Heading into New Year’s Eve, my wife and I had planned a quiet night at home with the kids, with copious amounts of reasonably healthy snacks and loads of board games. When she approached the kids with this idea, the unanimous response that morning was that they wanted to play Dungeons & Dragons with Dad.
We’ve played occasionally over the past couple years; I started the four of them off with the 3.5 Basic Game, the 2006 edition of the set. It’s not a bad iteration of the rules...a very simplified version of 3.5 with each pre-gen character (there are four) having an entire booklet for their character. Granted, the way the rules are presented led my children to say things such as, “I want to move my speed, then move my speed again.” It also reveals the nerfed version of some of the 3.5 monsters: just three encounters after reaching second level the PCs are led to face (and expected to defeat) a young blue dragon. No joke. Allow me to repeat myself here: THE iconic creature of D&D is expected to be defeated by a party of four second-level characters.
Sigh.
At any rate, after running through the encounters contained in the Basic Game in September, I had several different ideas about where to take the characters next. The appeal to play on New Year’s Eve made the decision critical, so I turned to something that I knew would allow for some range of open decisions on my kids’ part and something that would allow for some exposition on detail, backstory, and whatnot. I was also concerned that it pose a serious enough challenge to them that it subdues their memories of killing a dragon so easily. What I decided upon was this: Dyson’s Delve.
I had a “battle map”: I’d wanted to run my adult players through this little gem in the next few months and so I’d already taken some time to prepare some blown-up versions of the first three levels. They weren’t perfect and they weren’t hi-res, but they worked with the kids’ miniatures at 10' per square. And they gave the kids something to look at. And I know, all my OSR friends and readers are apoplectic right now. I know that I didn’t have the maps and miniatures back in the day and I did just fine with my imagination. My kids range from sixteen to eight and have varying degrees of concentration so I’ve found the miniatures and maps are necessary for now.
I also have to admit that I turned to what most consider to be an overused trope: the tavern meeting. Not having a lot of time to plan any kind of set up, I jumped to Digital Orc’s Inn Table. The percentile dice came out and rolled twice giving me The Putrid Wand, a less-than-reputable inn on the edge of the Thieves’ Quarter in Burlingbrook, the town at the base of Mt. Chal (my homebrew location for the dungeon in our Basic Game).
WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!! (And to my Players: this means STAY OUT.)
