Friday 13 September 2013

Our all-girl gaming group

Welcome to my blog. Who knows who will actually end up reading this, but at first probably just the other girls in the group, so I won't bore you with a bunch of preamble other than what I've just said.

We are a group of girls who have decided to play D&D on the weekends. It started with an innocent game of Hero Quest (a 1990 dungeon crawl board game by Milton Bradley and Games Workshop) and has turned into a quest with a much larger scope. Yes, we'll continue to play through our "Heroine Quests" but we have decided to try to go through each version of D&D in order or release. In the interest of expediency, lack of a background in miniature gaming (i.e. Chainmail), and based on the fairly small amount of changes between them, we have opted to begin this quest with the Basic Set. I haven't been able to get hold of the Holmes rules though, so we're using Moldvay's rules first, then gradually we'll move towards the Mentzer and Rules Cyclopedia versions within this first campaign world.

Then (eventually) we'll move on to AD&D 1e, 2.0, 2.5, D&D 3.0, 3.5, 4e, 5e, etc.

For now, I've temporarily used the name Hydras & Heroines for this blog, but I haven't decided for sure on the name yet. Also, the players haven't decided on a party name for their band of adventurers for the first campaign yet (of which, I am the DM)

The first campaign is, as I mentioned, using Moldvay's rules for D&D Basic Set. I'll be using the compilation module set B1-9 - In Search of Adventure, set in the Grand Duchy of Karameikos (in the Mystara setting, which was the default for the "Known World" in the Basic Set of D&D). It's a compilation of adventure modules B1-B9 which have been pieced together to provide several different options to the players, while offering them 3 distinct paths through the basic levels of 1-3 and eventually moving them (if they so wish) to the capital by around the time they reach Expert Set levels.

I have never DMed before and I've only played a very few sessions of D&D in any version (1 session in Dark Sun with 2.5, and 3 sessions in a homegrown setting with 3.5). I did play through the entire Hero Quest board game, playing all 4 heroes myself, with my best friend 20 or so years ago. And I did have all the core rules for 2.5 and the Forgotten Realms campaign setting, which I read all of entirely and spent countless hours thinking up adventures and rolling up characters in the hopes that I could successfully find a group of friends to play with back in high school without my right-wing religious parents finding out that we were playing "The Devil's Game." But I never got to actually play.

Also, my girlfriend has never roleplayed before (other than those 3 sessions of 3.5 we played with other friends recently but we only got halfway through our first combat before it sort of fell apart). And none of us have actually played a full campaign through (as far as I know).

Anyway, we've rolled up our characters and are pretty much ready to start this weekend! Wish us luck!


Sylvie - Dastardly (and perhaps in over my head?) Dungeon Mistress

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