Hi everyone! I’m a pretty new GM. I’ve only ever played ttrpg as a GM with my kids, using the Hero Kids system.
We’ve been having a lot of fun running a longer campaign, and my kids were not really interested in the flavor of playing as actual kids (they want to be hulking lizardkin warriors who yeet the bad guys across the room and intimidate even the city guards to let them carry weapons in the city) so I have done a lot of adaptation of the included Hero Kids adventures to fit their style.
What I like to do is pull general plots and encounters out of the pre-made adventures, cut out or change stuff that doesn’t fit, and use them as kind of quantum side quests whenever the players want to ask about rumors from the local innkeeper and stuff like that.
I have been mainly designing my own stuff as we go along but those adventures help a LOT with prep and having resources already compiled in a mostly usable way. It also helps me learn a lot about how to design encounters and plots since I don’t have much experience.
I’m posting because I am about out of the Hero Kids adventures that I feel like fit our setting and play style and I am wondering if there are any other books that have adventures that can be used in this way that aren’t system specific?
I’ve heard of things like the One Shot Wonders book, and others, or even the actual D&D published adventures, but having no experience with that or with even playing D&D 5e, I don’t know how much work it would be to adapt things. So I am wondering if anyone has used resources like that and knows how they are put together would be able to let me know of some good ones to use in this way.
Free resources would be great, but I’m definitely willing to spend money if there are good products.
Not precisely what you asked for, but very useful resources so I’m plugging them anyway because I love them:
The Dungeon Alphabet seems great! I will add that to my list to check out.
Fire on the velvet horizon also looks interesting, but maybe a little intense for my current game. Kind of giving me some SCP vibes. Would be fun to run a Fringe-like campaign in a dark fantasy setting with these kinds of creatures. Reminds me of The Tales of Durand series, too, where when certain things happen, the world kind of starts to unravel and unbinds a lot of dark creatures and things.
Yeah. The “Fire on the Velvet Horizon” stuff is really too powerful to be used as-is in my experience; generally I’ll insert them in much reduced form. “Hostage Frog” becomes a big frog monster that tries to swallow and digest the adventurers. “Ice Age Eye” becomes a particular frozen part of the map that’s unusual and strange in a certain way. That is why I love it though; any one of those entries easily contains enough powerful content that it could take over and consume the entire campaign structure, so there’s plenty of creative strength to use for adding flavor to the adventure even if it’s not safe to use undiluted.
How about creating your own customized stories, monsters, items, through a fun and entertaining game?
I found Storycaster completely by chance, bumping into its creator in the Fate Discord. I’ve playtested it a couple of times. They regularly publish adventures created with it for free too. Highly recommend it.
I do, I try to do as much creation as I can to exercise those skills, but having some prepared adventures to steal things from makes it a lot easier. Like going to the gym with a professionally made program before learning to write your own programming. And I don’t want stuff so pre-prepared that I don’t ever learn to make my own stuff - I’m not so much just running the pre-made stuff as I am dissecting it, trying to understand it, and taking what I like to plug into my game.
When I have prompt or encounter ideas I write them down in a notebook and flesh them out later, but a lot of the time when I sit down to prep it’s hard to think of things out of thin air. I’m getting a lot better at creating new things and integrating things the more we play.
So yeah, any resources on how to better design stuff is very welcome too. I have watched a lot of the Matthew Colville running the game videos that have helped a lot (especially the “Prep Can Be Literally Easy and Actually Fun” video)
Something like Storycaster looks interesting. I have heard of some other story prompt / plot cards (Fabula and Narata) and I might look into those too… That kind of thing is exactly what I’m looking for. Something that can help me generate ideas to flesh out into encounters or side quests that I can keep in my GM notes and stick in different locations so when the players decide to go into the mountains instead of the forests I have a general idea of what might be there…
I usually see https://thealexandrian.net/ mentioned for new GMing advice, especially the Don’t Prep Plots article. I also personally enjoy the Angry GM’s advice.
If you aren’t specifically worried about converting statblocks and mechanics but just porting the general story over, you can take the characters and plot points from any system really.
That is fantastic. That don’t prep plots makes a lot of sense and is very helpful. I will bookmark these.
Thank you!
Hello! So, I did a quick cursory glance of the hero kids system, but likely missed some things, so please reach out if you have any questions.
The easiest way to convert 5e modules to a 2d6 based system:
The lowest you can roll on 2d6 is a 2, and the highest a twelve. So, we convert 5e’s 1-20 numbers to fit that. (Ability modifier in parentheses)
2d6 stats vs 5e stats
2 (-5) = 0 and 1
3 (-4) = 2 and 3
4 (-3) = 4 and 5
5 (-2) = 6 and 7
6 (-1) = 8 and 9
7 (0) = 10 and 11
8 (+1) = 12 and 13
9 (+2) = 14 and 15
10 (+3) = 16 and 17
11 (+4) = 18 and 19
12 (+5) = 20
Example conversion: In 5e, an orc has an Armor Class of 13, Hit Points of 15, gets + 5 to its attack roll, and deals 9 damage on a hit.
In this 2d6 system, it’s armor would be 8 (need to roll above an 8 to harm it) hit points would be 9, gets +4 to its attack roll, and deals 6 damage on a hit.
Using these conversions, it should be pretty easy to add new monsters or bad guys from DnD 5e modules. There’s a few free ones on dndbeyond to look over that may help give ideas for quests! I highly recommend Frozen Sick.
This is awesome and I will definitely save this for reference as there are a few 2d6 systems I want to try out, but Hero Kids is even more basic than a 2d6 system, at least as far as I understand them.
Your stat pools are basically just the number of d6 you get to roll, and you just take the higher number. Every successful hit deals 1 damage (health pools are between 1-4, 1 being like a weak minion or a spider egg or something, 4 being a leveled up hero or a boss). So higher stat just means you are basically rolling with more advantage, more chances to get a higher number, but you always only use the highest dice.
So a hero with 3 melee attack would roll 3 d6 and take the highest number, and that is their attack roll. If they are attacking a creature with 1 defense, the GM would roll 1 d6 - if the attackers highest dice is equal to or higher than the defenders dice, the attack hits and the target takes 1 damage. Otherwise nothing happens.
I think the best way to convert something like 5e stat blocks into this would be to just say - is this monster supposed to be easy, medium, or hard - and then just copy a stat block from a hero kids monster that is similar to what you want. There is a pretty good monster compendium for hero kids so for a lot of creatures I can just use those directly.
I’m less concerned about copying stat blocks directly than I am about just having good narrative / story content, like NPCs and locations. Having never read any other RPG content besides Hero Kids (and perusing a D&D Players handbook a bit) I don’t know how much of the adventures are story content that works everywhere vs just “This place has monsters with these stat blocks” that is D&D specific or requires conversion.
I didn’t realize that DnD Beyond had free adventures, so I will definitely check that out, and that will probably give me the information I need on whether or not I’d like to spend money on other 5e adventures.
