This is the Neverwinter cleric, but I decided it was Luciana the Wise...

In the ancient times  .... how the early games went down

The first person I gamed with was my wife, simply because I didn't really have anyone else. We started off playing the Dnd Castle Ravenloft board game which came with a few tiles and miniatures, and I couldn't resist hacking it - to add extra monsters, and a bit of roleplaying, and different magic items... and then it basically morphed into Dnd proper.




I should point out that I was a huge RPG, Fighting Fantasy and Warhammer fan back in school before the usual happened - life got in the way. I took a LOOOOONG break from gaming as I went to college, formed rock bands, partied, failed to impress girls, got a job which turned into a career, bought a house and got married.

Then when my wife was pregnant with our first child, I took a deep breath and remembered the person I was all those years ago. Call it extreme forward planning, but I was thinking about gaming with my children one day. I dusted down what was left of my RPG collection (and there wasn't much of it ... I'll tell you that story another time). And then I casually started surfing the web for the latest news in the world of miniatures and RPGs. I was looking for something casual that I remembered from my youth - something like the Heroquest board game or maybe the Fighting Fantasy RPG which sprung from the gamebooks of the same name.

So, this is to blame for tempting me back... as I said, lots of tiles and miniatures come with the game (actually, this pic does not even seem to show half of them - there are 42 miniatures total, see below)

This was early 2011 - and what I found surprised me. I think I expected that things would hardly have changed since 1996. Maybe a few more online games. But Dnd had gotten as far as its fourth edition and was all obsessed with miniatures. Dragon magazine didn't exist anymore! (at least not in physical form...)
There was something out there called Pathfinder, that was Dnd, but apparently also wasn't. There were Robot Chicken, Penny Arcade and Acquisitions Incorporated videos on YouTube. The OSR was beginning to rumble but I wasn't sure what OSR stood for. Warhammer had gone all plastic (or was it finecast?) and the prices of the miniatures made my eye pop.

What I didn't realise then was that, in the case of Dnd at least, the game was in a period of great turbulence - the miniatures line was about to be cancelled, within months there would be no 4e releases, there would be an interminable wait while playtesting happened for the 'Next' edition to appear.
So not the most intuitive time to jump back in to Dnd, but still ... I had plenty of catching up to do.

I wanted a board game we could play on the long nights at home with a baby son so I picked up Castle Ravenloft. As I said it comes with loads of miniatures, which I could not resist painting up, reawakening another childhood obsession for all things 30mm tall, plastic and lead.

This is from the WoTC community pages by some dude called Pewfell. They look stunning, far nicer than my early efforts

We played a few sessions (you don't need a DM for the board game, so that's cool) and had fun - but after a while I sorta turned to my wife and said: "You know, this board game is actually based on a roleplaying game which I played a lot of when I was in school..."
She looked at me funny, unsurprising given that RPGs were never that big a deal in Ireland - certainly not in the 1980s or 1990s. So I grabbed some paper and scrawled out a character sheet from memory, based on my memories of the Basic red box from about 25 years earlier. Luckily most of it is seared on my brain because I was, like, eight when I pored over those two paperback books and I seem to remember EVERYTHING I read when I was eight.

Thus Luciana the Wise, first level cleric, strolled into Waterdeep in search of adventure. Castle Ravenloft features heavily simplifed 4e rules, so we were using those mashed up with what I remembered from Red Box basic, a fairly bizarre hybrid that would have munchkins and grognards alike appalled! I kept in the idea of healing surges because I only had the one PC, but as it turned out even that wasn't enough...

I'd been listening to the Robot Chicken adventure with DM extraordinaire Chris Perkins just that week, trying to get my head around what 4e was like. So the adventure I ran that evening borrowed heavily from his Tomb of the Orc Slayer, plus some other bits I remembered from favourite adventures back in the day.

My wife nearly died in the first room. She went down the webbed corridor (rookie mistake) and I threw two deathjump spiders at her (also... rookie mistake). I soon learned that you can NEVER outnumber a lone PC because one lucky dice roll is gonna end it all. Which is what happened here. She couldn't hit a barn door in the first two rounds while my creepy crawlies went to work.
She was down to 0 in two rounds.
I decided to have some mercy and ruled that she woke up, suspended upside down from a giant web in sorta Aliens-style coccoon. A 13 Strength check and she could burst out and stumble away from danger. She rolled a 15. And luckily, she had some healing surges.

As my family has come to realise, I love giant spiders. Sooo creepy.

So we both learned our first lessons of playing Dnd with your family. And I avoided sleeping on the couch that night.


PS: The Learning DM wrote a cool post about how you can use Castle Ravenloft material for wider Dnd campaigns, as well as looking at some of the other board games and miniatures available. It was written a while back, but it's still worth checking out.