DM Dream

Opera Trance - The Dream from MissDjDolce on https://youtu.be/kBTUdY4X2-8

One of the worst ways to bore people at a party is to tell them last night's dream.

No matter how cool or scary or weird it was, your listeners, because they weren't in your skull with you at the time, have no choice except to make excuses and flee, or nod their heads politely and say, "Uh-huh...that sounds pretty weird."

They have no recourse to responses they could make in a normal conversation that would turn a monologue into a dialogue:

"Yes, I've been to Venice before, too.  The canals certainly are pungent!" or

"Yeah, I hate that team, too!  My sister dated every last player on the Detroit Red Wings 1966-67 roster...all during 3 months in 1985!"  or

"So you like to knit, huh?  I do, too.  At least I used to, that is, before my horrific accident..."

So here goes - but at least my dream had to do with D&D:

Rachel, who is a gamer and successful YA author in real life, bids me to follow her to the bright flourescent basement of the Friendly Local Gaming Shop, which I don't recognize in the slightest.  She points at a long table around which 20 sort-of-hepcat people between 22-35 years of age sit.  There is one seat open.

I'm supposed to sit in that empty Aero Saarinen chair and DM for this entire group of intimidating strangers.

Rachel utters profuse thanks as she dashes up the stairs and hurries out the gaming shop.

I turn back to the table.  People with day-glo hair, wearing sunglasses indoors and fuzzy-fringed hooded parkas (is what my subconscious thinks is cool?  WTF, subconcious!) look at me expectantly.

 "Awwww, YEEEAH!"  whoops a young man whose curlicued mustache partially covers a tattoo of a curlicued mustache.  "Let's get our GAME on!"

Right in front of me is a laptop computer.  Did Rachel leave DM notes for this session somewhere inside this machine that I'm supposed to find and run in her place?  Am I supposed to project images from the adventure onto the wall?

I can't find any paper module or map or notes.  None of the younglings seated around the table have paper character sheets or pencils.  No dice are to be seen anywhere.

On the laptop, I can't even get into the Documents folder or the Desktop.  All I can get is this nonsensical window ad for Chlorox Bleach: a full-screen pop-up that stayed up... forever.

"Um, five-minute toilet break..." I declare weakly to the ring of eager sunglasses-wearing faces.

I run upstairs, rummage around the completely unfamiliar game shop that I'm supposed to know.  I find a yellowed newsprint map of the sample dungeon in the 1st edition AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide.  The cashier waves me on; the paper has gone fungal, so it's free.

I rush downstairs to the over-illuminated table of hepnik whippersnappers.  A glacier of boredom has hardened over the table.  The hepcats and kitties sigh and yawn and chew on their neon dread-perm
extensions.  In the ostensible pursuit of increased comfort, they are in awkward and rude poses of repose.

"Can I just watch this one movie on my phone while you intro the adventure?" says one neo-slacker chica. Her deely-bobber tiara has little acid house smiley globes wiggling on twin springy coils.  She is probably wearing them ironically.

"No, no phones!   No movies, no TV, no calls, no texts!  Pay attention while gaming to the people right in front of you!  At most, you can stack dice into towers on the table, although that's still kind of annoying..."

I wish I had been having a lucid dream, so I could direct myself to wrench open a window (in the FLGS basement wall) and yell out over the impossible subterranean rooftops of the city the "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore..." speech from Network.  I could melt everyone's cell phones and deely-bobbers with my mind.

Instead, mercifully, there comes a time in everyone's droning dream story where they finally say: "And then I woke up!"

So

AND THEN I WOKE UP!



     

Picking Up the Gauntlet: MS Paint Monster Manual Challenge

OK, so Tristan at Bogeyman's Cave threw down the gauntlet of choosing (or opening to a random page and putting one's finger on) a couple of monsters from the Monster Manual or Fiend Folio or another bestiary and MS Painting them and fearlessly sticking them on one's blog. 

The point is, the images are only done when YOU, the blogger, decide they are done.  The drawings are good enough just because they exist and you felt like making them exist. 

