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Some of you may remember the story of how my 6-year-old played Pathfinder. Well, he hasn't stopped yet. Sometimes, when my father came for a visit, my son had him read a few parts of the Core Rulebook, and got him interested. So when we decided to start a new campaign, we invited my father to join us. He started playing a halfling bard, and when that character died in the final battle of the first adventure, he decided he'd be happier with a human fighter, whom he's played ever since.
I wanted to run a couple of old D&D modules in this campaign, but in an effort to make this look as Paizo-ish as possible, I got a PFRPG GM's screen. I already had a couple of Bestiary Boxes for monsters, but the Beginner Box gave only a few choices for PC figures. My father repeatedly complained about that. He kept saying "When will you get more pawns, already?" So when his halfling character died, I got an NPC Codex Box in time to give him a big selection for his fighter character. When I told him that, he looked awkward, and muttered "Oh, you didn't have to get that", and without even LOOKING in the NPC Codex Box, just chose the Valeros pawn from the Beginner Box. Go figger.
But he's been having fun and doing well in this campaign, for the most part. He participates, and he role-plays in character at some of the times when I least expect it.
My "default" campaign world is Golarion, but this time around, I surprised my son by announcing that this campaign would be set in the Grand Duchy of Karameikos, for a reason I kept secret at first.
Long ago, I had learned the hard way to start beginning players not with an ambitious, long-term campaign, but with a simple dungeon crawl. So I ran "King's Festival". Then I ran "The Sunless Citadel" just to level the characters up before I got to the big one.
Well, I don't mean to pooh-pooh "The Sunless Citadel". It IS my all-time favorite introductory module, so I felt like I was really accomplishing something by writing up a PFRPG conversion. I don't run D&D modules in PFRPG "on the fly". And for something as special as "Sunless", I didn't want to take a lot of shortcuts. I statted up all the NPCs, staying as true to the original stat blocks, and to PFRPG, as I could. For other adventures, I might have just grabbed some handy stat blocks from the NPC Codex, or something, but I just couldn't bear to treat "Sunless" so dismissively. I even statted up Erky Timbers! (Well, I did copy the gear from the NPC Codex to get Sharwyn's treasure.)
But when the party finished "Sunless", I felt it was ready for the adventure I REALLY wanted to run. I had been waiting for five years for this moment. I had chosen the setting because of this module. Now I could finally run "Night's Dark Terror".
And I could run it the way I wanted to. Upon seeing the...
See, that's the nifty thing about starting at first level. One of my earlier players started his first campaign at 5th level, and didn't realize what he had until he had to start his next D&D Campaign at level 1. Now my father understood how the challenges of a Pathfinder adventure could be deadly to ordinary mortals. Now he could truly appreciate that his PC and his party weren't just run-of-the-mill people, but HEROES!
Anyway, we've been sticking with the campaign for a long time now. We're now on 5th level, and we just entered...
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Everybody's gotta start somewhere to whet their whistle for gaming. Well done. :D
Heck, my Dad played D&D with us. OD&D. He might have been the oldest player at that point in time.
Thanks Aaron, nice post! We need more positive posts like this.
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My gaming group, while mostly unrelated, runs from early 20s to late 60s.
So you're working cultural-transmission-of-RPGs into future and previous generations? Well done, sir! I could never get my parents to play; however much they might have enjoyed science fiction et al, I think they just conceived of it as a kiddie game. :(
This is awesome. :)
Fantastic story Aaron.
My brother and I managed to get my dad to play a one-shot Boot Hill-esque home-brewed system in the early 80's. Maybe that was why he relented, being born in 1933 and a former US Navy Lieutenant he was a little unfamiliar with Tolkien/fantasy tropes. Wild West? Sure.
He played "Black Bart", a rough outlaw pardner'd with my brother's couple of erstwhile cowpokes. Raised in Australia, we only knew the WIld West from Battle comics, Lone Ranger and John Wayne/50's movies. But my Dad really engaged. We never did it again, but it seemed enough.
Now to get my mum to play RPGs with my nieces and nephews - she's extremely pop-culture savvy, reads everything sic-fi, post-apoc, fantasy. Huh. But she is a human cyclone and likely wouldn't sit still long enough.
I love this story. Three generations of gamers at the same table :D
Also because of the Mystara references ;) I'm still working on one day running an online Mystara campaign using the PF rules, just waiting until the VTT software I'm using for it is... um... written :)
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Thanks, everyone.
I think my Dad's main motivation for playing is to spend quality time with his grandson, but he often shows signs of having fun with it.
Just hearing the dad had said, "well, that's it - we're dead" made me laugh pretty hard...awesome stuff.
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Whew!
After more than a year of playing "Night's Dark Terror", we finally finished it.
Again, it might not seem like a big deal to those of you who have played through, say, entire APs, but this is the most ambitious adventure I've ever finished. I've never spent more than 8 months on a single adventure before in my life.
Just my BECMI-to-PFRPG conversion notes for this module came to 28 pages! To me, this is big.
For some time now, my son, now 9 years old, has had better mastery of PFRPG than I have. He frequently answers my rules questions, or finds rules in the book far more quickly than I could.
