D&D, The Teen Paradigm

Posted On March 10, 2015

My now fifteen year old son showed me the notes that he’s drafting for the D&D campaign he is running for his friends.  It’s an interesting glimpse into one creative solution designed by a player who has played the game for years, but has never cracked open a module.  He had no model on which to build, so he just sat down and started making notes in a very visual manner.  You’ll have to click to make these readable.

This is the start of the campaign.  The players are tasked with helping a large city defend itself against a besieging orcish army. The double lines are the city’s inner and outer walls. The king has been duped by an evil mage, and there’s a dragon riding hero in the mix too.  Evidence that the king’s adviser is a traitor is scattered about; hopefully the players aren’t expected to find them all, but that they represent different ways to learn the truth and confront the evil mage.

The mech powered by the oblisk (sic) in the lower right hand corner ties into the second part of the campaign…

I don’t know the full details here.  There are pieces of the oblisk scattered about, so there’s your fetch quest.  Now we learn the evil mage from part one was serving a lich undead boss.  It looks to me like an evil lich is supplying the drow – commanded by driders (a departure from canon already, thumbs up).  There are potential allies up above that spooky magic fog in the form of a dwarf fortress.

When I asked him about the details, he said these two pages give him everything he needs to fill those in.  He doesn’t know what the players are going to do, so he just wrote down a bunch of stuff to help him remember the important bigs.  (“You mean those are all mnemonics?”  “Is that what those are called?”).  As for stats…he figures all he needs is a spell list for the casters, and he can make the rest up as he goes.

Harry Chapin put it best…