Back in The DM's Seat Again

It's been a while but I finally have a regular RPG session again. Surprisingly, this one is with my own family.

With my daughters now 13 and 9 and still interested in gaming, and with a gamer wife it's too good an opportunity to pass up.

I have been trying to get such a game going for a while now, but with the end of summer, the beginning of school and life in general it's been hard to pin everyone down. In fact, it was so hectic a start, that I even hesitated to blog about it until I could see that it really was happening. In the end, I was finally able to get characters made and the game going.

My wife and youngest daughter both made dwarfs, Gerta and Halfa. My wife is playing a fighter and my 9yr old is playing a cleric. She wanted a spell-caster but I was afraid a magic-user would be a little too stand around for her to keep her interested. Clerics are bashy and have magic and so it was the obvious choice without the fiddly neutrality of Druids or the wait for it nature of Ranger or Paladin magic. Don't get me started on Bards.

My oldest wanted to play something different and asked if she could play a "kitty person". I took this as a challenge and created an exotic race of cat-folk that live on an island in the remnants of their once mighty civilization - the Shathra. I worked out a culture, back story and even dredged up some cool art online to illustrate them. I wrote them up from scratch, no re-skinning and ultimately....

They were kitty-people...

Such is the world of RPGs with teenage girls, I suppose. She made the character a fighter as well and so we set out with two fighters and a cleric, none of which are humans.

So far the sessions, of which there have been three, are going really well. We have integrated them as the climax of our regular "Screen-Free Sundays" as a reward for surviving all day without TVs, video games, or even computers. The girls have a knack for gaming which is mostly my oldest girl's doing as she has been running her own light weight D&D/Labyrinth Lord games for over a year now. For both of them, this is their first time playing in a "serious" campaign.

They are still in the middle of the first adventure but have already had a few surprising role-plays and some good ideas come out of it. I have even had to edit the original adventure concept to go along with a few good ideas, the girls had, that I felt deserved capitalizing on. This has lengthened the adventure beyond where I had originally written it but will also allow them to gather some more X.P. before adventure number two.

-Eli