Adventure 02: The Bridge Toll
The bridge on the river road has a toll now. The toll is forks. The toll-keeper has been missing a week, and somebody has to open that road.
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Start here instead. Nothing in this one leans on Adventure 01, and plenty of tables will begin at the bridge.
It does help if somebody's rolled a twenty-sided die before. If nobody has, you'll be teaching that at the toll gate, where the opposition is two goblins with fourteen hit points between them and your party has something like a hundred. It goes fine.
Three endings, and you don't pick
- Out-fight him. A goblin king, a big jagged sword, a lot of hollering.
- Out-argue him. He keeps a ledger. Somebody at your table will want to read it, and it's always somewhere they can find it.
- Give him the thing he wants. There's a half-finished crown made of forks down in the cellar, and any party can carry it back up.
Which one you get depends on what your kids do in the room. Read all three before you sit down, because you won't know which one you're in until it happens.
Scariness level: loud and ridiculous. It happens outdoors in daylight and ends at golden hour. Nobody has been kidnapped. Fenwick the toll-keeper is under the tollhouse, perfectly well, reading rules aloud to two small goblins who think he's the most interesting man alive.
The goblins are absurd little bureaucrats. They confiscate, they stamp, they file, they lose things. The scariest thing in it is a stern goblin with a clipboard. Somebody at your table will push one of them off the bridge, which is also fine: the river is warm, slow, and shallow enough to stand up in. Tone guardrails are printed near the front if you'd rather read them first.