This is like painting naked... or skydiving naked... or doing that public speaking exercise when you imagine the audience is naked - except YOU are naked, giving a rambling speech, wildstyling, not advancing the PowerPoint slides, making your lawyers burst into flames, and not even caring! 

Sooo - I swiped from Pixabay free images, shredded them in MS Paint:

Gelatinous Cube, of course

And pure freestylin' freehand MS Paint drawing:

Larvae, the souls of unhappy jerks...

I almost psyched myself out looking at David A. Trampier's perfectly mood-suffused woodcut-looking India ink masterpieces, but then I looked at some of the WTF D&D?! pieces and charged once more unto the breach!

I hope more people feel inspired to do this.  It deserves a hashtag like #Inktober. 
How about MS-Paint-vember?

Sparks onto an oil-soaked cloth

I am a huge fan of the weird stuff Janelle Shane coaxes out of the neural networks she trains.  She feeds the machines all kinds of inspired fodder, which they then cough up into interesting shapes, including D&D spells, character bios, adventures. What the machines make is often the perfect spark to ignite our human elaborations, e.g. Swamp of Monsters fleshed-out spells.

Her latest post, my new favorite, is specifically about prompts to human creativity  - a word each day in "Inktober" to inspire 31 ink drawings by the end of the month.

Lynda Barry in similar inky exercise - www.drawnandquarterly.com/one-hundred-demons

To me, things like this should spur the captions of moist, oozy, severely D&D comix by somebody like Karl Stjernberg of Spores of the Sad Shroom fame - or Tim Sievert's Intrepideeers or Clandestinauts:


Future adventure prompts, or play reports scrawled on napkins stained with orange Cheez Doodle dust from another planet.

If you want to have visions, inhale deeply at AIweirdness.com...

 If you make something, words or pictures, please tell me and I'll link with your permission.

Lost Lush: RELOADED is out

I put my new, expanded, and improved Lost Lush: RELOADED up at the Coiled Sheets of Lead storefront  at DriveThruRPG.com.

It's fun and should appeal to fans of gritty but humorous low fantasy urban picaresque. Like the first version, it's a medieval pub-crawl in search of a drunken buffoon, traceable through the wreckage and outrage he leaves in his wake, through weird nightspots inspired by 1990s Prague (where I once lived) and 1890s New York City (which the excellent Luc Sante's Low Life can tell you about in detail).
 
It is now 54 pages long but I'm selling it for the same $4.99 price I sold the original The Lost Lush: Extracting a Carousing Fool for.  I will have to start a new entry sometime soon, in order to get the buzz of "New Today at DriveThruRPG," but I wanted to get everyone who already bought the tiny 20-something-page original version to get my expanded update free.  

I'm trying to avoid tedious kvetching, but it has been weird wandering through the wilderness hexcrawl of marketing.

Two meditations on marketing by people with more coherent skulls than mine:

1.   Cecil Howe  
Thanks to Florent "KillerKlown" Didier for spotting the broken link! 
It looks like Sword Peddler blog keeled over and died since I posted this!
It also looks like Nick LS Whelan was kind enough to convert Cecil Howe's blog entry into a podcast... 
This is like getting your consciousness uploaded into the Singularity Universal AI before your body dies:
Blogs On Tape: How to Become a Godzillionaire on DriveThruRPG


2.  Necropraxis  Correct Link for Necropraxis's post on Marketing Imagination


Anyway, I tried to get my new version playtested among various boards and contacts online.  No dice.  So I printed tearsheet flyers and tacked it up on the physical corkboards at friendly local game shop The Source  - I had it OK'ed by managers and employees.

Nary a nibble!  What's up with people?

Does nobody want a hard-copy spiral bound thing to test for free?  Is it because I lack the requisite full-color dungeon-punk anime-influenced art and 5E compatibility and Hasbro/WOTC livery that people want these days?

OK, kvetching over.  But I felt compelled to mention this phenomenon.

I'd better put up better free maps to promote Lost Lush on DTRPG.  Sure, people might just take the free maps and ignore the paid thing they might have paid for to get the maps, BUT my maps should be as good as I can make them as a matter of pride and should be free as a matter of principle.

