One Hell of a Gaming Night

The Game Map and a Very Angry Dragon

Well, Thursday night was one hell of a game night.

Kids' Stuff

We started out with a game of Advanced Doggies & Dragons which I ran for my daughter and her cousin. Last time Character sheets were introduced. This time I added a map. Basically, the idea was to have a board-game-sized map along the lines of Games Workshop's Hero Quest, with rooms drawn in as the PC's discover them. Everything was improvised on the spot, the rules, the size/contents of the next room, the dialog. And with kids, your DM dramatization can really shine. At one point my daughter told me "Daddy, this is really scary!"

They tricked a dragon, fought guardsmen, won a Rabbit for a friend, and eventually pulled him from the Dragon's belly before high-tailing it out of the castle with a box of treasure and tummies full of fresh vegetables.

At one point my daughter came up with an interesting way to find the statue referred to in one of the mysterious notes the party had found. While I was negotiating a combat round with her cousin, she grabbed my marker and drew-in a statue in an unexplored area of the map. Then after the combat she said "I'm going here and I find the statue!" Yes, that's right, my progeny takes meta-gaming to a new level!

The Only Gaming Aids You Need

A Game for the Big Boys

In any case, once the kids went to bed, our usual group arrived and it was time for the adult game. This is the DnD Next game that A. has been running recently. I played Sir Manly of the Divine Turnip, the little Halfling Paladin that could. He was joined by Pam the Dwarven Alchemist(ported from WFRP 1e, apparently), some sort of Half-Elf hiding his bastard heritage, and maybe some sort of Magic-User... someone from the group please correct me--my memory of the evening is a bit fuzzy for some strange reason...

Get out of my chair and back in
bed. Dammit--this is why
Daddy drinks!

The game was Hoard of the Dragon Queen and that mean PC's were instructed to choose a "Bond", some back-story element that binds them to the adventure location. Being a sandbox-snob, I wasn't about to go for this sort of back-handed railroading without having some fun. So Sir Manly's was that he had once gotten sick on some bad seafood in the town of Greentree and had dreamed...well let's just say some pretty disturbing stuff, but it included converting the naive locals to the way of the Holy Turnip, so there's that. There was much speculation over what the Paladin had really eaten given that Greenstump is a landlocked town...

(Dramatization) 

In any case, upon approaching the town, the party saw it was on fire, and with a dragon breathing lightning bolts circling overhead. We approached by the brush along the riverside, then fought Kobolds & Cultists and eventually helped some refugees to the keep. Manly's new squire even helped out(his squire is some sort of living Turnip-like vegetable matter, booty from last session which was a rather improvisational puzzle-solving adventure, birthed from A's wonderfully twisted mind--but that's another story.)

So, in short, it was a fun, if somewhat brief session. At one point I even broke the DM's sanity with mere Turnip-related humor, such that he could only laugh epileptically for several minutes straight and nothing else. But I won't take all the credit since VSOP had already stabbed him in the Cerebellum earlier in the session.