Last week the players in this AD&D game slaughtered the most harmless and helpless members of a group of bugbears, and the exceptionally nurturing bugbear mother who had been taking care of the communal offspring. They're starting this adventure thinking they can just camp out overnight in the midst of all this carnage: there are several things which could go wrong. It's my fault; I'm the dungeonmaster, and told them twice they had figured out the north entrance to the castle in (L1) The Secret of Bone Hill was the least guarded. Very few female humans will still respect me if I don't have the tribe rain its full rage down on the party, in a self-destructive fury fueled by the desire for revenge. The other thing that could go wrong I'll keep to myself, for the moment.

We had a good game with a little exploration and a lot of combat. Our monk leveled up to third, gained the least impressive of all psionic disciplines, and it turned out to be pretty useful. The fourth-level magic-user rejoined the party, only using one of his spells, in this last battle. I maybe pumped up my DMing skills a little when I told my players, afterwards, that we had fit six battles into this five-hour session. There were six encounters: cute little skeletal animals, a frustratingly hard to defeat zombie, a perfectly ordinary poisonous snake, a lone bugbear, a bunch of skeletons, and the last. But the elusive bugbear hid and snuck up behind the party during their battle with the skeletons, which was pretty scary for our youngest player and his magic-user (he loved it).

The adventurers didn't fart around on top of Bone Hill and got into the castle just before dark, so none of them know what comes out there at night.… It's possible everybody's characters will die, but with great risks come great rewards. They've managed their resources pretty well so far.

This is a second- to third-level Advanced Dungeons & Dragons campaign (kids get a bit of a break starting out). The classes advance at different rates, humans can change classes allowing them, potentially, to have fairly many levels in two or three classes, and other races multiclass differently. Such a multiclassed character is typically a level behind in hit points and other abilities, but they always get the best of each class, including to-hit bonuses and saving throws. Elves and halflings are very stealthy, and halflings excel as multiclass fighter/thieves, thief being what rogues were called when D & D was new. Elves are often fighter/magic-users, the AD&D wizard, and I allow dwarves to be fighter/clerics, a common house rule of the period. Assassins are not allowed in this campaign. The most popular classes for humans are probably magic-user, druid, paladin, and ranger. Rangers are the stealthiest of all characters, and we have been feeling the lack of one in the party.

Characters with multiple classes have more of a chance to get psionic talents: every non-elf, non-gnome character gets a first roll for psionics at every level. The chance to spontaneously develop psionics is around 10% depending on your Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma, then there is a 90% chance to acquire additional powers at higher levels. These are the psychic, often subtle, abilities of characters on the fringes of society, seen in movies of the 1980's like Firestarter, Scanners, and Star Wars. One player in our group has a character with the same mystical "Jedi mind trick" as Obi-Wan Kenobi…and we have two empaths, like Deanna Troi on Star Wars: TNG. We're not going to have any dimension-ripping telekineticists before fifth level, but the next character to get psionics will get us to a threshold where the mind-bending thief can borrow some of the party's mental energy to fry an enemy's brain. The characters have already been to the Upside Down, though.