Team building with RPGs

My manager asked me to run an RPG as an activity for our team building day. Here's how it went down.

Before The Game

Venues

With our team being rather geographically diverse (several of us are home workers) the first challenge was picking a location where the travel wasn't too awful for anyone, and the manager picked Oxford. He found an escape room for our first activity, but it was down to me to find somewhere suitable for the game.

While you can run an RPG in a pub, you need to really know the pub to be sure there isn't going to be loud music/sport/crowds, and that wasn't something I could figure out that far from home. Fortunately, as a board gamer I was aware of Oxford's board games cafe, Thirsty Meeples, even though I'd never been there before. I was confident they could offer a reasonably quiet space with clean tables, and on further investigation learned they also had the other thing that my team seem to consider indispensible: beer.

Choosing a game

When previously considering games for beginners I was pretty sure that Dragonbane would be a good choice, especially when I realised that the game was going to be quite popular and with the event taking place on a week day it was unlikely I'd be able to recruit a second GM. 4-5 is my normal sweet spot for player numbers but this time I was absolutely going to have to accomodate 6. That's a lot easier with something with a board and miniatures and skill rolls and hit points than something that's largely narrative based.

Another reason to go for a game like this is that with one exception, all the players were absolute beginners. And my team aren't all former theatre kids, who seem to take to the improv aspect of RPGs very easily. We're a tech team. Most of them are database administrators and similar. People who can easily get into dice rolling and movement rates and weapon ranges but might take a bit longer to get into character motivations.

And finally, this was a team building event, with a side goal of promoting DEI. Dragonbane is a game that absolutely promotes teamwork, as a successful dungeon crawl often hinges on people working together to defeat the monsters, and also promotes diversity, where you can clearly see the benefits of a diverse team all bringing different skills to the table.

Preparation

By the time it was confirmed that I'd be running an RPG for this event, I'd bought a copy of Dragonbane and run the quickstart adventure The Riddermound multiple times. This seemed like a solid choice. Nice simple motivation for the characters. Get in, find treasure, get out. And I knew it well enough that I wouldn't have to do too much thinking about the adventure itself and could focus on the players.

I decided to use the cardboard standees that come in the core set for the player characters, and regular miniatures for the monsters. This meant there was a clear visual difference between PCs and monsters on the board. Using the standees also meant I wasn't having to explain that I didn't have any duck miniatures so please pretend that this tengu is actually a duck. They could just find the mini that matched the art on their character sheet. Meanwhile our miniature collection does include reasonable minis for the monsters encountered in this adventure.

Naturally I used the pre-gens from the quickstart, although I did also need to add in a sixth character. I created a dwarf bard, Urd Gildenclef, and while the back page of his character sheet didn't exactly match the others (I didn't have the right fonts, and also couldn't quite cut out the art from the book as neatly as I'd like to paste into the sheet) it was near enough that it still looked good and had a matching standee.

What else did I need? Dice, of course. I do have enough dice to loan six people enough dice to play Dragonbane. But, I found myself asking, did I want to? Of course not. Those are my dice, and every one of them has a story. A gift, a prize, a special purchase. I didn't want to lend them out.

Fortunately dice aren't too expensive if you're buying in bulk and don't much care about colours and stuff. I ordered a pack of six dice sets with drawstring dice bags on Amazon for about £10, and then shortly afterwards ordered another six when I realised numbers were about to get complicated. I figured people could keep them if they liked them, and if not I now had a decent set of loaners should I find myself introducing more beginners to gaming.

Then something struck me. Battle boards.

Like all good gamers, I have a Chessex Megamat at home. But the trouble with the Megamat, as the name implies, is that it's big. Really big. Rolled up it's 34"/86cm long, which is not the easiest thing to take with you on the Park and Ride or to carry across Oxford city centre.

By contrast, the battle board provided with the Dragonbane core set fits very neatly into the box. But it's small. Significantly smaller than the Riddermound map. I love that it's included in the set, but it wasn't going to work here.

So began my hunt for a battle map that would easily fit in the backpack with the rest of the gear, which will probably become a blog post by itself, but which ended with me buying an Ergon Games battle map from Amazon, which allowed me to draw the map in advance and then fold it up and put it in the bag.

On The Day

While I'd set a limit of 6 players for the game, I actually ended up with 8 people sitting at the table with me. One was my manager who'd organised the day, and who I knew would be an extra person well in advance. He suggested that he could be an observer, but I had another idea to give him more engagement. He could play the monsters. Easy enough in Dragonbane. I gave him the bag of monster minis and the rule book, and he rolled the dice, read out the attack descriptions, and rolled the damage dice.

