D&D introduction for women playtest and actual session recap

After kicking around multiple ideas on the intro to D&D for women adventure, I finally settled on sticking to something a bit more traditional. In other words, I didn't want to take a lot of time on things that may not be a likely D&D adventure they would play with someone else. So I came up with a clever way to sort of introduce various mechanics and rules while also making it into a traditional style adventure.

For four years, I ran a D&D campaign for a group of friends that centered around the establishment of a small hamlet on the frontier that would be used as a buffer against human barbarians and orcs. I had a lot of details on the town like what types of people lived there, the military and town guard, the government, the holidays and festivals, the diplomatic relations with other cities, and maps. In other words, I had all the source material I needed to keep a group busy.

I picked one of the unique festivals to serve as the focus for the adventure - the Hog Run festival. This town named Om Hamlet (silly, but fitting) used boars for both food and for defense. Being almost entirely inhabited by gnomes, the cavalry required pretty short mounts, and so they domesticated wild boars and taught them to be ridden in battle. The festival celebrates the role of the boar as both a food source and a protector of the village. There is a running of the hogs similar to the running of the bulls in Pamplona as well as dueling, archery, and other competitions.

So I had all the details of the setting that I wanted to have which meant I needed plot devices. I started out by creating PCs that were all sisters in the same family. The five sisters includes ages from 23 to two 19-year old twins, and they all had gone into various adventuring classes for their own individual reasons. One of them became a cleric of the water god after their riverside village had been attacked by a giant water monster. Another one had become a mercenary who fought to protect the village or anyone else who would hire her. Each one had a short bio on their character sheet along with any interesting relationships with the other sisters. To begin the plot, the sisters had all been asked to come back home to visit their parents before the twins moved out on their own. They would be traveling to the Hog Run festival to take a gift to the lords of Om who had helped the village in times of need previously.

The first part of the adventure had the sisters given some freedom to get to know the town, meet the townsfolk in the pub, and see what types of things they could find out. In the test run, the players went and spent their time in the pub causing mischief. They picked on each other like sisters would while a couple of them acted a bit loner and did their own thing. One of them was portrayed by my mother-in-law, and she tucked her hair under her hat and also rubbed some dirt on her face to make the men in the pub think she was a man. It was an issue I hadn't thought about, but it was a very interesting action. During the GenCon session, they talked to people in the pub to find out what the town was like, visited the main guard tower to see how the village had been built with a magical firefighting device, and talked with the guards about the town's history.

During the next day, the festival started and everyone got a chance to see what would happen. While they did not spend significant time taking part in the festivities, they got to enjoy watching a bit. The sister who had disguised herself as a man the night before fought in the duels and almost managed to defeat the fighter she had been trash-talking the night before. The characters were then given a plot hook about some children that were missing out in the hills where they had wandered and gotten lost.

Both the playtest group and the GenCon group made their way through the dungeon where the children had been captured by orcs. However, they both did it differently. One set made quite a racket and had to fight orcs that were waiting for them. They also almost let the leader escape since he had been forewarned by their noise, but some good dice rolling helped them kill him as he invisibly tried to sneak passed them. In the GenCon session, they were very quiet and sneaking around the dungeon. In the two combats they had, they manged to surprise the orcs and kill, Sleep, or otherwise knock them unconscious before they could react. The most interesting event was when they finished interrogating one of the orcs, they just cut his throat. And some people say women don't like violence!

The two women in the playtest and all three women in the GenCon session were new to D&D, and they all said they had fun and would like to play it again. It was a good time, and it made me think that I should run a D&D intro session every time I get a chance.