New hub for tabletop enthusiasts: North Quabbin Gaming Guild finds steady home in Orange

First, they built the community; then came the Guild.

Joe McNamara, James Maxwell and Owen Smith met through their decades-long passion for tabletop role-playing games and spent time recruiting like-minded enthusiasts before formally creating a group in June for players of all skill levels to share their love of the hobby.

“And we started talking between the three of us about it — it would be nice to have a place where we could do it,” Maxwell said. “The struggle right now when you’re doing this is you’re doing it in someone’s dining room or you’re at the library … or someone’s living room — whatever you can find. But we figured … with all the people that we know that do this, a space might be a good idea.”

The North Quabbin Gaming Guild moved to 7L East Main St. after McNamara noticed a “For Lease” sign in the window.

“From the beginning, our vision of what this would be was the same,” he said.

Smith called the Guild “a natural offshoot of” the regular and one-off games he and his partners have facilitated in the area. The group’s primary focus is the fantasy tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), but the founders plan to incorporate other games, such as cribbage and board games like Monopoly or backgammon. The storefront’s shelves are lined with games like Risk, Catan, Fitchburgopoly, and Gloomhaven.

The Guild plans to start offering memberships on Dec. 1, at roughly $10 per month. The three founders are not looking to make a profit but emphasized that memberships will help fund keeping the lights on.

“[We’re] trying to keep it as affordable for the area as we can, but also try to cover our expenses,” Smith said.

The founding trio expects to have about 50 Guild members.

On a recent Tuesday night, players on Tuesday were treated to pizza, soda and snacks like pretzels and Mini Babybel cheeses. Beginning player Stephen Taranto, of Templeton, could be seen dabbling in a one-off D&D game on a wooden table.

“These guys are great. I’m very new at this and they’re very welcoming. It’s nice to be able to come to a situation like this and everyone will tell me I’m doing it right or wrong,” he said with a laugh after McNamara and others around the table helped guide him through his turn.

McNamara served as the dungeon master, or the person who acts as a game’s host and controls all of its elements. Taranto used a bonus action — a specific type of action a character can take on their turn in combat, in addition to their main action and movement — to learn about his enemy, and McNamara informed him the creature he was fighting, a shapeshifting monster known as a mimic, was immune to acid damage and to being knocked prone.

“Everybody but Tony, make a dexterity-saving throw,” McNamara called out at one point.

During the regular Friday night games, the top role is filled by Maxwell, who has been dungeon master for a game that has been going since February 2021.

The Guild, which has become a limited liability company, used to hold large games at Honest Weight Artisan Beer on W. Main Street until it closed recently, and Taranto’s children participate in the youth games McNamara holds at Wheeler Memorial Library in Orange.

“Joe does a great job with them,” Taranto said.

The Guild’s founders, who all live in Athol, have a 3D printer they use to bring to life, in miniature form, any of the members’ original characters.

“We’ve actually got some on the table right now,” Smith said.

He pointed to drawers of different figures and explained the range from players’ characters to the beasts they engage in combat.

“All sorts of this kind of thing get printed out — trying to build the whole library of monsters and characters and that stuff,” he said. “I’ve got a friend who made a lot of these first, and now we have a printer here.”

Maxwell explained he got interested in tabletop role-playing games in the 1970s.

“[The hobby] started in the very small, and I started shortly after that, and then in the ’80s it started to grow. And that’s when you had the ‘Satanic Panic,'” he said in reference to the moral hysteria fueled by media coverage and sensational claims of organized Satanic cults engaging in child abuse and ritualistic crimes.

“And then recently, in the last decade … it started to hit pop culture,” Maxwell said.

Smith mentioned the Netflix series “Stranger Things” has provided a major boost to D&D. There are now live-play podcasts and the Guild’s three founders are considering live-streaming D&D games and hosting birthday parties in the future.

More information is available at nqgamingguild.com or on the Guild’s Facebook page.