Hello, all! I have a passion project I've been wanting to start on, and I was hoping to get some advice from some more experienced DM's (players, feel free to give your input as well). Recently, I ran a small one shot child campaign for my daughter (7) and my husband. She absolutely LOVED it (proud parent here), so I'd like to create my own campaign just for her. My husband will be playing with her, and I'm hoping to reel in my brother who loves DnD as well. What I would like from all of you is any advice you can give. This will be my first attempt at a homemade campaign, so I could use advice for just about anything. Any guides to making monsters and NPCs that any of you have found helpful would also be greatly appreciated as this will also be a first for me. Also, are there any others here that have played with/DM'd for children, and if so, did you go all out like you would for an adult or were there things you changed for the sake of the child? I don't want to hold back, but I also don't want to accidentally overwhelm her and push her away from the game.
I'm by no means an "experienced" DM, but I am a very experienced player who has starting DMing very methodically.
I ended up typing more than I intended to, so it's spoilered below:
TL;DR
(1) Start small, consult the DMG (pg 274 for Monsters), mix published and homebrew to give yourself breathing room.
(2) Be flexible. The less you have on paper, the more you can adapt on the fly. Learn to scale difficulty mid-encounter and improvise NPC/Monster abilities.
(3) Be a steward for their world, rather than have them be players in your world.
(4) With children, start with bumpers and add grittiness later. Give them teasers and see how they react before going deeper. Casually debrief them after each session to make sure you're reading them correctly.
Being in the process of creating my own homebrew world, I'm finding that it's very valuable to not overwhelm yourself with an entire world all at once. Unless you specifically want your party to be far traveling wanderers, it is entirely possible to have an entire campaign take place within a single country. (Curse of Strahd takes place entirely within Barovia, which can be traversed in a single day.)
The depth of a campaign comes from the little details, and it's much easier to bring those to life when you limit yourself to just the world that is actually going to be explored. (Basic outline for a world, Low detail for a continent, Medium detail for a region, High detail for the next session.) Also, the less you put on paper, the more flexible you can be when you find out what drives your players.
That said, most people, and especially children, enjoy a buffet of experiences, and may not be so keen on narrative continuity. You might want to deliberately put your party in a situation where they will jump from one exotic location to the next, which will let you focus on building 1-3 session "short stories" without trying to intricately connect things together. You could draw from movies and books that the child enjoys, so that they can discover a sense of familiarity and anticipate small details about the world. (Ice Queens a la "Frozen", a gateway to the afterlife a la "Coco", etc.) Don't try to make everything original when an obvious cliché can provide the same or greater excitement.
However, a little bit of continuity still matters. People need to feel like their actions matter, so you could give them a ship or "base" where they can accumulate their "trophies" from their exploits.
After that, it's mostly Fantasy Fulfilment. If your child loves dogs, let them rescue a dog and keep it as a pet. If they want to feel special, put lots of detail into describing their actions and magical items. They don't actually need to be more powerful, they just need a spotlight. etc...
Ultimately, the story and world needs to be designed to respond to the players. Try to think of yourself as a "steward" for their world, as opposed to having them be players in your world.
[And don't be afraid of dropping a piece of a published book right into a Homebrew world to buy yourself some breathing room. There will be plenty of ocean to fit the Sword Coast along with everything else.]
Most of that was probably either obvious or was obvious in hindsight.
Beyond that, the Dungeon Master's Guide will have most, if not all, of the tools you'll need to create custom NPCs and Monsters. Page 274 has a table for "Quick Monster Stats", and various resources exist for modifying existing monsters for your personal setting.
However, it can be valuable to not get too caught up in creating statblocks. Let monsters be a little flexible to give your players a challenge. Focus on getting a sense for how to rebalance encounters on the fly, either by having new enemies/allies appear, or revealing that the BBEG was either weakened from a previous fight or hiding secret powers. Their "power" doesn't have to be anything supported by official rules, NPCs will have their own mysteries that will never be solved. As with world building, if the monster/NPC isn't on paper, it can adapt to your needs. The dire wolf with lightning breath might be able to activate it every round, if you party needs a challenge, or it could just be 1/rest, if the encounter becomes too dangerous.
