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Bulhakov
2022-08-04, 05:10 PM
My kids, nephews, and nieces (8-11 years old) asked me to GM for them as they really want to get into RPGs (two of them just came back from an RPG camp).

I decided on a simple system - Quest, as it is free and very rules-light. The setting will be an open "points of light" world - a generic magic-heavy fantasy world with civilization living in force-field domed cities and villages connected by teleport circles and separated by dangerous wilderness.

The kids are all heroes who showed some magical talents growing up, so after basic education they are being sent to a "hero academia". On their 15th birthday (or some equivalent for their race) they touch a magic manhir stone in their school/village and are teleported to a magically-chosen school (sort of like the Sorting Hat).

We got the characters, backstories, equipment and abilities all set up and tomorrow they will arrive at the new school.

I'm looking for suggestions for adventures/quests the school will send them on. My first idea is to teleport them out into the wilderness about 3 days march through forests with a simple mission to get back into the city (maybe make it a race with other similar teams?).

The story so far:
Thanks for all the contributions and hooks. We're off to a great start. Possibly a bit too bloody for the age of the players, but they're all fresh after reading and/or watching the Hobbit and LoTR, so they wanted "mature" adventures. The two oldest girls (11) just finished Faewood and are right now into the Ranger's Apprentice series.

Story so far (three sessions in):
- all "kids" turned 15 (or rough equivalent for their race) and received introductory training in their disciplines
- the party consists of: a wolfkind Warrior, an elf Illusionist, an elf Naturalist, a half-fiend Ranger with a wolf familiar and a human Healer/Necromancer with a third eye for seeing ghosts
- the kids thought up their backgrounds and as a graduation ceremony were to touch their various town/village's teleportation stone to see if destiny will send them off somewhere to further their education
- they arrived at the largest city on the planet with a magical university, got acquainted with each other and were welcomed by a half-polar-bear "Hagrid" NPC... who they managed to quickly disrespect and piss off, so instead of showing them around the school he sent them off on the first mission without any prep-time.
- they received magical school badges, but without an explanation on how they work (the badges are actually a sort of safety-net - the wearer cannot be killed, if the owner drops to 0 HP, he/she gets teleported to the school infirmary... also the school teachers can snoop on the students Ender's Game style)
- the first mission was simply "get back to the school in 3 days" they were teleported 3 days walk away from the city into a wild forest (Teleportation outside of the preset sites is very "wild" - only setting the range but not the direction, also usually sending someone several meters above the ground.)
- they managed to alert some goblins with very loud behavior and in the evening were ambushed by almost 30 of them
- they barely survived but managed to kill all the attackers (we had to have a time out during the fight, as my daughter was perfectly fine with her brother's character nearly dying twice, but got a bit too emotionally involved when her wolf familiar's life was in danger)
- after talking to a goblin's fresh ghost, they burned all the bodies and were warned that the ambush party was just lowest-level mooks and the real goblin warriors/shamans/chiefs will hunt them down in revenge
- they spent the night in a magical "tent-in-a-can" (all players started off with a single magic item) after hunting down a vampire-rabbit for supper
- in the morning they got ambushed by a giant boar (the sentry rolled a 1 on the perception check) but they again barely won
- aware they were being followed by goblin scouts they managed to reach the nearest domed town...

Next session starts tomorrow. In the setting all bigger towns are magically domed (only sentient beings "christened" by one of the many major deities can pass through the force fields) and connected by teleport stones/circles controlled by a coalition of all the temples (I'm thinking the gods have a similar rules-heavy non-violent non-interfering setup as in OOTS).

I'm currently looking for some one-day mini-quests that the small town temple will send the players on to be able to teleport back to the university. I'm thinking the temples have a deal to let adepts teleport only after using them for a day to complete some chore/quest. The quest could be deity-related and an introduction to the pantheon.

Later on I plan some in-school adventures while all the fresh adepts are on a similar 3-day mission as they were. I'm thinking of assigning the players to infirmary duty, as the various "killed" recruits teleport back in after suffering too much damage.

