Hi all! I’ve got a quick interview today with Martin Lloyd about The Quest for the Dragon Crown, a campaign for Amazing Tales! Check it out below.
Illustrations by Iris Maertens.
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What is The Quest for the Dragon Crown, both as a product and as your vision?
The Quest for the Dragon Crown is a campaign for Amazing Tales, the RPG I wrote for kids aged four and up. Since Amazing Tales is a zero prep game I wasn’t initially sure it needed adventures, but a lot of people were asking so I thought I’d better write one.
I set out to write an adventure that would take people’s games to the next level. So The Quest for the Dragon Crown tries to put in place some of the things that you might not get in an improvised game. There’s a plot that carries on through five separate adventures, there are riddles and puzzles to solve – these are some of the hardest things to improvise.
I also wanted to give small players a big story. There’s a tendency in games for kids to make the player characters children and give them ‘child size’ challenges. That’s fine, but my experience of gaming with kids is that they want to be mighty heroes and do big stuff. So the Quest for the Dragon Crown plays into that – the heroes get to save a kingdom (two actually), fight dragons and consort with kings and queens.
Finally, I wanted to bring some of the game into the real world. Amazing Tales is very much a ‘theatre of the mind’ experience, but I know lots of kids like to bring their toys into the game. Indeed there are even people who create games simply by going on a journey from one side of their toy strewn living room to the other, improvising encounters as they go. Anyway – I loved the idea of the game becoming physical at various stages. I couldn’t quite get my idea for a magic mirror to work (another time), but there is a cut out and color in dragon crown, a color in map of the kingdom, and a multi-part riddle that parents can cut out and prepare ahead of the game for their kids to solve.
Now I’ve done one I’m pretty sure there are going to be more – and I’ll try and stick to these principles as I write them.
What are some of the unique challenges for designing for younger players that you have addressed with these new elements of the supplement like coloring and cut outs – how do those keep kids interested? It seems like an interesting design piece!
In fairness I think there are plenty of adult gamers who would like things to cut out and colour in too. There’s a DCC supplement that includes a maze for the players to solve and that always goes down well.
The challenge in designing for kids comes from two directions. The first is in the need to keep things simple – kids want to know that they’re doing the right thing. They’re not going to keep track of some extended sandbox environment with a developing plot. So it’s important that every session has a clear start point, a clear end point and a sense of achievement in between.
The next is the challenge of designing for kids of different ages. There’s a huge difference between a four year old and a ten year old in terms of how much complexity they can handle. For a four year old you’re likely to run a game that feels like Dora the Explorer. You’re given a mission. The mission is repeated at regular intervals. When you accomplish something it’s repeated back to you with a reminder of what’s coming next. That’s just how four year olds need things structured if they’re goint to stick with something.
Ten year olds will have much more agency, they’ll make plans and try to carry them out, and make efforts to anticipate the consequences of their actions. Give them too much guidance and they’ll start to feel contrained.
A lot of how this gets dealt with is down to the GM. But it’s also important to make sure that there are NPCs around who can lead the characters to the right answer at each stage if needed. For players who want a bit more room Amazing Tales has a strong improvisatory element and the Quest for the Dragon Crown has plenty of moments where the heroes can go off and have a side adventure if they want to. The plot will still be there when they get back.
I love the idea of riddles and puzzles, but they seem kinda…dicey. How do you design exciting and fun but still not too challenging riddles and puzzles?
I’m hoping I’ve got this right. The main puzzle was finalised after playtesting so we’ll see. Again the insurance policy is having NPCs around who can guide the players through the puzzles if they need help. In this sense it’s not too different for a parent than helping their child think their way through other puzzles they might come across outside the game. The big puzzle is also designed to take place inbetween sessions. One session wraps up with the heroes acquiring everything they need to solve it, with the next starting once they’ve cracked it, so there’s no risk of the game grinding to a halt if they get stuck.
I’ve got loads of ideas for future games though. There are loads of parenting websites packed with activities kids can do that can easily be incorporated into games. Lots of craft activities or basic science experiments that could be turned into magic. My daughter was learning about ciphers and codes at school , something that will definitely feature in future supplements. You can also just think about things kids might not have encountered before. One of the first puzzles I set my kids in a game just required them to be able to read grid coordinates. But since they’d never come across them before it seemed to make no sense. So they enlisted the help of an outside expert (Grandad) and five minutes later they had the answer and were feeling very proud of themselves.
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Thank you so much to Martin for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out The Quest for the Dragon Crown today!