Re: "Going All Out"
This is definitely going to depend on your particular situation and the age of your child.
Video games, movies, and cartoons all cover the concepts of killing and death pretty regularly, so there isn't as much need to censor that, but a young/immature player might struggle with their own character's death. Gauge your players, and plan accordingly.
Blood and gore is usually fine, as long as it's not hyper-realistic. Fountains of blood can be "comical", Zombies can generically "gross", but if you start naming specific arteries and describing the symptoms of real diseases, you've probably gone too far.
Sex/****/Torture/Racism/etc... These are subjects that can be difficult even for a table of adults. Implication and "fade to black" are always fashionable. A case can be made to carefully insert these topics into play for realism or to provide an opportunity for moral action, but it can also go south if taken as an invitation to explore forbidden topics.
For a game with a child, or minors in general, I'd recommend activating the bumpers from Session 0. Don't create openings for awkward conversations later.
It's always possible to make your world bigger and more nuanced as time goes on, but it can be very, very difficult to close Pandora's Box once opened.
As a kid myself (just under 16), I know how dnd can be SO fun. But with younger kids, some things may need toning down. Things to avoid; physiological stuff (it's almost always worse than horror and jump scares), of course adult content (sexual or otherwise rude), etc.
Then choose a theme. This can be reflected in the opening e.g a very 'adventurous' adventure could start as part of an Adventurers guild, and being sent far and wide. Just as an example.
Make use of people you see. Maybe that really round and short old man who looked so happy about going for a walk in the rain on a Tuesday who you saw yesterday could be in it, with maybe some minor alterations.
Reinforce their favourite things: e.g battling, reading, nature etc. Helps keep them interested.
And that's the simple guide.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
'The Cleverness of mushrooms always surprises me!' - Ivern Bramblefoot.
Thanks, guys. The advice is very encouraging. She's a rather smart 7 year old (little squirt got up during the night to watch Madoka without me knowing and it's her favorite show), but I definitely know not to go Berserk on her. lol I appreciate the new information and the reinforcement of the things I already knew. You guys rock!
i''d actually take a bit of a different approach as you're talking about recreating the wheel. maybe start with something that's already out as a starting point and adapt it, that way you don't have to start completely from scratch and can focus on a few topics instead of everything. 3 pillars of an adventure - exploration, social interaction, and combat. for a kid (mine's 12 though so not very comparable to 7):
exploration - this is all on you-your ability to describe the environment. this feeds your kid's imagination.
social interaction - this is your challenge to them, provide a few characters but really challenge your kid to describe what they'd actually like to say to the NPCs and why. As a parent, this is a real tool for development imo - allows you to start getting your child to talk through and support/defend their answers/opinions in a very comfortable and fun environment.
combat - imo, change the goal from kill to capture...this can very well be a problem-solving exercise. you can still describe blows against armor, blocking, parrying, all that exciting stuff.
if you want to start in a city, i'd really suggest waterdeep: dragonheist - you can do that whole book without really killing anything (bottom line is you're just looking for a fancy rock) and it gives you an absolute mountain (almost too many) of segways to do whatever you want. there's a lot of distractions in that book though so pick and choose. East of waterdeep is a forest you could go to if you want to get out of the city and provide a woodland environment.
here's a couple ideas you could build in or get inspiration from:
I dont know if it helps very much because of the age difference, but I occasionally play with my 3 and 5 year old daughters. I basically attempt to replay whatever Disney movie/show they’re into at that time. Recently they’ve been into princess Sophia. We also have princess dresses that they like to wear.