At some point I plan to reveal the students are being watched (and judged), but I'm not sure when to do it. Should I do it early on? Or save it for after they try to go the "murder-hobo" path?

Pauly
2022-08-04, 08:54 PM
The school bully is a very old trope as a challenge for kids to defeat. Harry Flashman is the prototypical example.

Something is burrowing underneath the school!
It gives a chance to break out the tunnels, underground critters and claustrophobia feelings. Let the characters discover it before the teachers. Give them a reason to go down - retrieve something that’s stolen, rumors of treasure, familiars to capture and train. I’d play it as what is doing the tunneling is benign, but is causing problems so they have to persuade the tunneler(s) change where they’re digging.

Prank war!
Another magic school is in a prank war with the character’s school. The characters have to prevent their pranks and perform their own.

Bulhakov
2022-08-05, 03:35 AM
They're all wielding weapons and/or deadly magic so I'm worried bullying might escalate a bit too quickly. (although the school may shun on too much cadet-on-cadet violence. I'm thinking of Hermione's "We may be killed or worse... expelled!" )

I'm liking the prank-war idea though. Maybe even within-school, as I decided the cadets will be divided into adventuring teams of 5 members each. So they'll have similar groups to contend with.

Anonymouswizard
2022-08-05, 05:32 AM
You have two basic options: missions or school drama. The specific setup mostly excludes ye olde PoL mission of 'find ruins, kill inhabitants, bring treasure back to town, blow it on wenches and mead', but that might be for the best here.

Ideas:
-The biology department needs fresh wyvern lovers for an upcoming lab. Unfortunately their budget just got slashed, if only there were some rookie adventurers around to send to Wyvern Canyon...
-The PCs come across a disgruntled bugbear who wants help getting the local owlbear population to leave.
-The feast day celebration is in two days and you've been charged with preparing the main course.
-The PCs need to capture some live wyverns and bring them to Wyvern Canyon.

Brookshw
2022-08-06, 06:46 PM
DMing for kids can be fun, I run games for my 4 1/2 yro, and one of my players 10 and 14 yros play with us. The nice thing is you can recycle classics/tropes galore, either they haven't seen it, or haven't seen it enough to immediately recognize/be sick of them.

Offhand, I'd say (1) remote village where everyone's disappeared, (2) mystery murder involving a werewolf, (3) undead are rising from a local graveyard, people suspect the creepy wanderer; nope, someone stole the sacred gold doohickey from the graveyard that was keeping the dead at rest.

Classic monsters they'll get excited about and have heard of is a plus, and I suspect saving their teachers would be good (maybe poisoned on a trip and they need to find the rare herb to cure them).

@Anonymouswizard, I read your "wyvern lovers" as people who love wyverns, which would be a hilarious fetch quest, and I'd very much want to know what the lab experiment would be.

Anonymouswizard
2022-08-06, 07:08 PM
@annonymouswizard, I read your "wyvern lovers" as people who love wyverns, which would be a hilarious fetch quest, and I'd very much want to know what the lab experiment would be.

Part of me wants to correct the typo, the rest thinks it's funnier as-is.

Yora
2022-08-07, 04:20 PM
I think a magic school setting doesn't lend itself very much to points of light scenarios.

In the school you have a big institution of authority and control that takes charge of things and manages the risks for the kids. If anything goes wrong or difficult, it's always sensible to go back to the teachers for help. Which isn't inherently a bad thing for a campaign. But I think it does require approaching adventures in a different way than typical points of light environments where the lack of real authority and regulation is a central feature.

Vhaidara
2022-08-07, 06:27 PM
Some fairly standard ones could include things like supply runs (ranging from "get some wood" to "get some basilisk gallbladders"), or field trips to external ruins (headed by professors who, while very knowledgeable, are not combat trained)

You could also do things like escaped experiments, either in town or in the wilderness.

