One year after my original Pathfinder Fantasy Adventures course, I took a class on how learners use their brains. This allowed me to overhaul my lesson plan to give a better and more educational experience should I ever get to teach the course again. While I have not yet had an opportunity to run this course, here’s what would have been, along with an outline for an adventure roughly based on Paizo’s Crypt of the Everflame module.

Our fifth day wrapped up the Pathfinder course. The PCs escaped from Zanzer Tem’s dungeon and made their way home in different ways.

On Thursday, I learned that the Friday session would be shortened, so I needed to wrap things up quickly and with a bang.

Three days in, the distance began to grow between the two groups. Group One was initially behind because of some bad rolls that kept them in their cell for an extra day, and then fell further because they didn’t work very closely together as a team. I had to institute the initiative system not as a way of keeping track of combat but as a way of determining who got to act when the group was trying to decide on a plan. Things were complicated a little bit by the player who is in both groups, who I had to give an actual warning about metagaming. Since Group Two had befriended the goblin, he was convinced the same tactic would work with all goblins. The rest of the group, though, wanted a fight.

The second day of my Pathfinder course had a couple of hiccups due to some poor coordination that left the kids half an hour late, meaning that both of my hour-long sessions became 45-minute sessions. Despite the delay, the two groups began to show their separate personalities on day two. Group One was much more violent and more prone to infighting, while Group Two ran like a well-oiled machine.

Ten years ago this summer, I got to teach a class of middle-schoolers. In my first such endeavor, I thankfully have an experienced teacher, as my wife Sarah helped me out. It also helped that the subject was something I was familiar with: role-playing games. Specifically, Pathfinder.