Long time no see, everybody! I have been rather busy lately. I had a booth at the Calgary Comic Expo, and it was amazing. I got to wield a longsword and Nightmare Moon was my backup:
Image may be NSFW.
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Before the Calgary Expo, my mom was in town. She doesn’t come out very often, so I was excited to see her. I took her to the FLGS and we bought her very first set of dice! They’re purple and sparkly.
Later that evening, I was at my aunt’s place for a barbecue. Whenever I go to a party or barbecue, I make sure to toss some board games in the back seat of my car, and I know my mom usually looks forward to playing a game when we’re together. This time, one of the games was the Pathfinder Beginner Box (the rest were Smallworld, Blokus and Carcassonne). I’ve played with it once before, when I took some college friends through an apple cellar to find a drunk green dragon.
After dinner, my mom was talking about her trip to the game store and she asked, “So D&D… can you play it with two people?”
“Do you want to go on an adventure? I can do that.”
And that’s what we did. I used an adventure I’d had in my mind for awhile, Snakes on an Airship. My mom chose the rogue pre-gen from the pile, and she started in a tavern. Mom was drinking a pink martini and flirting with the bartender when another girl came up and started edging in on mom’s flirtfest! She got a little touchy with this girl. The stranger offered my mom a job: that evening, an airship would be leaving for the Southern Front with the officer’s wages. Did mom want in on a heist?
Shit yes she did. But first she pounded back some more pink martinis.
They got to the airship, mom followed the plan (I would soon learn this wasn’t going to keep happening). They circled, saw dignitaries, scoped out the hallways. Then! Terrorists had taken over the airship! Mom was in the ballroom trying to pick pockets when ceiling tiles were pulled back and giant snakes fell down, and started killing innocent people! A bad guy started monologuing!
My mother left the ballroom and closed the door behind her. Because she had a job to do, and killing snakes was not that job. She went to find her rogue companion so they could carry on with the plan. When she told her adventuring companion about the complications, she lost it. She panicked, and asked my mom what they should do. My mom did what needed to be done: she… killed her companion?!
“Mom, you’re seriously going to kill her?”
“She’s a liability, Lyndsay! I WANT THE MONEY.”
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
So, my mom killed the companion. Threw her over the deck. Mom killed two witnesses, put on their clothes, and threw them over the deck.
Mom found an ally. Killed a few snakes (I used the dire rat’s stats from the Beginner Box GM guide) and the big bad terrorist – mom got her first critical.
“You slash him! This is the top type of damage you can do!”
“So I SLICE HIS FEMORAL ATRERY!”
“Yes! He dies!”
“No, Lyndsay! It takes 45 seconds for the human body to bleed out so I get to ask him some questions!!”
My mom put her EMT training to great use here.
She got the the pilot’s cabin so she could steer the airship to an island, get the money and run. The pilots confronted her, so mom tied the pilot’s shoelaces together. Attack of opportunity was missed, but her dex check failed: she wouldn’t be able to tie them together, and she was prone with 2 baddies threatening her.
She bluffed: “There’s a snake in your boot!”
She killed it and succeeded. The pilot panicked. She got control of the ship and she found an island. She was rich, rich, rich. She regretted nothing.
So how was it?
It was amazing.
I had never expected that my mom’s first RPG experience would be so… bloody. Once she was on that airship, her only allegiance was to her potential riches. She killed the DM’s character, her adventuring companion. She pulled some daring moves, and she did what I least expected her to do over and over again. I laughed so hard I cried at one point because of her ruthlessness. She looked really impressed with herself.
My mom’s RPG experience encapsulates what I love about RPGs in general: the opportunity to be someone else completely. My mom has a lot of acting in her background, so she didn’t have much trouble letting big parts of her personality go when playing her rogue. She let loose, she killed everyone in her path, and she had a blast. For her first RPG game, I think it’s pretty safe to say that my mom won.
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