It is a Friday afternoon in March in the classroom of Jorge Santos, associate professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross, and wizards, rangers, bards and monks have replaced his fourteen first-year students.
It’s the first time the students are playing Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), the 50-year-old fantasy role-playing game they’ve studied as part of Santos’ new course for Holy Cross’ Montserrat program: Dungeons, Dragons & Diversity.
Grouped into three teams, players grip small velvet pouches containing dice. Santos as dungeon master, the game’s head narrator, commands the room in a floor-length black robe (worn, on another occasion, for pomp and circumstance) as mystical music plays from his laptop. He decrees today’s quest: Locate and capture four potions hidden across campus.
Today, each student is playing as a D&D character version of themselves, drawing on their unique skills and abilities as they cause distractions, solve puzzles and work together. Santos narrates how each move unfolds. As the minutes tick down and the first three potions are pocketed, all three teams descend on Brooks Hall (where, as first-year Montserrat students, they all live together, in reality), as they battle for the final potion.
“To every student’s credit, all of them are committed to the project of the class,” Santos says. “They understand D&D is a vehicle, it’s not the point.”
Students spent the first half of the course examining racial commentary in 21st-century fantasy films and classic novels like The Hobbit before turning their attention during the second semester to high fantasy and D&D to discuss positive and negative representations of ethnicity and race.
“The promise of literature has always been to see the world through someone else’s eyes,” Santos says. “If we take that to the next level, D&D asks you to be that person and tell the story yourself.”
Origin Story
In May 2023, Santos worked with several Holy Cross professors to co-found the College’s new Critical Race and Ethnic Studies department. He also began exploring course design.
When he heard that a close friend and colleague, Jarred Wiehe, was successfully using tabletop role-playing games (TTRPG) like D&D in the classroom at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi to discuss gender performativity, Santos wondered: Was there a way to use D&D to have deeper conversations about race and ethnicity?
Weiss Summer Research student Jango Janigian ’25 thought so. Last year, Janigian asked Santos to advise their 2023 research project on folklore and racial narratives within D&D. They focused their summer research project around Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel, a hugely popular book of 13 playable D&D short stories, each written by a different author of color who includes folklore, mythology and history from their world cultures and lived experiences.
“D&D is a rich vehicle to talk about diversity because, at their core, TTRPGs are systems of empathy,” Janigian says. “They allow players to experience the lives (and research) of others in a low-stakes and fun environment, offering the opportunity to explore cultures that are removed from them temporally, geographically or academically. D&D also gives voices to the marginalized and historically underrepresented — allowing people to adapt and explore their culture through their characters.”
Santos says, “When I saw Jango’s project, I knew I wanted to create a course designed to make students produce the work that Jango just produced.”
Using Janigian’s project as the model, Santos’ students researched the mythological, folkloric and sociopolitical aspects of one of the thirteen short stories from the book. Then, they designed characters to play from that story’s world culture and one different from their own.
“The culminating project of the course is for students to pretend and embody for a whole afternoon that they are a member of another culture in a fantasy setting — and to do it responsibly,” Santos says.
The Final Adventure
On a Sunday in late April, Santos gathered his Montserrat students in a large suite in Holy Cross’ Hogan Campus Center. They finally had the chance to play as the characters they had exhaustively researched and designed, inspired by a story from Radiant Citadel. Santos and three members of Holy Cross’ TTRPG Club, “Session Zero,” served as dungeon masters.
“I was shocked by how much I took from the experience,” Nik Karvelas ’27 says. He played as Tequihua, a dwarf barbarian. He created the character after reading “Trail of Destruction” by Alastor Guzman and researching Aztec culture and the 2017 Mexico earthquake.
“The author was inspired by the acts of kindness shown by survivors and others trying to help each other after the wake of destruction,” Karvelas says. “Playing a character with this type of mindset changed the way I took actions during our adventure. I always tried to help my teammates instead of going for hits on an enemy myself. I tried to support poor non-player characters who needed help and tried to do the kind thing whenever possible.”
Found Family
The course has been a perfect fit for Montserrat, largely because the first-year program is all about building community, something D&D does well, Santos says. “We even have a two-week unit on the most traditional D&D narrative — the ‘found family’ story. We are embracing that because we are a found family in this class.”
Students in the course created posters for a 2024 Academic Conference on their research, recorded a podcast about their experience, and wrote a research paper, as well as reflective pieces.
“Professor Santos has done an amazing job getting us to help each other be creative and support each other,” says Avery Nientimp ’27. “The course is an incredible opportunity to dig into what makes you unique, all while spreading your wings and dipping your toes into different cultures.”
“It’s been nice to have this safe environment where we can talk about serious societal issues and get used to the kinds of conversations we’re going to have at a school like Holy Cross,” Patrick Bohn ’27 says. “The most important part of the class is that you come in and try to put yourself in somebody else’s shoes.”
By Meredith Fidrocki, College of the Holy Cross