Sometimes they lose interest and we do something else, but I can proudly say we made it through our re-imagined sequel to moana once. The premise was that the winds had been stolen from the world via an artifact that was related to a god. The lack of wind had effects on food production, weather, as well as navigation from their boats.
they like rolling dice a lot, so I let them roll whenever they want. The youngest one loves it, while the older one is more about the adventuring aspect.
You guys are awesome! Just realized I could upvote all of your posts, so I leapt onto that. I really appreciate all the help. Glad I finally joined DnD Beyond.
So I returned to the game to DM for my kids about five years ago, ages 9-12. They were smart, critical kids and my wife played with us, so we used gaming as a way to explore all kinds of terrain. They started out on an adventure on an island, so the world was narrow and with a defined mission. But that expanded into the surrounding area, and then into the province until, years later, they're dealing with international struggles. But the biggest thing we did was to use D&D to do more than fight monsters. The campaign was from the beginning about stakes and stakeholders. It has been political the whole time.
For example, their first adventure was to respond to goblin raids on an island with a few fishing villages and a monastery, and if possible rescue a magic item. There was a big reveal, though: the goblins who stole it, were actually stealing it back. It was theirs originally. But the fisherfolks used it to get the fishing fleet safely home in bad conditions, while the goblins wanted it for warfare. The players got to deal with the moral question: give it to the original owners, or those making the most beneficial use of it?
One of the players is a half-Orc, and we used that to deal with a lot of sophisticated issues of race. For example, his believed-dead father was a cavalier, extremely rare among Orcs, and taught his son to ride horses believing that military service was the route to respect within human power structures. That backstory evolved into a complex internal dynamic within the Orcish community, split between assimilationist modernizers, hunter-gathering traditionalists and adherents to an authoritarian human faith. This has evolved, around twelfth level, into a brewing religious war, complete with an Orcish messiah.
Along the way, my wife's female character fall in love with a female gnome, which everyone treated as no big deal -- except that it pulled the party into Gnomish affairs. When a major city expelled its entire Gnomish population, the characters had to do what they could to help a charismatic Gnomish religious leader reverse the expulsion and secure political rights for his community.
There have been plenty of monsters and BBEGs to fight, but the puzzles to solve have generally been the puzzles of intergroup conflict: who has what at stake, who needs help, and what would help them. So, if your parenting and your kid are so inclined, I'm saying that DMing for your kids can explore more than math and fantasy. It can explore big questions about why the world is the way it is, and you don't have you lean away from that. You can lean into it. I now have high school aged players who play in a complex world where their adventures can swing a royal war of succession, free a city from a tyrant, or create a homeland for people who need political self-determination.
It can help to have a prefab campaign setting to create the situations, but you don't have to script out everything. You just need to have a few operating forces, and things they want, and things they can do. Suppose you have a Hobgoblin warlord trying to set up a fort in a new territory, and the players successfully trick him into believing he's about to be raided by another Hobgoblin force. You don't have to decide what he does. You can make a list of things he could to, assign some numbers, and roll d20. Perhaps list them from most cautious to most aggressive, then assign d20 results and roll. Did the trick work? The players see a huge raiding party leave the fort. It is minimally defended by a skeleton crew. This may be their opportunity to sneak in and retrieve something ...
You can teach your players that committed individuals can make a huge difference. Second level players won't slay dragons or command armies. But getting a key message through or collecting a piece of intelligence that nobody else has could swing an entire battle. If this works for the players, they may find that the world around them is shaped by their actions, populated by people who have been helped or harmed by their previous adventures, and give them a sense of agency and consequence.
As a fellow (Sort of child, I guess? I'm technically not an adult yet ...) child, I would suggest that sometimes you put in a little something a tad bit nuts, but make sure you don't go to far down that path. Getting the players to laugh is always important, and making sure to keep it fun is important. But make sure it stays a little controlled, because if it becomes to bad, the players might make it a habit to do dangerous things, (EX Hopping off the roof, thinking it's funny) because then you either fudge the rolls, (Making the habit worse) or you end up seriously damaging - or killing - their character. As someone who's played with little kids, that can sometimes cause a meltdown. Or make them start stress eating popcorn ... but it's always a good idea to have ground rules.
