Good times! Have fun!
Just to let you all know: My sister has gone home now. The game was a great success!
Not that we accomplished any objectives, mind you. The party set out on Dec. 1 (after translating the local calendar) to recover the McGuffin. They've got to get it back in time for the solstice celebration, and it's taken them about a week to get close to the Frost Drake guarding what they hope is the entrance to the depths of the Frost Maw, which is where they hope to find said McGuffin.
But we did some fighting, and a lot of role-playing, and I managed to keep almost ahead of the party in terms of developing my extemporaneous adventure. The characters all worked, is the main thing. (We had done some homebrew advanced races that were definitely powerful, but I was happy to get the lift in APL when it came to figuring out challenges for the party.) The classes were a good mix. As I was hoping, my sister picked the slayer (renamed to scout); Debnor played a bearbarian and a lore oracle; and I played the timid rat-kin hedge-witch.
As predicted, my sister picked not just a scout/slayer, but a cat-kin at that, and thanks to Julian W's advice, I had her climbing a waterfall surfaced with gold first thing, in order to get the McGuffin down for preparations for the ceremony. She fell into RPing without a hitch! (The rat-kin matriarch who sent her left out a bit of intel... The right hint of asperity tinged the respect in her voice when she reported it missing.) She also got to climb (sneakily) a great stone cairn now serving as a Shadow Drake nest, and scout out a cave that (as it turns out) was serving as the den for a pair of dire wolverines. She's about to have to scout the way through a trap-filled pass to get to the Maw. Lots of felinesque things to do, and thank you, Julian, for the suggestion.
My most stressful decision came in the last session, after one of the dire wolverines knocked the cat-kin unconscious. I froze. Normally, I'll have an intelligent nasty or even a beast ignore an unconscious foe in favor of another who's waving a sharp sword around. Well, unless their personal objective is to drag an unconscious meal away... In any case, they don't go for a kill. But I'd thrown DIRE WOLVERINES at the party. Raging dire wolverines, at that. They're crazed; they don't strategize. Now, my sister was actually quite cheerful despite getting knocked out of the fight. Noooo, she wasn't going to be so cheerful if her beautiful snow leopard PC got killed. Noooo. It took me a minute to figure out motivation for the male wolverine to turn on the bear-kin who was busily slicing up his mate rather than savage the limp figure in his claws. But I did it. Whew!
My sister mentioned after that last session that if her PC had died, that would have been that. As it is...
She's going to play over the phone!
So, thanks to you all, we not only had a great holiday with lots of fun family entertainment, I now have an on-going activity with my sister. Yay! And yes, thank you from the very bottom of my heart.
Glad it all worked out! :-D
New PCs always want to climb and hide. They're sneaky and always getting into trouble.