The Last Hunt for the Jabberwock
Nyles cautiously approaches Soothsore Dam, her comically oversized battleax at the ready. The tiny fairy barbarian is poised to strike. There is a rustle in the forest below. Professor Cinnamon McWhiskey Biscuits emerges, dragging a massive, pungent bait ball. The saccharine scent of malted grains wafts through the still air. Plumbeus, wielding a pair of wish-forged daggers, tumbles awkwardly from the undergrowth.
The trees shake. The forest is afraid.
The Jabberwock, with eyes aflame, rises above the canopy, burbling as it approaches the terrified heroes.
Standing atop the dam, Honhk hefts Snicker-Snack, the rude and wholly unhelpful broadsword who has done nothing but mock the adventurers on their journey through these whimsical woods. The Jabberwock casts its gaze upon the hateful sword, the only weapon in all the Warren that can harm it. White-hot fire bursts from its eyes, blazing across the river, striking the sword as Honhk plunges it into the dam’s heartstone.
Soothsore Dam crumbles. Water pours forth as the wishstones holding back the swamp shatter. The river surges. From deep in the swamp, the melodious ribbits of cheering Frogfolk are heard. The forest that was once their home will become their home once again. Downstream, a village of Rabbitfolk braces for the oncoming flood.
The Jabberwock turns its uffish gaze towards the soggy heroes…
Thus begins the third and final act of the Last Hunt for the Jabberwock: A Feywild Adventure in Ecologic Succession (Thaler 2024). Throughout this Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) campaign, players explore the ecology of a strange forest, study the impacts of a magical dam, and meet the communities that grow, thrive, toil, and suffer in this altered ecosystem. They discover how the history and ecology of a fire-dominated forest is shaped by the loss of keystone species. They unravel the environmental and social implications of building a dam that brought prosperity to one community while depriving another. As they reach the climactic conclusion, the players must decide how to balance the needs, desires, and fears of many different peoples based on what they have learned about this strange and whimsical forest.
The Last Hunt for the Jabberwock is a story about environmental justice, ambiguity, and the hard choices that must be made to heal a damaged land. It is an adventure built for educators and designed to be used within the framework of formal and informal environmental education programs. Included with the adventure are lesson plans, built around Common Core and Next Generation Science Standards, which help students understand the context of the adventure through real-world examples of succession in fire-dominated ecosystems as well as the environmental and social consequences of building and removing dams. Those lessons combine in- and out-of-game activities that help inform decision making in this imaginary forest. Throughout the journey, players will encounter creatures from local legends. Some will be friendly, while others are spoiling for a fight.
The Last Hunt for the Jabberwock is part of a growing movement to integrate games, both serious and silly, into educational programs. Successful implementation of games creates immersive, meaningful experiences for students through a learn-by-doing approach to complex topics. Tabletop Role-Playing Games (TTRPGs)—collaborative, storytelling-driven games in which players assume a character and act out their motives and actions through discussion and dice rolls—have increasingly found a home in both formal and informal educational settings. In addition to knowledge production in diverse subject areas, these games promote positive attitude and behavior changes, social-emotional learning such as social awareness and empathy, and increased communication skills while engaging with multiple learning styles (Tan and Nurul‐Asna 2022). TTRPGs encourage creativity, social interaction, and improvisation as the players shape the story’s outcome.
Creative Role-Play and Collaborative Storytelling in the Classroom
At their core, Dungeons & Dragons and other TTRPGs are tools that allow students to engage in creative role-playing and problem solving in a shared fantasy world in which dice introduce random elements into the adventure. As collaborative storytelling engines, they allow students and teachers to explore new and challenging concepts in a safe environment, guided by a game master who sets the tone and pace of the adventure. TTRPGs can serve as dramatic rehearsals where players can view complex and challenging issues from multiple angles and tackle decision making when there is no right answer. In working toward a common goal, players negotiate the competing needs of their party by building and rebuilding consensus (Haarman 2022). TTRPGs are autotelic—it is the experience, rather than the outcome, that is important.
