Getting Into D&D 5e Adventures

I was super excited Sunday morning to kick off this game.  I even pulled out an old t-shirt my wife got me when my son was born to wear as I DM’d the session (it felt very fitting). I’m super impressed with the contents of the Essential’s box and used it to set up my DM “command center” and put out the box as decor on the nearby shelf.  When my son’s friend and his friend’s dad arrived they all started talking about their characters. I had them find a suitable mini from my collection of 3rd ed minis and newer 2d standees.  My son’s friend is running a Halfling Druid and his father is running a Gnome Warlock.

My son (age 10) wanted a figure to represent his first created D&D character (the first campaign I ran for him used pre-gens).  He picked out a Human Paladin figure to represent his Fighter with a Knight background.  I was excited to paint this up for him with some new speed paints I received over Christmas.  It was great that the figure was already primed because we’ve had some very cold weather come through.  He picked out the colors and I asked him if he wanted anything on the shield.  At first he wanted an “R” to represent the character’s name, Sir Richard.  I decided to dig into some old decal slides and he decided to go with a wolf from an old Space Wolf sheet.   I was able to finish the figure the night before the first session of the campaign.

I had a set date for hosting the D&D game and I was setting up some of the terrain I wanted to use.  I realized that the windmill terrain tiles didn’t fit in well with the rest of the items I was going to put on the table.  I suddenly remembered that a friend of mine had given me a large box of foam blocks.  I glued them together to make basic walls for the windmill.  My son wandered into the room and commented that he thought they should be gray.  After the glue dried overnight, I did a quick dry brush over the walls and set them near the window to the catch the sun (hoping they’d dry before the game started that afternoon).

I decided to make some tiles to use for the windmill in the Umbrage Hill quest.

I cut some pieces off of cardboard boxes left over from the holidays and sprayed one side with black primer.  I used a glue stick to affix wrapping paper that has 1 inch grids onto the cardboard as easy reference for player movement.  I had a great time using markers we had around the house to copy the maps from the campaign book.

I decided to cut some of the extra cardboard to make the roof details.  I had some craft paints and used that to paint on some basic shingle shapes.  I glued the smaller roof pieces to the appropriate tiles and made a final tile for the top roof.

My plan for the first adventure is to have the characters meet in Phandelver.  From their, the adventurers will discover the Quest Board that will have the 3 starting missions.  Because of the geography, no matter what quest the adventurers will select they’ll have to deal with the Umbrage Hill mission due to the geography/they have to travel past it to get to the other quests.    This will help make things easier on me with prep.  I plan on using part of the Dungeons and Lasers The Elven Woods terrain, some of the ruins from the Bolt Action hamlet set, and make map tiles of the windmill.

From there I’ll let the adventurers decide if they want to attempt the Gnomengarde mission or the Dwarven Excavation.  Then I’ll have plenty of time to prep for one of those for the next session.

I ran Dragons of Stormwreck Isle for my friends and family.  We finished up the last mission earlier this month.  Next up is Dragon of Icespire Peak.  The plan is for everyone to create new characters for this campaign.  The DOSI characters will be “backups” if any of the characters die 🙂