Prelude to smashing monsters and gathering coins (and maybe even rescuing a princess)

We had a little fun last night creating the characters that my wife will play in her first D&D game.

I asked her if we had any note cards to use as character cards. I was expecting plain old index cards, but she dug around in her craft closet and found this fancy stationary. Excellent!

Instead of rolling up stats as usual, we did things a little different. I randomly choose four of the pre-rolled character stat lines listed in the B3 module. These characters were all ready to go with weapons, armor, and spells. All we needed to do was name them. Of course, we randomly generated the names using the Treasury of Archaic Names.

The results:
Veva Cateris - Elf
Representing the Blue Guardian Inn
Her cute freckles beguile extraordinary strength.


Eldon Garner - Fighter
Representing the Huntsman & Keys Roadhouse
His unique laughter has earned him the nickname "Quack".


Maira Striker - Hobbit
Representing the Big Black Brook Lodge
Her friends call her "Plucky" for obvious reasons. Don't let the revealing bodice fool you...there is chain mail underneath!


Aarl Whells - Cleric
Representing the Scribe & Scorpion Club
The bristly "Grizz" one possesses great wisdom.

Each character has a color-matched d20 and a damage die to expedite batch combat rolls in the dice boot-tower.

My wife had so much fun rolling the random names that she didn't want to stop. The dice tower is that exciting, let me tell ya. I explained that there will be more character generation in the future because the game is kinda like Super Mario Bros in that when a character dies, you can make another character to play with.

"Kinda like 1-Ups?"

"Uh...yeah...like that."

Das Boot!

I finished building this "dice boot" last night. Drop the dice down the hole at top...

...and they rattle down into the box at the bottom.

I tried to give it a twisted wizard's tower appearance:

The twisted wizard:

You show me yours, and I'll show you mine

During holiday gatherings, my wife's family plays mahjong for money until late at night, the noisy "shuffling" of the tiles keeping me awake as I lie in bed. It's similar to rummy, but with many special rules and exceptions that I never totally grasped. A few weeks ago, my wife taught me how to play. So now I know the basics, but it will take some practice to learn effective strategies. At some point during her lesson, I suggested that I'll teach her to play Dungeons & Dragons. She didn't reject the idea outright, so I'll assume she's really excited about it.

Designing D&D adventures from scratch for her to play is something I'd like to do eventually, but for her first (and hopefully not last) game I think I'll use a published adventure module. I have a humble collection of them on my bookshelf and hard drive, and they are there to be used. After considering a few, I've chosen B3 Palace of the Silver Princess, published by TSR in 1981. For several reasons:

• The most obvious reason is because parts of the module were clearly designed to appeal to women, at least more so than most modules it seems. This isn't thee major reason I chose this module, but it's worth pointing out. What kind of woman wouldn't want to find a treasure of bath oils and luxurious towels?
• It has a short, programmed beginning to the adventure, somewhat like a choose-your-path story. It's an easy way to teach newcomers some basic dungeon-exploring techniques and introduce game mechanics.
• It's set in a castle. My wife has little to no interest in the fantasy genre, bus she loves castles.
• It has a story. Not a complicated or restricting story, but just enough to give plausibility to the environment and motivation to the characters. I feel my wife would appreciate this more than she would a raw quest of carnage and plunder.
  

I'll be using the green-cover version of B3, not the censored/recalled orange-cover version. Read about, download, or purchase the orange version.

There are some things I like about the orange version, such as the maps, but there are several reasons why I won't be using this version with my wife:

• It has some supremely grotesque scenes that my wife would not appreciate. I'd have great fun presenting the lair of Deranged Travis to other players tho.
  
• It doesn't have the programmed introduction. Instead, it has a map and description of a wilderness campaign setting. It's a nice little setting with a great map, but the programmed introduction has more value to me for how I'll be using the module at this time.
• Way too many secret doors and false doors for my tastes. I believe I counted 20 secret doors and 10 false doors on the two map levels. They give the castle a nice mystery madhouse atmosphere, but I like beginning adventures to be a little more forgiving. The green version mostly just converts all of these into regular doors.
• Its story is more just background and not really integrated with the characters and castle the way it is in the green version

Hopefully, we'll get this game underway some lazy Saturday evening in the near future. Hopefully, she'll enjoy it. If not, no big deal...it's just a game...we all have one.