D&D Story #2: Birthday Bedlam

For a few blog posts now, I’ve been dropping hints about the special one-shot D&D adventure that I’d planned for my middle child’s 16th birthday.  Now it’s time for a full explanation.

First of all, understand that this kid (whom I used to refer to as the Smaller Animal, but now is taller than everyone else in the house) enjoys playing D&D, and really enjoys playing a fantasy character who can change shapes.  That’s just his thing.  In D&D (as you may recall from my story of his first ever D&D session), that typically means druid, so my kid has played a lot of druids.  Like, a lot.  A metric shit-ton, even.  And there’s certainly nothing wrong with playing the same class all the time, if that’s your jam, but it’s also good to step out of your comfort zone every once in a while.  So I (and my eldest child) have long been working on convincing the Smaller Animal to try other things.  And, while we’ve had a few minor successes here and there, he’s mostly stuck with the druids.

So, for this birthday, either The Mother or I (or maybe we did it together) had an idea to have a “D&D paty,” where his friends could come over (which they haven’t been able to do for the past two birthdays in a row) and we’d all sit around and play D&D all day.  Something self-contained, I thought: a one-shot adventure, designed to be completed in a single session.  And I hit upon the brilliant idea to invent a new ancestry (which D&D often refers to as “race,” which is not only a word charged with real-world baggage, but also just a terrible term for it—“species” would be closer) ... a society where everyone is a shapeshifter.  No need to be a druid, you see: you can just change your shape.  All the time.  To (mostly) whatever you like.

Now, no one’s ever done this in D&D before because it would be difficult to come up with an ancestry that’s (roughly) balanced¹  against the core ones: human, halfling, elf, dwarf, etc.  But I had the advantage of being able to say: look, you’re all going to have this ancestry—it’s part of the conceit of the game.  So they were all on equal footing, so balance didn’t really matter.  Plus they could all choose to look like any crazy thing they wanted to.  (If you’re interested to see the stats I came up with, feel free to check them out.²)

And this seemed to work: given the freedom to be able to change shape whenever they liked, they seemed not to need to actually do it in the game—even my shapeshifting-obsessed child never changed into anything the entire session.  So I think I was successful.

Next, I needed a short, self-contained adventure which could be adapted for teenagers.³  I ended up picking a short adventure called Bedlam at the Benefit.  This adventure was short (and inexpensive), and it had a number of advantages:

• It has a social interaction phase, an exploration phase, and a combat phase, thus giving equal weight to D&D’s “three pillars of play.”
• How well you do on each phase has an actual impact: the social encounter determines monetary rewards, and “succeeding” on the exploration challenges makes the combat easier.
• The vast majority of the bad guys are not human—not even remotely humanoid.  There’s no question about whether or not they need to be eliminated.
• The device of a children’s hospital is going to engage the players immediately: you’ve got to be pretty stony-hearted to not want to help a children’s hospital succeed.
• It’s very self-contained: you can present this is a mission the characters have been given, they go do the mission, and everything wraps up neatly at the end.

Still, the adventure isn’t perfect.  It had a number of things that I felt needed adjusting:

• It’s too hard. You’ll notice that this was the one aspect the reviewer I linked to above dinged it for: while it’s ostensibly designed for 5 3rd level characters, it’s likely to wipe out such a party.  Given I was working with younger people, who were not inexperienced, but also not as fully tactical in combat as experienced adults might be, it was probably even more likely.  This one was simple to fix: I just doubled the levels and told everyone to make 6th level characters instead.  Besides, 6th level characters get a lot more cool features to play with than 3rd level characters do, and that’s important for a game where you’re not likely to play those characters again.
• The monsters are too samey. Basically, other than the mad wizard, you’ve got neogi and gibbering mouthers.  Now, a gibbering mouther is an awesome monster, with a whole bevy of flavorful abilities, and I absolutely adore the neogi, just for the utter insanity of its existence: it’s a spider the size of a large dog with an eel for a head.  But I wanted more variety.  Plus this gave me the opportunity to make sure I could tweak the difficulty of the combat just so: having a bunch of monsters with different toughnesses makes it easier to dial in the exact level of menace you want to portray.
• Innocent people get killed, by design. This adventure is designed to raise the stakes for you by starting to off the innocent bystanders.  Maybe that’s fine for a group of adult players, but it seemed unnecessarily grim for a group of kids.  This was easy enough to fix as well: I made it so the innocent bystanders would just disappear instead, and then they could all come back at the end (see? everyone’s okay after all).
• Neogi in D&D are historically slavers. That is, a neogi has a power that it can use to take over someone’s mind and make them do things against their will.  They’re hardly the only D&D monsters that can do this—vampires have a “dominate” power, for instance—but neogi are specifically portrayed as going around enslaving other creatures and using them to boost their own status in their society.  Which is a bit ... icky.  But, above and beyond that, it’s absolutely no fun for your character to get taken over.  In some ways, it’s worse than dying.  And kids hate it even more than adults, I think.  So I took that off the table by reducing the number of neogi to one, and giving it a big creature that it had already dominated (which itself was a pretty horrible monster), so it had no need to try that on any of the characters.
• Monetary rewards are fairly meaningless for a one-shot. That is, once the adventure is done, handing out a bunch of treasure doesn’t do your character any good, because you’ll (probably) never play that character again.  So essentially you get a bunch of gold you’ll never get to spend.  I handled this by just converting the monetary rewards to bonuses on future rolls, and handed them out right before the big combat at the end so everyone had a chance to use them.

Next, I wanted some cool shapeshifting music.  That just involved scouring YouTube for music inspired by shapeshifting creatures such as werewolves, rakshasas, kitsune, and selkies.  Then I had to arrange the songs into the proper order.⁴  Then I had a playlist, which you too can enjoy if you’re so inclined.