In the beginning of the campaign, it's normally best to use published monsters originally, because sometimes your homebrew stuff turns out ... not as well as you intended. If it's not that great, that's fine! It's not about skill there, it's about having a good idea, and it takes a lot of practice before you can execute the homebrew stuff perfectly. Also, make sure you don't overuse monsters to much, because that gets a little predictable.
NPCs are a major challenge. I would suggest the Dungeon Masters Guide, because that has a lot of great stuff in it, for all parts of DMing.
im a 15 year old who runs the game for my similar age friends and my 10 y/o bro, i'd suggest starting with a world map, usually just 1 continent, you don't have to draw it up yourself, I steal most of mine. make sure to leave it mostly open except for 5-6 towns, this way you can add more things in if you want or need to. only plan for starting town and any areas they go to immediately around it that you think they could get to in a session. the rest you can make later. after the session detail places you think they could get to next session from where they left off, this way you only have a bit of worldbuilding work each week. As for how much i change for having a child there, go a little lighter on character death, i give my players 1 deus ex machina(revive, usually with character development) with a small rp disadvantage, such as a death cleric no longer being able to hide that they're death domain. sry about length
TL;DR plan only nearby areas, go light on character death with children
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
NNCHRIS: SOUL THIEF, MASTER OF THE ARCANE, AND KING OF NEW YORKNN Gdl Creator of Ilheia and her Knights of the Fallen Stars ldG Lesser Student of Technomancy [undergrad student in computer science] Supporter of the 2014 rules, and a MASSIVE Homebrewer. Come to me all ye who seek salvation in wording thy brews! Open to homebrew trades at any time!! Or feel free to request HB, and Ill see if I can get it done for ya! Characters (Outdated)
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Hello, all! I have a passion project I've been wanting to start on, and I was hoping to get some advice from some more experienced DM's (players, feel free to give your input as well). Recently, I ran a small one shot child campaign for my daughter (7) and my husband. She absolutely LOVED it (proud parent here), so I'd like to create my own campaign just for her. My husband will be playing with her, and I'm hoping to reel in my brother who loves DnD as well. What I would like from all of you is any advice you can give. This will be my first attempt at a homemade campaign, so I could use advice for just about anything. Any guides to making monsters and NPCs that any of you have found helpful would also be greatly appreciated as this will also be a first for me. Also, are there any others here that have played with/DM'd for children, and if so, did you go all out like you would for an adult or were there things you changed for the sake of the child? I don't want to hold back, but I also don't want to accidentally overwhelm her and push her away from the game.
Thanks in advance!
I'm by no means an "experienced" DM, but I am a very experienced player who has starting DMing very methodically.
I ended up typing more than I intended to, so it's spoilered below:
TL;DR
(1) Start small, consult the DMG (pg 274 for Monsters), mix published and homebrew to give yourself breathing room.
(2) Be flexible. The less you have on paper, the more you can adapt on the fly. Learn to scale difficulty mid-encounter and improvise NPC/Monster abilities.
(3) Be a steward for their world, rather than have them be players in your world.
(4) With children, start with bumpers and add grittiness later. Give them teasers and see how they react before going deeper. Casually debrief them after each session to make sure you're reading them correctly.
Being in the process of creating my own homebrew world, I'm finding that it's very valuable to not overwhelm yourself with an entire world all at once. Unless you specifically want your party to be far traveling wanderers, it is entirely possible to have an entire campaign take place within a single country. (Curse of Strahd takes place entirely within Barovia, which can be traversed in a single day.)
