D&D 5e prep

Had a busy day preparing to run D&D 5e. Spent some time at the cafe with notebook working on the beginnings of a random dungeon generation scheme and some encounter notes. Then monopolized the dining room table again to put in some time scraping mold lines and cleaning sprue off a bunch of dungeon dressings. Cleared that mess away as the bits went outside for priming. Then picked out 4 figures to set up characters for test run, and wrote up their character sheets. Took about an hour per character for the full writeup but I wasn't rushing it. It's the traditional F/MU/C/TH party, with some minor wrinkles in the details of the characters.

Started with a cave entrance and the beginning of a Dwarven Forge dungeon, and my daughter sat down and laid out the rest of the dungeon behind the door from the pile of pieces for her own amusement. I'll go with her dungeon design, though I'll be adding some monsters, since she only had the little Cthulhu statues that were in the bag of DF pieces.

Leila and her dungeon

The party enters the cave with a balance of greed and trepidation.

Then they stop for portraits just before breaching the first door.

Gnigel the Gnome Rogue Raconteur - He'll be an Arcane Trickster if he survives to 3rd level. Upgrading his sling's performance to approach real world numbers may be my first 5e house rule. RPGs always underrate slings for range and damage while ignoring their real downsides. As a former slinger and student of the weapon, its one of my pet peeves.

Llewella of Kinholm - Noble Human Fighter in  mostly sensible armor. Greatsword armed and starting with the tanking feat Heavy Armor Master via the human starting feat option. Great weapon fighting is the obvious Fighting Style for her.

Ban Gundenson - Sage Mountain Dwarf Wizard - given his heritage, he'll either soon have armor under this robe or change to a more traditional dwarf figure. A wizard that can wear medium armor and has dwarf weapon training should be an interesting hybrid character.

Brother Kadros - Human Cleric, Acolyte of a war god. Shield and warhammer not depicted. Given the war god leanings that evolved with the character, and martial weapons proficiency, he'll probably move on to another figure soon.

Starting their adventure now as my shakedown cruise with the rules, then back to stitching together a megadungeon out of all those maps. Have the location picked out on the campaign map for Night's Dark Terror.

Postscript

First fight with 5 goblins ended totally in the party's favor. After two combat rounds, they were unscratched, four goblins were down and dying and one running away. Got a better sense of how some of the rules interacted and sketched out house rulings on morale checks for the goblins, fumble handling, random displacement by successfully dodging a Sacred Flame spell, etc.