A couple of weeks ago, my daughters History and Mystery asked me if I would be willing to run a D&D adventure for them and their friends as part of a Spring Break sleepover party. My response was as excited as it was swift. After dancing a quick "I win at life!" jig, I told them that I would be more than happy to run an adventure for them and their friends. My daughters and I have been playing My Little Pony: Tails of Equestria - The Storytelling Game for a little over a year, so they have a good amount of role playing game experience. As excited as I was at the prospect of running a D&D game, I wanted to make sure that the event was perfect and that it spread the love of D&D to a whole new generation. This meant that I had to approach the event with a plan, not just any plan, a master plan, ...mwa..ha...HA!!!
The first thing I did was ask James, one of my regular gaming group, if he would be willing to play in a D&D session with me and my daughters a week before the sleepover. I would have asked the entire gaming group, but our schedules are extremely difficult to juggle and we are lucky if we can get together once a month. James has one of the more flexible schedules and he not only agreed, he was as excited as I was. I knew James would be a good player mentor to bring over as he and I met when I was running 4th Edition D&D Encounters at a local game store with a group that included young teens. He's helpful without being condescending and is always "all in" to making sure others have a good time. That session was a great success and the girl's experience with My Little Pony meant that they didn't really need mentoring at all. The only real challenge was character creation. We built the characters using D&D Beyond and I began to see the first hints of what it's like to play D&D in a "post-Appendix N" world. While my daughters love to read, they haven't read a lot of what's in Appendix N or even much derivative of it. The closest they have is Adventure Time, How to Train Your Dragon, My Little Pony's D&D episode, and Norse Myths. Those go a long way, but they don't go all the way. Explaining the Paladin class as "what Finn is" works fine, but explaining what a Bard is or the nuanced differences between Sorcerer, Warlock, and Wizard took some time. Time well spent though as their friends had even less connection to Appendix N literature and derivatives, and zero exposure to Tolkienesque archetypes.
Having turned my daughters into the player mentors for their own gaming group, the time came to choose the adventure I'd be running. While I am happy to wing it with my own group, though we do post wing it book keeping to maintain world consistency, I wanted to have something with a solid structure that could be run in a short time. I did what any reasonable person would do and asked my friends on the Book of Faces for their advice on what adventure to run. I was quickly met with a number of responses regarding HOW I should run an adventure for young gamers. An answer to a question I didn't ask, and answers that didn't really provide anything I didn't know. Much of it was very good advice, but it wasn't advice that a 20+ year gaming veteran who has run games for tweens at game stores in the past needed. I needed advice on an adventure that could be run in four hours. I received some good recommendations, but they either came too late or were for Pathfinder. In the end, I looked through my own gaming collection to see what I could run and settled on the first Dungeon in a Box adventure: Caravan of Peril. This was an ideal choice.
David Crennan, aka "America's GM," designed the Dungeon in a Box product to fill the exact niche I was looking for and I've been a fan of his from the Saving Throw Show for quite some time. The great thing about Dungeon in a Box products is that they come with almost everything you need to run a vibrant and immersive adventure, right out of the box. All you need are the D&D rules. His box includes all the character miniatures you need, battle maps, a flexible short adventure, and some great replay value due to some evergreen content in every book. In this case, there are three pieces of evergreen content: a random caravan generator that allows you to populate any caravan with interesting characters, a random events table that is very flexible and much more in depth than a wandering monster chart, and a new type of magic item that adds depth to a campaign without breaking the game system. Below is a picture of the contents of Caravan of Peril, along with additional minis representing the player characters.
As you can see above, Crennen has provided a battlemap showing the caravan resting for the evening. In addition to the caravan on the map, he also provided a play tile of an additional wagon. This additional wagon becomes important in game play as the adventure continues. There are a number of transparent standee miniatures that have fun illustrations on them and that cover all of the creatures you need for the adventure, except for spiders. Thankfully, Trash Mob Minis has some excellent spiders that are perfect for younger gamers. You need spiders. Finally, there is a world map that hints at the larger setting of the Greenwold. It's a fantastic product and I cannot recommend it enough.
Having selected the adventure I was going to run, the next step was to to my Dungeon Master prep. I carefully put together my DM adventure worksheet, a sample of which you can see below.
As with the the twins' earlier session, we began with character creation. Let's just say that everyone, and I mean everyone, wanted to be a wizard as their first choice. After some discussion of how the different classes complemented each other, we were finally able to get a relatively balanced party. One of the kids even agreed to be a Cleric. The final party was as follows: Claudia the Aasimar Paladin, Emmy the Aasimar Cleric of the God of Magic, Fluffkins the Elf Wizard, Gwynneth the Changeling Wizard who changes the color of her hair every hour, Nummy the Golden Dragonborn Barbarian, and Skybolt the Copper Dragonborn. Character creation took over an hour and most of that time was spent describing the various classes. Everyone knew what a wizard was, but the audience was very unfamiliar with most traditional fantasy classes. They may play Minecraft and Portal Knights, but they don't think about it the same way a D&D player does. It was interesting describing D&D classes in Portal Knights terms instead of the other way around. I helped the kids pick minis for their characters, and the majority of the minis were selected from the excellent Wardlings series by Wizkids games. Every player wanted a pet, and every wizard wanted a familiar, this worked out perfectly. Since pets in games like Portal Knights have little to no "game" effects, the kids weren't disappointed that only wizards could scout ahead using their pets. After assuring one of the players that she wouldn't be facing Demogorgon today (she HAD seen Stranger Things), the group of six young girls was ready for their first D&D campaign to begin.
The girls role played well during the early role play heavy encounters and seemed to enjoy my various character voices. When I gave one my best "Artful Dodger" voice (which I am certain would horrify my British friends), the girls really engaged with that character. Sadly, that was Ulmeer Tweetweaver and not Harald Pickleshipper. Some of the girls were reticent to "act" and others weren't, but all had a fun time during these scenes as I exhausted myself to make sure that everyone was included in the scenes. I didn't want any one player to dominate time and energy, which is something that can naturally happen even with experienced gamers. Over the course of the journey, the players had a couple of skirmishes and managed to tame an Owlbear, who was quickly given the name Albert the Owlbear. I found this really funny as that's what most Owlbears are called in my regular group too. It was nice to see intergenerational humor, even without shared Appendix N or Monte Python references. I will also add that the flat minis, or minis in general, were invaluable here in showing the players what the monsters look like.
Having finished the first half of the big boss fight, the second half comes after the players track where this raiding party originated, I looked at my watch to see that it was past eleven at night. I knew the girls would want to have some time to themselves at the sleepover, so I ended the session there with the hope that they would all want to play again in the future.
It was a great time and one from which I learned many lessons, as I always do when gaming with new groups. The biggest challenge this time was conveying a sense of a traditional fantasy adventure when the group didn't have much experience with the genre. For example, I was surprised that my daughters were the only ones who had seen The Dragon Prince or Trollhunters on Netflix. Given that things like Adventure Time are as much a deconstruction of the archetypes of the genre as they are depictions of those archetypes, they only serve a certain level of utility in bridging the gap. All of the kids are still pretty confused regarding why Bards are a thing. And no, I didn't mock Bards. Looks like it's time to pull out some Celtic mythology off the shelves for bed time stories and to point out the places in the Norse Tales where skalds play a role.
Can't wait for the next session.
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