This weekend we finished The Wild Trilogy from DnD Adventure Club. The first challenge involved sneaking around an Owlbear. The kids asked about their options and I noted that in addition to sneaking, they could try and distract it. Sam’s dwarf, Grumpy McGrumbles, has a cooking hobby, so he took hits pots and pans and made a bunch of noise so that the Owlbear would follow him around the camp.

After that there was a mini “dungeon” crawl in the basement beneath a wizard’s tower. The girls finally started to get the hang of investigating chambers rather than blindly setting off traps.

I’ve written a lot about DnD Adventure Club, including my last two posts. Today while I was looking at the Pathfinder Humble Bundle, I went to the Pathfinder website to see if they had a page listing differences (since Pathfinder started as a fork of D&D 3.5). I found this page - Adventure Paths. It looks like they’re doing the same thing as DnD Adventure Club, except in Pathfinder 2e and without a kid focus. Also, it seems like each trilogy is building to a larger story (like Buffy the Vampire Slayer with its villain of the season, but also overarching story). It makes me wish that Wizards of the Coast (the Hasbro subsidiary that runs D&D) would do something similar - or if a 3rd party creator did it that it would be tightly coupled to D&D beyond. One advantage of WotC doing the mini-adventures is that they could use them to highlight different aspects of the mechanics or classes. I love that DnD Adventure Club comes with a new character each month with some example backstories. It really helps demonstrate the different races and classes. Also, upon further examination of the Pathfinder adventures I saw that each trilogy is written by a different person (creating opportunities to showcase new writers) and that (at least the one I clicked on) is tied to a campaign setting book. This is SO smart from a marketing point of view. “If you enjoyed your little trilogy in this corner of our world, you might enjoy learning more about it…” Yeah, WoTC should DEFINITELY look into this.

Scarlett was inspired by my previous post and made an animatic-style drawing of some of her favorite moments from the campaign.

The top panel is the party questioning the guards. (The ninja-looking character is Sasha, the character that Scarlett plays)

The next panel is Grumpy using intimidation to question a gnoll. The middle panel is the throwing of gnolls I referenced in my previous post. The last panel on that row depicts the characters examining someone who was shot mid-exposition.

I was DMing the first third of a DnD Adventure Club campaign for my kids today. My son likes to mostly play as Grumpy Mcgrumbles, a dwarven fighter. The kids were attacked by a group of Gnolls. Normally, most of the time, the kids play pretty straightforwardly although they are starting to get more creative. My son decided that since he’s a strong dwarf, he wanted to pick up the Gnolls and throw them into the river or into each other. I wanted to encourage the creativity, so I had him do an athletics check. Between his +7 and a series of lucky rolls, he ends up almost always successfully tossing the Gnolls and the kids and I erupted into fits of laughter as the battle became more and more chaotic. It was even funnier when he finally had a bad roll and so he just picked up the Gnoll and dropped him at his feet.

I’ve been backing a few different D&D 5e adventures on kickstarter, but the one I’m most excited about getting fulfillment on is Obojima: Tales from the Tall Grass. It’s so freakin’ beautiful that I had to hold myself back from getting the package that came with everything. But I’m not the only one excited bout it, I also read this article about it in Wired today. One of the points they make in the article is about how gamers and readers are moving away from Grimdark because there’s already enough of this in the world:

Two years ago, while spending time with my brothers, I played Dungeons and Dragons for the first time ever. David had been introduced to D&D by a coworker during COVID. Tony and Alex apparently had played in high school. I’m not sure when David’s wife started playing, but she joined us that night, too. David played the role of DM and selected a one-off campaign. I had a blast and couldn’t believe that I’d somehow gone most of my life without ever having had someone convince me to play. Incidentally, in our campaign, we accidentally murdered Santa Claus. Ask me about it some time.