‹ Tabletop roleplaying . blog

Tags / ttrpg with kids


Our community have several library boxes where people can trade books with each other.

Seeing that our old favorite White Box was so fairly priced we ordered a bunch of them and some dice sets to put out in our local boxes. Hopefully it allow someone to discover the joy of tabletop roleplaying!

Jan 07, 2021

We have been wanting to try out the original dnd rules as presented by the White box. My son asked me if we could play something where he could play a dragon. So why not, I thought to myself, and picked up this light weight combo:

And off we went to invade a Dwarf fortress full of undead monsters!

I just drew as he explored, giving his character the stats from one of the dragons in the game.

This seems to have gotten him inspired so when I finished work the other day he had prepared a dungeon crawl using (almost) the same set-up. Great way to end the day.

Happy to announce the second issue of my Mausritter zine Thistle Kingdom!

This winter issue contains:

  • An adventure: take the young mice in the Nature Patrol on a camping trip! What could go wrong?
  • A ready to go hex-crawl map.
  • The heavy armored infantry landsknechts.

Check it out on itch.io.

I’ve written before concerning the house rules I use when I play with my son.

I am also running a Dolmenwood campaign right now and here are the house rules we run with.

  1. The first one is inspired by the house rule I have when playing with my kid: Crits! (They’re fun) We will be using the crit and fumble tables from Dungeon Crawl Classics

  2. (LotFP inspired) Knocked out on 0 HP. Death on -3 in 1d10 rounds no saves. Death instantaneous on -4.

  3. Acending Armour Class.

  4. (LotFP inspired) Heal 1 HP for nights rest, 1d3 for days rest.

  5. Shields Shall be Splintered - sacrifice a shield to block all damage from one single hit.

  6. Buy back dead characters XP (for the players new one) if they spend 1 GP per XP on the funeral.

  7. The Specialist Class from Lamentations of the Flame Princess (instead of the OSE thief and skills)

  8. Wrestling from Ten Foot Polemic’s House Rule Document.

  9. Spell failure from B/X Options.

… will be adding to this list as more things come up.

Our youngest was sleeping so my wife joined in with my eldest son for our first session in Dolmenwood. We had such a fantastic time.

Here I’ll list the different adventures we have run in our OSR and Mausritter campaign.

Our OSR campaign.

  1. Winters Daughter - acquired the magic sword, set free the ghost.
  2. Please go to sleep, Arthur Cobbleworth - murdered the parrot. Recruited a clerk to the group.
  3. Homemade dungeon crawl of local Barrow - minor loot, had to tactically retreat.
  4. Oh no, Toads! - save the village, killed the Toad King.
  5. The curse of Buckthorn Valley - managed to get the evil chalice out of the water supply
  6. Dolmenwood: Arriving in Lanskshorn - inherited house and an old dog in Lankshorn.
  7. Dolmenwood: The House of Merridwyn Scymes - Ongoing…

Mausritter seem to inspire a lot of crafts. These tokens we drew for our characters.

Character tokens for Mausritter

Character tokens for Mausritter

Hand drawn mice (color copied and printed) on white paper, we wrapped them around cardboard and then used some plastic stand from a board game we own.

Been on the lookout for some good models, if you know of any let me know

Quickly sharing how I sketch out a short OSR adventure (Old School Essentials).

It’s a simple streamlined affair that I ran with my son. About a sentient Giant Toad king who is trying to establish dominance over a local lake and thereby disrupting the fish trade.

Been running two adventures this far with my young son (almost five years old) with the Old School Essentials rule system. It’s a modern layout of the old B/X rules.

Its been working great this far and we have played both Winters Daughter and the one-pager Please go to sleep, Arthur Cobbleworth.

We added some minor house rules to make things extra fun:

  • Crits: On a natural 20 on an attack dice we double the damage roll (we thoroughly enjoy the mini celebration every time you get that sweet 20 on the dice)
  • 0 HP: When a character reaches 0HP we do not instantly kill him. Rather he passes out and we make him permanently injured by loss of an attribute point.

I will add to this list as we discover more things we’d like to tweak.

« Older posts Newer posts »