Brace yourselves; this is going to be a long one...
For as long as she can remember, my daughter, who is now 11, has seen her dad engage in all types of nerdish behaviour, like painting miniatures and playing weekly games of DnD with his mates. When she was little, she liked to join me in my painting sessions, and did so for a couple of years, with varying degrees of concentration and finesse, but over the years, she has drifted away from 'painting dollies' and found her own passtimes, like horse riding and all types of crafting. Which is fine, of course.
But just last December she approached me while I was painting and asked me about 'that game' the lads and I regularly play. Because on rare occasions I had shared some gaming anecdotes with her and her mother at the dinner table. My wife is usually not very impressed with my fantastical antics, but the little lady must have been more attentive than I had expected. So much so, that she asked if I could play it with her some time!
Obviously I could barely hold back my excitement, but with effort I played it off cool and answered her: 'sure honey, I'll see if I can find something suitable'. But in my head, a thousand campaign ideas started whirling around already.
However; in order to keep it easy for all involved, I decided to start off with a simple one-off starter scenario. I checked my old red DnD box for the beginning adventure, and also my old set of Oog des Meesters (translated into English as 'The Dark Eye'), which was my introduction to RPG games about 35 to 40 years or so ago. But they did not quite grab me again as I thought they would.
So I ventured onto the web and found that there's tons of fun one-off adventures for beginning players. And plenty of those cater to younger audiences as well. So in the end I settled on this one adventure I found, called 'The wild sheep chase'.
Which was perfect, because I had told my daughter she should ask a couple of her friends if they wantend to join in as well; Ideally I wanted 3 or 4 players in the group. And her best friend, who is sure to be invited, has an inexplicably strong love for sheep, and things start out with an encounter with a talking sheep, so that would work just fine.
There's also a bear in an outhouse and a bed half transformed into a dragon, so you get an idea of what we're dealing with here
I picked some ready made player characters from elsewhere and then the fun could really begin. Because obviously there should be miniatures. And when there's miniatures, there needs to be terrain, so you can see where this is going…
Firstly, I sourced all of the miniatures, and I always find this one of the most enjoyable parts of such a project. I have a plethora of sources here, but materialwise, I've got metal, plastic, siocast, bones and resin-printed minis in the mix. Of course I started with scouring my own collection first, but the characters are so specific, I only had a few directly available. Which meant I had to go shopping (from the comfort of my own computer desk, obviously).
What I needed was:
- a sheep (I sourced this from an STL for a set of 5 that I purchased. I printed all 5 and will add to them by mirroring them for added variety, so I will then have a small flock of them. Always useful)
- a hulking half ork with a greatsword (I received a freebie of a rather large barbarian type miniature missing his hands and a weapon at a convention from a Siocast machine salesman. I added a huge sword from a Frostgrave Gnoll sprue and sculpted a set of fangs and his two hands)
- Three wolves (I already had wolves lying around (of course). I believe I had 7 or 8, but I could only locate 3 of them. they're older, metal sculpts and look a tad goofy, but they will certainly do the job)
- Three apes wielding longswords (I had a set of 8 chimpansee-like apes wielding primitive weapons (spears, bones, clubs) from Lucid Eye. So I painted up all of them. Always useful
I did not give them swords though; I decided to use the spear wielding ones, because outside of this scenario, I see very little use for longsword wielding apes)
- A grizzly bear (I had previously been gifted three large 3D-printed bears I intended to use as polar bears for Frostgrave, but I'm sure one can be spared)
- An evil wizard (the main antagonist. I had to order the Frostgrave Wizard box for this guy. No problem; it's loaded with very useful bits that will find a purpose eventually. I built up the wizard from this set, with the addition of a wand cut from plastic rod, as this was pretty specifically described in the scenario)
- A bed-wyrmling (yes; an actual bed that got transformed into a dragon, but not quite. I found a pretty nice 3D-design for free on Cults3d and printed it off. The design also came with an untransmorphed bed, so I printed that too)
- a Gibbering Mouther (this is a pretty specific DnD monster and by far the most disturbing one I ever painted. This too was a 3D-design that I printed)
Then there are the player characters. I sourced six (they came in a balanced set) and my players wil be able to choose which ones they will use. I might make some changes to the strength of the NPC's depending on their choices, but this will all be on the fly.
- a male human ranger (from a set of metal rangers by Midlam Miniatures)
- a male Elf Rogue (Started life as a GW Dark Elf Shade, but I cut down the wicked barbs on the sword and replaced the crossbow with a longbow and now he's all nice and stuff. Mostly)
- a female dwarf fighter (Sourced as a bones miniature from Reaper)
- a male gnome wizard (a Reaper Black Bones figure)
- a female Elf Cleric (another Reaper Bones miniature)
- a female halfling bard (yet another Reaper Black Bones mini)
And those are the miniatures sorted. But what of the terrain then?
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