How I run games with kids
This quick start was written by everweird.world. I make fun and horrible things for RPGs and I play a lot of games with kids.
A home base
In the game I play most frequently with kids age 7-12, our setting is a school for adventurers set high in the mountains.
The valley below was once invaded by monsters who travelled over and under the mountains to wipe out all the towns and villages there. During this event, all the people of the valley learned to work together to defeat the monsters. Where there were once separate villages for elves, dwarves, dragonborn, humans, gnomes, and others, there was now just one home for everyone.
The people decided to found a school where new generations could learn about monsters and become great adventurers who would protect the valley from further invasions. They built the school in the mountains where they could keep an eye on the land beyond, to watch for gathering monster hordes.
At that school, the PCs are students. They meet teachers of different specialities: potions, sorcery, monster-handling. These teachers take groups of students out on adventures.
One-shots
For each session, a teacher comes to the kids with a problem that requires an adventure to solve. The teacher usually (but not always) accompanies the kids to help them out if they get in real trouble.
I use One-Shot Wonders from Role Play Press almost exclusively for session ideas. The book is a perfect blend of high fantasy and whimsy and describes adventures that don’t rely on combat. It also doesn’t feature hard stats so it’s easy to adapt for any lighter rules system.
More resources
The Young Adventurers’ Guides from D&D are fun introductions to the world of D&D–the monsters, classes, magic, etc. But they do not contain any rules. This guide is meant to present rules that can be used with those books.
The DnD Adventure Club publishes a simplified rules guide and a new adventure for kids each month. It’s meant to give kids the tools to run games themselves (as is this guide here).
Adventure with Muk is an activity book and introduction to D&D from D&D themselves. It doesn’t provide a lot of tools for running games but it can be a soft introduction for younger kids interested in D&D.