The depth of a campaign comes from the little details, and it's much easier to bring those to life when you limit yourself to just the world that is actually going to be explored. (Basic outline for a world, Low detail for a continent, Medium detail for a region, High detail for the next session.) Also, the less you put on paper, the more flexible you can be when you find out what drives your players.
That said, most people, and especially children, enjoy a buffet of experiences, and may not be so keen on narrative continuity. You might want to deliberately put your party in a situation where they will jump from one exotic location to the next, which will let you focus on building 1-3 session "short stories" without trying to intricately connect things together. You could draw from movies and books that the child enjoys, so that they can discover a sense of familiarity and anticipate small details about the world. (Ice Queens a la "Frozen", a gateway to the afterlife a la "Coco", etc.) Don't try to make everything original when an obvious cliché can provide the same or greater excitement.
However, a little bit of continuity still matters. People need to feel like their actions matter, so you could give them a ship or "base" where they can accumulate their "trophies" from their exploits.
After that, it's mostly Fantasy Fulfilment. If your child loves dogs, let them rescue a dog and keep it as a pet. If they want to feel special, put lots of detail into describing their actions and magical items. They don't actually need to be more powerful, they just need a spotlight. etc...
Ultimately, the story and world needs to be designed to respond to the players. Try to think of yourself as a "steward" for their world, as opposed to having them be players in your world.
[And don't be afraid of dropping a piece of a published book right into a Homebrew world to buy yourself some breathing room. There will be plenty of ocean to fit the Sword Coast along with everything else.]
Most of that was probably either obvious or was obvious in hindsight.
Beyond that, the Dungeon Master's Guide will have most, if not all, of the tools you'll need to create custom NPCs and Monsters. Page 274 has a table for "Quick Monster Stats", and various resources exist for modifying existing monsters for your personal setting.
However, it can be valuable to not get too caught up in creating statblocks. Let monsters be a little flexible to give your players a challenge. Focus on getting a sense for how to rebalance encounters on the fly, either by having new enemies/allies appear, or revealing that the BBEG was either weakened from a previous fight or hiding secret powers. Their "power" doesn't have to be anything supported by official rules, NPCs will have their own mysteries that will never be solved. As with world building, if the monster/NPC isn't on paper, it can adapt to your needs. The dire wolf with lightning breath might be able to activate it every round, if you party needs a challenge, or it could just be 1/rest, if the encounter becomes too dangerous.
Re: "Going All Out"
This is definitely going to depend on your particular situation and the age of your child.
Video games, movies, and cartoons all cover the concepts of killing and death pretty regularly, so there isn't as much need to censor that, but a young/immature player might struggle with their own character's death. Gauge your players, and plan accordingly.
Blood and gore is usually fine, as long as it's not hyper-realistic. Fountains of blood can be "comical", Zombies can generically "gross", but if you start naming specific arteries and describing the symptoms of real diseases, you've probably gone too far.
Sex/****/Torture/Racism/etc... These are subjects that can be difficult even for a table of adults. Implication and "fade to black" are always fashionable. A case can be made to carefully insert these topics into play for realism or to provide an opportunity for moral action, but it can also go south if taken as an invitation to explore forbidden topics.
For a game with a child, or minors in general, I'd recommend activating the bumpers from Session 0. Don't create openings for awkward conversations later.
It's always possible to make your world bigger and more nuanced as time goes on, but it can be very, very difficult to close Pandora's Box once opened.
Woo... This is my area of expertise!
As a kid myself (just under 16), I know how dnd can be SO fun. But with younger kids, some things may need toning down. Things to avoid; physiological stuff (it's almost always worse than horror and jump scares), of course adult content (sexual or otherwise rude), etc.
Then choose a theme. This can be reflected in the opening e.g a very 'adventurous' adventure could start as part of an Adventurers guild, and being sent far and wide. Just as an example.
Make use of people you see. Maybe that really round and short old man who looked so happy about going for a walk in the rain on a Tuesday who you saw yesterday could be in it, with maybe some minor alterations.
