just sad. But I loved it. In Canada they were called Pizza Delight. There were a few Pizza Huts, but Pizza Delight was the big competitor, but loved it. Couldn’t get enough of it!

Steve Thomas: Lucas, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It’s really been great talking to you and learning about all this stuff. Like I said, I’ve sort of have a little toe in it so I have some understanding, but I think it’ll also be very helpful to people who are just getting started.

Lucas Maxwell: Thank you so much for the opportunity. It’s been really fun talking to you.