Humblewood Session 01

Last weekend I decided to try the Humblewood D&D campaign setting with the kids. For the past year (give or take) we’ve had a lot of fun playing DnD Adventure Club campaigns. Our one major foray in to regular D&D, Dragons of Stormreck Isle, was a failure. I think there were a few reasons for that. First of all, I was fairly new to DMing and so probably not doing as good of a job as I am a year-ish later. Second, since it was a campaign meant to introduce people to both playing and DMing, it came with pre-made characters. I think that meant the kids had less of an attachment to the characters. Also, the session went very slowly as I had to go back and forth through the player handbook, monster manual, and campaign sheet to look up spells, monsters, etc.

I came across Humblewood recently and thought the kids might like the setting. Humblewood takes place in a world where some species of birds and other woodland creatures are human-sized and intelligent. When the Humblewood book arrived, I gave it to the kids and told them to stay away from the DM chapter. They looked through the species and decided what they wanted to play as. It was pretty funny that Sam usually plays a dwarf in DnD Adventure Club and he ended up choosing a strig in Humblewood; the dwarf equivalent in the Humblewood species. The header image for this post is Sam’s drawing of his character for his character sheet.

To avoid the issues we had with combat going too slowly with “real” D&D, I decided to do a hybrid between digital and physical. We created the characters on DnD Beyond and I printed out those sheets for the kids to use to fill out the Humblewood character sheets. In addition to helping us make the characters without having to look up too much, it allowed me to use DnD Beyond encounter creator to create all the encounters. This sped things up by handling initiative tracking for me and automatically surfacing the monster’s stat blocks. I also used DnD Beyond’s map feature for the big battles so that the kids could see where they were in relation those they were battling. To keep things moving even more quickly, I used 2 laptops - one had the story and map and the other had the encounter builder. (I would REALLY love to see DnD Beyond unify these tools)

The kids and I had a blast and they can’t wait to play the next session. The highlight moment was when the kids went to a Tavern. Sam is a strig (owl), Stella is a mapach (racoon), and Scarlett is a jerbeen (mouse). When I had the tavern waitress come take their orders, Sam ordered fried jerbeen. I don’t know if he was trying to be funny or just going with the fact that real life owls eat mice, but it was a hilarious moment within the game. Scarlett illustrated the moment here:

• DM
• DnD
• D&D
• Hit-Point-Press
• Humblewood