Writing Age-Appropriate Fantasy Quests for Kids

I posted on this topic a while back and thought I'd re-visit for a fresh take.

I have a little project to create an adventure module for Neverwinter Nights intended for my daughter to play, and she is 5 years old and loves fantasy adventure stuff. I'm struggling to develop ideas for quests that would capture the attention of a preschooler.

Writing age-appropriate questlines is more challenging than I expected. On the one hand I can't have her going around massacring hoardes of monsters (though I am not shying away from combat encounters, just toning them down or making them just cartoonishly violent enough); on the other, she is no longer a baby and writing things like "you lost your favorite stuffed animal in the woods" is way below her level of intellect and imagination.

For reference, she is a voracious reader (I'm very proud of this), loves stories about dragons and other fantasy elements, and really enjoys media such as Elena of Avalor, Centaurworld, and Battle Kitty (if you've seen these, you know what I am getting at here), so she can appreciate a level of sophistication in story writing that I was not prepared for. Kids are pretty amazing.

I've been "borrowing" ideas from other games. For example, in Skyrim there is the quest called "Hitting The Books." Fairly straightforward fetch quest with an interesting climax. I'll be removing the necromantic elements and some other unsavory details, but that quest is a great example of something that could serve as a template for relatively linear quests a preschooler can get excited about.

Wondering if others -- whether parents or not -- have dived into this corner of the thinking pool.

Posted Jun 8, 2023, 4:47 PM UTC

816
Loading comments…