The Tuning Room

Entrance to the chamber:  an iron door.  If the characters spend time examining it, they will note that it becomes very hot to the touch, then 30 seconds later very cold to the touch, then back to hot 30 seconds later, etc.  Listening at the door will also reveal a repeating pattern of five low-frequency musical tones.

Created in OmniGraffle.

Inside the chamber:  The room is 15' wide near the entrance, then there's a 5' bottleneck, and then it expands again on the far side.  The ceiling is high, maybe 40'.  The target treasure is on the far side (see diagram).

Near the entrance on each side is a statue:  one statue of a red dragon, and one of a white dragon, both facing the door.  They seem to leer at the delvers as they enter the room, grinning.  Once every minute, the red dragon statue spews a blistering cone of fire, and the frost dragon blows a biting cone of frost.

Beyond the statues, where the room narrows, a stone slab 4' tall blocks the way.  The slab is hanging from the ceiling, supported by five thick steel cables of varying thickness, starting with the thickest on the left and the thinnest on the right (similar to what one would find under the hood of a piano or on a guitar).  Higher up, out of reach, mechanical hammers strike the steel cables to create the pattern of musical tones.

If the characters look closely, they'll see that the stone slab is already a few inches off the floor, but this doesn't leave enough space for them to crawl through.  Also, the cables are thick enough and grouped together closely enough that characters cannot squeeze between them to climb over the slab.

A stand with the next magical instrument they must collect is clearly visible on the far side.

Solution:  Careful examination of the statues will reveal that the heads are not fixed into place; they can be swiveled around and aimed.  Aiming the red dragon head at the cables will cause them to expand, lowering both the pitch of the musical tones and the slab of stone, not helping the characters at all.  Aiming the white dragon's head at the cables, however, will cause the cables to contract, thereby shortening their length, causing the musical tones to rise in pitch, and raising the slab of stone to a height sufficient to allow the characters to crawl under it.

Little Furry Critters

I made a big breakthrough this weekend with my youngest daughter, Nora.

Older than she looks, but still young (8)

Since introducing her to RPGs almost two years ago, I've been challenged to make adventures that appeal to both her and her older sisters.  Livie and Sophie thrive on the danger of combat, but Nora shies away when the ride threatens to get rough.  On good days, her halfling druid hides until she is critically needed, or until her animal companion Pinky the riding dog is in dire jeopardy.  On other days, Nora declines to play altogether.  This puts me in a pickle because on the one hand we consider these sessions to be valuable to her education, but on the other they're supposed to be fun.  I don't want to make her play if she's not going to have fun doing it, and if she's miserable, she isn't going to learn anything anyway, except perhaps how miserable playing RPGs can be.  That would be a shame.

I thought about this all weekend as game day approached.  I decided that the session would be required for Nora, but I was determined to make her want to play rather than force her to play.  Then, once I got her to the table, I would aim to make it as fun for her as I could.  So the first thing I did was set up the table the night before, then pulled her aside to ask her where she would like to sit.  I told her I was giving her first choice of seating.  She did not waste the opportunity.  She looked over the map, pointed at the only two rooms drawn on it, and asked, "Which way is it going to go?"  

I told her where I anticipated most of the action would go down, and she chose accordingly, putting herself front and center.  Apparently this made a big impression because she mentioned it to my wife the next morning.  So far, so good. 

Getting her buy-in was all I had planned on doing, but then Sunday morning it finally hit me:

Little furry critters.

The section of the dungeon they are in is populated by Ratfolk.  Their goal is to try to capture the characters and sacrifice them to their "god," a gruesome creature made of worms and mud (this is the final boss for the level).  The Ratfolk ride around on oversized rats and use them to do all their grunt work.  This much I had already planned.   

The new thought was this:  what if the rats don't want to serve the Ratfolk?

