Enter mine, fight

I am continuing to do regular family RPG nights.  Pinkie Pie is always excited to play, but playing with her often has me scrambling to figure out what to do.  She seizes on things and insists on following them to the end at times that I simply do not expect.  For example, in the last session the party decided to go explore a mine that I had put on a map in an earlier adventure.  The mine wasn't important at all, and the only information they had was that the mine was long abandoned and no longer profitable.

But at some point in the past Pinkie Pie had asked what was in the mine and I made a joke about it being infested with bearsharks.  That is, a monster with the body of a bear and the head of a shark.  It was out of character, obviously silly, and not intended to be taken seriously.

Pinkie Pie was determined to go to that mine and see if there were bearsharks in it.

So off they went.  They didn't find any bearsharks but they did find some dwarves who had enslaved other dwarves and were working the mine.  The characters had some hilarious discussions with the dwarves and then eventually decided to insist on the slaves being freed and violence ensued, as it so often does in fantasy stories.

When designing adventures I like to throw in lots of side stuff.  People that aren't necessarily important, places that the characters don't need to visit.  I think the game is a lot more fun if things that aren't plot critical still get fleshed out.  I hadn't intended that the mine be a thing the characters did, though I had the basic premise sketched out of what would happen if they did go there.

This is one of the things that gets a lot better with time.  Eventually a GM can get a lot better at figuring out what random stuff their group will seize upon and follow up so the preparation can be more efficient.

Pinkie Pie has a powerful magic item that she wants to activate so I assume she would be all about chasing down that storyline.  Instead she was all about going into an empty hole in the ground.

I have some things to learn yet, it would seem.