My New Old School Essentials Campaign & the DungeonCraft YouTube Channel

The First In-Person Session. All girls had been
quarantined for the pandemic and some were 
already tested as negative. 

I've been writing on here for the past few months about starting a D&D campaign for my daughter and her friends. 

After a few months of planning and preparing, we finally started our game back in September with a "Session 0" that was held primarily online (a few of us were in-person, including my daughter and me). Before we met up, I had asked my daughter what her friends' favorite colors were, and got them each a set of dice in that color and had it shipped to their house. During our Virtual Session 0, I discussed how the dice worked, some of the basic terms, the idea of playing a character, and went through the basic class types. We're using Old School Essentials by Gavin Norman, and I've found it to be a really great way to help keep things streamlined and without too many options to make these first-time players get confused or overwhelmed. I also had emailed one of the free OSE character sheets to each player before the game and asked them to print it out, and together online we rolled stats, assigned them to the ability score of choice, and picked classes. At the end of this, I asked them on their own time to pick equipment using the equipment list I sent them, and to send me questions before our next session. 

CHALLENGES WITH YOUNGER PLAYERS: BETWEEN GAME COMMUNICATION
One challenge I have found with this group is that they are not comfortable with using email, but they aren't old enough yet to have their phone mobile devices, so it's very difficult to get in touch with them between sessions or get them to answer emails. My own daughter has told me that my emails are "too long," which which I guess she means that they are longer than a short instant message that one would send over Google Hangouts, which these girls use for school (but which I can't use to chat with them, because their school accounts, rightly so, do not allow non-school people to message the kids). 

So, at our first actual session, which was held the weekend before Halloween, most of the players had not yet picked their equipment, so we spent a good 45 minutes or so going over the equipment lists and explaining what certain things were. One character wanted to keep as much of her starting gold as possible, so her equipment was very limited. Another character spent every last coin. 

The players consist of my daughter, three of her friends, and the dad of one of her friends (who I'm also friends with, so that makes it easy). My daughter and two of her friends all three decided to be elves, and one other friend decided to be a thief. My daughter's friend asked her dad if he would play a cleric, because "we might need healing." She had paid attention enough as I described the different classes and their abilities to understand that cleric were the only class with magical healing and turning undead abilities, and so her, that was more important than fighting or wizard capabilities.

INSPIRATION FROM YOUTUBE CHANNEL
Before officially starting the session, I also asked the players if there were any subjects that were "off-the-table" for them. For example, I know my daughter has a severe fear of spiders, and I wanted to understand if giant spiders appeared in my game, if that would be a problem for her. The last thing I want is for these kids to have nightmares over something they experienced in a game. Most of them were pretty vague, although one girl had a very strong fear of being bitten by a shark, and several of the players did not want to have any encounters with evil clowns. I also asked about descriptions of violence and how graphic was "too graphic" for them. On this, they were a bit more accepting of most things "as long as it isn't too much." 

As I mentioned earlier this year, my plan was to start with the old-school adventure, B2: Keep on the Borderlands, partly because I remember playing at least parts of that adventure when I first started, and I still have my copy that came with my Moldvay Basic Set that I got as an Easter gift back in 1982 or 1983. As luck would have it, I was searching online for reviews of the Goodman Games version of the adventure, a revised hardback called Into the Borderlands, which combines both B1: Into the Unknown and B2: Keep on the Borderlands into one big package and includes both the original adventurers as well as a 5E conversion. While I didn't plan to use the 5E stats, I was curious about the new material that was included. One of the first video reviews I found was by "Professional Dungeon Master" for the YouTube Channel, DungeonCraft, which I'd never really looked at before as I wasn't interested in creating terrain or painting miniatures for my game. However, after the review on the channel, the next video that came up was a summary of a Keep on the Borderlands play session that Professor DM ran for his group, with a grim-dark twist to it. I got sucked into, and I'm really glad. I've found DungeonCraft to be so inspirational and giving me new ideas to run my games, and using advice from this channel, I ran my favorite session of D&D ever for my daughter and her friends just a few weeks ago. 

For those who are interested, I highly recommend looking at the video playlist for the DungeonCraft Campaign, which covers a few early sessions and then goes right into Keep on the Borderlands. Along the way, Professor DM doesn't just recap what happened during the session, but instead he tells you why, and what rules or techniques he used to achieve his results. He talks about re-skinning monsters so they aren't straight out of the Monster Manual, limiting over-powered PCs, a very unique twist on magic that includes rolling to cast spells, the three types of NPCs you need in your game with examples of how he incorporated them into his game, how to run dungeons and mazes using theater of the mind and limited terrain rather than elaborate maps, and more.  