Since 2019, a raggedy band of marine science misfits who call themselves the Cephalosquad, of which the authors of this piece are members, have run a D&D “actual-play” podcast, Dugongs and Seadragons. “Actual play” is a term for podcasts and live events in which the performers play a TTRPG to an audience. Actual plays involve performance and improvisation in addition to the mechanics of the game. The Dugongs and Seadragons podcast has an environmental education twist. Everyone involved in the adventure is an ocean scientist, artist, educator, or student. Through Dugongs and Seadragons, the team has explored concepts of overfishing, marine pollution, whaling, ecosystem-based management, Indigenous rights, and environmental justice, all while sharing their love of ocean science and fighting creatures inspired by real marine animals and legendary maritime monsters.
In its eight-year history, Dugongs and Seadragons has produced over 370 episodes across the main storyline and several shorter stories, with over 70,000 downloads. The podcast has frequently broken into the top ten most downloaded for both Science and Dungeons & Dragons podcasts. The Cephalosquad have performed live shows at both pop culture conventions and scientific conferences. Monsters, especially those based in folklore, can provide shared cultural or place-based touchstones that help players engage in heroic role-play. To bring natural history-inspired monsters into the adventure, Cephalosquad members produced several books integrating marine science into D&D, including Scientific Secrets of the Salt Marsh, Scientific Secrets of Avernus, and Scientific Secrets of Icewind Dale. These modules make it easy for educators to drop specific monsters into existing D&D adventures.
One such adventure is The Curse of the Snallygaster (see Appendix), a beginner adventure for Everyday Heroes. Everyday Heroes is a TTRPG based on the 5th edition of D&D, which uses the same familiar rulesets of D&D but replaces magic and mediaeval mayhem with skills, gadgets, and specialized equipment more appropriate for grounded, realistic storytelling in the modern era. In Snallygaster, the players work for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Special Cryptid Unit, where they investigate sightings of strange creatures throughout the country. Namely, players hunt the elusive Snallygaster, a Maryland cryptid described as a winged bird-like reptile with a metallic beak, sharp talons, and, sometimes, tentacles. Some theories hold that the original Snallygaster, first documented as a story of 18th-century German immigrants (Fair 2013), was a heron attempting to swallow an octopus.
Throughout this adventure, which includes lessons plans and is designed to be played over a few classroom sessions, players learn about methods for studying wildlife, including conducting line transects, placing camera traps, and doing eDNA analysis. The Curse of the Snallygaster can also be played as an “actual-play” adventure, in which conservation and science professionals run the game for a live or recorded audience as a novel and entertaining tool for teaching students about careers in wildlife conservation.
D&D and other TTRPGs can offer tremendous value for environmental educators. Access to the outdoors is not equitable (Parkin et al. 2025) and many students, particularly those in urban and suburban settings, may lack direct access to large parks, forests, and wilderness areas (Thomas et al. 2022). Even in rural areas, automobile dependence renders wild spaces out of reach for many students (Hemby et al. 2023). Social gatherings for young people are increasingly geared toward digital spaces. This phenomenon results in students who rarely interact with wilderness and are unfamiliar and uncomfortable with wild spaces.
Creative role-play, grounded in environmental themes and settings, allows students to explore and interact with unfamiliar places in a comfortable space that creates opportunities for emotional risk-taking without physical risk and can help promote an appreciation for the natural environment in situations where access to wild spaces may be limited. Even wholly virtual experiences that place a focus on natural exploration can inspire more direct engagement with environmental issues (Fletcher 2017). These experiences provide new ways to talk about natural processes, using fantasy as a buffer against the fatalism of environmental change and allowing students to explore solutions in a controlled setting (Niedzwiedz et al. 2025). The structured rules of TTRPGs allow the teacher to guide discussion in productive directions while encouraging exploration. Controversial topics become more approachable when discussed in the abstract, using fantastical worlds and monsters inspired by familiar folklore, rather than real-world scenarios.