UPDATE from 11-19-2019:

One of the points of advice Cecil Howe's advocated was that creators should spend DriveThruRPG Publisher Promotion Points (PPP) on submitting their adventures for the Deal of the Day cue. He said that people should immediately plow all of the PPP earned from this success into submitting their adventure(s) back into the Deal of the Day cue... and again... and again.

This seems like sound advice (I also liked his warning to forgo wasting PPP on banner ads, because nobody ever clicks them.)

I get the feeling it was easier to do the PPP to Deal of the Day cycle this when DriveThruRPG was a few years younger.
 There were fewer products, fewer creators.  Fewer PPP were needed to submit a Deal of the Day.  There was a shorter wait time until one's adventure was featured as a Deal of the Day.

It took me from 11-1-2017 until August 2019 to earn enough PPP to hit the fluctuating quota required to submit a Deal of the Day.  I paid 473 PPP to put my adventure in the cue. 
I returned from out of town in late October to discover STATUES had been the Deal of the Day while I was gone- I had to grin to my chagrin!

72 people bought STATUES during October 2019.  I think maybe there was one purchase before the Deal of the Day, earlier in October.

Now I have 88 PPP.  If I can add another piece of advice to Cecil's, it's that a creator should price their creation a bit higher than I did, if they want to do the Cecil Howe tactic.
Cecil Howe's $10 offering probably generates more PPP than my adventure with every sale, so that he can plow the PPP earned in the wake of his Deal of the Day immediately back into submitting his adventure for a Deal of the Day again.  I can't do that with my $4.99 adventure.

It also helps that Cecil Howe's creations are beautifully designed.

Googly Eyes Make Everything Better

A couple of years ago, I really enjoyed how somebody  (Jeff Reints maybe? Actually, Dyson Logos    as kindly pointed out by Tom H of  Plastic Polyhedra) creatively vandalized a boatload of classic D&D art by sticking googly eyes on the characters and monsters.

I know I have a tendency to slide into the bottomless abyss of humorless joyless pooptacularity.

So I stopped dissecting with MS Paint the Otto Wirsching Dance of Death woodcut I wanted to modify as the cover for my upcoming rollout of the new, improved, and expanded Lost Lush: Reloaded.

And I used the poor man's Photoshop to stick googly eyes on it:

 

Not only does this imply the wacky hi-jinks that are likely to ensue in this adventure, it burps up a black humor streaked with potential pathos.  The idiot noble on a bender which the PCs are searching for is one insult away from inciting the put-upon proles to barbecue him in a brutal neo-pagan revolutionary rite.  

I tried putting googly eyes on everyone in the picture, but that was too much.  My own kid, the Princess of Excess, said if everyone was googly, it was like no-one was googly.  No true visual impact.  A wise 8-year-old.

Speaking of the kidlet, I lashed out and bought the 2014 version of the boardgame Dungeon!   I wanted to get something we could play together as a family.  

THAT one. Pic swiped from Amazon.com

Kidlet is waaaay too interested in video games like Roblox, and watching loud, hyperactive teenagers play Roblox games on Youtube: "Hey, FELLAHS!  WassUP?"  These kinds of entertainment feed off her negative emotions and ADHD, like some kind of Star Trek: The Original Series entity.

Like from "The Naked Time" or....

Pics from Memory-Alpha.fandom.com

So anyway, I would really like to get my kid playing tabletop D&D, boardgames, or anything unrelated to the accursed iPad.  

Did Dungeon! do the trick?  Yes, for a while.  Then ADHD overcame attention span.  But we've tried two times so far and we'll try playing it again sometime soon.  Still, there's the nagging feeling, "Dungeon! is fine but when will she be ready to play the real thing, ie. Holmes Basic?"

