Roanoke Library Hosts Long-Running Dungeons & Dragons Game

This conversation originally aired in the June 29, 2025 episode of Inside Appalachia.

Every week for the last 15 years, kids have gotten together at the Roanoke Public Library to play Dungeons & Dragons. 

Dungeons & Dragons, or D&D for short, is a roleplaying game that allows players to inhabit characters in a fantasy setting. They work together to battle monsters, find treasure and tell a shared story in which they’re all the main characters.

Youth Services Librarian Jeffrey Wood ran a recent session, guiding a group of young teenagers through an adventure involving a sheep, a dragon made of furniture and a few other creatures.

“As you go to pat his head, his head seems comically large,” Wood said of a character the players met along the way. 

One player suggested removing the hood on the characters, leading to a dramatic reveal of the grizzly bear underneath. The teens shouted in surprise and delight.

Wood is the gamemaster at the library D&D game. That means he’s the person who prepares each game and acts as referee as the kids work their way through it. 

Inside Appalachia Host Mason Adams made a couple visits to the Roanoke Public Library and spoke with Wood one evening as he prepared the next episode. 

The transcript below has been lightly edited for clarity.

Adams: For listeners who don’t know, what is Dungeons & Dragons, and what does it look like in a library setting?

Wood: Dungeons & Dragons is a game where players take on the role of a fantasy character in a fantasy world, and explore that world. It’s dangerous. They have to work together. There’s treasure, there’s monsters, there’s challenges and traps. It’s very much a fantasy-based game, but it’s also a device for a group to tell an interesting story together. My basic goal is to help kids learn literacy skills. That was essentially the original goal, was a literacy-promoting program. Dungeon & Dragons is famous for it being a pencil-paper-books game. It’s not on a computer, it’s not on a phone or a console. It is a game you play with books and paper and pencils. My goal is to make sure that not only the kids are playing games, but they’re also trying to learn something from it, in terms of developing their literacy skills and their group work skills.

Adams: How did you first get into D&D?

Wood: I didn’t play it as a kid at all. I didn’t discover Dungeons & Dragons until I was about 22 years old. When I first started here, I had heard of it. I had friends of friends that played it, but it always seemed like the nerdiest kids, and I wasn’t into roleplaying. The way I got into it is the former children’s librarian here in the city asked me, would I like to come up and play a game with the kids? There’s a couple off-hours after my shift ended. I came up and he actually showed me the game, and I was instantly like, “This, is it. This is the coolest thing that I have ever seen, because the characters can do whatever they want.” There’s no limits, like there are in a computer game or a console game. It’s a group activity. It’s very social, it’s very fun, it’s very funny for the people involved in it.

And I just had a blast. We started very humble. It was, basically, whenever we had teens that would wander in the library, as teens do, we’d go up and do the pitch and see if they would tell their friends to come. It’s been very much a word-of-mouth program. 

Adams: What kinds of kids are attracted to come play this game and what’s in it for them? 

Wood: Dungeons & Dragons is unique because it attracts an extremely diverse group of kids. If you look at some of the materials that the person who’s running the game uses to try and get the kids to participate, they’re very aware that it attracts a diverse audience. In the source materials, if you’re trying to learn how to facilitate these games, it’ll say, “You’ve got the kiddo that’s interested in beating all the monsters. You’ve got the kiddo that’s interested in making friends. You’ve got the kiddo that wants to tell an interesting story, or be the one that makes the jokes.” It’s very much a motley group. They’re all very diverse in what they want to get out of the game, which makes it very challenging for the person who’s running it. 

Something that’s very dear to me is sort of this concept of “found family.” A found family is essentially different characters or different people that, by happenstance or accident, find each other and go on an adventure together. There are lots of found families that you’ll know. One of my favorites is the claymation “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” [You’ve] got the misfit elf and the misfit reindeer Rudolph, and they both have their talents that do not fit with where they’re supposed to be. Santa’s a real jerk about it. So they just take off, and they find other people who are kind of misfits on their way.

Adams: How have the kids playing changed since y’all launched this in 2010? When I came the other night, there was the younger group, and you also had an earlier generation that was playing that are now older.

