Bovard Auditorium was completely still. The packed house was ensnared by the story being told on stage, but that silence was broken by booming cheers and applause as an elated Maddox Pennington, an assistant teaching professor of writing, announced that for the very first roll of the game, they had just rolled a natural 20.

On Wednesday night, Visions and Voices hosted “Roll for Tricksters: A Powwow Heist.” The night consisted of an all-Native group of players and professional game master Brennan Lee Mulligan playing an original one-shot of “Roll for Tricksters,” a tabletop role-playing game created by Pennington.

The table consisted of Pennington, who organized the event and wrote the module, USC alums Lucas Brown Eyes and Diego Galileo Melendez, and professional writers Kelly Lynne D’Angelo and Joey Clift.

“Native visibility like this matters in particular because it locates Native peoples and cultures and communities firmly in the present,” Pennington, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, said in an interview with the Daily Trojan. “So much of Native representation is historical, which is important … but the present is also authentic.”

For Joseph Maldonado, a Native attendee, the night felt perfectly targeted to him. He came with his typical crew of Dungeons & Dragons players and was excited to see the large turnout to the event.

“A lot of people can go their whole lives without meeting a Native person. It’s nice to come out and see Native people having fun and being someplace modern,” Maldonado said. “A lot of times people [think] we don’t exist anymore, and we totally do.”

The night started with Pennington coming out and explaining what exactly a powwow is, and disabusing the audience of the notion that a powwow has anything to do with a conference room. According to Pennington, powwows rose to popularity in the 1950s and were a form of preserving cultural traditions and creating new ones.

“A powwow is a social and commercial gathering of one or many Native nations and tribes. There should always be good food, good music, native art, dance, competition and community,” Pennington said. “We gather with you tonight in a spirit of defiance and resilience. We are here, in short, to play.”

Catherine DeCristofaro, a sophomore majoring in costume design, said she was interested in the event because she had long admired Mulligan’s work and wanted to see him play live.

“Getting the chance to see a live D&D game, DMed by someone I really admire, for free. I’m like, ‘Awesome, that’s a great way to spend my day,’” DeCristofaro said. “I’m looking forward to the chaos that inevitably shows up in anything run by Brennan Lee Mulligan.”

Within minutes, Mulligan announced to the crowd that things had already gone wildly off course.

“This is the fastest I’ve ever been off the rails,” Mulligan said. “We are at the end of introductions, and I’m very much already winging it.”

The night kicked off, and the audience and players alike were immersed in the world of the Upstate Gathering grounds. It was here that the characters began to learn that things were not quite all right at the powwow, and they had to set things straight by finding items stolen by trickster spirits.

The next two hours were filled with jokes that never failed to land with the audience. Thanks to D’Angelo’s sex-positive character, Auntie Bree, everyone got to learn who had a bubble butt or if they had a “long back.” Brown Eyes’ character Lenny-Leroy Notdog did not surprise the audience when they learned he was, in fact, a dog.

The game drew visceral reactions from the crowd, with people booing loudly as the villain, Howard Vanderhugh, a representative of the fictitious “Outer Urnfitters,” came looking for authentic Native art to mass-produce and sell as a bohemian aesthetic. Vanderhugh was ultimately revealed to be a culture vulture who sought to steal the powwow’s identity.

After the players defeated the hungry culture vulture and successfully reclaimed flour for fry bread and moccasins for the grand opening ceremony of the powwow, D’Angelo’s character delivered a moral to the audience’s cheers.

“You know how sometimes the moral of the story is that the root of all of our issues is capitalism,” D’Angelo said. “How about tonight we make it colonialism?”

Over the course of the night, the audience was immersed in the world Pennington built and felt as if they were at the powwow, even if the fry bread food truck was run by a dog.

“I hope [people] walked out just recognizing that it is okay to go into a Native-set game and play,” Pennington said. “We all want to avoid cultural appropriation, but you can go play this game; there’s room for everybody to find an angle that they can relate to and learn and play and experience. It’s a part of humanizing and modernizing Native culture.”

Pennington said they were happy about the event’s turnout, both from USC and the broader Los Angeles community, and they hope that people will go to the second event in the series on Feb. 18, where students will be invited to play the module themselves.

“Community is hard, but community is important, and thank you all for helping us stay together today,” Pennington said at the end of the night.