You see, Nora is reading Redwall by Brian Jacques.  She also has watched the entire animated TV series several times.  Something about it obviously appeals to her.  Having read the novel myself some years ago, and having some familiarity with the TV series, I get the gist of what it's all about.  It's anthropomorphized woodland critters going on heroic quests to protect the ones they love, usually against cruel woodland critters with dreams of conquest.*  

So Redwall is about little creatures with big hearts, while Nora's a little kid with a big heart who plays a druid who can talk to animals.  How perfect is that?

I didn't have enough time before the game to really nail down all the particulars, but I did just well enough that the session really lit her up, and I was able to sew the seeds for an ongoing influence of little furry critters in our game.  Here's how it went down.

The characters came across a room of junk where the rats store, well, junk.  They saw two rats who were terrified of the party.  Fiona (that's Nora's druid) quickly jumped in and cast a spell to speak with the animals.  The rats said they were frightened, but once Fiona had put their minds at ease, they cautioned the characters to avoid the "Cult of Oogma."  When pressed, the rats said that the cult consisted of Ratfolk.  Later on, while the other characters were trying to get over a river, Fiona spoke some more to the rats and learned that the underground city that she and her companions are seeking is "just beyond the waterfall."

"Oh!  Where's the waterfall?" she asked, excited.  

"Follow the river," they replied.

Fiona dashed from the room to find the others and tell them about this important discovery.  In real life, Nora was standing up shouting, positively elated.  We had to calm her down a bit, but I was taken aback.  This was the most emotion she had ever shown in the game, save once when Pinky almost bought the farm.  I had struck gold.

***

Now, how to keep her interested?  That's what I've been thinking about all day, and I think I finally have the answer.  

What I plan to do is to create a set of events running in parallel to the player characters' main adventure.  These events will involve a cast of furry little critters that Fiona will get to know in her travels.  They will have their own quests, unrelated to the main thread, but they will come into contact with the party from time to time.  Information, goods, and services can be exchanged between the critters and the PCs.  Along the way Nora will periodically get caught up on what's going on in the little creatures' story, and she'll be in a position to help them out from time to time and impact the outcomes of their quests.  In turn, the information she obtains from her tiny friends will be important for the overall quest she shares with her sisters.  It's a win-win scenario.

Our next session, coming up this Sunday, should see this strategy blossom.  The characters really screwed up last time, and they're all down to their last few hit points and floating down a river toward a waterfall.  No big deal, the Ratfolk have nets just beyond the edge to catch them with.  In fact, their whole strategy is to fire arrows from the banks, thereby herding their victims toward the nets.  Players will always surprise me, so I suppose they could get out of this mess, but this time their situation is rather dire. I predict they will be captured.  Well, not all of them...Norma the dwarf and two NPCs took different routes and are safe for the moment, though separated from each other.

While captured in the nets, Fiona will meet Slave Abigail (Abigail, Abby, Redwall Abbey...see what I did there?), a rat who plans to lead the resistance against the Ratfolk.  The rats are being forced by their masters to drag the party to a holding area.  Abigail will whisper to them, "Please free us!  We wish to be slaves no longer.  You must slay Oogma!"  She will then begin gnawing at their ropes, but will be interrupted by a Ratfolk sentry before she can finish the job.  As she leaves she risks one final message: "Wait for my signal!"

The idea here is for the party to rest overnight in captivity and heal up, so they'll be ready to face Oogma.

When/if Norma and the others reunite and show up, and when the party breaks their binds, Abigail will give her signal ("Rise, my brothers and sisters!  Rise against our oppressors!  Free the topsiders!" or something like that), and chaos will reign supreme.  The characters should emerge victorious, as they are wont to do.

The next time they see Abigail, she will have a new title:  Seeker Abigail.  She will be questing for the Lost MacGuffin of Chikkitok.

...an artifact that a certain weasel by the name of Dweezil, with designs against Abby's people, will also be interested to acquire.

