My son as a game master

As a gift for Easter, I produced a Heroica Fanfiction Audioplay for my older son. Fifty minutes of fantasy-action, just for him, including the bosses and monsters he and I made up. I even gave his favorite characters the best moments. This, after repeated listenings over the holidays, inspired a creative frenzy in my son. While I was doing things like household chores, he was upstairs in his room, labouring away with the boxes of Legos that he inherited from me. Then he presented me with an adventure of his own making. He'd play the bad guys, I'd play the heroes. He was going to be my game master (although he doesn't know the term, this has happened totally organically).

His idea of a great adventure was that the Goblin Kings (The Twins, we usually call them, as we have two of them and they together form a boss encounter) have gathered all the monsters in their keep. Except for the Spitting Snake and the Giant Spider, all bosses are there as well. The goblin fortress is seperated from the human village by the bridge. In it there is the main hall full of horrors and troops, as well as three side wings. In one there is first the Kraken, then the Hydra, its den serving as a treasure chamber full of gold, potions, and a key. One is the throne room with the two Goblin Kings. The last one is another side wing. It features two hidden keys and a secret door that leads to another land.

That other land is the goal of the quest, as my son informed me. The kidnapped king of Heroica, father to Prince Alrik, leader of the heroes, is held there – but the heroes don't know that yet. I was allowed to have four active heroes at the time, the other four waiting as backup at the village tavern.

Mathematically, my team was very unlikely to defeat the massed foes in the main hall. My first strike team consisted of the Prince, the Knight, the Priest and the Thief. I had a plan: The team would head straight for the treasure chamber, where the Knight would hold the monsters from the hall off while the other three dealt with the Kraken and the Hydra. Then everyone would retreat with the loot to the village, where the treasure would allow them to heal and gear up.

The plan went reasonably well. While I lost the Knight and the Thief, the Priest and the Prince got out with the treasures. I filled the ranks with the Archer and the Druid and started back to the Goblin Fortress. That's when things got even more RPGish.

My son had used the turns I had spent buying stuff in the village: He had set an ambush with werewolves on the bridge. That failed to stop my heroes. When a single Level 1 goblin came out of the fortress, I decided to negotiate. I told it/my son that he didn't have a chance as a single goblin against four heavily armed heroes. My son conceided. The goblin decided to become a good citizen and went onto the big ship to take a nap. Later, while my heroes were entering the fortress again, he would go to the village oak to nibble on its big branch. As my son explained, goblins love meat and wood. He was the smartest of the goblins and thus decided to be a good guy.

Inside the fortress, my heroes encountered another wave of enemies in the form of miscelaneous smallish monsters and the Dark Druid. Then the remaining goblin forces surrendered – under the condition that my heroes leave the throne room and their kings alone. I decided that these were acceptable terms for Prince Alrik, after he had learned that the goblins didn't have his dad. The heroes went into the wing with the magic door undisturbed and we decided to call it a night and continue the adventure/campaign in my son's other land another day.

It was only half way through that game of Heroica that I realized that I was in fact playing a roleplaying campaign designed by my son. He is only five and can't read or write but the graspable little character sheets made from Lego combined with the simple tactics of the dice rolls and loot system enabled him to become a game master. I am astonished and proud that he put thought into things.

He even heeded my advice from an earlier game and gave me a good reason to go into a dead end full of boss monsters (all the treasure and a mission-relevant key). During my last assault he even realized that his guys should try to kill my healer (the Priest) but after that failed, he figured the smart thing for the goblins would be to give up. I'm glad he isn't one of the bloodthirsty kids that assume that murder is the only way to play this. And I'm very very curious what the land beyond the magical door has in store for my quartet of heroes.