Last Sunday, I ran my TS&R Jade campaign. Only three players showed up: Steven (my 10yo), Charles, and Nate. They hired half a dozen men-at-arms, purchased a few torches, and headed into the Pits of Lao. For some reason, Nate and Charles thought it would be fun to let Steven be the mapper this time. It took him a bit of practice to get used to translating the descriptions into lines on the map, but once he got the hang of it, he did really well.
Steven had been thinking about the campaign rumors over the weeks (scheduling nightmare) we weren't playing, and he had a plan. We'd been discussing the use of his locate object spell. One rumor was from a former adventurer who had located a machine that allowed him to find a big score of treasure and retire. He wanted to find that machine. I told him that his locate object spell could help with that.
When they got down to the second level of the dungeon (there is a set of stairs leading down from the entrance room), they bribed a group of bakuto (gambler yakuza) who collect tolls there with some wine, then went on their way. At first, the spell didn't detect the machine. It has a radius of 120', and the target was a little out of range...but none of them realized they had explored and mapped to just a room or two away from the target. Luckily for them, they decided to explore east instead of west or south, and moving to the next room allowed Steven's PC to get a ping with the spell.
The next room had some low level Taoist mages and their ashigaru bodyguards. Reactions were positive, so they discussed trading information. I had to come up with a reason why the mages were examining the room they were in, and I decided they were doing an inventory for the Lao family (the last Lao, the crazy wu jen daughter of the Venerable Lao, having died 100+ years ago). This led to a brief discussion of the Dungeon as Underworld for the benefit of Charles, who is new to RPGs. After the game, I sent him a link to Oakes Spalding's blog, which has a copy of Philotomy's Musings on the subject. He was thankful for that.
Anyway, the party found a well with treasure but the "water" was actually acid, and didn't try to recover it after Saro, Nat's PC, got singed. Then they wandered up and fought some giant toads, but had a surprise round so they weren't in any danger. Finally, the locate object spell led them to the Fighting Ring, an area they'd been to before, where you can summon a Level 2 Random Encounter to fight for cash prizes, while phantasmal fans cheer on the fight. They'd been here before.
Just beyond it was the room with the Potion Transmuter machine. The machine has two settings: healing potion and potion of treasure finding. After a bit of examination and experimentation (a healing potion poured in became a potion of treasure finding, wine poured in became ruined wine). Nate's henchman had another healing potion, and he decided to convert it as well as Saro's (the first experiment). Then Saro drank his potion and off they went, trying to find treasure.
Pro Tip: I had marked my dungeon map with gold dollar signs using a colored pencil in any room with monetary treasure, and with blue stars for any room with magical treasure. That made it easy to let them know which direction the nearest treasure was. Of course, the nearest treasure to the transmuter machine was the gold down the acid well that they had already found... But there was more treasure beyond that.
They ended up with a really nice haul in the end. Slider, Charles' Thief, made it to Level 4, so Charles can make a henchman for him. He's considering a Wu Jen. Niko, the henchman of Citizen Snips (Steven's character), also leveled up. It was a good session, and I'm really happy to see Steven getting into the game a bit more, rather than just trying to make jokes and do silly kid stuff.
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