It’s a day or two since the D&D taster session took place. Even longer since the D&D campaign was held. But here we are with the post mortem for the taster first.

Despite a less than conducive environment for playing D&D everyone had a good time, and enjoyed themselves.

The adventure that I went with for the session was The Lost Tomb of the Delian Order (by Matt Colville).

I started the adventure off at the foot of the hill on a dusty road with the owner of a local inn hiring the adventurers to investigate missing people from the nearby village.

The inn keeper gave the party a bloodied bone and told them to break it when they got to the entrance of the tomb. The bloodied bone was a magical item I created to cast the spell aid over the party when it was broken into two.

Sadly the party did not do this.

They finally did use it over the scrying pool.

On a practical level I used The Giant Book of Battle Mats (generously given to me by Shane) along with scatter terrain to give the layout of the tomb.

I should have used my Big Book of Battle Maps because table space was once more limited. I thought before hand we would be using two of the folding 6ft tables.

However unbeknownst to us all, the evening of our taster session at the community centre it was also open mic night.

In my opinion they would have been better off watching us play D&D than listening to the public murder of songs.

That’s why earlier I said that the environment was less than conducive to playing D&D.

The volume of the “performers” murdering rock and pop songs was bordering on making it impossible to play.

The Wizkids 2D miniatures worked well. I think the players enjoyed having something to represent their chosen characters.

The puzzle in the adventure appeared harder than I thought it was. The other group I’ve run this adventure with got it pretty quickly. A fact that when strategically shared with Gavin made him determined to solve the puzzle.

I did give some time at the start of the session for the players to read their character sheets and ask questions. There was a whistle stop tour of the abilities and how an ability check works.

Having multiple copies of the Starter Set rulebooks available was a good call. I think for a taster session for new players they were just right. Especially for finding out the details of the spells. Easier to navigate, and a lot less to search through.

I did half the damage that the goblins did in combat. It seemed the right thing to do considering they low hit points first level characters have. It meant I was able to avoid a tpk. Although it was looking likely at one point!

Having The Arcane Library PC Cards on hand with the pregen details on was useful, and worked well for me.

I think that’s about it for now. Who knows if and when I’ll run another taster session. Maybe it’ll just be an adhoc one one shot for this group instead.