Tfw help your little brother design an adventure for his first ever RPG session and realize an 11 year old kid just...

>tfw help your little brother design an adventure for his first ever RPG session and realize an 11 year old kid just made a way better one than half your idiot friends ever did

People get too caught up with bullshit "originality" or "epic story" and shit they forget how to make something good.

> helped by his older brother

The magic was in you all along.

This. Kids aren't as worried about muh tropes and all that other bullshit that goes on in the heads of adults. If they have an idea, it goes into the adventure.

It usually means that the adventure turns out to be an insane mishmash they have no hope of running properly, but it's at least fun

The only important word in the entire spoilered sentence was the very last one.

Actually, for being 99% his ideas (I just told him in general terms stuff like "maybe add a twist or something in the end", but the rest was his), it's surprisingly coherent. More than what most of my regular players could probably make. It helps that my little brother is a weird probably-kinda-autistic dweeb obsessed with history books

There's a barony called Rennak on "the frontier", which was built in the middle of nowhere to get to the region's rich silver mines. The last baron of Rennak was killed by wolves during a hunt, and his son just took over the barony, so to cement his power in the eyes of the court he wishes to retrieve his great-grandfather's heirloom axe ,which was stolen by goblins who live in the mountain and occasionally raid the miners. The sword is kept in the goblin town, which is buried in the mountain BEHIND a dungeon. The dungeon is actually the ruins of the ancient goblin city (see below), and because of my brother's aforementioned autistic fetish he designed it like a real city (specifying that some of the architecture is informed by the fact that goblins "don't have fields, they grow nutritious mushrooms on the tunnel walls and raise giant moles for food, whose excrement fertilizes the mushrooms"), then randomly collapsed parts of it and filled the rest with monsters and traps (again, reason becomes clear later).

The twist is that the new baron of Rennak has already recovered the axe before arranging for his own father's hunting accident (I'm not clear on where, I got to ask my brother about it). He wants the heroes to go into the goblin town in the hopes that on the way they will slaughter them all, allowing him to expand his mine into the area of the dungeon, which sits over the richest silver vein. The goblin city which became the dungeon was depopulated by the original human settlers in an attempt to get to the silver, but those were repelled when the goblins collapsed the city on them.

(cont.)

The goblins, wishing to protect themselves from further intrusions, turned the ruins of their city into a dangerous dungeon and dug deeper to make their new city.

The monsters in the dungeon are all creatures the goblins captured from the wilderness and chained there to be used as "watchdogs" to keep away more humans. The traps are similarily for defense.

There are a few holes in it, but holy shit. It's better than some official D&D adventures I've read.

>The sword is
derpity derp. The magical treasure is always a sword, so my fingers automatically wrote that instead of axe. Case in point for "you read too many commercial adventures, you begin to lose the capacity to handle even slightly original ideas."

Damn. That sounds really good

>that plot
That's actually a really good adventure concept. I might steal it for my own campaign.

I see this a lot. People who aren't yet fully inculcated into the RP community and its norms tend to have way more creative, outside-the-box thinking. Especially children.

It does. Could you scan the maps OP, please? I'd really appreciate to see 11yo autistic fetish at work.

I doubt he'd let me.

Basically, it looks like a bunch of main tunnels organized a few larger central spaces from which jut "housing spaces". The dungeon has a fuckton of rooms which contain nothing but poisonous spore clouds (all the houses were filled with food-mushrooms, and when the goblins left the city much of it was left to grow wild into a huge mutated mess). An underwater river flows besides it from the east, connected via smaller tunnels into the tunnels which make the "streets". Everything is damp, moldy and stinky, except for the ancient treasure vaults. These are filled with 300 years old goblins silver craft, but are now protected by a chained cyclops. The cyclops himself eats wild giant moles, which have grown to horse size and became aggressive after 300 years of surviving in the fungal tunnels.

Is your brother looking for players...

Sheeit, that's hardcore. Add some tits and it'd sound like something from DeGenesis.

>at Veeky Forumss suggestion, user exposes his 11 year old brother to Degenesis, fucking up his childhood

So was they good goblins who dindu nuffin?

...

I got to say, this guy's pretty adorable. 8/10, wouldn't slaughter to get to silver mine.

I would literally pay your little brother to write adventures for me.

Goblins in traditional folklore were not necessarily evil beings, mostly just mischievous.

You think an 11 year old knows that?