Here are some examples of ideas I got directly from the DungeonCraft channel and incorporated into my game to help get the campaign started. 

• I dropped the characters right into the action, but at a festival instead of a combat. This was a way of way helping them learn a bit more about the world but also get used to role-playing. The characters were approached by various NPCs who asked them if they wanted to enter the Archery Contest or Cart Lifting Contest. Each contest was just a simple D20 roll and adding the character's missile attack or melee attack bonus to the roll, with the highest number winning a small purse of 10 silver pieces (1 SP to enter). I loved this idea because it helped these very novice characters get used to rolling dice and how to find the bonuses and penalties on their character sheets to adjust the numbers, as well as learning how to talk with NPCs. 
• Given the age of my players and the make-up of the party, the next thing from the DungeonCraft channel was a "courting ritual" that involved Charisma checks, with female characters able to win potential suitors. I changed this slightly, and used an exposition NPC of an elderly woman who talked about always looking forward to the Fall Festival every year and how she had met her husband there, but that perhaps these adventurers were "too young for that sort of thing." (My daughter and her friends have all chosen to play characters who are in their very early teens at the oldest). But, there was a dance, and the players had to interact with NPCs who asked them to dance. One refused, while two others agreed. Meanwhile, I decided to have a young orphan girl approach the thief character (who, in game, is only 12 years old, and had no interest in participating in the dance) and instead introduce the thief to the idea of Beggars Guilds and Thieves Guilds, and let her know that most big cities have one if not both, and that as a Thief, she could always seek them out and might be able to get assistance or at least a few rumors to follow up on. For the cleric character, who is celibate and did not want to participate in the dance, I instead introduced him to an NPC and allowed him a chance to discuss his faith, which is a small cult that most people haven't heard of. All of these required Charisma checks on the part of the players, once again so they could understand using the dice and how it can complement their role-playing. 
• Lastly, I gave the characters a chance to visit a fortune teller and have their fortunes read. This was a way for me to distribute different rumors without making it seem forced, and for a twist, I decided last-minute that the fortune teller refused the tell the Thief's fortune for "unknown reasons" - something to follow-up on later, perhaps. For each character that had their fortune told, I had them make a Wisdom check, with the highest roll getting a "Luck Point" that they can spend once to re-roll a failed "Save or Die" saving throw. 

The players loved this, and I actually watched a lot of other videos on doing accents and such beforehand, so each major NPC had a completely different accent. It was a good way to get the players used to talking to NPCs and having conversations in-character. 

INTRODUCTION OF AN ONGOING VILLAIN

Other ideas I took from the DungeonCraft channel were to have the players encounter a strange hooded and cloaked figure (foreshadowed through the use of the fortune teller and various rumors about town) who was with bunch of beast-man cultists conducting an evil ritual at some abandoned ruins on the outskirts of town. The characters were overwhelmed with fear at the cloaked figure, and eventually ran away after the Thief character shot him with a crossbow bolt and got a Natural 20, but the bolt appeared to do hardly any damage. 

They ran back to town and tried to warn the townsfolk, who were mostly intoxicated from much revelry, and refused to listen. The cloaked figure and his cultists arrived shortly after and began to raze the town, and the adventurers, realizing they were outmatched, chose to run away again and head east on an ancient, neglected road that was the only way out of town. That was the end of the first play session. 

I guess the folks at Bottle Logic are gamers.

