Diving into D&D

So this all started in 2018… after nearly 5 years we are still going as a group. It was my intention to keeep track of the adventures here, but well you know life the universe and everything.

So after many chapters and serveral story arcs which has seen the death of 4 characters, and recently the resurrection of one… the party of brave adventurers are currently in a desert hunting down 5 star gems inorder to save the world 9so they think). They have just come out of a dungeon that they have spent nearly 8 months (real time) getting lost in.however they now have 3 of the 5 gems that they seek.

The gaming group has changed and developed over time, I am no longer the sole DM as Andrew ( Brucelee) has taken on the mantle of DMing which has given me a chance to play in an alternative story line and also a chance to get a breather from sorting out the adventure every week.

During our time we have also visited Coleraine twice to hold two face to face sessions in a AIR BNB that is basically father teds house these have been an absolute blast. Hopefully we will have more to come.

Anyway I will try and add more to this project as I have plans to take the DMing to another level, but will not say much about this until I know for sure what I will be doing.

Shortly after creating this page, a small group of us from the BoW/OTT community decided it would be fun to get together and do some RPGing. We mostly consiste of those that have met on the Boot camps, and realised that by doing some role playing online we could have fun gaming together without having to wait for a boot camp.

First up we started with a game of Cthulhu this was GM’d by Gerry and a great job he did too. It was a fun adventure which I believe resulted in my character causing the mayhem in the Middle East.

Subsequently we moved onto playing Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition and I jumped in as GM. This game is set in the world of Athodorian as mentioned in a previous entry

It has been a lot of fun so far and here I am going to attempt to outline roughly what has happened and the adventures to come.

The Starting Group

Bogrin – Dwarf Rogue played by Justin (screwed over the party and was exiled)

Tammy – Teifling Warlock playebd by Lina ( Retired in mourning for Tegno)

Tegno – Gnome Wizard played by Martin (deceased)

Berrian – Elf Paladin – played by Andrew (deceased)

Ragnvald – Human Barbarian played by Mick (deceased/resurrected)

Added Characters

Asvor – Elf Barbarian played by Shona appears from Chapter 2

Val – Elf Bard brother of Berrian – Played by Andrew

Ghazkull – Half-Orc (deceased) – Played by Mick

Malaxire – Aasimar Paladin – Played by Stephen

Berec – Half Elf Cleric – played by Jason

Fizzlewick – Gnome Fighter/Champion – played by Michael

Guests

Warzan – Human Barbarian appeared at the end of Chapter 1

So who lives in a world like this? We have decided that the world will be mostly made up of the following races.

Gnomes – everyone loves a cheeky chappy

Goblin’s- they will be the amusing foe

Halflings – they are the bumbling types are mainly there to cover the areas of countryside.

Ok been a while since I added to this but after some consideration I decided you go a bit bigger with the world.

The reason for this is I have started DMing another group (which I will will talk about in another post) so I have created a wider world. However I have included my Son’s map within the wider world.

So whilst I am stust getting my head around DnD 5e I decided to start things simple with my son. So I picked up a copy of Warlock of Firetop Mountain.

So after about 4 sessions of about an hour each, we completed the Warlock of Firetop Mountain.

Pros my son enjoyed it mostly, but the big con was he was not to keen on the endless corridors.

Note to self … When creating a dungeon make sure there is not too many of those. ..lol

Ok in parallel to this adventure into DnD, my gaming group has started a Tuesday night rpg group around a friends. We are playing 2 RPGs. Each has a separate GM and will be played alternative week s to give the GM time to plan.

1. Traveller – a sci-fi based game currently published by Mongoose, but has been around since 1977. All we have done so far is roll up the characters.

Mine is Called Benjamin Renzi, he was born into a Nobel family, but fell out with them after failing to get into university, joined the Space Navy and survived for a bit got a medlm for bravery before being hounded out by a jealous collegues. Has now met up with a group.

2. A light DnD type game, so far we have rolled up our character s mine is a Human Thief call Atticus Filtch. So far we have Killed some Goblins , returned a cart of Beer to a village killed more goblins found a crypt with a giant snake.  Found a gem and a riddle, stocked up on supplies signed into a ferry boat as guards and have arrived in a small mining community.

Ok so now that I have started reading through the rules and the adventure, things are starting to come back to me… This is going to be fun. I have ordered my Son his very own dice, which hopefully when he gets we can start playing.

Right before I go onto the decision I should make a little confession. I say that I played D&D and so I did however what stopped playing as two factors. My mates decided that they wanted to move onto Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, I was all for it, until I played it and really didn’t enjoy it, cannot remember why but it just was not my thing. Also we played other RPGs like TMNT and also Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay…which became one of my most beloved RPGs so D&D fell by the wayside.

So now it is 2018 I am in my early 40s I have a 9yo son who wants to get in some D&D, excellent it’s where I started in gaming. Then the realisation dawn’s on me ..how? I have no idea what has happened in the world of D&D since i was 15 or so. Do I just pick up my old books and start to play or do I look at another course of action. So I decided to ask and so posted a thread in the forums

Dungeons and Dragons – where to begin

As you can see if you read the thread I decided to order the starter set for 5th edition, which has a ready made adventure included. I found it for a £15 so cannot be bad.

Since I last played D&D there has been an amazing technological leap forward. And so in order to get my head around things and also introduce my son to things I decided to see what is out on Your Tube and sure enough there is more stuff than I could ever imagined.

But what it has done is started me thinking about how I will make this exciting for mt Son. It will therefore be  a three stage process.

1. Generating basic characters

2. Playing through a ready made adventure.

3. Start the world building

So this is what I will be exploring over the coming months.

So what I have also learned is there are free rules .? Only basic but hell I ain’t ain’t going to say no.

http://dnd.wizards.com/articles/features/basicrules

So now it’s doing some reading, and I have also asked my son to go looking on you tube at some videos. After all he watches lots of video game related stuff.

Well this project is about the journey I have decided to take with my 9 year old son Robbie into the world of Dungeons and Dragons. Unfortunately due to life circumstances my son lives with his Mum a bit of a distance away so I only get to see him on holidays.. However we do skype regularly and have been playing online games quite a lot together. However Robbie has been asking about playing D&D recently, so I said ok we would look at it as it is something we can easily play over skype.

So it has been about 30 years since I last played Dungeons and Dragons. As a teen I was quite heavily into RPG’s but D&D was the first. The version I played was the TSR 1983 set. I owned the basic set, and a friend of mine acquired the subsequent books and we had many hours playing. Mainly dungeon crawling and monster killing not so deep but hey its what we enjoyed.

Anyway over the last 30 years RPGs took that back seat to miniature based games, then girls, then miniature based games, so I have completely lost touch with what is what in the world of D&D.