My boys and I finally get in our next Tiny Dungeon session in what will be an ongoing campaign. I had intended to do a fair amount of preparation, but the best laid plans tend to fall by the wayside when you're a member of a family of eight1. Today I ended up having roughly one half hour to pull something together before we started playing. I had a couple kernels of an idea going forward, but nothing as solid as I would have liked. Looking though one of the Tiny Dungeon Zine pdfs I have at my disposal I discovered an Adventure Generator engine in the rulebook that helped solidify my plan and then some supplemental material on goblins that also helped.
The idea behind the Adventure Generator is that you have a set of five 6x6 tables that you use to fill in the blanks of a statement in the form: The Adventurers must VERB the SUBJECT in the PLACE, while dealing with a HINDRANCE and opposing the ANTAGONIST. I rolled two dice five times and this was the sentence I came up with: The adventurers must RETRIEVE the GOBLIN from ENEMY TERRITORY, while DEALING with a BROKEN PROMISE and opposing the NECROMANCER. As it happened this matched up really well with what I was already considering and so I jotted down a couple more specific things on a 3 by 5 card and we were ready to go.
I had originally planned for the session to go for about an hour, but we ended up going for closer to an hour and a half. The funny thing is that there didn't end up being any combat whatsoever. There were several tests requiring dice rolls, a fair amount of roleplaying/talking, and at least one chase scene, but no actual physical violence yet. There were also some funny moments and my favorite idea from the session was a popular puppet show in the bazaar that recounted the adventure that they just had at Dragonspire, but rather than being factual Corrick and Elrick are portrayed as the bumbling sidekicks to a recurring hero puppet named Greensleaves who doesn't exist in real life.
We ended the session after the two heroes caught the Goblin in question, but the remaining three pieces of the generated sentence still lie ahead. I plan to do more preparation on those items before we play again, but I really shouldn't need to do too much more additional work. Overall I was quite pleased with how easy it was to cook something up and make it fun enough that an hour and a half went by quite quickly. Even though I didn't have very much prepared before we started it all came together pretty nicely and this bodes well for a lot more low preparation fun ahead.
Plus cat now so basically nine in terms of family members that require at least some time and attention.