Other Examples of Creative Role-Play in Educational Settings
There are myriad opportunities for implementing creative role-play into informal educational programming. In a long-running program through his local library, Thaler explores concepts of censorship and book banning, as well as the value of reading, with mixed student groups from elementary through high school. He has published a complementary expansion to the 2025 D&D Starter Set, which adds these themes to a pre-made campaign.
A collaborative short series with the podcast Marine Conservation Happy Hour explores local history and folklore in a duet of adventures set in Colonial Williamsburg just after the Revolutionary War. The players learned about colonial medicine, colonial taverns, historically appropriate food, the history of the College of William and Mary, and piracy (in particular the infamous Blackbeard, whose crew was tried in Colonial Williamsburg). The stories involve local legends and incorporate St. Nicholas and Krampus into the creation of the American Christmas.
There are many systems, like Everyday Heroes, which take the ruleset from D&D and integrate them into other science and fantasy franchises. Doctors and Daleks is a TTRPG based on 5th Edition D&D that places players into the Doctor Who universe rather than the Forgotten Realms of D&D. This system uses persuasion, logic, and problem solving, rather than violence, to overcome encounters with monsters from science, history, and folklore. Parsons runs Doctors and Daleks adventures that include searching for Bigfoot in the Pacific Northwest and exploring U.S. Antarctic research stations, with a focus on learning about the National Science Foundation’s polar program.
Practical Considerations
Whether in the form of extended, semester-long campaigns like Jabberwock, or shorter, focused adventures like Snallygaster, TTRPGs offer students an opportunity to see how their own emotions are affected by engaging in situations and perspectives that differ from their own (Haarman 2022). These games make space for the instructor to explore new ways of teaching using pre-existing systems, which allow educators to focus on the lesson rather than the mechanics of the game (Burenheide and Allen 2025).
Integrating a D&D campaign into formal or informal lessons does not have to be a difficult or time-consuming task. With over half a century of material, much of which is designed around nature-based themes, there is a plethora of adventures to choose from. D&D may not be the right choice for every program. D&D and its connection to the moral panics of the 1980s can still run afoul of school guidelines and face resistance from parents. Other TTRPG game systems offer similar experiences with varying levels of complexity. All TTRPGs generally follow the same basic gameplay loop: A game master, who oversees the experience, describes a scene. The players decide what they want to do in that scene. The game master then uses the rules of the TTRPG to decide how that decision will be resolved, usually, though not always, through a dice roll. The story then continues, using the outcome of that encounter to determine how the game master describes the next scene. Choosing a TTRPG with which teacher and students are already familiar (which, in most cases, will be D&D) eases the task of integrating it into an educational program. The less time you need invest in teaching rules, the more time you can focus on the adventure and the lesson.
D&D, with its massive back catalog, numerous rulebooks, and universe of miniatures, maps, and accessories can seem daunting, but the game itself is resource agnostic. The core rules for the current version of D&D have been released free under a creative commons license as the System Reference Documents 5.1 and 5.2. While it can be helpful to have the three main rulebooks (the Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide, and Monster Manual), they are not necessary to play. You can start with nothing more than a set of dice, a character sheet, and the free online rules. The fewer accessories and barriers to play, the greater the opportunities to encourage imagination. Even the rules can be cast aside in favor of imagination. The “Rule of Cool” allows game masters to discard the official rules in favor of rewarding their players for especially novel or creative solutions that may violate the written rules of the TTRPG but better capture the spirit of the adventure.
Note to Teachers
Combat, death, and violence are an inherent part of D&D (nearly two-thirds of the 2014 Players’ Handbook is dedicated to combat and combat-focused magic [Albom 2021]), and excessive violence may not be appropriate for classroom gaming. D&D, particularly the 5th Edition, provides numerous alternatives that allow the players to seek nonviolent solutions to challenges facing them. The strict structure of combat in the ruleset can serve to incentivize non-combat approaches, which work within a system that offers infinite variability through the advantage/disadvantage system. However, we also believe that part of the act of heroic role-play (and opportunities for student joy) should include the occasional drawing of swords or casting of fireballs, when appropriate.
