Roleplaying with a six-year-old

This post involves some coolness about roleplaying with my son, but at the end, I ask for some feedback and ideas. If you just want to participate in the brainstorming, skip to the end.

My son turns seven in less than a month, and I've been thinking about introducing him to roleplaying for over a year now. (He just finished the first grade, and he reads and does math at least two grades above his level.)

I mostly just thought about it… I was trying to come up with the "perfect" introductory adventure, in addition to dealing with the fact that I run Fudge and I have no neat, concise rulebook to give him. It's not like I can hand him the equivalent of the D&D Player's Handbook and let him obsess over it the way I did, but I figure he'll want to read the rules for himself. So I stalled.

In the end, his introduction was rather accidental. We've been packing stuff up, getting the house ready to put on the market, and some of my really old board games were temporarily put on a shelf near his books. Among them was the boxed set of Fantasy Paths (BCS, Inc)… cardboard dungeon tiles from the eighties, and fairly well-done for the era.

So my son wanted to know what they were, and I figured I'd get them out and let him play with them. I wasn't going to actually play a game… these were dungeon tiles after all, and my vision of introducing him to roleplaying had nothing to do with dungeon crawling. But before I knew it, his asking just what we were supposed to do once we'd laid out the tiles led to sketching out Bilbo Baggins (the fantasy hero he most identifies with, I think) in Fudge terms and soon he was fighting skeletons and running away from goblins.

After that, I thought about it and wondered if maybe dungeon crawling of a sort wasn't all that bad of a start. And there's the nostalgia thing… my early years were all about D&D and dungeon crawling. And it's a nice, structured format. (Which I later found useful… when he was in town, before heading to the dungeon, he was all over wanting to go to the next village to recruit help, hunting deer to use as bait to trap the ogre, going fishing and negotiating for supplies so he'd have something to eat after he'd defeated the ogre, and so on.)

Anyway, he's into the maps, and I'm on limited time, so instead of trying to write something from scratch and make my own maps, I went looking for a dungeon crawl adventure I could adapt to six-year-old sensibilities and a single PC of a Bilbo Baggins level of power. That meant minimal bloodshed, no unspeakable evil, not too complicated, and very "low-level".

I ended up with a product I never thought I'd buy… Dungeon Crawl Classics #0, Legends Are Made, Not Born. It's designed for "0-Level NPC classes"… the butcher, baker and candlestick maker are the closest thing the village has to heroes, and they have to go rescue their friends from a runt, drunk and mildly poisoned ogre. :) And to my surprise, it is not as shallow as the boiler-plate DCC ad copy leads us to believe.

[ Spoiler Warning: I'm going to reveal the gory details of the plot to this adventure. ]

It all looks good on the surface… there's an ogre, and my son loves Shreck while understanding that an ogre can be bad. The ogre's hobgoblin servant is an outcast from his tribe because he'd rather grow mushrooms than fight, and he'll surrender at the first sign of real danger. There's a fight with an animated broomstick! The only things my son is likely to kill are some giant bugs and a shrieker. Oh, and there's a minor demon in league with a minor wizard mind-controlling the ogre and trying to summon a minor god.

Um… wait, that just took a wrong turn. We started the adventure over the weekend, figuring that I'd decide how to rewrite that part before I got there. And I did… instead of a demon and a wizard, it's just a magical dohickey in the abandoned wizard's laboratory below the ogre's cave. It's recently "woke up" for some reason and is controlling the ogre to do its nefarious bidding.

And that's all good… except I gave my son the setup, and now I have to figure out how to fit the setup into my plans.

The ogre has been there for years, and he demands monthly tribute from the village… just some sheep and ale, because he's not very ambitious or bright. A real fighter in the village tried to kill the ogre once and lost an arm for his effort, and nobody's been brave enough to try since.

Now, after years of peaceful coexistence, the ogre has demanded gold, lumber and slaves! The villagers poisoned the ale they gave him with a mild poison, but refused to give him slaves, at which point he flew into a rage and grabbed two villagers and hauled them off to his cave.

(Let's not ask why the villagers didn't poison the ogre ages ago, or why they used a mild poison when they did try. Obviously, the point is to soften the ogre up for the 0-level adventurers.)

Now, here's the deal… as the adventure is written, the gold is to buy a summoning scroll and components for the summoning, the captured villagers are there as a sacrifice, and the lumber is for building cages to hold them until the summoning. In my revisionist view, there is no summoning, thus no clear reason for these things. I could just gloss over it and hope my son won't remember these details, or care to think why the ogre wanted lumber and gold. But I know my son… he'll ask. And for my own satisfaction, I'd like to have answers.

What does this "magical orb" want with gold, lumber and slaves? Sacrifice or other killing of the slaves is unacceptable… no using their souls to power a wood-and-gold golem.

The wizard's lab, where the orb is, is inaccessible to the ogre. But not to the hobgoblin. So it needs people for something the hobgoblin can't do.

The lumber could still be to build cages. (Though I didn't understand why the author thought it necessary to build multiple cages to hold the villagers when they could just be barricaded into one of the caves.) Or to build barracks or such.

What about the gold? I suppose it could be consumed in some spell, but that seems like a cheap way out. Yet I can't come up with a good reason why the orb would need money. Some future plan, for when it's been freed from the dungeon? I suppose that would be adequate, but a cooler reason would be… cool.

Any thoughts or feedback?