I had several family members in town for a reunion last week, and some of my siblings and teenage nieces and nephews were looking for me to run a game. I jumped at the chance to run a very, very rough version of one of my distantly-pending projects, Perils of the Broken Road. So they each picked the PC they liked best from The Emergency Character Collection and a fistful of dice.

Then I killed them all in the second fight.

They had cleverly bypassed several critical clues about an upcoming encounter during the first hour of play, so when they got to the encounter they were totally blindsided (which is an inside joke, actually!) and everyone was killed. Undaunted, they grabbed new characters and ultimately won their way through not only the rough encounter that had killed them before, but all the way through to the end.

Although I've got a few modifications to make to my adventure outline--such as making that killer encounter not quite so bad if the PCs have no warning about it--I think it went quite well, and I'm happy to kick Perils of the Broken Road into high gear as an upcoming project!