The major resource limitation for playing D&D, or other TTRPGs, is time. These games lend themselves to two- to four-hour sessions, which can be shortened if necessary, but longer play sessions tend to yield more rewarding experiences. Some adventures, like Snallygaster, can be run as a single event, with players completing the story in one session. Others, like Jabberwock, are played over several sessions with players completing the campaign over months. This does not always fit into a conventional classroom schedule. To account for time limitations, Jabberwock has been designed with smaller bite-sized adventure chunks that can work with either a limited classroom schedule or stretched out over longer sessions of a few hours.
The instructor’s time is also a critical consideration to successfully implementing a TTRPG into the classroom. Preparing for a D&D session, especially when you are new to running games, can take almost as much time as running the actual game, if not longer. Instructors need to familiarize themselves with the story and the rules and prepare any materials, props, or lessons ahead of time. With practice, this preparation time can be substantially reduced.
Conclusion
Our students are hungry for adventure. Dungeons & Dragons and other tabletop role-playing games offer a portal for formal and informal educators to engage their students in complex environmental topics that center decision making on the students. Combining learning with creative, imaginative play, while incorporating real-world scenarios into fantasy settings with monsters drawn from shared stories, can be a powerful tool for challenging students to explore solutions to the problems they face in their own world. This allows them to take an active, rather than a passive, role in addressing seemingly abstract global challenges.
Whether facing the threat of environmental change or staring down the slavering, tentacular jaws of the Snallygaster, through creative role-play students can see themselves as the heroes of their own environmental stories.
Andrew D. Thaler is a deep-sea ecologist, conservation technologist, and ocean educator. He runs the St. Michaels Free Library Dungeons & Dragons group. He is an adjunct at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Sciences. He appears on the podcast Dugongs and Sea Dragons.
Erin Z. Anderson is an ocean artist. She is the author and illustrator of the D&D compatible adventure Interrupted Interment. She appears on the podcast Dugongs and Sea Dragons.
Naomi F. Farabaugh is a shark ecologist, aquanaut, and science communicator at the University of Washington. She appears on the podcasts Dugongs and Sea Dragons and Ocean Science Radio.
Andrew Kornblatt is a marketing and communications specialist who focuses on ocean issues. He appears on the podcast Dugongs and Sea Dragons and Ocean Science Radio.
Romaric (Remy) Moncrieffe is a marine biologist and bivalve ecologist. His work focuses on promoting healthy marine ecosystems, fishing regulations, and wetland and estuary protection. He appears on the podcast Dugongs and Sea Dragons.
Travis Nielsen is a marine biologist, ocean educator, and high school teacher. He appears on the podcast Dugongs and Sea Dragons.
Rae Pendergrass is a science communicator, performer, and edutainment producer. She appears on the podcast Dugongs and Sea Dragons.
Heather D. Penney is a marine biologist at St. Francis Xavier University. She appears on the podcast Dugongs and Sea Dragons.
Leigh J. Thaler is a student at St. Michaels Elementary School and helps coordinate the St. Michaels Free Library Dungeons & Dragons group. She appears on the podcast Dugongs and Sea Dragons.
E.C.M. Parsons is a marine conservation biologist specializing in cetaceans. He is the co-author of Scientific Secrets of the Salt Marsh, Scientific Secrets of Avernus, and Scientific Secrets of Icewind Dale. He appears on the podcast Dugongs and Sea Dragons and Marine Conservation Happy Hour.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Robert Forloney for encouraging us to draft this manuscript. Andrew D. Thaler thanks David Shiffman, Eileen Caddel, and Amy Freitag for playtesting Last Hunt for the Jabberwock, as well as the Talbot County Free Library and Amy Wise, Dana Newman, and the staff of the St. Michaels Library for supporting our ongoing D&D programming.
Erin Z. Anderson prepared the artwork, and E.C.M. Parsons created The Curse of the Snallygaster, provided in the Appendix, below.
