As you may be aware I've been trying to get my kids (7 & 9) into D&D () for some time now to get their minds think beyond "which solider should I take out next with my sniper rifle on my XBox". I've tried different things with varying degrees of success so now I've gone all out and created an adventure from scratch.

The reason for this is I can tailor it to the kids instead of the kids trying to fathom it all out and therefore came up with this:



I've been writing the adventure the best I could but would appreciate if you guys could take a look, tell me what you think so far and give me some pointers? The players start on the snowy tile at the left and finish in the treasure chamber where the bronze dragon is.

Any advice on a good encounter for kids would be extremely appreciated! Here is the adventure (pdf 650k) as it stands:

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Here are a few more shots:



Again, any criticism would be very helpful.

It's a very straightforward dungeon crawl, with a strong boardgame-like, tactical element. If that's what you're going for, I think it's just fine.

Now, if it were me, I'd try to go for a more open-ended approach, with more emphasis on problem solving, interaction with NPCs, and more faerie-tale-like elements. As in, have some sort of plot or mission (Save the Queen of Faeries), and a few non-hostile encounters. Less combat, more wonder. This would move the game away from Hero Quest, and to some sort of story.

Of course, I'm not too familiar with D&D, so this might be totally off target

Ditto.

I had my kids squirming in their chairs and begging for help from the NPCs with my adventures.

I started my 8 year old with an old solo adventure "The Ghost of Lion Castle". I updated it to match his Pathfinder PC. Youngsters sometimes become overwhelmed when things are too open ended. He enjoyed the adventure, I think in part, because his choices were more limited. After he played for a while, I noticed him asking if his PC could do this or that. You could see that once he had an idea of what a character could do, he naturally started to use more and more imagination. It was like going from dot to dot to free form drawing