---

* Ironically, Jacques - like nearly every other author who writes about anthropomorphized woodland creatures - portrays mice as the innocent, virtuous protagonists, and rats as the wicked antagonists.  The truth, as I have learned through my hobby of captive snake husbandry, is quite the opposite.  Rats are highly intelligent and fairly gentle creatures.  Mice are just plain mean and kill each other for sport in the brief time it takes to get them home from the pet store.  

Organic Curriculum

In talking again with my wife about this post, she thinks I'm giving short shrift to the role of RPGs in our homeschool environment.

She doesn't see our gaming as a supplement to the core curriculum that she focuses on.  Instead, she sees it as a curriculum in its own right, and one that develops organically, without a whole lot of structure.  The way she described it reminded me of unschooling.

It's definitely a different way of looking at it than how I have been presenting it in this blog.  I have talked about RPGs supplementing the curriculum, or even being "part of" the curriculum, but she sees it as a second curriculum, and one that isn't as tightly controlled as the more traditional schooling she provides in the classroom setting.

That's a more accurate way of describing what we're doing, I think.

Another Music Puzzle

The characters will arrive at the edge of a huge pit.  They must get to the far side to retrieve another instrument for their quest.  Eight stone discs, big enough to stand on, float magically in open space over the pit.  Each disc has a number associated with it from one to eight as indicated by diamond-shaped markings.  The markings are configured like the symbols on playing cards, while the discs are arranged in a pattern relative to each other as shown in the diagram to the right.

The characters will be able to hear a simple, repeating melody playing overhead.  The melody will correspond to the root notes of a standard jazz progression:

I  vi  ii  V  I   (1, 6, 2, 5, 1, or  C, A, D, G, C)

This is the order that the characters will have to tread the discs in order to get to the other side.  Stepping on any of the discs out of order will dump the character into the pit below.  The minimum weight to activate a disc is 50 lbs, so the players won't be able to easily test them. The distances between the discs will be such that the PCs can jump from side to side (e.g., from  #3 to #2), or from one row to the next (e.g., from #2 to #4), or even diagonally to the next row (e.g., from #2 to #7), but they won't be able to skip rows (e.g., from #2 to #8).

You may have noticed that they will not be able to make it back to disc 1 from disc 5.  The players will need to make the connection that #8 can serve as a substitute to #1, just as the 8th note of a major scale is the same note as the 1st note in the scale, just an octave higher.  So the true pattern is 1, 6, 2, 5, 8.

This will not be an easy puzzle for them.  The pit won't be save or die, of course, but I will put something creepy down in the bottom - and a way to get back up on the near side - to add to the excitement.

Farewell to Fibon, and Delving Again

We finally got another Pathfinder RPG session in! This time we moved the story forward and began actually questing rather than just shopping. I find it much easier to prepare when the characters are actively pursuing their goals, so although I winged it today, I won't have to next time. By the end of today's session they were actually in a dungeon, arguing bitterly over direction, and going their separate ways.

Which works out just fine for me, actually. Part of the problem we've had in recent months is that my two oldest daughters have gymnastics on different and alternating nights, Monday through Thursday. Then they both have gymnastics on Fridays and Saturdays. That leaves Sundays for gaming, but something always seems to come up. By splitting up, they allow me the opportunity to run their separate adventures on the night each individual is home. We'll get in at least one session apiece this week.

We learned a few words tonight: arcane/arcana, keep, motte, and scriptorium, to name a few. We saw some new mechanics we hadn't looked at before, especially how poisons work, and what happens when core abilities like strength are sapped. We finally met an NPC who believed Elerisa's outrageous story about being an elven princess from a civilization that disappeared 500 years in the past. His name was Forg, an elderly sage working in the depths of the archives below the city library. Into his care they entrusted the skull of the ancient scholar Fibon the Wise. He was most pleased to be brought to such a prestigious place of learning and research, but he was unable to thank the adventurers for bringing him there, for no sooner had he been placed down on a table when Norma spied guards in the corridor outside Forg's study coming to apprehend the adventurers.