Earlier this year I took her to see the band KISS on their End of the Road Tour.  We sat around a long time in the arena, then watched the opening act - a speed painter- then sat around an interminable length of time before a voice boomed out: "YOU WANT THE BEST?  YOU GOT THE BEST!" and then "Detroit Rock City" busted out and there were fireworks.  It was cool for that song, but then my kid was saying, "I hope you're not mad, Daddy, but I want to go home..."  I wasn't mad at all.  She had lost the earplugs I gave her during the rock-and-roll speed painter, and so I had given her mine, but the high volume of KISS reverberating in the craptastic tin can acoustics of the Target Center was making her kid's body physically sick.  I had brought fully-over-the-ear headphones for her to further protect her ears, but the music was buffeting her sternum and guts. Besides, I was feeling the loss of my own pair of earplugs.

But even from the beginning of the evening, an unspoken pissed-off grumbling kept echoing off the inside of my skull:"I wish I could have taken her to see Gwar instead, and not in a basketball stadium."  So anyway, Dungeon! is a better substitute for D&D with families than KISS is for Gwar, but you'll still wish everyone was able to play D&D.

The most un-rock-n-roll $20 souvenir EVER!  I drink coffee out of it, and my kid drinks milk out of it with a straw and blows bubbles.

Czech "Witch-Burning" night is thinly-Christianized Pagan ritual (and excuse to party on hilltops)

From www.ved.sk

April 30th is the eve of the festival of St. Valburga, called Walpurgisnacht or Hexennacht by  Germans.  Hexennacht means "Witches' Night".  As noted by Tim S. Brannan   and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe  on this night, evil witches are supposed to convene their Sabbath on the summit of the Brocken in Thuringia.  

The Church was eager to establish a feast day for St. Valburga (Walpurgis) close to the time of this opposing holiday, on May 1st, because the saint was a staunch missionary among the still-pagan Germans of the 8th Century and because of her reputed efficacy in battling witchcraft.


In the Czech Republic, the sometimes-celebrated holiday is called Čarodějnice ("Witches") or Pálení čarodějnic ("Burning of Witches").  Crude effigies of witches are burned in large bonfires on hilltops.  Supposedly the bonfires ward off witches and associated evil spirits. Of course, up until the present day many young people celebrate this holiday just as an excuse to meet in natural areas, drink, and party.

It's easy to see a pagan ritual with a thin veneer of Christianity covering it.  The "witch" effigy is actually Morana the ancient Slavic goddess of winter and death.  Burning her effigy is symbolic triumph of Spring over Winter and Life over Death, a drama which Czechs have been enacting seasonally since long before conversion to Christianity.

During the Nazi occupation in World War II, and under the Communist regime of 1948-1989, Čarodějnice activities were suppressed.  My first host family in Prague described how unstructured, youth-driven sports like skateboarding were anathema to the old regime. Imagine how incensed the authorities would be toward these rowdy ancient traditions that involve nature, huge bonfires, effigies, and Christian and pagan elements.

Often the hilltop sites of today's bonfire celebrations, such as Petřín hill, were formerly "pagan paradises" where the ancient Czechs kindled sacrificial fires amidst clearings in the groves.  Centuries after Bohemia was converted, these fires were supposed to spontaneously ignite at random times.  People peered into the flames and saw the faces of their pre-Christian ancestors, or pagan deities dressed in ancient clothing, or devils.  Old people felt their rheumatism improved if they warmed their bones around the mysterious fires.

There's a better picture by Neprakta of the devilish faces in the fires, but I'm too lazy to scan it

I don't know if you are inspired to create gaming content out of all of the preceeding, but I hope you'll be inspired to get life-content out of the following: May 1st, besides the Labor Day meaning emphasized from 1948-1989, can be a powerfully pagan-ish (or just fun) holiday for Czechs.  If they are willing and able, they smooch under blossoming cherry trees.  Like getting smacked in the butt with a pomlazka switch, getting smooched under the flowering trees is supposed to "keep women from drying up" and "keep them feeling young and beautiful" in the coming year.

From charlottestips.blog.cz

The original Karel Hynek Mácha wrote the most famous Czech romantic lyric poem starting with "It was late in the evening on the First of May/An evening in May - the time of love..."