Works Cited
Albom, Sarah. 2021. The Killing Roll: The Prevalence of Violence in Dungeons & Dragons. International Journal of Role-Playing. 11:6-24. https://doi.org/10.33063/ijrp.vi11.281
Burenheide, Bradley J. and David S. Allen. 2025. Dungeons & Dragons in the Classroom: Roleplaying, Gaming, and the Future of Education. Games in Learning and Teaching. 1:1. https://newprairiepress.org/gilt/vol1/iss1/1
Fair, Susan. 2013. Mysteries and Lore of Western Maryland: Snallygasters, Dogmen, and Other Mountain Tales, 1st ed. Mount Pleasant, SC: Arcadia Publishing.
Fletcher, Robert. 2017. Gaming Conservation: Nature 2.0 Confronts Nature-Deficit Disorder. Geoforum. 79:153-62. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2016.02.009
Haarman, Susan. 2022. Dungeons & Dragons & Dewey: The Potential for Dramatic Rehearsal and Civic Outcomes in Tabletop Role-Playing Games. Philosophical Studies in Education. 53:56-70. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1366548
Hemby, Tyler L., Robert B. Powell, and Marc J. Stern. 2024. Availability and Distribution of Environmental Education Field Trip Programs for Adolescent Students in the U.S.: A National Study of Spatial Accessibility. Environmental Education Research. 30:214-34. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2023.2237706
Niedzwiedz, Claire L, Shamal M. Kankawale, and Srinivasa Vittal Katikireddi. 2025. A Systematic Review of Social, Political and Geographic Factors Associated with Eco-Anxiety in Children and Young People. Nature Mental Health. 3:1579-1615. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44220-025-00550-z
Parkin, Nicola, Kersty Hobson, Wouter Poortinga, Mark Stead, Julia Newth, Jonathan Reeves, and Merideth Gattis. 2026. ‘A completely different space’: Teachers’ Perspectives on Disadvantage, Access to Nature and Outdoor Learning. British Educational Research Journal, 00:1-24. https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.70103
Tan, Cedric K.W. and Hidayah Nurul-Asna. 2023. Serious Games for Environmental Education. Integrative Conservation. 2:19-42. https://doi.org/10.1002/inc3.18
Thaler, Andrew. 2024. The Last Hunt for the Jabberwock: A Feywild Adventure in Ecologic Succession, 1st ed. Dungeon Master’s Guild. https://www.dmsguild.com
Thomas, Elena R., William L. Rice, Jaclyn Rushing, Jennifer M. Thomsen, and Christopher A. Armatas. 2022. Constraints to Wilderness Recreation: A Scoping Review of Existing Research. International Journal of Wilderness. 28:18-35. https://research.fs.usda.gov/treesearch/65704
URLs
Last Hunt for the Jabberwock https://www.dmsguild.com/en/product/505687/the-last-hunt-for-the-jabberwock-a-feywild-adventure-in-ecologic-succession
Dugongs and Seadragons https://open.spotify.com/show/4fALIkq95JBf2gfeCInBt5
Scientific Secrets of the Salt Marsh https://www.dmsguild.com/en/product/304375/scientific-secrets-of-saltmarsh
Scientific Secrets of Avernus https://www.dmsguild.com/en/product/314770/scientific-secrets-of-avernus
Scientific Secrets of Icewind Dale https://www.dmsguild.com/en/product/331050/scientific-secrets-of-icewind-dale
System Reference Documents 5.1 https://www.dndbeyond.com/attachments/39j2li89/SRD5.1-CCBY4.0License.pdf
System Reference Documents 5.2.1 https://media.dndbeyond.com/compendium-images/srd/5.2/SRD_CC_v5.2.1.pdf
Marine Conservation Happy Hour https://marineconservationhappyhour.libsyn.com/williamsburg-pt-1-the-apothacary
MCHH Christmas Special https://marineconservationhappyhour.libsyn.com/krampus-a-christmas-eve-special
Doctors and Daleks https://cubicle7games.com/en_US/doctors-and-daleks