This is not a normal D&D adventure. In fact, I’m not really sure what it is.

Some time ago a friend asked me if I could write up a little D&D adventure for them. They were helping to run a summer school for young Quakers in the UK and wanted to see if they would like some tabletop roleplaying as part of their activities.

Normally I would have just whipped up a little dungeon crawl for them – stab a few orcs here, loot a treasure chest there – but this time the circumstances were a little different.

One of the core principles of Quakers is that they’re determined pacifists, and while I had no idea whether this extended to imaginary violence too (turns out the answer, as always, is ‘it depends‘) I didn’t want to risk landing my friend in hot water by setting up a bloodbath.

Therefore I created The Tower of Five Tests. This little trial would see the players tested on not only the ability to roll dice, but also their approach to the important Quaker ‘virtues’. From what understand the exact details of these virtues can vary pretty dramatically from country-to-country, and even region-to-region, but the list I was provided listed:

• Truth
• Equality
• Peace
• Sustainability
• Simplicity

This laid the foundations to the adventure, where a kindly old wizard would test the young heroes to see if they were worthy of being awarded a portion of his power. There would be no need to fight if the party didn’t want to, though there was always scope for ner-do-wells to progress with a bit of imagination.

I am certainly not an expert on Quaker history – heck, I’m not even a Quaker – but the feedback I got was overall pretty positive. Apparently the kids liked if enough for extra sessions to be put on, though how much of this is down to the adventure and how much is thanks to the lure of tabletop RPGs in general is up in the air…

In any case, the adventure is available for download HERE if you feel like checking out the weirdest adventure of my career.

So far, anyway.