Today I finally got to break out my 5e books and - more importantly - A Red & Pleasant Land for a one shot. I've been waiting on RPL since I first saw the 'Eat Me' posts on the D&D with Pornstars blog some 1 and a half years ago and for 5e since I realised it's OK to buy yourself Christmas presents. (Sorry, I'm Australian and don't believe in commas before 'and', as much as they increasingly make sense to me.)
3 players, I'll call them J, Z and R. The only thing of note here is that it was R's first time ever touching tabletop RPGs and she was one of the last people I'd expect to play D&D.
There's not much I can say about 5e that hasn't already been said. It's been examined to death by now in terms of basic mechanics and what it means for the franchise. I will say that it's a very solid system that's easy to use as both a GM and a first-time tabletop RPGer. 20 minutes in and R was making Persuasion checks as if she'd been doing it for years. I couldn't be more pleased with the system mechanics-wise.
As a side note, (as much as I like some of the open source streamlined versions) I'm completely on board with the official 5e character sheet: it's extremely simple and effective for communicating information to both players new to the edition and to D&D itself. Besides, you can easily get by with the first 2 pages granted you're not a spellcaster, which is 100% reasonable.
Alright, enough about 5e and onto the main meal. Let's start with a couple post-game quotes, shall we:
"I can't believe no one's come up with this until now... Vampires and Wonderland just work"
This was a one shot adventure for level 1 characters that I threw together over the weekend using the adventure plothook generation tables in RPL. Sure, I scrapped half of that result, replacing the pearl selling with attending the Hatter's tea party and the children of the well with an Unwelcome Guest, but that's what this material lets you do. It's almost too easy.
The players and their characters were like this:
Z - rogue
R - the Alice
J - paladin, (and later) ranger
In short, the party was tasked by the city of Vornheim to hold an audience with the Queen of Heart's Minister for Foreign Affairs (i.e. Reasonable Propositions) to establish trade relations. This was the Rabbit, obviously, who speaks almost every language in and out of existence. This was the same rabbit that J hurled a javelin at 4 minutes into the game. Also the same rabbit that the party didn't identify until practically reaching the tea party because they killed most sources of information.
So here's something I noticed: vampires are everything you want them to be just like what you grew up on, but they still manage to be different in the best way. Sure, human blood consumption and the running water issue are alive and well in the minds of the players, but these vampires make one reconsider their own moral alignment. For instance, from almost beginning to end, the vampire bride/kitten accompanied the party. Surprisingly, the only one who blindly trusted her at the start was J. Huh. I suppose he only remembered he was a paladin after he died.
Here you had an obviously vampiric kitten, openly craving some chow of the human variety. This was outright deplored for maybe the first hour of play, with even the loyal J preaching about what cats do and don't eat. Then the human children living in the leech well happened. Amidst all the arrows flying at R's rump in the dark, in addition to prior useful directions and help with vampiric communication, a thought occurred to the characters and players alike: this vampire is hungry - she kills to survive - so then maybe it's not evil? After all, the kitten had certainly resisted any temptation to feast on the party members (save for the uncontrollable bloodlust after her first taste of blood. Z was understanding. Terrified as she gently stroked his face post-drain, but understanding.) The catharsis was signalled by J lobbing the kitten through the air and onto the face of a child (again: paladin. Huh.)
Of course, the kitten/bride Ildna betrayed the group, but this was purely political in nature. Their acceptance of this came partly through a developing understanding of Voivodjan society and the fact that, whilst not entirely monstrous, vampires in the Place of Unreason are still intensely scary. All this from a NPC I threw in as an afterthought when the PCs went to the statue garden rather than anywhere else.
The setting itself is also a big part of challenging the pre-existing meta-knowledge surrounding vampires. Voivodja is strange. The Place of Unreason. Every talking caterpillar, every left turn that actually puts you 3 floors up, every little thing that shouldn't be but is. It all adds up. No assumption is safe (though some are and that's where things get really weird.)