Reinforce their favourite things: e.g battling, reading, nature etc. Helps keep them interested.
And that's the simple guide.
'The Cleverness of mushrooms always surprises me!' - Ivern Bramblefoot.
I'll worldbuild for your DnD games!
Just a D&D enjoyer, check out my fiverr page if you need any worldbuilding done for ya!
The single best piece of advice I can give you is to watch this series:
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
DDB Buyers' Guide
Hardcovers, DDB & You
Content Troubleshooting
Thanks, guys. The advice is very encouraging. She's a rather smart 7 year old (little squirt got up during the night to watch Madoka without me knowing and it's her favorite show), but I definitely know not to go Berserk on her. lol I appreciate the new information and the reinforcement of the things I already knew. You guys rock!
i''d actually take a bit of a different approach as you're talking about recreating the wheel. maybe start with something that's already out as a starting point and adapt it, that way you don't have to start completely from scratch and can focus on a few topics instead of everything. 3 pillars of an adventure - exploration, social interaction, and combat. for a kid (mine's 12 though so not very comparable to 7):
if you want to start in a city, i'd really suggest waterdeep: dragonheist - you can do that whole book without really killing anything (bottom line is you're just looking for a fancy rock) and it gives you an absolute mountain (almost too many) of segways to do whatever you want. there's a lot of distractions in that book though so pick and choose. East of waterdeep is a forest you could go to if you want to get out of the city and provide a woodland environment.
here's a couple ideas you could build in or get inspiration from:
Guide to the Five Factions (PWYW)
Deck of Decks
I dont know if it helps very much because of the age difference, but I occasionally play with my 3 and 5 year old daughters. I basically attempt to replay whatever Disney movie/show they’re into at that time. Recently they’ve been into princess Sophia. We also have princess dresses that they like to wear.
Sometimes they lose interest and we do something else, but I can proudly say we made it through our re-imagined sequel to moana once. The premise was that the winds had been stolen from the world via an artifact that was related to a god. The lack of wind had effects on food production, weather, as well as navigation from their boats.
they like rolling dice a lot, so I let them roll whenever they want. The youngest one loves it, while the older one is more about the adventuring aspect.
You guys are awesome! Just realized I could upvote all of your posts, so I leapt onto that. I really appreciate all the help. Glad I finally joined DnD Beyond.
So I returned to the game to DM for my kids about five years ago, ages 9-12. They were smart, critical kids and my wife played with us, so we used gaming as a way to explore all kinds of terrain. They started out on an adventure on an island, so the world was narrow and with a defined mission. But that expanded into the surrounding area, and then into the province until, years later, they're dealing with international struggles. But the biggest thing we did was to use D&D to do more than fight monsters. The campaign was from the beginning about stakes and stakeholders. It has been political the whole time.
For example, their first adventure was to respond to goblin raids on an island with a few fishing villages and a monastery, and if possible rescue a magic item. There was a big reveal, though: the goblins who stole it, were actually stealing it back. It was theirs originally. But the fisherfolks used it to get the fishing fleet safely home in bad conditions, while the goblins wanted it for warfare. The players got to deal with the moral question: give it to the original owners, or those making the most beneficial use of it?
One of the players is a half-Orc, and we used that to deal with a lot of sophisticated issues of race. For example, his believed-dead father was a cavalier, extremely rare among Orcs, and taught his son to ride horses believing that military service was the route to respect within human power structures. That backstory evolved into a complex internal dynamic within the Orcish community, split between assimilationist modernizers, hunter-gathering traditionalists and adherents to an authoritarian human faith. This has evolved, around twelfth level, into a brewing religious war, complete with an Orcish messiah.
Along the way, my wife's female character fall in love with a female gnome, which everyone treated as no big deal -- except that it pulled the party into Gnomish affairs. When a major city expelled its entire Gnomish population, the characters had to do what they could to help a charismatic Gnomish religious leader reverse the expulsion and secure political rights for his community.
