Game secured for click-and-collect from my FLGS. Happy dance!
While I'm here, an update on my lad's D&D game. Feel free to look away now!
He's on session 11 or 12 now, all over Discord, so (virtually) a seasoned pro. It's been fascinating to watch his campaign mutate from the 5th Ed Starter Set adventure into something original, and he's lifted the local setting out of the Forgotten Realms and dropped into his own creation. In the very first session, he had an extra player join, so rather than slow things down he had him play a recently-captured goblin until he could roll up a character. Of course that never happened, and the character has now grown to become a sort of half-genuine goblin Messiah, with the other characters (human, elf, dwarf, halfling) conniving to be paraded as subjugated representatives of the humanoid races, as they gradually convert and recruit a born-again goblin army to march on the mercantile cities of the coast and overthrow their snooty rulers.
Meanwhile, the Rogue character has secretly sold out his companions to a shadowy organisation who also want to see the city states overthrown, but place their own agents at the wheel: each player has been gifted a minor magic item Galadriel-style by this grateful local "businesswoman", but in fact each is a different kind of monitoring device (sound, vision, location etc.) that combined allow her to watch their every move. And that's just two of the characters!
I know there's nothing more boring than other people's D&D stories, but I wanted to highlight how there really is nothing like a tabletop RPG: even in this day and age of realistic multi-player computer games. A gaggle of complete noob teenagers sitting in their own homes can take a simple commercial rescue-a-dwarf introductory adventure and not-enough pre-gen characters and spin it up into over 2 months (so far) of completely unpredictable free fun.
It's a damn fine hobby.