Wood: I’ve seen them go in every direction. I’ve seen kids that met here when they were young teenagers, and they later went to get married in their 20s and have had children [and] bought a house together. I’ve seen kids go off to college. I know at least a couple have gotten very advanced degrees. Some went straight to work. Some went to care for family members. The kids who have come through here and made friends, I’ve seen go in every direction in life, which has been interesting and also makes me feel very ancient. One of the things that I think is valuable is this is a weekly recurring program. When they’re around the same people every week and going through these tumultuous adventures that I put them through, they tend to make friends with one another and try and get along with one another. Some of them have stuck with this into their adulthood, and still hang out even outside of the library, and so they’ve made some lifelong friends, hopefully.

Adams: This running D&D game has been going for 15 years now almost. Why is it important for the library and its offerings?

Wood: One of the things that’s challenging for libraries is to get teenagers actively involved with the community and to read books. More specifically than that, it’s a challenge to get teenagers to read dense books and practice skills like critical thinking and socialization and getting along. Sports plays that role in schools, where you’re on a team and you’ve got a goal. For kids that aren’t especially into sports, this can play a similar role, because it is a challenge, essentially, and all the teens come together to work together to deal with that challenge, and they’ve got to get along. If they don’t get along, then the dragon gets to win.

I see the kids go home with a handful of books, and they’ll come back the next week and they’ll be like, “No, I’ve studied this. I know how this works now. I know exactly what this spell does and how to use it.” And I’ve done this for so long. I’ve seen their literacy skills improve with it because they have a motivator. The motivator is to not get eaten by the dragon, or to make that friend, or to get to the end of the adventure, to have the most powerful fighter in the world. In order to do that, they’ve actually got to learn to read the books and learn when to negotiate, or when to hold them, when to fold them. 

I’ve had a lot of fun using it as a secret tool to educate. I’ll actually stop the kids at times when something comes up. It’s like a history lesson, because Dungeons & Dragons is loosely based on Lord of the Rings and fantasy, but also other kinds of mythology. It’s sort of a mishmash of European folklore, Greek mythology, even Eastern mythology. There’s a huge mishmash of history and cultural material that goes into this game. And so I get to actually stop the kids at times and say, “No, there’s a lesson. This is actually based on this, this sort of thing that happened, this real historical event.” And so it’s a secret tool for me to sneak in my teacher stuff.

Adams: What’s some wisdom you’ve taken away from this?

Wood: The most important thing that I’ve learned is not to make assumptions about what’s going to happen next, because I’ve seen these stories, not only the stories of the kids and their personal lives, but also, I’ve seen the stories in the game and the game world, go in fantastic directions that I did not expect to happen. They’ll make connections with characters that I’ve come up with, and they’ll mention eight months later that I don’t even remember. I’m going through my notes trying to remember, what is this character who they made a friend with? The most important thing I’ve learned wisdom-wise is just to not make assumptions about where things are headed or where things are going to go but hope for the best. 

During the COVID lockdowns, I actually said, the show does not end. The show must go on. The story must continue one way or another. We put the Zoom link up, and had everybody log in, and I laid out the ground rules. We got on there, and we told stories for the entirety that the library was closed to the public, and we went through a module called Curse of Strahd, which is about a vampire in a very depressing place.

One of my favorite characters — I just wanted to give a shout out to him. The kiddo is now in film school, doing a fantastic job making these things that look like they’re produced by Hollywood. He came up with the character named “Sir Ribbit.” So his whole trope was that he is a displaced knight wandering, doesn’t know who he is anymore, based on a traumatic backstory that nobody knew. He also had a floating mandolin that followed him around that made these Texas American sounds. He had a sound board. The thing that’s so funny is that whenever an abstract concept came up — if somebody mentioned the word “peace” or “love” or “honor,” or “kindness” or “goodness” — this player would hit his soundboard, and that mandolin would start playing, and he would launch into a monologue. He’d be like “Honor?! What is honor? Is it good enough to stand and fight a man twice your size that you know to be a scoundrel, or sneak him with the crossbow bolt and live to fight another day? What is honor even?” And he would do that, not just with honor, but with just every abstract concept that we all argue about. “Charity?! What is charity? Is it good to feed a hungry child, or let the hunger teach him to feed himself?” And so he would just pull these just out of the blue.

The funny thing was where we never expected it. It would just come up in the story. Some concept would come up: “We need to do the right thing.” “Right?!” And then the mandolin would start playing. It was just so good, such a good character.