I'm a fantasy writer, so how can I resist the lure of running my own game of Dungeons and Dragons? It isn't like I don't have experience. I've mentioned before that I ran a Star Wars roleplaying game for a couple of years in the late 90s. It was a blast, and I have so many fond memories and stories from those games.
I did try to run a home-brew campaign for a single player right off the bat back in 2017... and yeah, it sucked. I was really rusty, and I hadn't accumulated the knowledge of how the game runs best. I also made the newbie Dungeon Master mistake of trying to run my own material right off the bat. I really should have started with a published adventure first. The campaign crashed and burned, and it was mostly my fault for flailing around so much.
After playing for a bit longer online, I got a better handle on running a Dungeons and Dragons game. I will say that rules for 5th edition are much less complex than any other version of D&D. That said the game mechanics for old Star Wars RPG (created back in 1987... damn) were wonderfully simple, easy to learn and very flexible. So it makes sense that I wasn't quite ready to run a game so early on.
Sometimes a Dungeon Master needs a break, and so during our long online campaign, I helmed a couple short campaigns. One was three sessions long, the other two sessions. Each session was about four hours long. I home-brewed again, but this time I had a better idea of how to run the game. I think the first campaign went better. It was a simple objective - escape the dungeon. The second one, I went for a Mission: Impossible style adventure. I think the concept was good, but I didn't run it all that well (probably should have stuck to something simpler).
Since then, I've been bouncing around the idea of running a game online. I'm currently playing in two games, but that itch is just there to be scratched.
Enter the Essentials
Earlier this year Wizards of the Coast released The Essentials Kit, a boxset for new players. It contained a ready made adventure tailored for two players - one Dungeon Master and one player. It had an interesting concept of having sidekick characters that could travel with your single player and help out when things got nasty (or act as a meat shield - whichever). It sounded like a perfect way to try another game with my long suffering solo role-player. I picked up The Essentials Kit and gave the adventure a read through. It had some really interesting settings, characters, encounters and magic items.
Now I had picked up The Starter Set at the end of last year. That was an older product that also included its own starter adventure. That adventure, The Lost Mines of Phandelver, is a pretty linear adventure, really hand holding both the DM and the players along the way. The adventure in The Essentials Kit, The Dragon of Icespire Peak is a bit more open. There isn't a linear path to the story and the characters build their own story over a set of encounters that the DM places in front of them. I really liked this idea, and since my solo role-player had done some adventuring in the past I figured the open world would be a better fit for our campaign.
Lazy Days
I've been enjoying a podcast featuring Mike Shea, who wrote a couple of books, The Lazy Dungeon Master and the followup/revamp Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master. His podcast had a lot of great ideas for running a game using minimal prep time and hitting all the key points to keep the game fun and interesting for all the players, and yet not spend hours and hours on work that no one is going to see (a real danger for a writer). I picked up The Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master and found a lot of great insights and advice for running the game.
So I decided to take what I'd learned from Mr. Shea's book and use it to run Dragon of Icespire Peak. On a whim I asked a second person if they would be interested in playing some D&D (one of my other players from the old Star Wars campaign days). She agreed to give it a try... and lo, I have two players!
So I got to work prepping for my very first session of a new Dungeons and Dragons campaign. I knew we'd have to spend some time creating characters, describing the campaign setting, and of course setting my players exceptions of what the game was going to be like. Sounds like we needed a good old fashioned Session Zero.
Next Up... Session 0: Origin Stories
5 comments:
The quests and adventures of this game have a passing similarity to the once popular scavenger hunts, which also took imagination to organize well, though D&D has the advantage of not having to leave the table – which in turn allows for more fantastic scenarios. The clip is from “My Man Godfrey” (1936) in which one of items to be scavenged by the upper class players is a forgotten man (aka hobo): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtTNH--oGi4
Very true. That is one of the fun elements about this game. You can construct the adventures however you like. Part of the trick is finding out what the players want to do. If they want to do some world traveling Indiana Jones style adventuring in a fantasy setting, that is really easy to accomidate. This particular adventure has a little bit of everything in it, so it is good for new players to get an idea of what kind of stuff they may like.
As for "My Man Godfrey", that is one of those movies that I've heard about, but never actually watched. I remember it coming up quite a few times on our old "Scene It" game featuring Turner Classic Movies.
Definitely its a Depression-era movie that deserves to be on the line-up: very clever dialogue, great messaging, and good heart.
I'm a little late to the game here, but I just found your blog. I hope to run this adventure for a group of teens from my school in the near future, assuming we can get past this pandemic. I think the set pieces in the adventure are mostly good, and there is a good skeleton of a story. However, the guidance for a newer DM to build a story is lacking. As an experienced DM, I will definitely be altering the story to make it more cohesive. I look forward to reading about your adventures to give me some ideas.
Yeah there is a great skeleton here. I think on the one hand they were trying to keep it open so DMs could build their own material into it. But at the same time, for newer DMs it feels like it is missing some important stuff. I just ran the Axeholm portion of the adventure, and I really think they could have added some advice about playing up the haunted nature of the place. It feels like that portion could make for a different feel to break up al the orc shenanigans in the surrounding adventures. And they could frame it as a suggestion for tone, and leave it up to the DM on how to run it. But the lack of anything there just feels like an oversight. Still, there are lots of good moments coming out of this, and my players both enjoyed the sidekicks and the rules made things flow really quickly. I hope you find the adventures entertaining and informative. I'm thinking of doing a breakdown at the end of the campaign that will focus on DM advice for each portion of the adventure.
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