Grade 9

STEP 1: Arrange students into groups of 4-6.

STEP 2: Hand out (print may be easier than digital) this D&D Character Sheet. Students will build their adventure party together within their groups. Each student has their own character, but these characters will be working together.

STEP 3: Guide students through building their characters with the D&D Character GUIDE. Grade 9 students are building level 6 characters. 

• USE THE SPELLS AND SKILLS RECOMMENDED IN THE RULES

STEP 4: This Character Backstory & Party Collab document has a section for students to develop independently and a section to develop collaboratively with their adventure party.

Students enrolled late in your class? Use these Newcomer Characters for students to quickly fill out their character sheets.

I use an adventure I paid for and cannot legally reproduce it here. Below are some options to consider:

1) Purchase the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide for access to a some sample adventures of various levels.

2) Web search free D&D adventures of whatever level you need. There are LOADS. Single-level adventures are commonly referred to as One-Shots. Winghorn Press, for example, has several free one-shot adventures.

3) Ask AI (Gemini, ChatGPT, etc.) to make you an adventure at whatever level you need! You can even ask it to create scripts for the DM and guidelines for beginner DM and players.

• Provide students with this Student Gaming Documentation. Within is:

  • Collaborative DM-ing instructions

  • A chart for students to track DM responsibilities

  • Battle Tracker for all creatures and characters involved

  • Story Tracker for recording the events

These are the OFFICIAL FREE D&D RULES which, in reality, can be bent or broken as much as students want. If a student has an idea for their character to perform a certain task, just ask them if their character would realistically be ABLE to do that, if the group is OK with that happening in their fictional world, and what difficulty class you might apply to that task (see below). 

This DIFFICULTY CLASS EXAMPLES and this WHAT ARE THE SIX ABILITIES poster hang on my walls to help students keep things simple and flowing. 

Dice can be found free online. Type "dice" into your Google search bar.

After each chapter, I have my students complete two documents: 

1. Sentence Builder Worksheet as their warmup. All content should come from the adventure they JUST played.

2. D&D Paragraph Writing Organizer should be written in a narrative format. Exemplars and a checklist are provided and the work is chunked. Guide this as you deem best. 

Campaign Codex 9 is their final assignment to wrap up this unit. It is not terribly different from the grade 8 version. It just expands on things a little further. The bulk of the grade 9 challenge compared to the grade 8 content is that leveling up characters is a challenge, managing them is a challenge, and your expectations for their sentences and paragraphs is higher. The adventures are also more complex.