As far as bullying, depending on how high magic/fiat based you want to take the setting, the force fields could also have an internalized damping effect that basically makes all damage from non-kill blows non-lethal. So like, if you are trying to behead someone or cut their throat, that can kill, but if you aren't trying to kill, you don't How does it work? MAGIC. Specifically ancient and powerful magic on the level it would take to found a new city. So something that won't be easy to access, but theoretically could be accessed in the long term with enough effort.

And that's only if you want to take things in the direction of more openly aggressive bullying. Pretty much any setting has students with actual weapons or actually kill capable magic, but still have strong bully plotlines. This is because murdering or maiming someone, even if they are a ****, is generally frowned upon by society. In fact, a staple of that kind of scenario is the bully who has a lot more social sway than the protagonist, and specifically taunts the protag into trying to use violence only to play the victim.

One plotline I've used is a genus loci house (basically, the house and the grounds are a fully sapient living thing) that is cloaked in illusion, and is abducting kids with magical talents to teach and protect them. Whether the kids want to or not.

Another plot I did was that the princess has been turned into a very large, very aggressive swan. This was a mystery plotline with several overlapping motives and methods available to people, with like a dozen suspects, and the actual final result was that there were 3 people responsible for it (the final result was the combination of all of their activities). One of which was the princess herself. Very much a slapstick comedy type session, included the local elf mage (actually a druid who had taken the weekend off to head into the woods and get high af), an orc blacksmith and former shaman, a naga conman, a retired adventurer, a jealous handmaiden, an overworked seneschal, and a really, really angry swan chasing everyone around the palace complex.

Pauly
2022-08-07, 08:44 PM
You can always mine Enid Blyton’s “The Famous Five” series of novels for ideas. Wikipedia has an plot outlines for all of the books, and the basis of the stories is 4 kids and their dog get up to exciting adventures while away from the supervision of their parents.

Spore
2022-08-07, 10:18 PM
I think a magic school setting doesn't lend itself very much to points of light scenarios.

That is why you subvert expectations after an tutorializing intro mission.

Have an older student give them a hint with a mission way out of their league to impress the teachers. Maybe have a butthole teacher pick on a certain student. Have a daring groundskeeper endangering kids with a weird beast.

The school is just a start, an entry point into the world. You dont need to redo boring school lessons ingame. The kids have those in spades.


Some fairly standard ones could include things like supply runs (ranging from "get some wood" to "get some basilisk gallbladders"), or field trips to external ruins (headed by professors who, while very knowledgeable, are not combat trained)


Wow I didn't think one could express the boring MMO quest system of "collect 0/8 bear asses" into an TTRPG, yet here you are.

I mean supply runs are fine, but dont have it be something blindingly obvious. Not "obtain" or "gather", but rather "find the secret diary of x" or "find a way to get y out of detention".

Vhaidara
2022-08-07, 11:30 PM
Wow I didn't think one could express the boring MMO quest system of "collect 0/8 bear asses" into an TTRPG, yet here you are.

I mean supply runs are fine, but dont have it be something blindingly obvious. Not "obtain" or "gather", but rather "find the secret diary of x" or "find a way to get y out of detention".

Heh, I never said they had to stay simple, this is just the inciting incident that gets them out of the town. Once they get out all kinds of messes can ensue, like a magical climate change forcing the basilisks to migrate to a new environment, which the group only learns after fighting through the cockatrices that moved in. Or it turns out the wood they were supposed to gather belongs to a group of dryads who want to renegotiate the lumber contracts from their forests, and are not willing to wait for someone actually qualified.

Pauly
2022-08-09, 12:32 AM
Just to touch a little more on The Famous Five. They were the first real ‘kids on bikes’ adventures written 40 years before Spielberg and E.T.

In the stories the adults allow the kids to wander because the dog is sufficient protection for the normal dangers that normal kids would encounter. In a fantasy setting you could replace the dog with say a geriatric griffin. In addition to scaring off low level threats the griffin could then carry the team short distances by flying, be used as a messenger to get help, be used as a guiding NPC by the GM. The reason to make it geriatric is to ensure that the kids can't rely on it for combat and it will generally want to have a nap and not be disturbed too much whilst looking after the kids.