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Okay, so enough about how cool the vampires and general setting are - though damn, they're exciting. A Red & Pleasant Land is the ideal format for introducing someone that is foreign to RPGs.
R doesn't usually play games of any description, but wanted to see what the fuss about D&D is after Z kept telling her about it. Good job, Z. R eventually decided upon the Alice I'd pre-genned.
Most advice I see and hear relating to starting D&D as the greenest of greenhorns is to think of one's favourite character from the Lord of the Rings. Cool, a lot of people liked those films and even more have watched them. Here's the problem though: not everyone watches Return of the King and then goes to find out how they can get more of it - they watch it and say, "That was a good movie," and it's done. The point is that not everyone cares about that thing you care about.
Alice in Wonderland, on the other hand, could not be more suited as one of the most (if not the most) universal access points to tabletop RPGs in the West. That story has always been, at its core, about the innocence of childhood and the magic of imagination. Oh hey look, half of that is D&D. A good start.
It's the aspect of the innocence of childhood that's the real ticket though. Who can you think of that didn't have a childhood? The answer: dead babies. Everyone else has or will experience childhood and whether they end up associating it with positive or negative experiences isn't important; what's important is that people either want to re-create the childhood they've lost over time or experience the childhood they never had. Take Michael Jackson: worked hard and got famous as a child. That was his childhood, for better or worse. He grew up and ended up owning and living in the Neverland Ranch. Neverland is Wonderland's less pretty cousin. People have an attachment to childhood, even if it's not their own.
So back to R. She's watched the Lord of the Rings trilogy and that helped her understand the some of the more archetypal classes, but that just made her feel even more that the game wasn't for her. So she went for the Alice. It's a class that's relateable for many people due to a) the evocative mental image it paints (cheers Lewis Carroll) and b) everyone has had a childhood of some sort. More than that though, it suited R perfectly, as both 'individuals' are new to the foreign worlds I threw them into (being Voivodja and a RPG), making anything that's novel to the Alice similarly so for R.
R blitzed it. She played up the exasperation to the point that no one knew if it was R or the Alice talking. This made bringing up the exasperation table really simple, but also made me realise that for some players (definitely not all), a GM could use their discretion to roll on the exasperation table. Not necessary in this instance, as R ranted about how there was "suddenly a door" where there wasn't one before for a few minutes, even knowing that she'd used her exasperation.
By the end, R had left (she'd already stayed for 3 hours longer than she'd planned to - "2 hours is enough for this, right?" ... Ha) and the remaining party of 2 wiped twice: once in the room before the final boss fight (J threw down a treasure chest from the second floor that landed on the unconscious Z and J was then crushed by a coffin about 30 seconds later) and then again in the final boss fight which turned out to be more of a vampire brawl with a couple of single hit point PCs thrown into the mix. The Unwelcome Guest was making vampires' heads explode just by slapping them (see JoJo's below) across the face. It was beautiful. More so because the tea party doubled up as a wedding and Z played 'The Red Wedding' through his iPad.
Basically, thank everything that there are authors like Zak S out there.
A few last notes on the resources:
- Except for the goblins (straight out of the MM), every creature the group encountered was straight out of RPL with only a few easy mental calculations made for 5e/a level 1 party. The only NPC I put effort into statting was the Unwelcome Guest. That took all of 10 minutes, if that.
- I used this because I loathe pre-game math and it literally takes a few seconds to know exactly how you should be building your 5e combat encounters.
- The RPL book itself is a super convenient on-the-spot reference for DMs/GMs. I just slapped about 20 low-adhesive sticky tabs in it 30 minutes before leaving home today and I was good to go for the entire 6 hour session. I tabbed 4 of the random tables in the book, which could be used in any setting and that was only for during the session. I used a lot more in my prep.
- If you have A Red & Pleasant Land, are playing in a game set in Voivodja or just like vampires and you haven't read/watched JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, go do that now. If none of those apply to you, go do it anyway.
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