Three Sad Wizards

My 7-year old son Mathijs is eager to play D&D, so he sent an e-mail to my players group asking if they wanted to play. He sent me an e-mail asking if I could “provide the map”.

At first I thought I could run a part of Castle Verge or some other adventure I had already lying around, but then it occurred to me I better play something with a little less necrotic mutations, virginal sacrifice, and prostitutes than I normally run. So I decided to write something new, more suitable for a 7-year old but hopefully, still cool.

The adventure “Three Sad Wizards” consists of three mini-dungeons:

Bymen the Botanomancer (plant mage) lives in a little shack in a garden with beautiful flowers. But when he experimented with fertilizer potions brewed by Ermard the Entomomancer, the plants grew bigger and more dangerous than expected. Now terrible carnivorous plants grow in the garden: Archer bushes, strangleweed, vampire roses, and more make the garden unsafe.

Ermard the Entomomancer (insect mage) has many rare specimens of insects and arachnids in his underground laboratory. However, unkown to him, one of his giant spiders was really an arachnea. She has opened all the cages and now all the insects are running free in the house: Giant centipedes, a crab spider, beetle swarms and more. And there’s the aranea: a beautiful woman called Andrea.

Ostal the Ornithomancer (bird mage) lives in a tower. His birds somehow escaped out of their cages. Most of the flew away to freedom, with the exception of an axe beak, that roams the corridors of the tower. Unknown to Ostal, the birds were set free by an Evil Doppelganger of Lessie, his apprentice. Lessie looked into a mirror of opposition, and was set prisoner by Evil Lessie. When the Player Characters come to the tower expecting to fight birds, they will have to pass traps and Evil Lessie’s wand of wonder in a Home Alone scenario.

I found it more difficult to write an all-ages adventure than I anticipated. But in the end, I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out. I like the concept of three mini-dungeons the Player Characters can visit in any order, or not-at-all, if they don’t want to. There’s a little village, which I’ll give a bit of detail, and in the forest in which Ermard’s dungeon is located there are a few beast lairs.

All-in-all it’s one of the more complete adventure’s I have written. After we have played it, I’ll probably flesh it out a bit and put a pdf up on my blog.

International Anklebiter Illustrator Day

Zak from Playing D&D with Porn Stars declared today to beInternational Anklebiter Illustration Day. Since I have a 6-year old gamer running around the house, I put him to work.

The first drawing I commissioned was the obligatory drawing of a displacer beast. Mathijs also drew the castle it lives in.

For the other drawing, I asked Mathijs to design a sub-level of the castle for me. The way he went about it was fun: He drew the first room, and asked me: ‘What do you do?’ When I went west, he drew the next room, and there I encountered either a monster or a statue. So I played through the entire dungeon, and he stocked it in the process. So this will be the Displacer Beast Level of Castle Verge:

The black squares are statues. At the foot of the statue in area #5 is a healing potion, in area #10 there’s a note saying ‘go to area #8’. The little sun symbols are treasure chests containing gold pieces.

In area #6 there’s a statue that is actually a troll with stony skin. There’s another troll in area #13. There are displacer beasts in areas #2, #7, #10, and the big room without a number in the south. Area #9 has a sugar monster (variant rust monster), #11 has a dust monster (another variant).

The very long corridor between areas #10 and #15 is an underground stream with a bridge and treasure in the water. My favorite feature of the dungeon is area #14, which is just the negative space between rooms with doors leading to it.

In area #5 there’s a trodon, a giant humanoid with two bellies, so it can eat two people:

Trodon (1d4): AL C, MV 90’ (30’), AC 4, HD 5+2, #AT 3 (1 bite and 2 claws, or 1 weapon), Dmg 1d8 (bite), 1d10 (claw) or by weapon, SV F5, ML 10, XP 500.

Swallow whole: On an attack roll of 19-20, the trodon swallows the target whole. There’s room for one medium-sized creature or two halflings in each of his stomachs. A swallowed creature takes 1d10 damage each round.

Precision spit: After a swallowed creature is digested (brought two 0 hp), the trodon can spit out its remains as a ranged attack (short 20’, medium to 40’, long 60’, Dmg 1d6).

After I left, Mathijs apparently continued playing with his mother, because later on I found this map. The ‘)’ symbols on the map are cupcakes.

D&D with a 6-year Old

For the past two days, I've been playing D&D with Mathijs, my 6-year old son. Here's his character sheet for Tohmas, the fighter:

We're using the Basic set (the original "red box"), because that's the only version of D&D available in Dutch. And it’s probably my favorite version of D&D, aside from my own house-ruled variant. We have played through the choose-your-adventure-style solo adventure in the Players Manual, and now we’re playing M1 Blizzard Pass, another solo adventure.  Basically, I act as DM and read him all entries, after which I give Mathijs the options he can choose from. Sometimes I try to get him to roleplay by acting out the part of NPCs instead of just reading the text, but so far Mathijs doesn’t respond to that yet.

Mathijs is a cautious player: if given the option, he often flees from a fight after being wounded. But he’s adventurous as well:  when fleeing he often takes an exit leading to a part of the dungeon he hasn’t explored yet.

I’m impressed with the way the solo modules teach new players the ways of old school dungeon crawling, especially the adventure in the Players Manual. Plenty of options involve listening, peaking around corners, and other ways to find out what dangers lie ahead. It also enables the player to leave the dungeon when he’s had enough, and to come back another time fully healed. Mathijs’ fighter Tohmas made several forays into the cave before he was finally killed by a blade trap.

After finishing Blizzard Pass I’ll try to round up some players to join us in a group adventure. We still have to kill Bargle!