  

Czech Pagan Rites of Spring Underneath Layers of Christianity and Atheism

polaneis.pl/czechy/wielkanoc-w-czechach-pomlazka-i-inne-zwyczaje-i-tradycje-swiateczne

Pomlázka... Easter Monday

 
The Czech Lands, especially the countryside, quietly simmer with thinly-Christianized pagan traditions that survived centuries of religious turmoil and Communist promotion of atheism and sports.  Easter Monday is a beautiful hot mess of these traditions.

Boys buy (or make) plaited willow pomlázka switches and go from door to door, especially in small, long-established villages. 

Very young boys go around with their parents like Halloween trick-or-treating and politely chant a doggerel poem, threatening hitting with their switches unless eggs are handed over: "Hody, hody, dobra vody!  Give me some eggs, painted or at least white."

When I lived in a big apartment building soon after arriving in Prague, I answered tentative knocks on my apartment door: some kids and their grandmother were going door to door on Easter Monday.  I thought: "Oh, yeah!  I've heard of this!  This is that folk tradition thing!" So I listened to their unison-chanted doggerel spiel, thoroughly confused them by asking them to tap my wrist with their switches (I hadn't heard or understood the tradition correctly), and gave them apples (didn't have any eggs in the apartment at the time).

High school and college-aged boys, however, chase young women around in earnest.  They demand eggs or a shot of schnapps and spank the girls' butts with their switches if they don't get any.  This is a Freudian field day, these thinly-veiled pagan fertility rites of spring: the long willow switches, the girls' surrender of eggs.  Supposedly, getting hit with the pomlázka switches makes girls prettier and rejuvenated ("omladit") for every time they are smacked on the butt. My Czech ex's mother used to ask me to smack her on Easter Monday, as well as my girlfriend, for this rejuvenating effect.

This photo came from an article in the Lidovy Noviny newspaper site: "Is Pomlázka a Cute Tradition or Barbaric Custom?" Photo credit: Jiří Salik Sláma of Mafra media

In many villages, the young women get revenge by soaking the boys with buckets of water, thus "wilting" their willow switches.  "Ahem!  Dr. Freud... Dr. Freud... Paging Dr. Freud!"  In some villages, girls chase boys back with their own switches, either on Easter Monday or the next day or in a leap year.

Photo by Dušan Skala at Obec-Cizkov.cz

 So anyway, I hope you, dear readers, and your families have been doing well on Passover and/or Easter and are doing well on Easter Monday and/or Earth Day.

As for gameable content- that's up to you to sift out of this post!  Maybe something in a general folklore or folk horror or Dark Pastoral vein. Neoclassical Geek Revival did the Krampus-inspired adventures.  Chris Kutalik did Slumbering Ursine Dunes .  What folk tradition beautiful weirdness can you write up?

Non-Sequiturs and then Meaning

Made by me with substantial help from G. B. Piranesi's Carceri; additional inspiration from Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now

Pardon me for the fuzziness and non-sequiturs - I don't feel that great, have to work second shift soon, and the rain is making a sound like slow chewing and swallowing outside.

I just finished reading my friend's 177-page novel-in-progress.  It's very difficult to focus and give decent critique.  My hat is off to those who can and do: Bryce Lynch , Melan , Prince of Nothing , Ynas Midgard among others. 

I am also grateful and amazed at the energy and sincere interest people like Zach of Zenopus Archives , Jeremy Frothsof of Thought Eater, Alex Schroeder who compiles Old School RPG Planet bring to spotlight other people's creative work.

James Smith  of  Dreams of Mythic Fantasy was one of these people with a true enthusiasm in encouraging others' creativity.  As of April 2019, his family needs help with funeral costs.  Like me, and many people I know, he had no life insurance or decent savings.  See this post from his family on his blog for a link to Paypal where you can donate if you are willing and able.

Interested in Playtesting? Get glory, get influence, get a 54-page pub-crawling adventure in pdf!

I'm putting this on ODD 74 Proboards, too.  Anywhere else I should take this?

Late Night Free-Styling Free Association

The hour is objectively not that late here, but I am flopping around in the slow-pouring liquid concrete of subjective much-later-night tiredness. 

