Homecoming: First Blood

The first step of the family D&D 5E campaign started with a terrified village and a missing child, leading to their first “dungeon” and the first glimpse of the threat that would be the focus of the campaign.

Homebrew is going to encompass posts relating to my own gaming rather than gaming products—which will be posted over on the SEP site.

This is a continuation of a discussion of a game I’m running for family.

As mentioned in an earlier post, the action started when the Blue Sashes were called to the village of Split Tree Hill in the liminal space between the Northern Commandery—the northern province of the Kingdom of Haelmark—and the lands of the nomadic Uralgic culture. The villagers of Split Tree Hill were reportedly beset by monstrous creatures haunting the night.

This was an entrée into the main conceit of a world-threatening doom. The players know that they are getting a kind of Lord of the Rings epic, with them fighting a dark lord and lots of trudging across landscape, but the PCs don’t know that.

The village of Split Tree Hill is in a very remote, northern area and is on a trade route but is surrounded by a huge and ancient forest. In the shamanistic folkways of the area, the villagers had lived at peace with the forest spirits, propitiating them when they needed to take wood—lumber was a major product.  

The village has lost livestock to something haunting the night, and now the villagers are afraid to leave their homes after dark. This threat turns the comforting of the pedestrian into a source of fear—the villagers know the forest so well, but now something has changed. This not only threatens their immediate lives but their futures.

Of course, the day that the PCs arrive, a child is taken. The child and their siblings were working in the fields as the sun set and the thing came and took the child. The siblings escape and indicate it was a huge wolf. A wolf big enough to take a child? A wolf travelling alone? Both seem odd to the PCs, and they—of course—investigate.

What they find is an underground labyrinth—my daughters wanted to play Dungeons & Dragons, and since I can’t throw dragons at them right away, they get dungeons.

One of the difficult aspects in creating “dungeons’ for me is preserving verisimilitude. It’s hard to make it “real,” because it really doesn’t make sense, but I can build a theme. I want to make the residency of the dungeon’s denizens together be reasonable. A theme allows that. That’s part of what I did with The Abyss and the Cult—there was a logical reason for each challenge in those dungeons, and I tried to ensure it did not seem too weird for these “monsters”—many of which were NPCs—to be congregating together underground.

The theme for the first dungeon the family encountered was undead. This riffs on the BBEG of the campaign—the Necromancer King. Along with the usual skeletons—including skeleton dogs—the PCs met the undead minions of the Necromancer King, now being called Thule. These are Thule Apparitions, CR 1 monsters which makes them great for a 1^st level dungeon, but also for cannon fodder when the PCs reach a higher level.

The dungeon not only introduced the PCs to the threat of Thule, but also its process. It takes regular beings—the fearful beast attacking the village was indeed a wolf—and uses magic to steal their essence and make them monstrous—the PCs find not only the husk of the wolf used to create the creature but also the bodies of those used to create the Thule Apparitions.

I made it clear the transformation was irreversible. The process kills the subject. If I hadn’t, I knew at least one of my daughters would focus on saving the victims. That is admirable and could have been an exciting adventure on its own, but it wasn’t what I was planning.

So this first dungeon gave them a taste of the game they wanted to play—they heroically saved the child—and introduced the BBEG, though not the threat it represented. They knew there was a magical power known as Thule, and that it was taking victims to create monsters and undead soldiers, but they didn’t know why and they didn’t know where.

They would get set on the path to learning more once they returned to the village.