Wow – time has flown, between my work and school holidays I have completely missed a month. Well, you get what you pay for.
This time I have got Alpha (Girl, 9 yrs) to do the introductory Solo adventure that comes as a tutorial in the Basic D&D (Mentzer, 1983) Players Manual. This is a great idea as it mixes the “doing” in with the “reading”, breaking the monotony of trying to remember a bunch of rules all at once.
The Adventure is split into 2 parts. The first, introductory part introduces new concepts (such as your character sheet, hit-points, saving throws, character classes and alignment etc.) one-by-one as the adventurer requires them. You are led through a basic cave crawl where you fight a goblin (with a very stripped down version of combat), meet a good cleric and an evil mage (curse you Bargle!). There are 2 possible endings for this part of the adventure, depending on a saving throw against Bargles magic.
After completing the first part, you are given some deeper background on alignment,adjustments, the character sheet, combat, money and treasure, saving throw, special abilities. This lasts for four pages, before you are launched into the second (and main) solo adventure.
This adventure starts in town at the smithy, then takes you through more battle information before leading you back to into the caves. At this point it becomes a “choose your own adventure” style game. Here as an example is the first block of text:
1 The room you are in is fifty feet square, with 10’ wide exits in the middle of the north, south, east, and west walls. The ceiling of the room is 15’ up, but the corridors are only 10’ tall. The walls, floor, and ceiling are made of rough rock. There are some cracks and crevices in the rock walls, all very small. Standing in the exact center of the room is a stone statue of a woman in armor. You examine it carefully, and finally even touch it – but it is merely a statue, nothing magical or special.
You have entered this 50’ square room by the southern corridor, which leads out to fresh air and sunlight. The other corridors are dark. The light from your lamp helps, but shadows linger in the corners of this large room. Do you want to:
Stop and Listen? Read 42
Search the room? Read 57
Go down a corridor? Read 58
From here you just need to choose options and read the related text through to the completion of the adventure.
So How did Alpha cope? Great. At the end of the first adventure she was keen to continue on, but I needed to leave it for another day, and another post. And I still have to get Beta and/or some of the neighbourhood kids up to speed…
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