Wow, what a day. It’s Friday, it’s just after 8 PM, and I am bushed. My throat is raw from doing kobold yips and yaps all day, which I should probably tone down for tomorrow – but we’ll see. It’s so much fun! And it’s one of those easy things I can do to really make the scenarios stand out for the players at my tables.

This morning I ran WK3 Revenge of the Over-Kobold for 5th Edition and it went incredibly well. Great table of players, and I wound up with 7 instead of 6 – which worked out quite well actually. Two of the players were brand new to 5th Edition, but I got the sense that they picked up on the system pretty quickly. Which is good because I realized WK3 is a tough module, especially in a con setting. I shuffled some things around for the final confrontation and really made it a tough one – perhaps too tough, since things were not going well for the party by the end of the slot. We stopped with the characters escaping but the Over-Kobold was unharmed. Very fun.

My 4 PM slot was WK1 Caves of the Kobold Queen for AD&D 1st Edition (the stat blocks were written for Swords & Wizardry which is very functionally the same thing as far as monster stats go). I only had 5 out of the 6 players show up and no one came over to join as a walk up, and 2 of the players were new to con settings. I knew going into it, but it was really brought home how much low-level magic-users in 1st Edition are really weak. At 2nd level you can cast 2 spells, and while one of them could be sleep (incredibly powerful against 1d4 HD kobolds!) it still only has a limited radius. The players took some unexpected directions and ended up face-to-face with the Kobold Queen – only to have an INCREDIBLE series of bad die rolls run against them that turned every character into puppy chow. It was a knock down, drag out fight that the characters were up to their necks in, but in the end their bad luck cost them their lives. Oh well. I had a lot of fun and I think the players did too.

Tomorrow I’ve got WK2 and WK3 for 1st Edition AD&D and I’m a little nervous about them to be honest. Low-level 1E is so dangerous! And I’ve only got 6 pregens for them to take, and you really need all 6 to survive I think. We’ll see.