Why did this happen? Because of a scuffle in a weapons shop the last time we played. Three men they left for dead (they were later revived and healed by priests behind the scenes), and so Elerisa, Fiona, and Bubda the Beatboxing Bard are all wanted for attempted murder. In fact, Elerisa now has a wanted poster she snagged off a wall as a memento. She is being described as a deranged woman who suffers delusions that she is the long lost elven princess of Nimoriél...which of course she really is. She is considered armed and extremely dangerous, as is the small child she travels with (really Fiona, an adult halfling), who is reputed to recklessly summon dangerous elemental beings in public places to do her evil bidding.

Forg showed them a secret passage to a tunnel that runs between the library and the museum. He also gave them a parting nugget of information: somewhere in the labyrinth deep beneath the city is a portal that can take them across the sea to the Sylvesse, the forest that was once the domain of the elven people. Elerisa desires to travel there to find the lost city of Nimoriél, but first she wants to check out the museum, which proudly boasts an exhibit of treasures associated with the lost elven princess.

Norma the dwarf is not quite so motivated. This is a problem for me as the GM. I have devised a grand connection between the disappearance of the elves, the spreading of orcs into the dwarf realms that led to the enslavement of Norma's brother, and a special gathering of the world's druids. In other words, I have something special in mind for all three of my daughters. Unfortunately, only the elf has clear motivation at this time, so it seems like the story is all built around her. I keep promising Norma and Fiona that I'll bring it all together, but talk is cheap.

So we fought some giant spiders tonight, found a healing pool, explored an abandoned scriptorium, and then argued about which direction to go. Since there has consistently been a choice to move "forward" on the map (i.e., the direction they faced when they started, hereafter "north"), Elerisa has been determined to go that way. Norma, by contrast, wants to explore by taking some random turns. She has even started mapping the labyrinth. Normally Fiona sticks with Elerisa, but this time, when Elerisa chose to go straight no matter which way the others went, Fiona stuck with Norma the dwarf.

When next we play, Fiona and Norma will explore a few rooms off to the west of where they left off tonight, while Elerisa strikes out alone on the path heading north.

The pattern has been that predators pick off the stragglers. Elerisa is going to be in for quite the bumpy ride.

Nothing to See Here...

This winter gymnastics schedule is killing us. We haven't had a chance to play. I expect that trend to continue this weekend, due to the Superbowl.

Spoilers follow!

On the upside, I've got quite the game going with my grown-up friends. It's a custom adventure I made, but it's too dark for the kids. I'll need to clean it up before running them through it. I will run them through it, though. It's too rich and full of plot twists and turns to set aside.

One of the players found a magic dagger last session. At least, he thinks it's magic. That's because someone cast a spell on it to give it a magic aura that the spellcasters in the group can detect. In truth, though, it is not a dagger at all but a baby Mimic (used here in accordance with the OGL). When the player strikes at opponents with it, it does normal dagger damage, plus the mimic's bite damage. I describe the sensation of it tugging and ripping at the target's flesh. Not the kind of thing I would necessarily do with the kids, but you have to admit it's cool in a creepy kind of way.

The beauty of it is that the player has indicated all he needs now to round out his character is a magical rapier or short sword. Meanwhile, the more it eats, the more the mimic will grow. After a few more uses, it won't fit in its sheath anymore. I will describe it as having grown longer and thinner, not unlike a miniature rapier. If I'm lucky, he'll think that the item is magically growing to fit the needs of its owner. This will work out fine for awhile, at least until the mimic grows more massive than either sword type. It will then be a longsword, and eventually even bigger.

At some point it will show itself to be what it really is: a bloodthirsty fiend. Mwahahahahaaaa!

Spicing Up the Bag of Holding

The following is Open Game Content according to the Open Game License.

