Hero Kids: Intro Session

Sophie the Warrior and Character Sheet

Yesterday, I pitched the concept of roleplaying games to a group of Grade 2s and 3s. I had worried about dealing with a large group but, delightfully, I ended up with 3 enthusiastic youngsters. We met after the Clubs assembly, so didn't have a lot of time to get in depth.

I showed them the Map of Brecken Vale and read out the opening crawl from the rule book, which explains that they are all from the same town. Their parents are all adventurers and are often busy outside the valley that they live in, which leaves the PCs (player characters) to handle any domestic problems. Then, I brought out the awesome colouring-in pages and talked them through the basic character classes.

Some great comments and questions from the kids:

"If you're a girl do you have to choose a girl?" - great question, will discuss more about character versus self
"Can you choose more than one [character]?" - our boy wanted to play them all
"Look, he has bowls on his shoulders!" -referring to the Knight's makeshift armour

Our headstrong girl choose the girl warrior the moment she clapped eyes on her. The boy in our party loved all of the male characters and wanted to play a few of them, but eventually choose the archer. Our second girl deliberated between the healer and the thief, but in the end decided that she was sneaky and picked the thief.

Once they'd chosen a character, I brought out the character sheets for the three classes. The two girls could easily read everything on the character sheet. There was a lot of information to discuss, so I didn't get to it all this session. To start with, I focused on something central for them- how they would hit things. They found it interesting that the Warrior could only attack close up, the Archer could only attack from distance, and the Thief could do both - but not as well as the Warrior or Archer. We noticed that the Warrior also has the most health, so it would be good for her to be in the front during battles. In Hero Kids, each character has a specialisation. The warrior, appropriately, is very persuasive. The thief is sneaky and can use disguises. The archer can track animals and people.

When the bell rang, I gave them their character's colouring-in page and character sheet to read over and get an idea for next time. I also asked them to come up with a name for their character, and pointed out that it didn't have to be their own name. I said that I didn't want to keep them in during -break time... only to be told that they would be happy to carry on working on their characters during break! Unfortunately, I had to go to lunch but would definitely consider extending our RP time into break if that works.

In under an hour, I was given this by our new sneak-thief:

Sneaky Thief

Our warrior assured me this morning that she did all her Hero Kids prep last night:

Sophie the Warrior

During my IT lesson with our Archer's class, he bounded up to show me this:

As yet unnamed Archer, but his player is thinking about what to call him

 Our next session only happens next week so I'm bolstered by their enthusiasm. My next task is to cut out, colour and fold a bunch of Giant Rat tokens, ready for the Basement O Rats adventure.

Everything I've linked to is from Justin Halliday's excellent Hero Kids.