My wife's face is lit with a blue glow. She has slid down a Wikipedia and YouTube rabbit hole because I named for her the childhood feeling she got watching Bob Ross paint on public television: ASMR.  She had never heard the label, or even known that the weird sensation wasn't unique to her.

Meanwhile, across the stretched-out cats, on the other side of the hilly blankets, I'm reading Goodberry Monthly - the latest post is a whimsically creepy list of spells for necromancers titled "Necrom- Antics."  Thoughts of the New Romantic Movement of the '80s well up unbidden from the depths of my murky night-mind.  So I have to make this:

Fronted by NecroDandy Le Bon, DeadmanDeadman is the latest dark ripple in the NecRomantic wave. Le Bon is assisted by 3 Taylors, of whom only 1/3 carry on more than a semblance of life.


But on a different note, in another time and another genre, NeuroRomantics:

Otto's Dance of Death

That could be the name of a spell.  But it's also the title of a post on 50 watts.com about German painter and woodcut-engraver Otto Wirsching (1889-1919) featuring a series of Totentanz pictures he created.

Whose woods these are I think I know, his house is in the village, though...

I couldn't help manhandling the great Wirsching's work, which, like Robert Frost's Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening, is public domain now.

Which cover for my upcoming revamp of The Lost Lush is best?

Which imparts a better "urban picaresque" (badass term to describe the adventures I like best, coined by Tom of Fear of a Black Dragon podcast - apparently he's a British expat in Hong Kong who speaks Portuguese, lived in Brazil, and is a capoeira enthusiast) tone?

Even if it is misleadingly too dark and not comic enough, is it just too awesome to pass up as a cover?

I'm trying to channel David A. Trampier, who kicks Larry Elmore's tuchus 1000 ways to Sunday.

This is one of the older ones I made (using work from a MUCH older, even MORE public domain artist) which commenting folks liked, due to the black background:

Play Report: Holmes Basic Intro to Gaming for Post-Millenials

(Depicted: Severed goblin ears or maybe dried mangoes)
Two weeks ago, my friend A. sent me an email saying his kid wanted to learn how to play D&D, and asking if she had to buy expensive 5e books and equipment.  I pointed A. toward free basic 5e pdfs, but asked if his daughter would be OK with the older editions of D&D.  He replied that his daughter and her friend would be fine with something Old School, and asked me if I would do the honor of DMing a game for his nuclear family and his daughter's friend from school. 

So, on Saturday, the weather warmed up a bit and I drove out to A.'s house.

My wife was kind enough to take care of our own kid solo at our house for the majority of game day.

A., his wife, his nearly-teen daughter and her same-aged friend met me at their door and helped me unpack my dog-eared B2 Keep on the Borderlands and worn but well-appreciated blue Holmes Basic rulebook onto the kitchen table.  Character sheets and cheat sheet rule references from Zenopus Archives were to prove handy.

The daughter's friend had seen D&D played on Stranger Things and was a big fan of Legolas from the Lord of the Rings movies.  Both kids were able to relate to the idea of D&D races, classes and levels.

For the sake of jumping right into the adventure, I usually like to provide pre-generated characters for which players can optionally change the fluff/backstory/nomenclature, but I thought the kids would like to have the experience of rolling 3d6 in order and deciding what their potentially very flawed and interesting 1st level character would be good at.  The daughter's friend named her character a Tolkien Elvish name (no, not Legolas) but found his stats would be better for a human or dwarf.  So he became a dwarf.

The other players rolled up a human magic-user, a human thief, and another dwarf.  They gave them wacky names.  Nobody was interested in playing a cleric.  I thought: You'll be sorry when you get to the Temple in the Caves of Chaos!

The kids really got into drawing their characters and choosing age, height, weight, etc.

The green dried mango picture above alludes to the fact that I can't resist DMing anybody's adventure without customizing it. The PCs visited the Tavern soon after entering the Keep and extracted a hefty pile of rumors.

My addition to the rumor chart: You can "harvest" ears and hearts from goblins - the Keep military will pay a good bounty on each of them - and it's said that if you can stand the disgusting taste, they are extremely nutritious.  The PCs also heard this when they chatted with the Guildsman at the Guildhall, and learned that he would also pay for these items.