Another classic magic item that's been around in D&D for awhile is the bag of holding. Similar to Mary Poppins' bottomless bag, the bag of holding is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. Characters can stow their possessions in it without the weight of the bag changing. This means you don't have to hire a bunch of untrustworthy scoundrels to help you cart all that treasure you pillaged from monsters found in the dungeon. Just throw it in the bag and off you go on your next adventure.

In reading Pathfinder's description of this item (see link above), we learn that the bag's contents are actually kept in a "nondimensional" space, whatever that means. I'm inclined to think of this space as a place, regardless of it being "nondimensional." Perhaps it is in a tiny corner of some alternate reality or some kind of astral plane, who knows.

Contemplating this magic item, it occurred to me that it has wonderful potential to serve as both a puzzle and a plot device. The premise is simple: the characters find a bag of holding, and someone else - or something else - is out there with another bag of holding which opens into the same nondimensional space. Think of the possibilities! First, the characters discover all kinds of interesting stuff in the bag. Understanding the bag's potential, they start adding their own money/food/equipment into the bag. This works out just fine for a time, but eventually they go to retrieve an item, and lo and behold, it's gone. Or they notice something in the bag that they're reasonably sure wasn't in there before. All this because some other being is putting stuff in and taking stuff out of his/her/its own bag of holding.

It's only a matter of time before a character reaches into the bag only to have her hand grasped by...

...a claw!

Soft Skills

We tried something new this week. I think it has the potential to be a good thing, but it certainly didn't start out that way.

I assigned three special roles to the players: Mapper, Chronicler, and Caller. Mapper and Chronicler are pretty straightforward concepts and were easily understood by the kids, though I did have to give them the definition of "chronicle." The Caller role, by contrast, caused confusion and wreaked havoc in our gaming session.

The Caller, an unofficial role sometimes called Party Leader in past editions of the game, is the primary liaison between the players and the referee. The idea is to limit the chaos of five kids simultaneously trying to relate their characters' actions to me. The natural tendency is for each player to get louder in an effort to be heard over the others. I then quiet them down, but they just start over again from a lower volume point. If I go around the table and get their actions in turn, we find that one player's action is in opposition to what another player was trying to accomplish, leading to heated discussion and increased volume. And I'm not even talking about combat situations or any situation that calls for initiative rolls and taking turns (which goes smoothly). I'm talking about what the characters are doing while hanging out in the city.

Do we go to the bathhouse to clean up before shopping for nice clothes, or after?

Do the dwarf ladies shave their beards at the bathhouse or at the inn?

Do we get a room at a nice inn inside the city's inner wall (where only the wealthy reside), or outside the wall to save some money?

"I go to shave my beard."

"I'm going to the weapon store!"

"I'm looking for a candy shop."

If I allow each player to do what he/she declares, then everyone splits up, and soon the characters have no means by which to find each other in a strange city of over 150,000 souls.

Enter the Caller, whose job it is to facilitate the discussion, find out what everyone wants to do, put a plan together, then communicate the actions of the party to me with statements like, "We head for the gates of the inner wall." When describing this role, I was very careful to explain that the Caller is not the Party Leader. The Caller does not tell the others what to do, or make decisions for the party. The Caller is supposed to get consensus, then relay the group actions to me. That's how it works in theory, anyway.

The reality of the situation at my table was that the Virtues Fairy had to make a visit and take gold pieces from the Mapper, who actively resisted the Caller's efforts at gaining consensus, because in her mind the Caller was being "bossy." I was paying close attention, and although the Caller could have chosen her words better, she was trying to take a "team facilitator" style approach rather than a "boss" approach. The Mapper, however, assumed the worst intentions of the Caller and responded accordingly. Regular readers of this blog will not be surprised by this development.