I didn't have anything for the eighth person (a much more last minute addition) but there was a suggestion that two people could share a character, and I couldn't see any reason why not. Two guys decided to share, and picked Archmaster Aodhan, which worked out well for table space as I also had his spells printed out. One person had to leave early, so when he did, one of the sharing players took over his character.

I began by putting a couple of x cards on the table, explaining them as being like the emergency exit button on the escape room we'd just been to. I doubted we'd need them, and didn't make a big deal out of it, but I figure it doesn't hurt to explicitly state that it's OK to say no to things.

When giving my introduction to the rules I forgot to explain Boon and Bane, although I should have done given that some of the special abilities involve it. It did get used however, with me telling players when they were allowed to roll the dice twice and why. I could have handled it a little better, but it did go OK in the end. I did remember to explain resting, which as usual proved entirely necessary.

The game itself went as smoothly as can be expected. I was constantly having to remind people which dice to roll, but that was nothing I didn't expect, and the novelty of the polyhedral dice definitely caught people's attention. I made some minor alterations, such as reducing the falling damage for the initial descent into the mound to 1d6, as having characters risk death on the very first dice roll seemed un-fun. (I then rolled 5 and 6 for the damage on the two characters who failed the roll, so they still got the feel of this being dangerous.)

While on previous occasions I've run this game, I've always used the optional pushing rule, this time I didn't. Mostly I've played this with people with at least some familiarity with Free League games (or Call of Cthulhu) who were on board with the idea of getting a reroll in exchange for some kind of risk or penalty, but for complete beginners I decided it would be just one more thing to explain, and ditched it entirely. It's fun to include for more experienced players but the game runs fine without it.

There was only one moment where a character risked death, when the big bad rolled his biggest attack - 4d8 damage. Makander was standing right in front of him at the time, so I suggested that he should be the target, with his armour rating 6 plate armour and 16 hit points giving him a reasonable shot at survival. Only the manager playing the monster rolled 22 damage, taking him down to 0 points. Fortunately his next con roll was a critical, and while it took pretty much the entire party having a go at healing for someone to succeed, he was stabilised. On 1 hit point. Which almost resulted in him getting knocked out again at the end when I called for Acrobatics rolls to get back out of the Riddermound, but fortunately the final player to roll (Urd Gildenclef, as it happened) got a critical, so I told him he was able to bring the duck out with him.

Urd Gildenclef proved to be a very useful party member in the end, providing backup to Aodhan on knowledge skills, keeping the party well informed with beast lore, and of course giving boons in combat with his musical talents. If you're running with the pre-gens and need a 6th character, I thoroughly recommend including him.

You grew up in your family’s underground halls, dreaming of one day becoming a mighty warrior like your father. Until the day when you were first invited to blow the hunting horn that called everyone to dinner, and a new passion awoke. Instead of just listening to the chroniclers tell stories and sing songs of your ancestors, you began learning those stories yourself, and your skill at playing the horn won you many complements. Now you’re out in the Misty Vale, seeking out new stories to some day bring back home.

We ended up wrapping up in 2.5 hours, faster than I anticipated. I soon realised why. Experienced players talk a lot in character. These beginners didn't. So things moved along a little faster than I expected. Since we only had the table for 3 hours, that was fine - realising I was going to wrap things up well in time made things less stressful for me.

After The Game

With about half an hour left before we had to leave, some of the players decided to make use of the cafe's board game library and had a game of Uno. I didn't join in. I had plenty to do packing my gear away, and was happy just to watch.

Then it was back onto the Park and Ride, and an hour's drive home, and I could finally relax. I was exhausted. I felt like I'd just come back from a LARP, and while there had been some walking across Oxford and a bit of activity in the escape room, it wasn't enough to induce that kind of tiredness. Running for beginners comes with a lot more mental load that my normal games. So does running with eight other people at the table instead of the usual four or five. So does running for people who aren't just friends or acquaintences, but co-workers and the manager who asked me to do this. Hardly surprising I was wiped out by it.

That said, I would absolutely recommend this as a team building activity. It ticks the boxes on actually promoting teamwork in a way most of the nonsense you end up doing while team building doesn't, and I think people did find it reasonably enjoyable. Dragonbane is absolutely a solid choice for this situation and the core set is useful for providing the standees to match the character sheets.

If you do try this, and end up with eight prospective players, get a second GM if you can. Big tables are a challenge by themselves, and they're a bigger challenge when everybody is completely new to the game. But if you can't, bringing in the manager as the monster wrangler actually worked pretty well.

Whether I'll get any new gamers out of this, I'm not sure, but I'll certainly be offering to talk to anyone who's interested in learning more when we're back at work.