One that's designing underground cityscapes then simulating disuse probably did his research.

You never read/were read to some fairytales?

That's actually pretty good. I could see that being a published module.

What if his autism was so great he read about ancient city planning instead of fairytales?

Aren't you overdoing it a bit, now?

You guys suck

...

I Eh, I can see a 11 year old being that well read and/or stealing bits from settings that don't have gobs being auto-evil.

I mean, you got Magic:the Gathering if you really want to stick with a publisher. (Not interested in learning what stuff TSR published that was worthwhile.)

There's one thing I don't quite get: Why send the PCs on a mission to retrieve an axe that isn't there? Rather, what's at the end when they reach wherever the axe is supposed to be, and what happens next?
Couldn't the heir just hire them to carve up a bunch of crappy goblins?

Fug,I was I got with ideas this good when I was eleven. I'd struggle to get something so simple but at the same so good nowadays,and I already have a nice deal of DMing in my back.

This is known as the "synabarr" problem - basically back before OSR was really a thing you'd often hear lists of "the worst RPGs" with World of Synabarr on them, purely because the setting had some rainbow dragons and flying bears that shot lasers from their eyes.

>"muh setting isn't dark and grim enough"
- literally synabarr critics

Of course that was before FATAL and 3.pf to show how bad TTRPGs could be.

Maybe goblins aren't considered as universally monstrous in the setting as in most D&D (it seems kinda implied), so he may not be able to just direct people on a pure goblin carving mission without political reprecussions.

I'd cheat for those units in Age of Mythology.

I ran a pathfinder campaign for my 10 year old sister for a little while. I was expecting her to make something harmless and cute.

Instead she made a rather aggressive elf Magus, was very thoughtful about character creation and backstory, and was absolutely brutal in combat.

Sadly college ended that campaign but we still have fond memories of playing together.

>3.pf
I get that this isn't "popular here" but you're legitimately delusional if you think 3.PF is the worst TTRPGs can do. Especially if you consider them in the same category as fucking FATAL.

But the goblins reportedly raid the miners from time to time, so I don't think the goblins can really claim any legal protection. Granted, the humans had already attacked the first city.
There's still the whole thing about the retrieved axe. What the players are meant to find at the end of it all. Did the heir intend for the PCs to die in the process? There's no real guarantee that would happen, so he would need some insurance. And then what would be the reason to just send a bunch of people to their deaths anyway?

British? Only those with elves.

Yeah, OP. If I were you, I'd recommend he still keep the axe in the mine/goblin town. He can still have the baron be an asshole who wanted the PCs to kill all the goblins regardless.

Maybe conveniently keeping the axe hidden allows it to make his accession to the throne even more spectacular. He gains popular support, use the succesful raid on the goblins/unfortunate death of brave adventurers to gain even more support, and can appear as a messianic leader and put the rest of thegoblins to the sword. The PCs are only here as plausibke deniability.
I'm not saying it's a flawless plan, but I've seen worse.

I'm a crunch fag, so a game with a class system where more than half of the classes aren't usable is as bad as FATAL.

Maori folklore also has elves as underground dwelling lightskinned people who provided the maori with the technology of tattooing and trench warfare.

I'm fairly certain it was the British who provided the Maori with trench warfare.

Most people just thinks they are more interesting than they really are.

Pathfinder is like the Wendy's in the center of town. Everyone hates it because the service is bad, the food is mediocre at best, and its full of mouthbreathers and children playing yugioh. Its a big corporate shithole that no one wants to admit they've eaten there, but they probably have at some point just for sake of expediancy.
FATAL is like some shitty chinese buffet that got shut down by the healthy department after some kid died from food poisoning. It only continues to exist as a joke within the community, and as a warning to future start ups.

British women also look like light skinned goblins... coincedence?

But only the Welsh live underground, and no British would admit the Welsh are a part of the Union.

No, those are hobbits.

I, uh... I might steal this.

That's basically mashup of the plots of Eagle of the Ninth and Across the Black River with an episode of scooby doo.

I approve.

That sucks but I think there is enough "new blood" trying to be DMs and stuff that this is more of a wider cultural problem. People are obsessed with new and being "original" because those are buzzwords placed on the shit that's awesome that other people talk about. So without understanding what those words mean they keep on pursuing them and wind up with shit.

That really sucks about World of Synabarr that setting sounds awesome.

Fuck you for shitting on D&D don't be a douche