So we gathered with some of my friends yesterday and played a one-shot D&D game. I brought with me Labyrinth Lord, the reference sheets of OD&D, a playmat and the figs I got for Christmas, including a monk, two cultists and sacrifice victim, a bunch of derro and duergar grunts, as well as two Tannhauser miniatures and the unpainted set of minis included in Cadwallon: City of Thieves.

I bought a bunch of supplies for the game at the store, including some gaming paper, dry erase Staedler pens and some prepainted Legendary Encounters Reaper minis (3 orcs and an ogre chieftain).

A part of the fun for me was to come up with an adventure with limited supplies, limited amount of play time, and so on.

The day before the game, I decided I'd use the sacrifice victim as bait/hook, and the cultists kidnapping her for some nefarious purpose. Didn't know what yet. Using the duergar and derro was more of a challenge, because I didn't want to go for a straight Underdark-type set up, and wanted something more vanilla in tone. So in the end, I decided that the cultists basically convinced a group of underdark creatures serving in a Circus to leave their masters and assist them in reactivating an old portal to the underdark located in an ancient Temple of the Everseeing Eye (i.e. Beholder cult). Simple, straightforward, with a touch of originality and plenty of room to come up with stuff on the fly if necessary.

The day of the game, we started by rolling characters. No fancy character sheets or anything like that, just plain index cards for everyone. Select your class amongst Cleric, Wizard, Fighter and Thief, roll your stats, assign scores, roll HP, select your equipment and spells, assign resulting AC values. Grand total of 5-10 minutes and we were done. For level 5 PCs.

We ended up with a female thief, a female fighter, and a male boggart wizard (no adjustment to stats, no template bullshit for the boggart - it's just a boggart, with plenty of RP flavor, no effect on stats, and that worked admirably in the end).

The characters wake up, face in the snow, after the caravans they were travelling with to go to the Dunfalcon fair was attacked by unknown brigands. They check the few burning carts, a few victims dead here and there, and end up saving a monk half-dead, who pleads for them to help him recover his daughter. Hard bargaining for some payment on the PCs' part. These guys are a tough bunch. I decide to role play the monk as a cynical, petty bastard more interested in his coin than his daughter.

They finally agree to a "compensation," and follow the tracks of the brigands in the snow. They finally arrive at the entrance of the ancient temple, with plenty of people petrified outside of its gates (by some creature, basilisk, beholder kin or whatnot that has long disappeared from the area - just made the PCs wonder what they were getting into. Ambiance!)

They explore the complex, figure out the puzzle that was set before them (there were wall paintings scattered throughout the dungeon and, in the main corridor of the complex a giant eye of stone which would telepathically ask them to "Let Him See" each time they were coming close to it. Some of the bad guys were wearing amulets depicting an eye. The trick was to wear or hold the amulets in front of the painting, with the giant eye becoming alive and looking at where they stood, which would dispell the illusions of the painting and reveal the secret passages hidden behind them), kill the bad guys, have an argument with the monk who turned out to be the original owner of the circus the bad guys escaped from, freed the girl, got some payment additionally to the loot gathered throughout the dungeon.

Fun was had by everyone.

My wife who was playing the male boggart fell in love with magic users and her character specifically (one nasty bugger, if you don't mind me sayin'), and wants to play him again.

A few notes about some stuff that came up during the game:

- Character generation and game play were a breathe. I didn't bother giving saving throw values, thief skill values and any of the nitpicky information to the players. I had the OD&D reference sheets besides me and I looked into the LL book ONCE during the game to get a precise Thief skill value at some point. That was it. I was using the RuneQuest opposition table for tests, knew the effects of spells like fireball and phantasmal forces before hand... it was a BLAST on both sides of the screen.

- Gaming paper is AWESOME (I didn't use it in the game in the end, but opened it later). It's 30 feet square, in a long sheet of paper that is 30 squares/inches wide... HIGHLY recommended, particularly if you are into dungeoneering crafts, like making your own dungeon tiles, environments for miniatures and so on, since the stuff can be coloured, painted on, etc. The paper itself is extremely thin, but covered with a thin layer of silicon or something similarly translucent.

- Legendary Encounters Reaper minis are GREAT. I found the painjob VASTLY superior to anything WotC came up with with its prepainted D&D minis. Note that it's still not on par with the work you'd do yourself painting them (assuming you're a decent miniatures painter in the first place of course), but these are really great and will blend with my other miniatures very well.

- We decided to formalize gaming with my wife. Friday evening is going to be game night for us from now on. We might play some D&D, or some board game, City of Thieves, Carcassone, Abalone, or anything really, but we'll get some gaming done more regularly than we did in the past few years.

Everything went really well. It was cool to play with our Van friends again. I wish I could set up weekly games at Drexoll games (the one in Port Coquitlam, though the other one in Vancouver itself is an awesome place as well) - I love the place, and these are good people working there. I saw several people watching us play the game and being genuinely amused/intrigued at what we were doing. It'd be awesome to play games and just go "wanna try it?" or whatnot. I'd love to do this. But impossible for now, I guess, living so far up north the Central Coast as I am now. Maybe some day, who knows?

Quote from: Benoist;429338- Gaming paper is AWESOME (I didn't use it in the game in the end, but opened it later). It's 30 feet square, in a long sheet of paper that is 30 squares/inches wide... HIGHLY recommended, particularly if you are into dungeoneering crafts, like making your own dungeon tiles, environments for miniatures and so on, since the stuff can be coloured, painted on, etc. The paper itself is extremely thin, but covered with a thin layer of silicon or something similarly translucent.

I had a positive experience using it as well. The only caution is make sure you look at what you are trying to map before you start cutting it up. The 30 square width is the real limitation here.

Quote from: estar;429477I had a positive experience using it as well. The only caution is make sure you look at what you are trying to map before you start cutting it up. The 30 square width is the real limitation here.

Totally. Good tips there, Rob. The 30 squares width is indeed the one defining limitation of map layouts using the gaming paper.

Sounds like an awesome game!