I’ve relaunched my school’s story game club, Ludi Fabularum, expanding it to two days after school during the week with a maximum of six students in each group.
Group One features four 5th-graders playing Brock, human druid; Titanius, human paladin; Elcatude, human ranger; and Kya, human thief. I started them out using Jason Lutes’s “Children of the Wood” funnel starter. The players determined that Kya had befriended Sukira, the most recent missing child, who was the youngest daughter of a poor family befriended by Brock. Titanius and Elcatude believe that a cyclops lives in the Thornwood, and that this monster, which neither of them has ever seen, might be responsible for the monthly child abductions. The quartet ventured beyond the river into the forboding Thornwood. They picked a strange trail of small-footed humanoids which led them into an ambush by a bizarre, fearsome tree-like monster. We ended today in the middle of a pitched battle against this monster as well as a half-dozen thornlings that decided to ambush the heroes.
Group Two started with “The Dog-Men Cometh”, another of Lutes’s funnel starters. This group has more players, but they ended with similar party compositions: Elana, human druid; Celion, human ranger; Elixea, elf barbarian; Fox, human thief; and Piper, human barbarian. (Normally I’d not allow two of the same class, but Piper’s player started in Group One but had to change days due to transportation issues, and it didn’t seem fair to have her make up a new PC.) This adventure started in media res with the heroes holed up in a peasant’s home while dog-men battered down the door. After a pitched but lop-sided battle, the heroes emerged victorious and Celion and Kitty, her cougar animal companion, raced off after the few surviving dog-men, picking up their trail outside the village. In response to one of the pre-game questions, the students composed this nursery rhyme:
“Don’t go out at midnight.
Dog-men will come and bite.
They’ll definitely give a fright.
Good night!”