Down To It

All right, I'll amend my previous post a tad: youth sports are slightly less safe for kids than playing D&D. My son was injured during our last volleyball game, necessitating a trip to the ER at Children's Hospital. Fortunately, it's nothing terrible: a sprained MCL but no apparent tears/ruptures; he's in a brace and on crutches for a bit.

[for the curious, he made a spectacular, cross-court diving save to get to a ball, popping it over the net and scoring the point. Unfortunately, he landed all his weight on the side of his right knee where the pads don't protect. While the rest of the crowd and team were cheering the play, he was writhing on the floor in agony...we ended up needing to carry him off the court, as he was unable to walk]

So, a bit of a damper on the end of the season, though it made the loss easier to bear (no one was terribly worried about that, given the concern for my kid's health). It was still a helluva' ride, and the kids had a blast...one of my players asked if we could continue running practices till the end of the year just for fun. I told him, 'maybe.'

The positive to this is that our schedule is suddenly much more open than it was: Diego's out of soccer, (flag) football, and golf for the foreseeable future. In fact, for the the first Tuesday in a long while, the kids and I will be free after 4pm today...that's something like 3+ extra hours of time.

Game on.

The kids have been jonesin' for me to run some D&D, something for which I haven't had the bandwidth the last couple months. It's tough to be dedicated to one's craft when you have familial obligations that take priority. That's not to say I'd trade those obligations for the world...I've seen what the other half looks like, and that's not my bag, baby. But it can be frustrating, even so. Patience has never been my strong suit.

[pretty sure I've written that last sentence a hundred times on this blog, over the years]

Now that the opportunity has presented itself, I aim to take full advantage of the situation. The characters are all ready to go. Now, I just need to come up with a small adventure to introduce the players to the new region of my setting: the Desert of Despair, AKA the Snake River Plain of southern Idaho (AKA "the Idaho Deathlands"). My campaign setting is a couple degrees warmer than real earth and the water table is too low (and the region too dangerous) to allow the type of post-1900 irrigation that has transformed Magic Valley (sorry: no U.S. industrial complex east of the Mississippi in my world; folks are stuck with what's in the Northwest), so the area is mostly arid wilderness. 

It's delightfully deadly.

ANYway...need a low level adventure situation to get the ball rolling. The PCs are probably coming from Boise, which suggests "caravan duty"...that old chestnut. But what I need is a small lair, tomb, or bandit camp...not too far off in the desert that they can't make it to one of the (few) townships...that they can encounter around Rattlesnake Station on the road to Bellevue and/or Albion. Maybe there's some nomads that have been harassing the way station, or some local beef with the tribal families. Something. Because the PCs need some experience under their belts before they tackle the Tomb of the Pharoid or venture into the slow mutant lands or invade the duergar caverns beneath the Craters of the Moon. 

Welp...better get down to it.  Later, gators!