The First Few Levels

As mentioned in a previous post, I’m running a first-edition AD&D game for my son a few other kids in the 10-12 age range.

My primary goal is to give them a great experience so that they enjoy the game and look fondly at the RPG hobby in the future. I’m not trying to indoctrinate them into one true way of gaming, and I intend to go with the flow and adjust things as necessary to suit the interests they develop as they play.

This, of course, impacts the selection of adventures that I intend to run for them. I want to demonstrate the range of various activities that a character can get up to in the game. This is a game of Dungeons & Dragons, so some elements are a certainty, such as exploring a dungeon, fighting monsters, gathering treasure, finding magic items, encountering traps, exploring the wilderness, fighting a “big bad” at the end of an adventure, interacting non-violently with non-player characters (regular people, other adventurers, and opponents), spending time in towns or other civilized areas, learning a bit about the history of things that have gone before, and a few other basic staples of typical D&D campaigns.

But there are two things that hold no interest for me, which I think are just stupid, and which will play no part in this game.

• Edition-warring: There are hundreds of adventures that have been published for the game throughout its lifespan. Obviously, as the game has changed with editions, the specifics of the published adventures have changed in response. But a good adventure can be made to work with AD&D, no matter what edition it was originally written for. There are great adventures from Classic D&D, 1E, 2E, 3E, 4E and 5E, and nothing is off the table. In fact, I’m starting the campaign with a 4E adventure, because it works really well for a group of new players, regardless of edition.
• “Earning” greatness: I’m not interested in running a game where a single wrong move can end up with multiple dead characters. And random death is boring as hell and has killed more D&D campaigns than anything other cause. The kids are playing characters who are the stars of their story. And while a heroic death is possible, randomly killing characters will easily kill the interest in this game. And the characters, even at first level, are capable of succeeding with reasonable odds.

The First Adventure

I wanted to mix a bit of tradition with something more modern. So I started the game in a tavern…which was immediately attacked by goblins and hobgoblins in a surprise raid on the town. I’m kicking things off with a Dungeon Magazine adventure for D&D 4^th Edition called Rescue at Rivenroar (Dungeon #156). This is a great little adventure that involves a bunch of villagers being kidnapped off-screen during the opening fights, and the players are hired to follow the surviving goblin raiders back to their lair to rescue the villagers and recover a bunch of historical artifacts that were stolen by the goblins.

One of the great things about D&D 4^th edition was that characters started as heroes right from the first level and took on fights that would have been too tough in previous editions of the game. So, of course, I need to modify the actual encounters to make them reasonable for a first-level AD&D adventure.

But other than playing with monster numbers and changing out a few creatures, the adventure stands pretty well on its own.

The kids have played through the opening fight in the bar (with some creative use of abilities already), and then encountered the ogre that was chained to a wagon and throwing incendiary bombs at the buildings. They pretty handily beat both of those encounters with only minor damage to a couple of characters, which filled them with a healthy dose of confidence and made them want to come back for more.

Rescue at Rivenroar is the first adventure in the Scales of War adventure path, and I have no intention of running the whole path. I’m not actually a fan of the “adventure path” idea, as it requires the players to have no plans of their own for their characters, and the payoff takes a very long time to come.

Besides, I’m running AD&D – the speed at which characters level slows down the more powerful they become, rather than the consistent levelling system in 3^rd and 4^th editions. Which means adventure paths get too difficult too quickly for these characters.

I mentioned before that I’m planning to use The Temple of Elemental Evil adventure in this campaign, which is a fairly large, single adventure. I plan to make a bunch of minor changes to the TOEE adventure so that it doesn’t become a dungeon crawl that bogs down partway through. Those changes include plans for the various factions within the temple, providing opportunities for the characters to approach the temple in various ways (full-on assault, sneaky infiltration, cutting deals with factions against other factions, etc.) and allow opportunities for these different approaches to work.

So the goblins that raided Loudwater and which will be the first opponents of the characters in this game have a link to the temple. It won’t be so blatant that the kids will immediately find out about the temple, but it will give them a couple of clues that they can choose to follow when they are back in Loudwater.

As I’m running this game for completely inexperienced players who are also children, I want them to have a level or two under their belts before they discover the location of the moathouse in TOEE and head in that direction. This means providing them with a bunch of other adventure options they can choose to explore before they learn about the moathouse itself.

In this case, there are some great adventures that I can insert into the campaign:

Module N1: Against the Cult of the Reptile God – I intend to use the town of Secomber, just down the road from Loudwater, to replace the town of Orlane in the module. The characters will hear the rumours about the town and can decide for themselves if they want to investigate.

The Sunless Citadel – This was a 3E adventure for first-level characters. In the adventure, the characters have a chance to ally themselves with kobolds against a more powerful goblin force. Again, they will have a chance to discover some force behind the goblins, foreshadowing the rise of the temple.

Menace of the Icy Spire – This is a 4E adventure from Dungeon issue #159. This short adventure gives the chance for the characters to encounter an elemental-themed location well before they discover anything about the temple itself. I will use this as a great opportunity to drop in some history about the area and the temple.

The Fountain of Health – This is an AD&D adventure from Dungeon Magazine issue #39. It’s a pretty standard dungeon-crawl in which the characters are searching for a well that provides a healing potion. I intend to replace that with rumours of some kind of magic item that was lost here a long time ago, prompting the players to try to acquire the item.

While running these adventures, I intend to start foreshadowing the rise of the temple by having minor earthquakes, freak rainstorms, sudden heatwaves or perhaps a fire, and a tornado or two hit the region. The players won’t have the information to link them to the temple right away, but once they discover the temple, they’ll see the effect its presence has already had on the area and will understand the threat it presents.

I figure these adventures will easily get all the characters to second level. Once they hit level two, I will drop the location of the moathouse to them via rumours or NPC interactions. It’ll be up to them to explore the moathouse (I figure they might hit all four of the above adventures first before they head in that direction).

Other than a couple of minor adjustments, I intend to run the moathouse as it is in the adventure.

Actual Play

Unfortunately, as mentioned, we’ve only managed two sessions so far as there have been some life-related things that have gotten in the way. But I expect that we’ll be able to pick up a more regular schedule in January.

I’m considering writing the game up as an actual play, which I would post here on my blog. But I’m going to wait until we have a few more sessions under our belt first, just in case this game doesn’t end up having legs. I hate reading an actual play thread that just ends up fizzling out shortly after it begins.

Who else has run the Temple of Elemental Evil adventure? Did you add a couple of early adventures for the characters to get them some experience before they tackled the moathouse or did you send them out there right away? Did your players actually complete the entire TOEE adventure? Tell us about it in the comments.