Wicker Valley, episode 35: Darkness

Samara didn't hang about when it came to making her presence felt. Elizabeth put up a wall of ice, which slowed her down while she melted her way through it, which meant I had time to throw one of my tiny demons at her, which dug into her quite effectively. Eddie finished her off by hosing her down with one of the holy water supersoakers.

We needed another look at the house. Or rather, at the tree at the back of the house, which was bad enough. The whole area seemed to have a spooky aura, which was making everything very dark and cold. I was thinking about my next move when something happened to Michael. I couldn't see what was doing it, but something had him by the throat and was trying to choke him.

I ignored Elizabeth telling me to give him the kiss of life, and told the entity exactly what I thought of it in the infernal tongue. Not a permanent solution, but enough to make it go away for a bit. While the others looked around, I decided to try something riskier and look into the past to find out what really happened here.

I saw Ann Deltrose carrying a squirming cloth wrapped bundle, forcing it into a wooden box in a grave. Then flames erupting from the box, engulfing both of them. She'd never got the chance to use that rope. I let the vision go, but Samara had other ideas. It was a brief battle of will, and I managed to evict her pretty fast, but not fast enough to stop her using my claws to shred Michael's jacket. That could have been very nasty.

Michael had found the grave site. Adam got some shovels from the van, and we started digging. Burning the remains would have been our usual approach, but we were pretty sure it wouldn't help here. Salt and holy water was the way to go. We found Ann's bones first, and Michael spread out his ripped clothes to rest them on.

But unsurprisingly, Samara wasn't going to make this easy for us. Michael pulled out his weird knife. I threw another demon, then went in with my claws. But it was Eddie who finished her off, with some kind of magic I'd never seen before, which seemed to surprise him as much as everyone else.

We finished digging, and scattered salt and holy water over the remains, and gradually the spooky aura lifted and it was a bright sunny afternoon once more. The scouts were going to be able to have their bonfire after all.

We all needed some time off after that, which largely consisted of going to work, but that didn't mean things were peaceful. Tornadoes aren't exactly uncommon in the UK, but they're usually further south, pretty small, and don't usually do much beyond dislodging a few roof tiles, so having a whole bunch of them in the Lake District was definitely weird, especially when one destroyed a RoadChef services, and a bunch of people were injured. Between that and Eddie and Michael reporting on a lot of demonic portents, we were going to have to investigate.

Investigation wasn't easy though, as the police weren't our local police, and weren't letting anyone near the place. We had another option though. A woman called Martha had claimed to have been stabbed during the tornado and was in the hospital. I was pretty sure I could charm my way into getting us a chat with her.

I overdid it again, and now one of the nurses is my best friend and I'll be taking in a basket of scones for the staff to share. But we got in, and Martha was very happy to have someone believe her. She'd been plunged into darkness, and she hadn't been alone. It had lasted for hours - much longer than the time that had passed in the outside world.

We knew what we were dealing with now. It had happened before and it was called the Darkness. And not the fun kind.

Wicker Valley, episode 34: Firestarter

We needed to look in that house. Elizabeth cleared a path to the door through the greenery, using her lich powers, and we started the search. It wasn't a big place, but people had obviously lived here once. The skeletons of furniture remained. I headed upstairs. There was a bathroom, although it didn't have plumbing, just an old bath and a broken wash basin. And two bedrooms.

I looked in the master bedroom first. Not much there beyond the remains of the bed. If anything was hidden in there, I figured it would be under the bed. I was kind of right. There was a loose floorboard down there, and hidden under it was a diary with a name on it. Ann Deltrose. I only glanced at it for the moment, as there was the other bedroom to look at. Three beds, the remnants of old toys, and some odd black scorch marks above one of the bed.

I was almost down the stairs again, when Michael caught fire. I panicked, obviously, and tried to put the fire out with my hands and wings, which probably wasn't too pleasant for Michael. And I couldn't figure out why miss frosty lich hands was picking this moment to continue her aggressive shipping instead of using her magic to put the fire out, until the flames disappeared and I realised it had just been a vision. Something in this house really didn't want us to be here. There was a presence here with natural fire magic. Not taught like Elizabeth's magic, but something inherent. Like mine, except I'd certainly know if there was a demon in the house. As it was, it was Elizabeth who seemed the most aware of it.

Eddie had found a photograph of the family who used to live there, and between that and the diary, we decided we had enough for the moment and got out. We had a look around outside instead. There was a big tree at the back of the house, with the remains of what must have been a rope swing still tied to one branch. And one single rope.

