Kids' Campaign: Werebear Tracking

Kids' Campaign: Night Below Begins

This past Thursday, the wife and I took the minions out to my in-laws' for a night of D&D, their first full session exploring in Haranshire. They met a few of the local personalities: Tauster the Wizard, Garyld and Kuiper the Rangers, and Oleanne the Druid. Also, Tauster's missing apprentice, Jenna, is generally who the party is searching for.

Basically, this session, they went out to Kuiper's farm, to meet up with him and attempt to track down Jenna, the missing apprentice wizard. They met Kuiper, and soon after met Oleanne the Druid, who hadn't seen Jenna but was more worried about a certain werebear.

They tracked the werebear for a while, and made camp for the night. They were attacked by orcs, and dealt with ten of them inside of four rounds, including charming one whom they later interrogated.

I kind of decided on the fly that since our heroes are mostly level three at this point, there's no real big reason to adventure around Haranshire just to level up. If they decide to solve some of the problems around town, good on them, but I gave them the Underdark hook when they questioned the charmed orc, hook line and sinker, revealing that there is a passage that goes "below" and that "dark dwarves" come up to take the people they've been kidnapping.

So that doesn't bode well for the poor wizard's apprentice Jenna.

Oh, and they found the werebear and our clever young wizard subdued it very quickly with a well-placed "web" spell. Next they'll go back into town and more than likely make plans to assault the orcs. All-in-all, a very good night.

I continue to be impressed with how easily Microlite works with AD&D. The AC conversion is a snap, and everything else just works. It's pretty awesome.

Old School Inspiration: Night Below

The AD&D 2E boxed module Night Below is a classic, and for good reason. It offers a huge Underdark area to explore, new and interesting peoples to interact with, including deep gnomes and the undiscovered race of rockseer elves. There was an emphasis more on exploration and role-playing, particularly diplomacy and politics amongst the various factions of the Underdark. It was made very clear to the DM that the PC's choices often would have longterm effects on their relationships in the Underdark. 

This box set contains three books, a couple of map/posters, and an abundance of copyable player handouts. It's even got cut-out minis for combat! The three books are "The Evils of Haranshire," "Perils of the Underdark," and "The Sunless Sea." I see no reason that each of these books couldn't comprise a tier of 4th Edition play, albeit probably accelerated. It would certainly require a great deal of work, but a conversion could certainly be done. 

And I intend to do it! Yeah, one more D&D project to embark on, and a big one at that. A question for my readers who might be in the know: are the any legal issues that I need to deal with here, as far as TSR's IP is concerned? I have no intention of copying anything word-for-word from the original text, or of selling any of my work, but the plot and such would be essentially unchanged. Is this type of thing kosher or am I getting myself in hot water here? 

I know some of the work has been done before by others. The beginning is pretty easy, mostly because the first book is typical, cliche backwoods fantasy adventure stuff. The meat of Night Below happens when you actually get into the Underdark and start exploring. It seems the conversions that are out there tend to be more of the adventure-report style. I need to take some more time to read a little deeper into what people have done, but I'm not sure an actual start-to-finish 4e conversion exists. Prove me wrong! 

Perhaps do it as a series of dungeon delves? That would certainly be plenty of work to get my DMing chops up. I'd run into problems at the climactic parts (assault on the sunless citadel, et al) but a series of connected Underdark delves would be a lot of fun...