The Party also heard and noted the infamous "'Bree Yark!' is goblin language for 'We surrender!'"

Two mornings later, the PCs, once they had found the U-shaped ravine, headed into the goblin caves on the southwest lower level.  They were surprised when the goblins didn't give up after yelling "Bree Yark!" and reinforcements showed up instead. The goblins, snarling and whining, inflicted some damage on the intruders.

 My buddy, the family man's family man in real life, had his character wear the stink-eyed vulture from Gary Gygax's read-aloud around his neck as a grisly trophy (he had shot it.)  A. was also brutal in the goblin caves, drenching the humanoids with the oil he had brought and setting them alight. The PCs quickly harvested charred goblin ears and hearts when the combat was over.  They ran deeper into the caves as noises echoed from elsewhere in the complex of the remaining goblins mustering and bringing the roaring bribed ogre with them.

Injured party members who ate the goblin ears and hearts restored 1-3 of their hp.  Generous? Yes, but these were 6th Graders playing their 1st ever RPG. Gruesome?  Yes, but the parents were OK and the kids didn't think too much into it.  Besides, goblins, hobgoblins, etc. are big on eating humans. This is indicated by, among other things, the "Come in!  We'd like to have you for dinner" sign.

The party's thief rolled a lucky 12% and picked a locked door at the otherwise-dead-ended top of a staircase.  The party burst into the hobgoblins' common room.  Oil and torches were thrown.  Conflagrations ensued.  The party ran out the opposite door, spiked it shut, and the magic-user fired off his single spell of the adventure: hold portal.  As quickly and quietly as they could, the PCs searched for a way out.  They finally saw daylight oozing in under the oaken entrance door of the hobgoblin lair.

Agitated hobgoblin survivors of the Common Room Massacre broke through the spiked-shut door as the Hold Portal spell quickly faded.  They ran howling up the corridors and stairs, rousing the entire tribe to pursuit. Guards near the entryway hacked at the party, who took heavy damage.  The magic-user was reduced to zero hit points.  The party retreated under the afternoon daylight toward the forest, then the road, then the Keep.   

Goblin ears held aloft to the soldiers manning the Keep gatehouse earned the battered party congratulations and an invitation to dine, a few nights after they recovered, with the Castellan in the Inner Bailey.  The Castellan was pleased with the intelligence the party gave about the location of the Caves and about some of their inhabitants.  The party gave him several goblin ears and hearts as a gift, which also impressed him (thanks to the thief's canny suggestion, they seemed to offer the Castellan all of the goblin pieces, but actually retained several pieces to sell elsewhere or eat themselves later).

At this point, the kids were getting jokey and restless, so I adjourned things.  We all talked and ate snacks a bit, the daughter's friend's dad showed up to get her, and I left not long after.

Some observations:

• It was always fun to read Gygax's module, but to run this verbose, text-heavy material at the table I would have appreciated more Bryce Lynchian bullet point design.
• The read-aloud background, etc., is a wee bit long.  That "after 3 sentences, players stop listening" advice really holds true with kids.
• It takes a lot of energy to DM with a mixed group of kids and adults with somebody else's material (in somebody else's house.)  It would have been easier using my own material which I know inside and out.
• Maybe immersion of kids in a generic medieval fantasy world was easier in the cultural moment of the mid 70s to early 80s.   The generic medieval Keep didn't seem as fascinating to the youth of today as it had been to me and my peers.  Maybe they would have preferred something like Middle Earth Role Playing which could have the full force of known Tolkien characters, situations, and locations behind it. Seeing the Peter Jackson LOTR and Hobbit movies on the screen looms large in their cultural milieu.
• It was slightly interesting but not very surprising that nobody cared about the implications of using violent force in a hobgoblin common room filled with families and youngsters, nor about the implications of cutting out goblins' ears and hearts and eating them.  Everybody was secure with fiction. 
• The kids (and the adults, to a lesser extent) really hated having to make their own maps.
• I have never used miniatures because I'm cheap and I like to avoid hassle, but maybe the kids would have liked them (and scenery) to visualize combat better.