Did you see the Snallygaster?
It was there, clear as day, rooting through the trash at Foxy’s Harbor Grille, its tentacles probing for scraps of fish and week-old oysters.
More than a few people heard its horrifying caw as it took the the sky.
Thus begins the Curse of the Snallygaster.
The Snallygaster is an elusive Maryland cryptid, a winged birdlike reptile with a metallic beak, sharp talons, and, tentacles. Grounded in the folklore of 18th-century German immigrants, some skeptics believe the Snallygaster to be a heron attempting to swallow an octopus.
In the 1920s, the backwoods of Maryland were home to bootleggers who used the legend of the Snallygaster to scare off revenuers. A century later, in the small coastal town of St. Michaels, residents report eyes glowing in the dark, claw marks on barns, and livestock found drained of blood. Has the Snallygaster finally returned?
I am so excited to announce the publication of my latest paper Jabberwocks and Snallygasters: Exploring the Role of Dungeons & Dragons in Environmental Education out today in the Journal of Folklore and Education as part of the special issue Teaching with Monsters: From Whimsy to Shadow. Covering nearly a decade of experience using Dungeons & Dragons (and other tabletop roleplaying games) to teach marine science, conservation, and environmental education. We podcast. We build campaigns, with lesson plans for teachers, we run workshops for educators and adventures for students.
Following our initial success with The Last Hunt for the Jabberwock, Jabberwocks and Snallygasters builds on the lessons we’ve learned in a career of ocean education, sharing strategies for integrating D&D into formal and informal classroom settings, building lessons, and giving students the opportunity to practice heroic roleplay while facing some of the most difficult challenges in conservation.
I can’t confirm for sure, but I am fairly confident that the included short campaign, The Curse of the Snallygaster, in which student take on the role of a US Fish and Wildlife Service Cryptid Field Research Team to track down rumors of a legendary Maryland monster on the Eastern Shore, is the first peer-reviewed 5e campaign.
In honor of publication day, I’m making the associated campaign, The Last Hunt for the Jabberwock: A Feywild Adventure in Ecologic Succession, available for $1.50.
Of all the academic papers I’ve written in my career, this was by far the most fun. With art by Eric Z. Anderson, an adventure by our own Chris Parsons, and contributions from the entire extended Dugongs and Seadragons team, this might be the most extensive team of ocean science, education, and outreach professionals who also play very silly games with math rocks ever assembled. This is the first academic publication for several of our teammates (including one exceptional 10-year-old who helped developed the Jabberwock campaign).
Jabberwocks and Snallygasters: Exploring the Role of Dungeons & Dragons in Environmental Education is available open-access in the Journal of Folklore and Education, today!
Southern Fried Science is free and ad-free. Southern Fried Science and the OpenCTD project are supported by funding from our Patreon Subscribers. If you value these resources, please consider contributing a few dollars to help keep the servers running and the coffee flowing. We have stickers.