If you take the first famous five book as an example a quick outline of the plot is.
They go to an island.
A storm uncovers a famous shipwreck.
They recover a chest from the wreck.
Another storm covers the wreck.
They examine the chest and find the captains papers.
They make a quick copy and think its a coded treasure map.
The adults sell the chest for money to an antique dealer.
Bad guys try to buy the island.
The kids realize it is a treasure map.
The adults refuse to sell the island.p to the bad guys.
The bad guts sneak out to the island.
The kids stop the bad guys recovering the treasure.
The authorities cone and rescue the kids.
The treasure is real and rewards and happiness abound.

That’s a pretty sold basis for an adventure for kids.

Bulhakov
2022-08-09, 12:35 PM
I think a magic school setting doesn't lend itself very much to points of light scenarios.

In the school you have a big institution of authority and control that takes charge of things and manages the risks for the kids. If anything goes wrong or difficult, it's always sensible to go back to the teachers for help. Which isn't inherently a bad thing for a campaign. But I think it does require approaching adventures in a different way than typical points of light environments where the lack of real authority and regulation is a central feature.

Oh, I just got this one covered. The academy adepts all received magical school badges - they double as tracking/spying equipment for the teachers as well as a safety net - if one of the characters gets mortally wounded, they get teleported back to the school. The kids don't know either feature yet, they only discovered that if they remove the badge, it ominously glows and starts blinking slowly.

Bulhakov
2022-08-09, 05:26 PM
Thanks for all the contributions and hooks. We're off to a great start. Possibly a bit too bloody for the age of the players, but they're all fresh after reading and/or watching the Hobbit and LoTR, so they wanted "mature" adventures. The two oldest girls (11) just finished Faewood and are right now into the Ranger's Apprentice series.

Story so far (three sessions in):
- all "kids" turned 15 (or rough equivalent for their race) and received introductory training in their disciplines
- the party consists of: a wolfkind Warrior, an elf Illusionist, an elf Naturalist, a half-fiend Ranger with a wolf familiar and a human Healer/Necromancer with a third eye for seeing ghosts
- the kids thought up their backgrounds and as a graduation ceremony were to touch their various town/village's teleportation stone to see if destiny will send them off somewhere to further their education
- they arrived at the largest city on the planet with a magical university, got acquainted with each other and were welcomed by a half-polar-bear "Hagrid" NPC... who they managed to quickly disrespect and piss off, so instead of showing them around the school he sent them off on the first mission without any prep-time.
- they received magical school badges, but without an explanation on how they work (the badges are actually a sort of safety-net - the wearer cannot be killed, if the owner drops to 0 HP, he/she gets teleported to the school infirmary... also the school teachers can snoop on the students Ender's Game style)
- the first mission was simply "get back to the school in 3 days" they were teleported 3 days walk away from the city into a wild forest (Teleportation outside of the preset sites is very "wild" - only setting the range but not the direction, also usually sending someone several meters above the ground.)
- they managed to alert some goblins with very loud behavior and in the evening were ambushed by almost 30 of them
- they barely survived but managed to kill all the attackers (we had to have a time out during the fight, as my daughter was perfectly fine with her brother's character nearly dying twice, but got a bit too emotionally involved when her wolf familiar's life was in danger)
- after talking to a goblin's fresh ghost, they burned all the bodies and were warned that the ambush party was just lowest-level mooks and the real goblin warriors/shamans/chiefs will hunt them down in revenge
- they spent the night in a magical "tent-in-a-can" (all players started off with a single magic item) after hunting down a vampire-rabbit for supper
- in the morning they got ambushed by a giant boar (the sentry rolled a 1 on the perception check) but they again barely won
- aware they were being followed by goblin scouts they managed to reach the nearest domed town...

Next session starts tomorrow. In the setting all bigger towns are magically domed (only sentient beings "christened" by one of the many major deities can pass through the force fields) and connected by teleport stones/circles controlled by a coalition of all the temples (I'm thinking the gods have a similar rules-heavy non-violent non-interfering setup as in OOTS).

