More XD20 at the Library

 One of the hilarious things about roleplaying games (and occasionally, wargames) is the non sequiturs overheard by non-gamers. As pictures are worth a thousand words:

My players were visual learners.

Not having squared paper or miniatures, this was the method I chose to clarify positioning to tonight's players as they hunted... a giant crab. (Get yer minds outta the gutter.)

0: Characters were designed and characterized. We had:

• A giant frog. Not kidding. She may have been thinking of something like a Bullywug, but my monster manual didn't list it. We decided she was an escaped lab experiment with a very long and sticky tongue. She was afraid of sharp things (problematic, given the genre) and randomly was good at cooking. She carried many cooking potions. How useful these would be in an adventure... well, we're about to see.
• A fairly generic fighter, armed with a trident. Frightened of bugs, but ready to fight for his friends and family.

That gave me some useful ideas. Both characters met in the break room of the Royal Guard barracks where they had obtained jobs. After introductions and descriptions, the Captain came in and announced that the Queen was hungry for giant crustacean tonight. Our two heroes were ordered to head through town to the nearby coast, kill and retrieve a monster crab.

Off they went to Murder Rocks. To get there, they had to pass through the Wizards' Quarter, and passed a potion-supply shop with open displays of colorful beetles outside. This enabled our first tests - fear for the fighter, and hunger for the frog. The frog was also wary of running into her former master, but they made it to the coast.

This was a steep, broken slope of black rock and coral (sharp, thus intimidating the frog), with a huge flat crab sunning itself at the bottom (intimidating the fighter).

Zoom in to follow along by the numbers.

1: Our heroes scrambled down the slope - the frog assisting the fighter by letting out her long tongue for him to slide down.

2: The fighter, terrified of the crab, thought it might help if he couldn't see it. We decided that one of the frog's many potions was one for blindness. He drank it, then using his innate sense of the space around him, leapt onto the crab.

3a: He rolled low, and ended up slipping off and lying under the monster. He stabbed it with his trident, but couldn't really move and was drenched in stinking black ichor. (Grossness brings kids to attention like nothing else.)

3b: So the frog dropped a "lightness" potion that caused the crab to levitate.

4: It drifted away towards the sea. Not a good thing, since their job was to capture it. The fighter, recovering from his blindness, followed it and batted it back until it crunched into the cliff.

5: At which point it flipped on its back and died.

Our heroes used the last of the levitation potion to move the crab up along the coast road, through the town and back to the palace, at which point the warrior took a shower and the frog joined the cooks. Adventure complete.

Let's just say I gamemaster by the seat of my pants, and XD20 is perfect for that. The teens enjoyed it, and I think it was a fair introduction to DnD. They seemed eager to try again. This was the first time I was able to get more than one player, which helped enormously; there is a distinct atmosphere in a group game where players can bounce ideas off each other, and it was great to see them cooperate in achieving the goal. Hopefully, more exposure will bring more players and more adventures!