Children are expensive. They are also obnoxious, frequently dirty, smelly and time consuming, but that’s a whole other series of blog posts. An article about one couple not spending any money on their kids for a year got me wondering how I could introduce my children to D&D for free – or at least on a tiny budget. Surprisingly there is actually a lot of alternatives to coughing up the big bucks for rule books, miniatures, modules and maps. Using the resources in this series of articles you should be able to get up and running for less than $20.
Background: I have two children: An 8 year old girl (I’ll call her Alpha) and a 6 year old boy (Beta – although Beater might be more appropriate). I had some experience of D&D from the BASIC/EXPERT/1st Edition AD&D days, but had never been a DM. Before forking out a lot of cash, I wanted a quick, easy, free way to introduce them to the D&D multiverse. If they showed any interest we could build up to something bigger.
Thankfully Wizards of the Coast (who apparently bought TSR during that 25 years I wasn’t looking) have a free adventure called Heroes of Hesiod which comes in the form of a downloadable PDF. Print out the book, cut out the hero/monster cards and tokens (for use on the map) and grab some dice, preferably a normal six sided dice, and a twenty sided dice or d20. If you don’t have a d20, the game makes allowances for you to use three six-sided dice instead.
The game itself only lasts about 30 minutes (although the first one may be a little longer until you get the hang of it). It is designed for 5 or 6 players, and luckily we had a few of the neighbourhood kids hanging around when it was time to play. If you have less players, it might be a good idea to leave one or two of the monsters out.
The game itself is an extremely simplified version of D&D. The “map” is a rectangular dungeon with a few obstacles (rocks and barrels) strewn around. There are also four cages, each containing a monster, which the DM releases over the course of the game. If a player dies, the DM brings them back to life. Once the monsters are all defeated each of the heroes receives a badge with their characters name on it (which is also included in the PDF).
Overall the kids had a good time with Heroes of Hesiod, although Beta’s attention started to wane by the end.
There is not a huge amount of replay value, but it is relatively trivial to come up with some new monsters and/or heroes to mix things up a bit (there’s not a whole bunch of stats to roll up). I made up a few extra adventurers and monsters, and a fancier map using some of the free resources over at Drive Thru RPG.
I already had a set of polyhedral dice, but for those of you don’t you could invest in some standard D&D sets of 7 dice (D4, D6, D8, D10, D10 (tens), D12 and D20. These can be purchased all over the internet. Here is a few dealers worth trying:
- WarPuppy – Only ships within Australia. Nice Ch://www.wizards.com/dnd/dice/dice.htmessex brand sets starting from AU$8.50 + about AU$7 postage. I’ve always had great service from them.
- EM4Miniatures – UK Based, but has reasonable overseas shipping rates. TWO sets of 7 poly-dice including shipping cost me about AU$16.50 in total. Also sells stands for paper miniatures that I will be discussing in a later instalment. I’ve also had surprisingly prompt service from these guys.
- Milsims Games – Have quite a range starting at AU$4.50 including the beautiful but expensive Q Workshops dice. Shipping is AU$7.50
- Or, you could just find your local games store (if you are lucky enough to have one). Damned if I can find anyone selling this stuff around me.
(Note: Prices above were as of 7th Feb 2013)
If you don’t want to purchase dice, there are also free dungeon master programs (or web sites) to roll dice on your computer or smart phone. Below is a one line Perl program to roll a 20 sided dice. This will work out of the box on Linux systems (you like D&D, so you must be using Linux, right?). If your using some inferior operating system you might need to install the Free community edition of ActivePerl first.
perl -e 'print int(rand(20)+1)."\n"'
Change the number 20 to the number of sided dice you want to roll. Now that’s cheap!
Well, that’s all for this time!. If you have any feedback or comments, feel free to create an account, and I will do my best to reply. Note: You have my solemn promise never to sell or otherwise disclose your email address or other details to spammers or anyone else short of being presented with a warrant from a law enforcement agency. If I break this vow, may every player character in every adventure henceforth have a true neutral alignment:-(
Cheerio until next month!
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