Next, I wanted some pictures to throw up on the screen to give everyone a the proper atmosphere.  Since this was a children’s hospital that had been converted out of a spooky sanitorium, and they would be arriving close to nightfall, I went with this pic I found on the Internet:

Next, the arrival of the mad warlock and his twisted minions.  For this one, I had to find a bunch of different pics and glue them together with the GIMP.⁵  My picture editing skills are not great, but I get by.  Here’s what I came up with:

Finally, I needed a map.  I don’t use maps and minis for all my D&D games, but this one was special, and I felt like it really needed that extra oomph.  I employed both the two younger kids to help me put it together—that was a bit spoilery for the birthday boy, but he loves building maps so much that I felt it was better to let him help design the thing than try to keep a surprise.  Here’s what we came up with, as seen in game with minis deployed:

You can see the mad warlock in the center, towards the back of the main entrance; cells with prisoners in them in the back; a few miscellaneous walls for cover; and various statues and other bits of flavor throughout.  Our heroes are towards the front (which is on the left in the picture), either waiting to come in, or already charged in for battle.

Next was trying to get everyone to come up with their characters.  This is a bit like pulling teeth at this age: between indecision and procrastination, it was close to impossible ... in fact, my ten-year-old was the only one who got done early.⁶  The birthday boy went with an artificer.  There are different flavors of artificer in D&D, but his was sort of a fantasy mad scientist, sporting a “boomstick” (magical version of a musket), a shrink ray, an invisibility suit, and a portal gun (reflavored spells).  My youngest was a college of spirits bard, who communed with ghosts for information and magic.  My eldest was an earth sorcerer/monk, calling upon the stones themselves to help out in combat.  My middle child’s two best friends were, respectively, an owlin (looking) warlock who wielded a giant pen like a spear, and a bard who appeared to look so much like an ordinary human man that it was unnerving.  And that’s pretty much all the prep.

For the session itself, they were given their mission, went undercover as adventurers who were being called upon to impress rich donors and convince them to give more money to the children’s hospital (still under construction, though mostly completed), and actually raised a bit of money for the director (for which I rewarded them with some bonus dice to be used later).  Then, in the midst of the fundraiser, the mad warlock appears on the lawn with his minions and kidnaps a bunch of the rich donors.  They managed to kill both the gibbering mouthers (which made the final fight easier), but the rest of the monsters got away with some captives, as they were designed to do.

Next, they had to explore the creepy basement and sub-basement of the new hospital, which had been sealed up and forgotten about.  It was full of vermin and ghosts, and they had to figure out how to learn as much information about their foe as possible.  This was a skill challenge where each character could pick whatever skill they liked, as long as they could think of a way to describe what they were doing.  So, you could say “persuasion,” and then describe how you talked a ghost into giving you info, or you could say “athletics” and describe how you kicked down a door or moved some rubble to find some clues, or you could say “religion” to recognize some of the mystic symbols scratched into the walls ... whatever you liked.  If you get a certain number of successes before you get half as many failures, you “win” the challenge and the bad guy’s powers are reduced (because his evil, Lovecraftian overlords are disappointed in him, I suppose).  His powers are also reduced if you don’t get all the successes, but you do get at least half of them.  So there’s actually four different versions of the warlock you can face.  Our party didn’t quite cross the finish line before hitting that last failure, but certainly enough to pass the halway mark, so they got a middling version of the warlock to fight.

Then it was time to run the final combat.  This drug out forever, partially because I had probably overestimated how many monsters they could handle, partially because it’s difficult to get kids to focus on the battle and keep things moving sometimes, and partially because I didn’t have the chance to review everyone’s character ahead of time and familiarize myself with exactly what people could and couldn’t do.  But we got through it in the end.  Here’s my battle highlights:

• The winged pen-wielder did the most damage to the warlock directly, taking out over half his hit points.
• The artificer killed most of the smaller monsters with a single shot each, and did the majority of the damage to the medium monsters.
• A well-placed shatter spell from the disturbingly normal-looking bard did exactly enough damage to finish off the medium monsters.
• The earth sorcerer/monk took on the biggest monster solo and took it down to 2 hit points before it fled and eventually got taken out by the artificer.
• The ghost bard mainly concentrated on keeping everyone else alive, and ended up healing enough total hit points to constitute a whole ’nother party member.

In the end, almost all the monsters were destroyed outright, the warlock was killed, sending the few remaining monsters back to their other plane of existence, and releasing the trapped prisoners (even the ones who had disappeared).  The director thanked them all, the ancient evil was vanquished permanently, and the hospital was able to open in safety.

So I think everyone had a great time, despite us running close to twice as long as we originally planned, and I think they were satisfied with their characters and their success.  My two youngest (that is, the birthday boy and his little sister) are already talking about bringing their characters back for more stories, so I take that as a positive sign that it was a good time.  It was a bunch of work on my part, and it sucked up a lot of my time over the past few weeks, but I think it was all worthwhile to hear everyone cheer when the bad guys were defeated at last.

Hopefully we get to do it again sometime.

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1 Personally, I don’t believe things have to be precisely balanced in D&D.  Just not grossly unbalanced, if you see what I’m saying.

2 As always, credit for layout primarily goes to GM Binder.

3 Technically, my youngest is not a teenager yet, but she was probably the most mature child at the table, so I wasn’t worried about her.

4 See my series on music mixes for why I’m so obsessed with the order songs play in.

5 The GIMP—GNU Image Manipulation Program—is the open-source alternative to PhotoShop.

6 And possibly the only one who was truly and completely done with their character before we actually started playing.