The first time I played D&D with my nephew Mat was more than a year ago. You can read about that
here. After that, we played again on a couple more occasions but I forgot to blog about them and I don't remember when they were. Then we played again last weekend.
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| D&D next generetion |
Let's do some recap...
At the end of our first session his group, composed by a fighter, an archer and a magic-user, saved their village from the attack of a necromancer and his skeletal minions. It was a bitter victory because the magic-user died, so they were to go into a quest to revive him.
Session II (??/??/??)
The session begun at a near town where the local cleric revived the magic-user, but in exchange asked the group to retrieve a holy relic from the ruins of a nearby abbey. The group searched the ruins and found a flight of stairs going down. Mat decided that the group would go downstairs to explore, so I took out a sewer's battle mat from Dragon magazine. Since I wanted to introduce the concept of resource management, I told Mat to write down that each of his guys carried three torches and, as he explored, I would ask him to cross one out from time to time. He quickly realized he needed to leave some for the way back to the surface or be forced to navigate the place in total darkness.
The group set forward to explore a series of abandoned rooms, corridors and sewer tunnels. First they fought and killed a giant rat that thought they were an easy meal. Then some black tentacles with purple suckers emerged from the stagnant water and tried to grab them. Finally they found a couple of identically clad cultists. While one hold them off blocking the walkway, the other fell back to their lair. After defeating the first cultist, Mat came with the brilliant idea of having one of his guys to pose as the dead cultist!
At that point I asked him to check his torches and he realized he had about half left. He had to decide to press forward or go back. After pondering the situation for a moment Mat decided to stay. The fake cultist moved to find the lair while the rest followed a bit far behind. He managed to trick the remaining cultist into opening the door and they stormed the place. With the last cultist defeated they searched the room and found, not after the thief narrowly avoided a poison needle trap, the relic along with some treasure.
With that they made their way back to the surface with the risk of running out of light sources.
Session III (??/??/??)
I decided to start this session by rolling stats for the characters and make character sheets for them. I used the 1983 D&D Basic Rules and ran the adventure that comes in the Dungeon Masters rulebook. This was a huge step for Mat since we haven't used any sheet or stats for the party. We used just a d20 to roll the attacks and saves, and to roll damage a d4, d6 and d8 for the magic-user, thief, and fighter respectively. He was really excited about it, because the game took a whole new dimension for him.
I ran the adventure almost 'as is'. In the combat with the carrion crawler, the thief got paralyzed and Mat kept asking if he was dead, but I wouldn't tell until the end of the combat. After the thief recovered, the group went to check the entrance to the ruins and found it was guarded by some kobolds, which Mat renamed as 'dog-men'. The kobolds, sorry, dog-men, were defeated without much effort and their bodies looted. He's a quick learner.
The group then went to explore inside the castle ruins. I was glad to see that Mat remembered the light sources drill from previous sessions. While exploring a bedchamber some zombies emerged from the closet and the cleric attempted to turn them but failed. By that time he had to go so we left the battle for next time.
Session IV (20/05/17)
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| Braaains! |
Last weekend we picked up where we left last time, so we just rolled initiative! The group didn't have much trouble getting past the zombies. After the combat Mat asked 'Where's the treasure?'. 'If there's any treasure, you have to find it.' I replied. 'This is not like a tablet or cell phone game where the gold coins are floating on mid-air.You have to search, you have to
tell me you search, otherwise I'll assume you do nothing.' I added. He chew on my words for a bit before he decided to search the place where the zombies came from. He was delighted to found some treasure there (I didn't put it there, it was in the adventure).
After that they came to a room full of crates and boxes with a lonely large box in the center. Mat sent the thief to open the large crate, only to be surprised by another zombie! The cleric failed the turn check again, so the fighter closed in to end the threat.
Exploring further they encountered more dog-men (kobolds) and Mat wanted them to follow him. I secretly made a reaction roll (uncertain). 'They look hesitant. What do you do?' I asked him. 'The fighter will put down his sword and shield, and motion them to come closer.' he said. 'The kobolds look at each other and slowly get near you.' I told him. Being an evil DM, I was planning to surprise the party (hey, the strongest member have put down his weapons!) when Mat said 'I give them some meat!' That did it. 'They eat the meat hungrily. You now have a group of five kobold following you!'. Looking forward to play again!
