Another Newbie joins the fold

I had friends staying here over the weekend - my old pal from back in school days plus his wife and two kids. 20 years ago he was one of the guys I gamed with - mostly Warhammer stuff, painting miniatures and a few board games. We played some Dnd too but it was never our go-to game. We rarely had enough players to form a proper table.

Despite most of the weekend being consumed by chasing toddlers around the house or park, we also played a few games. We squeezed in Zombicide which is always a blast, and tried the relatively new Dnd adventure board game Temple of Elemental Evil (decent enough but predictably, it is very similar to previous games in the series). On Friday night we decided to play Dnd.

His wife had NEVER gamed before but she was refreshingly enthusiastic about the whole thing. She actually loves the fantasy milieu and is a big Harry Potter fan so I pretty much knew she would play a wizard of some kind. My friend had a fighter and my wife brought out her usual ranger character.

I had no prep time so I just bust out the DCC adventure Sailors on the Starless Sea. It is fairly straightforward but really evocative, it deviates somewhat from the hoary old orcs and goblins fare, with a lot more sinister beastman stuff going on, and I had also run a (hacked) version of it for my full 5e campaign over the past couple of months. So I was familiar with how the adventure went, and also had some ideas how to make it more appropriate for the newbie group.

Well worth picking up. It has a great mix of pulp, weirdness and creepiness

The session went down a treat and was great fun. Here's a few reminders about things you can do to help new players:

1) Give them obvious choices ... with consequences. In the original adventure, the PCs are presented with a path up to the castle and are pretty much railroaded past some plant zombies and then into the courtyard, unless they're clever and go off and think of more inventive ways to approach. In my version, there was a path leading straight up to the gatehouse and another path veering off left with a sinister hanging tree (the zombie encounter) just visible in the distance. The players were given a choice. They actually chose left, fought the weird plant zombies and then snuck into the courtyard through a crack in the wall.

There's them weird plant zombies again.

2) Make them feel useful. On a couple of occasions - in the tomb of the chaos warrior and on the longboat - there are strange runes. I ensured that the wizard character could decipher these runes. The wizard player felt invaluable. If she hadn't been there, it appeared, then the runes would have remained a mystery. Of course I might have figured out a way for a different set of characters to work out the runes, eg they might have been old dwarven glyphs if I had a dwarf in the party. But the illusion remains: if that player wasn't there, then the party would have been stuck.

Not sure where this pic is from but it's a cool image for the adventure

3) Make them feel powerful. Keep the monster AC low. Keep their hit points down. There's nothing more frustrating than swinging and missing, swining and missing. But ensure the monsters are also dangerous - make sure they CAN hit and CAN do some damage to keep the players on their toes.
The beastmen in this adventure only have 3hp (I made them 4e style minions so one hit would kill them, regardless). But I also made sure that if they hit, they delivered 1d6+1 damage which is quite a lot versus low level characters.
Once they were familiar with the combat rules, I upped the ante. I threw a wight AND a flameskull at the party at one stage. My dice were rather cold, but they survived and it was a memorably tense encounter.

As I said my friend was a big Warhammer fan so it was good to roll out some beastmen

4) Pay attention to their character sheets. They've only just created these fresh new characters so both as PCs and DMs it is important to remind each other of what the character can do, and what their personality quirks might be. I saw that the fighter had chaotic tendencies so I tempted him with the chaos warrior's helment and the cache of hold on top of the disintegrating pyramid. I saw that the wizard had Levitate on her character sheet so I let her use it to zip up the pyramid edge. I encouraged the fighter to use his action surge to close down the final boss and smack him in the face with an axe.

A lot of fun was had and we agreed to play again on the Sunday before they went home. It was a little more sedate as we were all exhausted after a busy weekend, all with work or travel the next morning. But everyone enjoyed and I'm certain there'd be no problem getting another game underway next time they visit!
Maybe not converts for life, but I'm still spreading the gospel. Job's a good one.