Passing on the torch

My son (12) wants to give a shot at being a DM.  I let him select a published mod from DragonsFoot and printed it out for him to prep for running a game within a week or two.

I started him with a quick and dirty little random dungeoncrawl generated on DonJon then he looked it over and decided he wanted to try to "tweak it",  I figured,  "why not?"  go ahead.  Hasn't even started DM'ing and he 's already a homebrewer, how do  I argue with that?

He did a quick run through of the dungeon crawl last night to get a better idea of how things work DM'ing a game.   I ran 4 PC's through the dungeon with different classes to give him an idea of how things work.

He had fun,  I had fun.  At the end, he realized he got carried away adding stuff and making a 1st level dungeon way too difficult for 1st level PC's, so then he pared back to almost too weak.  You could even tell when he realized things were going off path for his expectations.  I gave him some help  , but wanted to let him get a feel for riding solo, so to speak. 

I think he did pretty good overall.  I think he'll study the "big" module from DF better now as being unfamiliar with the crawl was one of his biggest problems, though he insisted beforehand he was familiar with it.  BUSTED!

The DF module is "DragonMount", a level 1 module.  The dragon focus is interesting to him so he'll be likely to read it over and get better familiar with it  I guess.

I've let him look over both the 1E DMG and the OSRIC guide and after giving him about a week to use both to look things up and to use them both to prepare for the dungeon crawl, I asked him which he prefered.

He said he thinks he would like the DMG more once he got more familiar with where everything is at in the book, but he really prefers the OSRIC guide as he thought it was easier to find what he was looking for and easier to understand.

Gotta give OSRIC major props.

I'll post on how the "big" game goes in about a week or so when we get a chance to play it out.

What's really trippy for me here is that my kids started playing this game about two years ago, after finding the books and getting me to run a game for them.

Now, not only have both of them continued to keep interest and continue to play for almost two years, they both want to try their hand at being DM.

How cool is that?