RANDOM TABLES FOR ROAD ENCOUNTERS

For the second session, which we held yesterday, the players continued on the road and had a few strange encounters, all generated using a random table of 100 Road Encounters that I made using inspiration from the DungeonCraft Channel, a few blogs online, and my own ideas to fit my world. To give the players some fun and also get them used to percentile dice, I took turns asking them to roll the dice, and then I dealt with the encounters, which included them coming across a clear, clean stream they could use to resupply their water-skins, finding a patch of herbs that could later be turned into a potion, finding a list of potion ingredients (like a shopping list of sorts), and one of the characters at night seeing a Faerie Mound in the distance with glowing lights flittering around it, and then feeling extra lucky afterwards (I gave her "Advantage," per the 5E rules, for a day afterward, even though that's not part of the B/X or OSE rules). The two biggest encounters consisted of passing two guards who were holding a wanted poster and who studied the adventurers intently, and revealed that they were looking for a female barbarian warrior who was accused of murdering the son of the baron of the adjacent barony. The characters hadn't seen her, but a few hours later, they came across an overturned coach and the unconscious body of a woman who matched the drawing on the wanted poster. This was an opportunity for me to introduce a sixth player to the group, the younger sister of one of my daughter's friends. I realized that it was becoming a bit of a challenge for the parents of my daughter's friend to have one of them playing D&D for hours on a weekend while the other one had nothing to do due to the pandemic and limited options for leaving the house. So, we all agreed to invite the friend's sister. She wasn't sure if she wanted to play, so rather than have her spend all the time creating her own character, I made one for her, a human fighter, and gave her a small backstory about having been accused of a crime she didn't commit. 

This last part is another thing I got from DungeonCraft: He has a random table of 20 PC Backgrounds, and I rolled on the table and came up with "accused of a crime you didn't commit." I took that idea and incorporated it into the campaign, in which I had already established a feud between two local barons. 

The session ended with the new character joining the rest of the adventurers, being attacked by an overwhelming force of goblins and eventually being subdued and imprisoned. They woke up in a goblin prison inside a dark cave, and stripped of equipment, weapons, and armor. After some incredibly lucky rolls against their goblin captors who were attempting to take one of the PCs to be prepared to be eaten, they tackled the goblin and used his body to keep the prison cell gate from crashing back down, then freed their comrades. As it turns out, this goblin prison is going to be part of the goblin caves from the Caves of Chaos from adventure module B2: Keep on the Borderlands. This is another idea I got from the DungeonCraft channel, and I really liked it. I did give the players a chance to defeat the goblins in the original encounter, but three of the six of them had been knocked down to 0 HP on almost the first round, so the fight was pretty much over before it really began. 

Another thing I asked each player to do was to send me an email indicating the thing their character fears the most, the thing they hate the most, and the thing they love the most. The answers were really interesting - unsurprisingly, my daughter noted that her character hated spiders. One friend said her character feared being alone. Another friend noted that she hated negativity, and that she loved her pet wolf, Drake. I hadn't realized that this player had thought that she had a pet wolf, so chatted with her about it, and we decided she would have a small wolf cub, completely dependent on the player character, and unable to do much in terms of combat. But, as the character grows in level, I will allow the wolf to gain some more HP and combat ability.

CHANGES FOR THE FUTURE

Some of the things I'm considering changing for our next game are reverting to Ascending AC. I really tried to give Descending AC a chance, but I really didn't want to keep referring back to the attack matrix tables when running the goblins to see if they would hit, and a lot of times, I just winged it and figured the number was high enough to hit so as to not slow down the action. In hindsight, it would have just been easier to use Ascending AC so I could immediately tell if the attack hit without referring to a table. 

I'm also considering adapting a few things from the 5E version of combat actions. One of the things I noticed when re-reading the combat section for Old School Essentials was that, during combat, the only move a character can make is a fighting withdrawal or a retreat; by the rules as written, a character can't move closer to an enemy and then strike (at least, as far as the way I'm reading it) [EDIT: I've been corrected on this due to a misreading on my part. Characters can move and attack in the same round, but once in melee, the only move they can make is a fighting withdrawal or retreat] . So, I'm considering implementing the 5E rule that a character can move and take an action during a combat round (with an action most likely being an attack, but can be activating an item or casting a spell). That's still pretty clear and I don't think all that game breaking. 5E also has "bonus actions" and while I don't necessarily intend to use those for my players, I may adopt the rule for some of my adversaries (for example, I allowed my goblins during yesterday's ambush to fire bows/slings, move, and then, as a bonus action, hide so that they attack from a hidden position on the next round).

I'm looking forward to our next game. We were playing outside last night and the main reason we stopped is because it was starting to get too dark to see, even with a lot of candles and decorative lights in our trees, and also because the food I ordered was going to show up soon and I didn't want to be in the middle of a combat or something and have to stop for food. 

As always, I'm very interested in your comments, whether about my game in particular, your thoughts on the DungeonCraft YouTube Channel, or your experiences running games for younger players. 

Hanging: Home office (laptop)

Drinking: Charisma Check IPA by Bottle Logic

Listening: "Hounds of Winter" by Sting, from the album "Mercury Falling"