improving my setting

[yellowrocket]

It's long and I'm sorry.

I started a world for my kids. They are a 13 yo boy who picked a druid. My 9 yo girl picked a paladin because they fight for good. Left out the uber tight restrictions some people are forced to play under. Ands she also picked half elf. My 8 yo girl picked a full elf Wizard.

Setting: their blended elf and human village was attacked. Many of the of buildings were damaged or destroyed. Many of the humans are leaving for the human city. There is an elven city that the more urban elves are heading to. The woods elves have a tree village that the "pureblood" elves are heading to. A few people were going to stay and rebuild.

There was a martial Academy that was part of the "order of the leaf". A group based around letting half elves find their place by doing good. The paladin comes from a family involved in the order. (Her idea)

The druid wanted to leave and see the world's on his own. Didn't want the paladin with because he's a neutral character and didn't want to burden the paladin with his choices. (I think he just don't want to play with them. )

The Wizard picked a background in making potions as well as her magic. (Easily hand waved to make her proficient)

Given the actions the npcs were taking the girls chose to follow the last group headed to the wood elves but to stay far enough away that if the group was attacked They'd be safe but close enough to help if they could. And then the girls would find a tree big enough to hollow out make a hidden house for them to make potions to sell and to make weapons for the group.

Asked where They'd get stuff to make weapons; the 9yo said "if we have to we can sharpen bones at least, or make bows and arrows."

They made camp in the city for 2 nights.

What can i do to plan out the world for them?

The wood elves have a ranger group. They're mostly friendly rivals of the martial school that had a paladin temple in the home village

I have 2 outposts in the wastelands planned where they can get either steel or silver depending on which they go to. The dwarves are past the outposts. I have 2 metropolitan areas and the wood elves tree village.

Am I missing anything?

[Vhaidara]

First off, good on you getting the kids into DnD. My dad got me started at about that age.
Second, of course your boy doesn't want to play with his little sisters. He's 13 :smalltongue:

Now, to relevant things...

Something that could be fun would be to have them discover some ancient ruins, maybe recently uncovered by a big storm or a rockslide? Things they can find in there...
Ancient relics of mixed monetary, historical, magical, and religious value
Ancient writings that speak of an old alliance between elves and some race that elves historically have bad relations with (orcs would be a standard, but even dwarves have potential)
An ancient, man shaped statue. When they approach it, it begins to move, and asks them their business in an ancient Elven dialect. As it turns out, the ancient elves who inhabited the ruins had the secrets of creating Warforged, and there are 50-100 warforged who deactivated when the old civilization fell.

I think that your son in particular might enjoy the warforged: Being a druid, he has a connection to nature, but these new beings he has found have NO inherent connection to nature. Also, he might enjoy the fact that DnD also allows for robots. I know I did at that age :smallbiggrin:

[atemu1234]

Warforged Urban Druid named Optimized Prime! (Wait, when I was 13 I wasn't playing d&d (that came later). Or watching transformers.)

Good luck, though. I'll be of more use after a night's sleep.

[yellowrocket]

I like your ideas. Partly because the girls are mostly in to it for the role playing and bit the combat. The relations between races leaves room for their imaginations to find solutions.

[atemu1234]

Now, for a bit of backstory. I'm not what you'd call "normal", and was no more (in fact, less) normal when I was thirteen. At thirteen, I was (if I remember rightly) in seventh-eighth grade, and was at that point obsessively playing trading card games.

So by that logic, you probably want some flashy random mechanics. If you can get him interested in warblades, maybe? Though I'm fairly certain that would work better on me than on him.

He might enjoy Optimized Prime; or you could ask him to give you a character concept (like a type of character he'd like to play) and you can build it. Then give it to him on a character sheet and have him go nuts.

The girls I can help with more (I used to help babysit my little cousin :smallbiggrin:). One's an elf wizard, I'm going to guess... generalist? That way she can learn more about casting spells. Since there are some pretty good ACF bonii to that from Races of Destiny, I recommend it. Though I doubt you're much looking into builds, more into how to engage them. The wizard and the paladin both like backstory, so I'd let them come up with the story for their characters.

All in all, to engage them, you can try to have villains that come across as evil, but leave the nasty bits of their misdeeds to subtext and try to keep it working that way. I mean, they can probably handle rescuing slaves from an evil warlord, but maybe we should avoid vivid descriptions of executions. Though I'm sure you've thought of this.

Since it's liable to be low-OP (between new players and young players) I recommend keeping a close eye on WBL (the best Monk class feature! (TM)) and giving lots of gold - maybe create an out-of-game representation (like 1 plastic gold piece for every thousand gold, etc.) to help the younger players keep track. It could help them with basic maths if you want to have them do it (I learned early on from similar things).