I'm going to DM my 70-year-old dad's first D&D game

So, 35 years after my dad brought home photocopies of almost the entire original run of D&D (everything but the Blackmoor book), which must have cost him a fortune in 1979, followed by him buying me and my brother all of the books for the next few years, which likewise must have cost a fortune while we were stationed in Europe, we're finally going to play D&D with him in a week and a half, for his 70th birthday.

To make things easy, we'll be using the Beyond the Wall rules, which are streamlined and easy, while still evoking classic D&D and make character generation a game in much the way that Traveller does.

For the actual adventure, I'm going to be using the Monomyth story structure, to give even a short evening's adventure an epic feel, capped off with a Five-Room Dungeon, the Lair of the Shadow Goblin Master.

Originally, I thought my third-grade niece might be playing as well, so I wanted an adventure that was at least somewhat kid-friendly. She's unlikely to play now, but I'm keeping the hook: Goblins emerge from over the wall that a long-ago wizard forbade the villagers from crossing, lest they stir up the (mysteriously pacified) forces of a giant sorcerer-king and his rivals, a fey court. The goblins raid the village, carrying off the school teacher, and it's up to the heroes to get her back and figure out what's going on.

After a 35-year wait, it didn't seem right to scrimp, so we're using miniatures (Reaper Bones), Dungeon Tiles and some gorgeous new Chessex dice.

I've given names to the village ("Little Benby") and NPCs that might be referenced during character generation and during the adventure, but I'm otherwise keeping that fairly loose, trusting that I can use the 7-Sentence NPC system to flesh out the details that emerge from play.

The Five-Room Dungeon the group will eventually reach is a now-ruined fort created by the absent (?) sorcerer-king and features goblin mooks, a room full of mysterious magical pools (a throwback to the room from B1: In Search of the Unknown), giant spiders, a mimic replacement (because Reaper's Mockingbeast miniature is awesome, and I can lull the players into a false sense of security with other dungeon furniture miniatures before they reach that room) and, finally, a chance to either bargain with or fight an ogre boss who ought to be just at the limit of their ability to defeat.

I'm looking forward to this, even if the group just ends up being my brother and dad (which might happen).

I forgot to mention: I'm also including a soundtrack. I'll be using the Princess Bride soundtrack (minus the song with Mark Knopfler singing) for everything before they cross the wall, which has a nice fantasy feel without being too dramatic and epic, and then the Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery soundtrack once they cross the wall. That album has a very different, otherworldly feel, to emphasize the group has passed into a supernatural realm.

Be sure to give him a good, old school introduction. His character should die at least twice in the first session.

Yes! There are potential players who are still older than the oldest D&D Grognards!

That makes me feel as though I'm actually a part of the crowd -- instead of not.

Thumbs up.

That's so cool
Looking forward to the play report.

Fantastic, WB. Please let us know how it went for him.

We finally played Sunday night, the day before we transported a one year old more than 250 miles across California, which was likely the bigger adventure.

My brother, who last played 1E in the mid-1980s, surprised me with a folder of photocopied Dragon magazine articles (various monster collections, "new" spells from Gary Gygax, the anti-paladin, duelist and witch classes, etc.) that he'd been holding onto since 1982, along with a hilarious monster he'd typed up and drawn that's basically a flying incorporeal spellcasting insta-kill.

Everyone sat down together and rolled their characters together. The Beyond the Wall system has a flow chart, Traveller style, that is used to create characters and several of the fields affect other characters at the table, affecting their stats and creating a shared background. My brother was the Heir to a Legend warrior (happily with an heirloom sword that fits in nicely with the setting and dungeon I created for them), my wife was the Apprentice to a Witch mage (we tweaked one of her rolls mid-session to change her from a crop-benefiting druidic witch into one who could serve as a healer) and my dad was a Local Performer rogue (we thought it was a rogue-mage, and he was bummed to get a social-focused rogue instead of something more spellcasty, so after the session, I agreed he could remake as identically as possible, since many of the tables are shared between characters, as an Assistant Beast Keeper rogue-mage).

My theatrical skills were a little rusty, especially with my mom watching for the first few minutes, so the village portion was pretty inconsequential, only picking up once they'd crossed the titular wall and headed into the forest, looking for the goblins who'd kidnapped the local teacher. My wife wasn't used to non-CRPGs, and was baffled by the idea that her witch, whose background featured a lot of time in the woods, could track, until it was pointed out to her, but then took took it. She wasn't as good at it as a real tracker would be, but she didn't fail enough rolls to trigger a goblin ambush. The group got to see a lot of ruined giant and shadow elf constructions in the overgrown forest and spotted the location they needed to go.

