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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cerebral Paladin" data-source="post: 5432404" data-attributes="member: 3448">Deforch and the Crystal Sword (Adventure 6)Thanks, Black Cat!  It's been an enormously fun, sometimes baffling experience. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Now, on with the story...-------Early last week, my son mentioned that he wanted to play a Dungeons and Dragons game.  He said that the adventure would be about Deforch finding a crystal sword.  There wasn't any time that day for us to play, but I thought that it was a perfectly good concept for a game.  So yesterday, we sat down to play Deforch and the Crystal Sword.  The other relevant design consideration was that my son really likes my displacer beast mini.  He calls it "Slingie," and he said that he wanted Slingie to be in an adventure.  He said that many people are scared of Slingie, because they think that displacer beasts are mean, but that Slingie is actually really nice.  (Incidentally, hearing a four-year-old stumbling through the phrase "displacer beast" is amazingly cute.)  I wanted to put that in the game as well.I started off by saying that people were getting very nervous at Deforch's family's castle and that he could hear guards running to the gates, saying that a monster was coming.  Deforch went to see what the matter was, and he saw that his friend Slingie was walking towards the castle's gate.  Deforch reassured the guards and went out to meet his friend.Slingie greeted Deforch and said that he needed help.  At this point, my son cut in and began speaking as Slingie.  "Deforch, all of the people in the castle think that I'm mean and nasty because I'm a displacer beast.  It makes me sad that they won't be my friends even though I'm nice."  My son then switched over to speaking as Deforch and said, "Don't worry, Slingie.  I'll come with you to talk to them and to tell them that you're actually really nice."  So Deforch spoke to the guards and introduced them to Slingie, and they became friends.I then went back to trying to advance my idea of the plot.  Slingie thanked Deforch for helping him become friends with other people, and then said that many of his friends had gotten very sick and could only be cured by going back to their homeland.  Going back to their homeland would require a magical journey that was only possible with the Crystal Sword--but only a human can recover the Crystal Sword, so Slingie needed Deforch's help.Deforch was happy to set off on the adventure with Slingie and Freezie (Deforch's silver dragon friend).  They traveled to the location of the gold-roofed cave (my son's description) that contained the Crystal Sword.  My son said that there was a heavy stone blocking the entrance, but that Slingie could roll it aside with his tentacles because displacer beasts are really good at rolling stones.  So that got them into the cave.As they entered the cave, a group of skeletons emerged from the walls of the cave and began attacking them.  Beyond the skeletons, they could see the Crystal Sword.  (Incidentally, I used the Excalibur mini from Shadows over Camelot to represent the sword.  My son was very excited by this.  "I didn't know that we could use things from other games to play Dungeons and Dragons!  Oooooo.")Deforch won initiative and rushed forward.  He destroyed three of the skeletons with his Dire Wolverine Strike, and then Slingie destroyed another.  Freezie rushed forward and breathed on the two remaining skeletons, but he only destroyed one of them.  At that point, the remaining skeleton struck Freezie... and another five skeletons formed at the wall.  Deforch finished off the last of the original skeletons, and the second wave began to engage.  As they destroyed a few more of the skeletons, yet more skeletons came out of the wall.  Deforch and his friends had light wounds, but they still weren't making headway, as the skeletons kept coming.  Freezie said that he thought that the skeletons would keep attacking until Deforch reached the Crystal Sword.  So Deforch ran over to the sword and grabbed it.When Deforch touched the sword, there was a brilliant, almost blinding flash of light.  As his vision cleared, Deforch realized that he was in a totally new space.  As I drew the map, my son looked at it and said, "this is shaped like a sword!"  Which was completely correct:  Deforch was inside the Crystal Sword.  He then read a message on the floor:To escape the sword,You must prepare it for battle.Ruby to the pommel,Steel to the tip.Seek in the quillionsand ye shall find.We spent a little while going over the vocabulary, to make sure that my son understood "ruby," "pommel," "steel," "tip," and "quillions."  With the help of a picture of a sword in the Players Handbook, he mostly understood what was going on.  I then asked him where he would go, and he said the quillions and pointed at the map.  Deforch moved into the first quillion, where he met a creature of living fire--a fire elemental.  The fire elemental won initiative and attacked, lighting Deforch's clothes on fire.  Deforch responded with his Twin Strike, and got a critical hit and a normal hit--almost destroying the elemental in a single round.  He then failed his saving throw, so he remained on fire--but that wasn't the worst thing in the world, since it meant that the elemental couldn't make thinks any worse.  On the next round, he finished off the flaming sentinel and then made his saving throw and succeeded in stopping the fire on his clothes.  Where the elemental had been, he found a red gemstone--the ruby!  So he brought the ruby back to the pommel, rested to regain his hit points, and went into the other quillion.  He saw a steel bar on the ground, which he immediately recognized as the last thing he needed, but he also saw the air swirling into a coherent form--an air elemental.  The air itself began to move to attack him, but Deforch won initiative and in a single massive attack destroyed the air elemental before it even got to act.  That was a little anticlimactic, but oh well.  My son seemed happy, so that's good enough for me.Deforch carried the steel bar forward to the tip of the sword, and with another flash he disappeared and reappeared in the cave.  The skeletons crumbled to the ground, and he rejoined Slingie and Freezie.  They then went back to the town where Slingie's friends lived (which my son declared was "Displacer Beast Town") and used the Crystal Sword to cut a hole in reality, opening a portal to the displacer beast's home realm.  The sick displacer beasts went through to their home, where they would be able to recover from the sickness.  Slingie thanked Deforch for helping him and for being his friend when so many people would have thought of him as a monster.  With that, we wrapped up the game.It was a pretty successful game.  My son seemed a little less engaged than in some of the other games, but that was in some ways a good thing--he never got upset during the game, which was very nice.  During some of the puzzle solving (such as it was), he did a bit of "Clever Hans"--pointing at random points and waiting for me to confirm one of the points as correct.  But he also seemed to have some understanding of the puzzle, so with a little bit of coaching he figured it out on his own.  And the effort to make friends for Slingie and to explain that he was a nice displacer beast was almost saccharine in its sweetness, but in a good way.</blockquote>

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