There have been plenty of monsters and BBEGs to fight, but the puzzles to solve have generally been the puzzles of intergroup conflict: who has what at stake, who needs help, and what would help them. So, if your parenting and your kid are so inclined, I'm saying that DMing for your kids can explore more than math and fantasy. It can explore big questions about why the world is the way it is, and you don't have you lean away from that. You can lean into it. I now have high school aged players who play in a complex world where their adventures can swing a royal war of succession, free a city from a tyrant, or create a homeland for people who need political self-determination.
It can help to have a prefab campaign setting to create the situations, but you don't have to script out everything. You just need to have a few operating forces, and things they want, and things they can do. Suppose you have a Hobgoblin warlord trying to set up a fort in a new territory, and the players successfully trick him into believing he's about to be raided by another Hobgoblin force. You don't have to decide what he does. You can make a list of things he could to, assign some numbers, and roll d20. Perhaps list them from most cautious to most aggressive, then assign d20 results and roll. Did the trick work? The players see a huge raiding party leave the fort. It is minimally defended by a skeleton crew. This may be their opportunity to sneak in and retrieve something ...
You can teach your players that committed individuals can make a huge difference. Second level players won't slay dragons or command armies. But getting a key message through or collecting a piece of intelligence that nobody else has could swing an entire battle. If this works for the players, they may find that the world around them is shaped by their actions, populated by people who have been helped or harmed by their previous adventures, and give them a sense of agency and consequence.
Anyway, it's worked for me.
As a fellow (Sort of child, I guess? I'm technically not an adult yet ...) child, I would suggest that sometimes you put in a little something a tad bit nuts, but make sure you don't go to far down that path. Getting the players to laugh is always important, and making sure to keep it fun is important. But make sure it stays a little controlled, because if it becomes to bad, the players might make it a habit to do dangerous things, (EX Hopping off the roof, thinking it's funny) because then you either fudge the rolls, (Making the habit worse) or you end up seriously damaging - or killing - their character. As someone who's played with little kids, that can sometimes cause a meltdown. Or make them start stress eating popcorn ... but it's always a good idea to have ground rules.
In the beginning of the campaign, it's normally best to use published monsters originally, because sometimes your homebrew stuff turns out ... not as well as you intended. If it's not that great, that's fine! It's not about skill there, it's about having a good idea, and it takes a lot of practice before you can execute the homebrew stuff perfectly. Also, make sure you don't overuse monsters to much, because that gets a little predictable.
NPCs are a major challenge. I would suggest the Dungeon Masters Guide, because that has a lot of great stuff in it, for all parts of DMing.
im a 15 year old who runs the game for my similar age friends and my 10 y/o bro, i'd suggest starting with a world map, usually just 1 continent, you don't have to draw it up yourself, I steal most of mine. make sure to leave it mostly open except for 5-6 towns, this way you can add more things in if you want or need to. only plan for starting town and any areas they go to immediately around it that you think they could get to in a session. the rest you can make later. after the session detail places you think they could get to next session from where they left off, this way you only have a bit of worldbuilding work each week. As for how much i change for having a child there, go a little lighter on character death, i give my players 1 deus ex machina(revive, usually with character development) with a small rp disadvantage, such as a death cleric no longer being able to hide that they're death domain. sry about length
TL;DR plan only nearby areas, go light on character death with children
NNCHRIS: SOUL THIEF, MASTER OF THE ARCANE, AND KING OF NEW YORKNN
Gdl Creator of Ilheia and her Knights of the Fallen Stars ldG
Lesser Student of Technomancy [undergrad student in computer science]
Supporter of the 2014 rules, and a MASSIVE Homebrewer. Come to me all ye who seek salvation in wording thy brews!
Open to homebrew trades at any time!! Or feel free to request HB, and Ill see if I can get it done for ya!
Characters (Outdated)