I'm currently looking for some one-day mini-quests that the small town temple will send the players on to be able to teleport back to the university. I'm thinking the temples have a deal to let adepts teleport only after using them for a day to complete some chore/quest. The quest could be deity-related and an introduction to the pantheon.

Later on I plan some in-school adventures while all the fresh adepts are on a similar 3-day mission as they were. I'm thinking of assigning the players to infirmary duty, as the various "killed" recruits teleport back in after suffering too much damage.

At some point I plan to reveal the students are being watched (and judged), but I'm not sure when to do it. Should I do it early on? Or save it for after they try to go the "murder-hobo" path?

Vhaidara
2022-08-09, 10:32 PM
we had to have a time out during the fight, as my daughter was perfectly fine with her brother's character nearly dying twice, but got a bit too emotionally involved when her wolf familiar's life was in danger

As she should be, brothers can be replaced, but you don't murder the puppy unless you want the PC to turn into John Wick

Bulhakov
2022-08-10, 02:32 PM
Bumping for "one day temple quest" ideas.

I'm torn between setting a list of individual assignments to pick from (many custom-made for the character's abilities), e.g.
- chop firewood (for the strong warrior)
- locate lost cat (tracker has a spell for that)
- help out in the garden (for the nature mage)
- entertain the perish kindergarden (for the illusionist)
- find out where the last high priest hid his spellbook/ledger (for the speak-with-the-dead helaer)
etc..

Or giving them a general "doogoder" task - go around the town and ask people how you can help out, gather "stamps" for various completed chores.

Or setting a price and having them try to earn the money (part should be covered by loot from the goblins and boar... if they can find buyers).

jayem
2022-08-11, 04:43 PM
Bumping for "one day temple quest" ideas.

I'm torn between setting a list of individual assignments to pick from (many custom-made for the character's abilities), e.g.
- chop firewood (for the strong warrior)
- locate lost cat (tracker has a spell for that)
- help out in the garden (for the nature mage)
- entertain the perish kindergarden (for the illusionist)
- find out where the last high priest hid his spellbook/ledger (for the speak-with-the-dead helaer)
etc..

Or giving them a general "doogoder" task - go around the town and ask people how you can help out, gather "stamps" for various completed chores.

Or setting a price and having them try to earn the money (part should be covered by loot from the goblins and boar... if they can find buyers).

2nd and 3rd have the advantages that they give a bit of initiative, and debate to the players on the macro level.
They also potentially allows some 'miscommunication' that allows them to be doing something that then escalates (again you have the prank gone wrong option too).

We've had the quintesential Famous Five, but perhaps Jennings (written by Buckeridge) also is worth a thought too.

Bulhakov
2022-08-13, 11:22 AM
2nd and 3rd have the advantages that they give a bit of initiative, and debate to the players on the macro level.
They also potentially allows some 'miscommunication' that allows them to be doing something that then escalates (again you have the prank gone wrong option too).

We've had the quintesential Famous Five, but perhaps Jennings (written by Buckeridge) also is worth a thought too.

Yeah, I'll go with 2 with an option of 3. The normal setup is to pay for teleportation, but adepts may choose chores which are definitely cheaper.

Pauly
2022-08-13, 08:06 PM
Some ideas for challenges at this age is to challenge the players not the characters.

Examples.
Give them coded messages they have to decipher in 20 minutes. I’d use a Caesar cypher but there are other age appropriate codes such as a strip of paper wrapped around a pencil. To increase the difficulty of a Caesar cypher you can remove the spaces between words, to make it simpler you can give them the letter count along with the message.

For a puzzle use one of the Jenga sets with 3 colors and a dice. Set it so player A gives instructions to player B, then Player B instructs player C and so on. The rules are that there is no pointing they have to only describe what block to move and where to place it verbally. The challenge is to reach a certain number of levels within a time limit. I use build to 27 levels in 15 minutes as a basic challenge.