I went up the tree to see if I could see anything interesting. I spotted the way into the cellar, which Elizabeth cleared away with a bit more necromancy. Sometimes I think she only does that when she wants a facelift. Anyway, the cellar didn't seem to like us much more than the rest of the house, and it was a long time since any of us had slept. Eddie, for one, seemed to be falling asleep on his feet. So we decided to give it up for the night, told the scout leaders to keep everyone away from that area due to sinkholes, and went home for some sleep.

The next morning, the photo and the diary got us some answers. The family in the photo were Jack and Ann Deltrose, their twin sons William and Arthur, their adopted daughter Samara, and a dog. I guess back then alarm bells didn't start ringing at the name Samara. Jack and Ann had married in the 1890s but struggled to have children, and eventually adopted Samara, who was the survivor of an orphanage fire, and I'm really starting to appreciate all the important lessons that horror movies have taught me. Much better than Doctor Who's approach to time travel, which wasn't helpful at all. And then had their two sons, about ten years later.

We went looking through town records, and much to our surprise, Jack and the two boys didn't die in a fire, but in a boating accident. We couldn't find graves for them in the cemetary, and it seemed pretty likely that those two crosses under the tree were grave markers. No record of what happened to Ann or Samara. We got Ann's maiden name, Welch, and as it happened there are still Welches living in Wicker Valley. We had a little chat with them, using the excuse of our museum, as of course we would want to feature the history of local families there.

But we still needed to figure out what was going on at the scout camp, so we packed up anti-ghost supplies and headed out. Things clearly weren't going well there, with several kids going home after unpleasant encounters. It was certainly sounding like ghosts. We decided to try the tree first. The spirits of the boys seemed a bit friendlier than Samara. There were some questions from the scout leaders about what exactly we were up to with all the candles and stuff, but between me and Adam we managed to convince them we were doing a geological survey to check for the release of underground gases, with the candles serving as a visual warning of carbon dioxide.

The boys were pretty sweet. One was pretty nervous and hung onto the dog, but the other talked to us. Their father was there too, which didn't surprise us as Michael had managed to find the third cross on the far side of the tree, although he stayed hidden. The dog was keeping people away from them. They were scared of Samara, which didn't surprise us. We asked about the boating accident, but it didn't seem to involve anything particularly suspicious like the boat catching fire.

We knew now what had happened to Ann. Sadly it came down to that single rope hanging from the tree. That poor family. And now we were going to have to go up against Samara. Ghost, firestarter, both. Either way, this was one battle that was definitely going to have theme music.

Wicker Valley, episode 33: Dogs and Ponies

It's all been a bit chaotic recently, starting from when we all got an invitation to dinner from Arthur's family. It all started out pretty normal, with Elizabeth and me getting taken to the conservatory for some girl talk, but then the storm started. The others had been taking Michael out to the stables, which I doubt he was too keen on, and then the storm in the shape of a horse with a glowing eye happened.

Most of us got out of there pretty quick, and after a bit of teleportation taxi services, so did Arthur, along with a mysterious box. The glowing eye in the cloud horse was supposedly some kind of chaos orb, and it needed finding, so Elizabeth and me set up the scrying circle. There were a few suggestions about what to use as a focus, but given our tendency to set things on fire, I didn't want to use anything important, and got out a My Little Pony with twinkle eyes.

Good thing too, since it caught fire. We didn't locate the orb, but I did have an exciting vision of some kind of wizard putting things in a cauldron.

Then, if things weren't complicated enough already, Rusty showed up, which meant explaining my jerk of a brother to Eddie. Chaos orb bad, we new that, but he did have a lead for us. One of my uncles had got hold of it at some point, and it had done bad things to him. So talking to him meant paying a visit to the slate mine.

I could see how creeped out everyone else was as we made our way down into the darkness, which is fair enough. My family are bad enough when they're in their right minds. It wasn't hard to find my uncle. We knew the orb made people's worst fears manifest, which reminded me a lot of last Halloween, so I wasn't surprised to find him shouting about angels. I couldn't remember if he'd ever known me as Scarlet so I introduced myself as Agnes, and he did know who I was. I wouldn't say we learned a lot, but it was a start.

We had other things to deal with though. Strange monsters being seen at the local scout camp. Arthur was staying with his family for the moment, but the rest of us loaded up Vanessa and went on our way. The only description we had was of a big dog, so we grabbed a few books to read along the way. We learned of two types of black dog sightings - malevolent ones like Black Shuck, and protective ones like church grims. Not very helpful so far.

At the campsite the scout leaders were doing their best to act normal while we took a look around. Michael found a pair of crosses concealed under grass at the base of a tree. A little further off we found an old cottage, almost completely covered in plant life. Then we had a collective vision, of two little boys, probably twins, running hand in hand. But Elizabeth saw something more. An older girl, with part of her face burnt.