I laid out the first room's worth of Dungeon Tiles as they descended into the lower levels of a ruined tower and, showing that my brother was still rusty at this point, let my unarmored father go first. (I pushed the table with gear to buy at them repeatedly, and he stocked up on lanterns, rope and a dagger, but not armor.) So, naturally, the goblin guards waiting behind the pillars in the first room peppered him with arrows, hitting him three times out of four shots and almost killing him in the very first round of combat. Oops.

My brother turned out to be kind of a badass warrior for a first-level character and my wife hexed the goblins one at a time to lower their chances of being able to hit, describing them shooting at each other, being blinded and so on.

At this point, my brother's old school muscles had either warmed up on their own, or my father's near-brush with character death did it, because my brother insisted on capturing the last goblin -- who did not speak Common, because, again, I'm rusty and didn't think to have that all worked out. But they kept him alive, bound and gagged in the first room before pushing in further.

The second room had a set of four mysterious fountains, including one portrayed by a miniature, the better to throw off suspicion for a trick later in the dungeon. They made the goblin drink one, and he died horribly (poison). Carefully tested another before, after a painfully long time, discovered it was a healing potion (which they filled their waterskins with, not realizing its magic only works once per day per person and only when taken directly from the pool) and then tried to use the fluids in the room to rehydrate the dried out fountain portrayed by the miniature. I decided to let the results be magical, although about halfway through the process, I discovered making a fake roll really freaked them out, and probably should have just done that from the beginning instead. (Told you I was rusty.) The reconstituted fountain residue gave them darkvision/infravision. (The fourth pool was just cool refreshing water.)

From there, they found a barracks (insisted upon by my six year old, when I laid out the Dungeon Tiles to plan the dungeon two weeks before), and they managed to surprise most of the four goblins there in their beds and kill them with only minimal injuries.

Returning to the pool room, they shied away from the oversized double doors (which Jenn figured out on the way out were locked anyway) and went down a side hall through another door, discovering a room full of spiderwebs. (The penalty room if they chose not to bring a lockpicking rogue.) My wife , incidentally, is not a fan of spiders and knew that those were there for her benefit. By my brother's OSR muscles kicked in again, and they threw lantern oil at the webs from the door and their ridiculous collection of 10 torches were turned into thrown flaming missiles, bringing out a large spider the size of a pony and two more the size of large dogs, which the group dispatched with relatively little effort. An evil altar miniature (again intended to throw off the scent for a later room of the dungeon) sucked up more time, as their witch detected it was magical and they put dead goblins and spiders on it, poked it with the Heir to a Legend's sword, and so on.

At that point, though, we ran of out of time, since we had three small children and a baby roaming the house, and we shut down for the night. My brother proclaimed the Beyond the Wall character creation system "pretty cool," my wife said just flinging cantrips around while saving her one big healing spell a day to be kind of unsatisfying (I warned her it was even worse under many other systems) and my dad wanted to rave about the game and plan for the next one, either with all three players together in the same dungeon (which only has two rooms to go, as currently planned) or another one if it's just him and my wife in a (probably all-dwarven) team.

Although I'm pretty good, I think, at improvisation in play-by-post, I'm going to go ahead and write out room descriptions, dialogue prompts and so on for the last two rooms, so that I don't forget my ideas the next time around. (I had gone to the trouble of tracking down goblin songs for them to sing and poisonous plants to use for goblin names, all of which were wasted.)

The miniatures (Reaper Bones, which were bolstered by two trips to game shops in Berkeley) worked great, but Dungeon Tiles take up a lot of room and aren't terribly flexible. I planned ahead and had the tiles for the dungeon in a single baggie ahead of time, but I probably should have had baggies by room, to make setting up each as they got to it quicker. I may end up going with a Chessex battlemat and wet-erase pens after this dungeon is finished.

Oh, and next time, I'm going to swear my six year old to silence, since he announced that the boss of the dungeon was an ogre, before play even started. (He watched, fascinated, as I originally set it up during the planning period.) I may end up changing the next room's inhabitants or just chalk it up as a life lesson.

But most importantly, my dad, after 35 years (!) of waiting to play D&D, had a ball, and had a million ideas for next time, suggestions and so on.

The kids -- two six year olds and an eight year old -- each peered over the edge of the table and announced they wanted to play in the future, and one of the six year olds helped draw the village map at the beginning (something else generated during the character creation process).

That is pretty cool!

It's a great feeling when they not only say, "I enjoyed it," but "next time, let's do this..." Sounds fantastic, WB.