And though not an avid gamer himself, my father stuck with it for the duration of the campaign. The two introductory adventures took about 6 months, combined, so that's over a year and a half.
It's been quite a trip.
Unfortunately, for the last several months, I've felt tired of tabletop RPGs. Only two things kept me running the campaign: my son was having fun, and I needed to know how the adventure would end.
I mean, I had been wondering how it would end for over 5 years. It might be another 5 years before I got my next chance. Really, the moment I realized I could run that module, my first thought was "How will I run that last chapter?" I kept obsessing over the question before the obvious thought occurred to me: "I need to START this adventure! I should be thinking about how to run the FIRST chapter! Heck, I probably won't even get up to the last part!"
But of course, I was wrong about that. And there were many fascinating aspects to the adventure before the last chapter.
One of the BBEGs in the module, a wizard working for the Iron Ring named Golthar, got some clues to suggest that a great treasure was hidden in a lost valley. After the adventure began, the Iron Ring captured the guy who had hired the PCs, an ex-adventurer named Stephan, and Golthar interrogated him about the location of the lost valley, unwittingly giving STEPHAN a clue about the matter.
About halfway through the adventure, the PCs battled Golthar and rescued Stephan, whose old taste for adventure got reawakened. The module intended for Golthar to escape... but when I ran the module, he didn't! Golthar blew a hole in the wall of his tower and flew away, so the PCs attacked him and reduced him to negative hit points. The party hoped to take him alive for questioning, but although the damage itself didn't quite kill Golthar, the fall did.
Stephan then asked the PCs to accompany him to the lost valley. Meanwhile, Karllag, another wizard who was a member of the Iron Ring and a friend of Golthar, went after the PCs for revenge. He tried to force a confrontation with the party, which - wisely, in my opinion - declined to take the bait, and ran off in the direction of the lost valley. So Karllag went after them.
The last chapter had the PCs find the lost valley of Hutaaka, with two warring factions: the short, bald, giant-lizard riding Traldar, and the jackal-headed humanoid Hutaakans. Both factions were Neutral. Both had some good points and bad points. Both would tell half-truths to the PCs, putting their own side in a good light in an effort to convince the party to help them.
One big point of suspense for the GM is: which side would the PCs choose? And what would be the consequences?
Now I know. The PCs sided with the Traldar and attacked the Hutaakans. The Traldar even told the PCs that their spy reported a wizard fitting Karllag's description helping the Hutaakans. At one point, after going on a mission to disrupt a Hutaakan ritual and chasing them off, the PCs intended to return to the Traldar...
....but then my son surprised my father and myself by saying that he wanted to follow the Hutaakans. It changed the whole course of the adventure! The Hutaakans sent a messenger to the party and posed the Hutaakans in a positive light. Whom would the players believe? After some thought, they decided that both sides were basically good, and that the whole conflict was due to a series of misunderstandings. (Apparently, the players forgot the Traldar's warning that Karllag was helping the Hutaakans.) They tried to negotiate a peace treaty, or at least a cease-fire.
I said "No way is that going to work!"
My son tried anyway, and to my surprise, he came up with a convincing, reasonable argument, persuading the Traldar to refrain from attacking long enough to let the Hutaakans perform a ritual to put the undead to rest.
In fact, the ritual was real. It truly did kill much of the undead of the valley... but the Hutaakan high priest didn't see fit to mention to the PCs that she was responsible for SOME of the undead in the valley, and had been sending them to attack the Traldar!
Upon exploring the old temple where the ritual had taken place, the PCs finally - after seeking it for many months of real time - found the hidden treasure. It was a big deal, as the party's wealth had been far behind their level. (They had managed to miss a lot of loot before, due to their tendency to neglect exploring dungeons thoroughly.) After all that time searching for that treasure, Stephan got to enjoy the fruits of his labor...
...for an entire night, before he got killed in combat.
You see, the Hutaakans and Traldar both wanted that treasure, and attacked the party to get it. In the case of the Hutaakans, their high priest was aided by 16 zombies she controlled, and by Karllag. And Stephan got the worst of it. R.I.P.
But all the members of the party itself survived, took giant lizard mounts from the Traldar who had attacked them, and headed out of the valley.
Under other circumstances, I might have run the ride back to civilization, complete with encounters on the way, but by this time, even my son was getting tired of this campaign (or of his own PCs at least). In the unlikely event I ever want to continue this campaign, I might even start the next adventure BEFORE the PCs make it back to civilization, so I ended right there, with the PCs riding off into the sunset. That's the way a movie might end, so why not a campaign?
Now I feel the need for an indefinite break from GMing. If I do go back to tabletop fantasy RPGs, it will almost certainly use a different setting, probably Golarion. I DID take a liking to "Conquest of Bloodsworn Vale"...
Killed your dad's character on session 1? Jeez! I did the same thing to my teacher in sixth grade.
Not session 1. Adventure 1. And for that matter, it was fighting the final boss of the adventure, months after we had started. The PCs had all leveled up by that time.
Ah. Very good then.