A Feline Adventure

Thursday was my partner's birthday, and since for my birthday she DM'd a 1-on-1 D&D 5e session for me (her first time DMing, and it was amazing) with an adventure she created for the occasion, I decided to return the favor.

First of all I had to come up with an idea, something that I knew she'd like - and it didn't take me long for the word CATS to pop up in my mind; it was going to be an adventure focused on cats...no, better, I'd make her play as a cat!

What system to use, though? 
Multiple options seemed suitable: something rules-light like FATE, Tricube Tales, or something already cat-focused like Armakitten and Be like a cat, which I would've had to learn...but as I was trying to decide, I realized that she's always played 5e so far and I am the one more interested in trying new systems, so doing something like that would be more of a gift to me than to her. Better to stick with 5e then; everyone always hacks it in a million different ways anyway, and in my case it could be a mostly flavorful thing, where her character is a cat but still retains all of the normal abilities. Claws can hurt just as much as a longsword, if you want it hard enough. I made the character level 4 and chose enemies up to CR2, to make it viable without trouble.
 
Next I needed a theme for the adventure.
I browsed through a few of the short adventures I used in the past, stuff I downloaded and used to plug into my first campaign, until I ran into a level 1 carnival themed adventure. Sounded fun. I didn't want to just use a pre-written module though; it would just be the inspiration. So something whimsy...faes! A pixie transporting the PC to the Faewild and turning them into a cat. That works.

Next I needed content for the adventure, and I wanted it to be cat-themed and linked to the gifts I had for her, so I came up with 3 different rooms to be tackled in any order, mostly puzzles with some chance of combat (I didn't want to exclude combat at all, but also didn't want 3/4 of the session to be made of fights), in particular:

  • A room with 3 pictures (a merchant cart full of crates, a cat sitting on a throne and an empty treasure chest), with the objective of finding what those 3 things have in common - the moment the word box is spoken, the wall opens to reveal a dais with a cardboard box on it...which turned out to be a mimic, for the boardgame Codename Duet;
  • A jungle where they could find a puppy hiding from a squad of cats (rolling odds/evens on a d20 to decide which side the PC meets first) and a decision to make on which side to pick, for the Hunger Games books;
  • A room with a narrow bridge over a chasm with gems at the other side, with beholder-shaped statues that start shooting lasers the moment the PC starts crossing - but the lasers are on the ground, and the PC needs to pass a Wisdom save to not get distracted by them and fall off the bridge (to be teleported back at the beginning), for a set of dice.

I clearly was on the right track with these design choices, because when she created the character she chose a Tabaxi (cat-like humanoid) Artificer with the Battle Smith subclass, which has the feature of having a Steel Defender which can take any shape the PC wants, and she chose - you guessed it - a cat.

Despite, as I said before, having never played any TTRPG that was not 5e, she showed a lot of ingenuity and thinking outside the box, easily figuring out that the trick to the bridge was to keep the eyes closed and managing, in the jungle room, to talk her way out of any fight and even finding a way to end the generation long conflict between cat and dogs which I had to come up with on the spot in response to her questions!

In the end I also had her decide whether her character wanted to return to their original aspect or remain a cat in the Fae realm, and she chose to keep being a cat! Symma the Artificer cat will definitely be an NPC I'll use in a future campaign.

We both had a lot of fun and plan on doing more duet games in the future (I'm keeping an eye on Runecairn) and it also gave me more confidence in my improv skills, so I'd call it a great success!

This is all for this week, see you next Sunday for my next post!

May your dice never betray you,
Kirhon

 

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