The Caller also expressed difficulty with her role in that she was unsure how to present her own ideas without coming across as bossy. In her mind the other players didn't even have any ideas; they were just interrupting her while she tried to illuminate them with her own ideas! "Did you even hear them have any ideas?" she asks me even now as I type this. "Any brilliant sparks? Wait...you're not writing this, are you?" The truth was I did not, in fact, hear any strokes of genius from anyone else that day, but that's beside the point. You can see what I'm up against here.

Part of the problem is that most of the time she is the only one offering any suggestions that make any sense. She is probably correct in her belief that the game would go faster and the party would experience greater success if they would just do what she says. I can't argue with the truth of this, and so I'm a little bit sympathetic with her plight. It's not how the world works, though. She's not going to be in charge. People are going to have their own opinions about how to do things, and she is going to rub some people the wrong way whether she likes it or not. And the other players aren't going to have fun following her orders. Again, though, not that she was giving orders: she was trying to solicit ideas, even as she made sure to share her own. Yet she has much to learn about the arts of tact and negotiation, to name a few.

Now is the time for her - and her sisters - to learn how to deal with adversity and function in a team environment despite conflicting personalities. If I can help them learn these soft skills through our weekly gaming, I will be doing them a huge service, and the investment in the RPG will be well worth it.

As soon as I figure out how to teach these soft skills, I'll let you know!

The Fine Art of Bombast

"[P]seudo-intellectual verbiage is the mark of someone overcompensating for the vapidity of his thought."

- James Maliszewski, from his blog, Grognardia, in a bit of self-deprecating humor.

---

Page 55 of Paizo Publishing's Pathfinder Game Mastery Guide is a full page of words that every GM should know. It's a pretty good list chock-full of juicy words, many of which you may or may not ever use outside the context of an RPG. Words like geophagy, defenestrate, and ichor. Last week I asked the kids to each pick two words from the list, write them down, look up their meanings, and write some sentences demonstrating understanding of the words. Just a little homework for them between sessions. They picked their words, and one of them chose "bombast." We made a slight modification to change her word to "bombastic."

She can tell you the definition, but she gets stuck trying to write the sentences. It seems she doesn't fully understand the meaning. So my wife and I started looking for examples from her books, movies, TV shows, etc. Well, right off the bat we learned that there's not as much bombast going on in children's entertainment as we had thought. At least no clear-cut cases that demonstrate bombast without it getting all tangled up with something else. Frasier Crane is a great example, of course, but our kids don't watch Frasier. Therefore I decided to take it upon myself to provide an example using the Savage Worlds game we're starting.

The assignment: the girls must read the following introductory passage that I wrote for our game. I'm also going to read it aloud to them in as pretentious a tone of voice as I can muster. Then, I'll ask my daughter if she can think of a word that describes the narrator's tone. Finally, all the girls will rewrite the passage in their own words, with instructions to avoid obfuscatory language.

Deep near the center of the galaxy, where glowing nebulae give birth to a profusion of brilliant, sparkling suns set amid shimmering curtains of stellar dust, a single planet revolves around the massive black hole comprising the galactic core. This planet is Sxibi, the heart and soul of the Great Alliance, and a shiny bastion of civilization’s wondrous triumph against the cold emptiness separating over a billion inhabited worlds. Here, among her beaming, pristine spires and the floating domes of her uninterrupted, globe-spanning metropolis, gather the greatest scholars, artists, philosophers, and scientists of the age, from every discipline and every species spanning the far reaches of space. Here, within her massive halls and over her glittering vistas are debates heard and ideas conceived that shape the lives of beings everywhere for millennia to come. Here, in its chamber beneath her pearly, glowing skies sits the Rryach, an eldrich super-being formed for the sole purpose of attempting to bring order from the chaos of more than a thousand million senators. And here, beneath her perfect veneer, dwelling in the deep shadows of her majestic architectures stretching higher into the sky than most can ever hope to see, are Sxibi’s teaming masses, numbering in the trillions, bustling about and eking out their meager livings by serving the needs of the rich and powerful, always alert for any opportunity to break out of the cold, subterranean depths and into the dazzling light of the upper echelons of Sxibian society.

