I’m volunteer DMing at a public library after-school D&D club for kids, mostly 10–13yo. 5e was established before I joined, so that’s settled. The librarian running the program and I each run a table, and there’s a plane-shifty meta-setting with some hand-wavey mechanics allowing for whoever’s there each session to drop into (and out of, then next session back into) whatever adventure.
I want to provide opportunities for simple, non-combat problem-solving. I’m planning to run Ben Milton’s “Alchemist’s Repose” and will see what else in Summer’s End might work.
Taking all that into consideration, are there any small adventures you’d recommend that might fit this situation?
Nate Treme often makes little dungeons for kids, I especially like his „Feathers and Steel“. As far as I can see, it‘s currently only available on his Patreon, but that‘s darn cheap, maybe join for a couple of months? Anyway, here‘s the link:
I am a HUGE fan of A Fistful of Feathers. While it is written for Cairn, it would be very easy to convert to 5e. I have run it with Knave 2e with very little effort and suspect the 5e would be even easier. A conversion for 5e should be a lot of drop in replacements for monsters and NPC encounters.
There are plenty of opportunities for role playing with rival feather hunters. I also run the starting town (formerly a fishing and logging village) like a gold rush boom town. I populate it with lots of stalls of people willing to outfit the party or trade in information and rumors.
One of the rival feather hunting parties has a lying/boastful leader who reminds me of Baron Von Munchausen. I looked up a bunch of stories of the Baron and converted them to fit in more with a fantasy setting. Then I added them to a table that I would roll on to see what the Baron is whenever talking about they cross paths. It is fun to see the looks on my players’ faces when they realize that these are all just tall tales.
My teenager kids especially loved the adventure. I stressed with them that not everything needed to be a fight and used reaction rolls to see how the stuff they encountered initially responded to the party. That led to stuff like a roving goblin band that was playing around with fire inviting the PCs into joining their campsite revelry.
Good luck. I’d love to see what other people suggest.
Since I put this under “Play” I’ll provide a brief report that I ran a first session with ‘Lair of the Keymaster,’ one-page puzzle-dungeon in “Summer’s End.” (They also had the option of pursuing a different goal that would’ve been “The Alchemist’s Repose.”)
I had 5 players, all 10 or 11yo I would guess. There was a lot of unmotivated light PvP action-declaration that I rebuffed, but I think in the future I’ll shift to asking the target if they think that sounds fun and let them mess each other up if they’re both into it. Maybe realizing consequences will lead to less disruptive behavior.
I made secret things pretty obvious, and they figured out one major clue with very little hinting. Another I had to hand to them. Once they understood the core mechanic of the dungeon they started to use it to explore further, but in the time we had they didn’t run up against any of the next tier of challenges, though they did see enough of one to plan a solution for next time, if they’ll point their brains at it.
I’m excited to see them tackle those next time. Hopefully I’ll have most of the same players.