FYI, "Sxibi" is pronounced "SH - bee," the first syllable being a schwa. It's just a little nonsense word that my middle daughter says, and it sounds funny when she does. And yeah, I know the passage isn't really the best example, but it is pretty bombastic compared to what they're used to.

Introductions Are In Order

I picked up these plastic miniatures for the game this weekend because I had no good ones for the four new players to use. It bothers me that they're not accurate representations of the players' characters. I worry that the players will substitute the appearance of the minis for the images in their imaginations, rather than the reverse. I've always hated minis for this reason, even when they're fairly accurate, but I guess with later editions of D&D, including Pathfinder, they're a useful and (almost) necessary evil. I rarely used them growing up and I guess I got used to doing it that way.

As always, to protect the anonymity of my friends and family (whether or not that's a worthwhile goal), I'll use character names to reference both the characters and their players.

Clockwise from the top: The Unnamed, played by my wife. She has 24 hours to name her half-orc monk character. Obviously her mini is neither half-orc nor a monk, but it is female and big. Next is Erynian ("Wren"), a female elven druid played by a good friend of ours. Gender and race are correct, but the spear is misleading. Marra the halfling ranger is played by Wren's daughter, and represented by a male halfling (didn't see any females). Finally, Isaiah Deluvia, a Saurian wizard played by our friend (Wren's husband / Marra's dad), will be using a human male mini since no Saurian-like minis of any class were available at the store.

Savage Worlds

My copy of Savage Worlds Explorer's Edition came in the mail this week. I've read through the book and I like what I see. I'm going to be using the Savage Worlds (SW) system for teaching history this year, specifically by inserting my kids' characters into actual historical events. I imagine I'll blog more extensively on that in future posts.

I've mentioned before that I have guests coming over this Saturday for a big Pathfinder game, so this weekend might not be the best time to try out SW. Maybe if the kids are up to it on Sunday afternoon we'll run a little play test, but I have a feeling they'll be all RPG'd out by then. Whether it happens this week or next, here's what we've thought up.

When I was first telling Norma about SW, I said it could be used for any setting. I said, "Pick a setting, any setting. If you could role play anything, anywhere, what would it be?"

She said, "I'd like to be shrunk down and play in a dollhouse, with my dolls coming to life." I said that maybe we could do something like that and started thinking about how to set it up.

Back when the girls were younger, I used to make up bedtime stories featuring a character named the Forgetful Fairy. The Forgetful Fairy gets into a lot of trouble due to her notoriously short attention span and short-term memory. Some stories were epic in scope and went on and on for weeks. Nowadays we read chapter books (currently working on The Golden Compass), so it's been a long time since the Forgetful Fairy has made an appearance, though my kids remember her fondly. When thinking about the SW dollhouse idea, I thought it might be interesting to bring the Forgetful Fairy out of retirement.

So here's how it will play out: the characters are kids who are away from home with their parents and stuck in a boring situation, and one of them wishes out loud that they could be back at home playing with their dolls. The Forgetful Fairy magically appears and grants the wish, and all three are shrunk down to doll size and whisked away to the dollhouse where their playthings all come to life. They have a blast playing with their dolls until they start to feel hungry. They call out for the Fairy to return and end the spell, but she's off doing other things and has, of course, completely forgotten about them. The rest of the adventure is a quest to the kitchen where both the food and the telephone can be found. Obstacles to overcome include the stairs, the cat, a faction of dolls that doesn't want them to leave, and possibly a snake (I keep pet ball pythons in real life, but they don't actually roam free in the house). Also, since the telephone is attached to the kitchen wall and the buttons are on the handset, calling their parents may be quite challenging. Allies along the way will include their Polly Pockets and an escaped Hamster.

We'll see what happens.