Yesterday my ten year old daughter started writing in a notebook all of a sudden. When I asked her what she did, she just said: "I'm writing a role playing game for you."
Soon enough, she was done, and we fetched all the funny dice we could find.
"We're going to use your map," she said, referring to my Untitled Goose Game-map we've been using. (She also used the English word "map" instead of the Swedish "karta"... Kids today!)
The map has expanded a bit since last time, so here it is in its current form:
But the notes in the notebook remained hidden.
"Ok," she said, "you are Musis, and you start here."
("Mus" translates to mouse, so Musis = Mousey or something like that.)
She picked up this little dude and placed him at the far left bottom corner, where the X is:
"Musis wants to join his friend over here," she said, picking up this mint blue cat toy. She placed it at the house at the top of the paper:
"I'm really pleased with my artifacts!" she then said, looking over her (still secret) notes.
(And yes, she used the word "artifact".)
There was no character sheet for this game - she promised to keep track of records. Apparently, Musis started with "twenty hearts".
After the short setup, Musis left the forest and started exploring the shore.
"Ok, roll this die," she said mysteriously and handed me a d6. I rolled something, and she consulted her notes.
"Ok, you find...a rock that looks like a small pyramid. Do you pick it up?"
"Yes!"
"Ok! You pick up the rock and lose one heart! It was very sharp!"
Bummer!
So with nineteen hearts Musis continued his mission to rejoin his friend. He found an old log to cross the stream, and searching the area on the other side of the shore resulted in a pack of Chicken McNuggets (eating them restored hearts).
We played for about an hour, after which Musis finally rejoined his friend on the other side. I got to roll several times, and found among other things baked beans in tomato sauce.
When we finished, I was very curious to see her notes, which looked like this:
So the top half of the page says:
1 4 6 = yes, but...
2 3 5 = no + 1 secret thing
...which I find very impressive, since we've never played with those kind of rules before (I might have mentioned that some RPGs use mechanics similar to those). She used this resolution mechanics a couple of times during our session (i.e. when Musis searched the shore and got the pyramid; I think I said Musis searched for something to cross the stream, but apparently I failed the roll and got a secret thing instead).
The bottom half of the page is the "secret thing" table. The hearts and shield symbols are great.
Item 5 is the Chicken McNuggets ("mac,nuggy's").
Item 6 - "Böne" - is the name of one of her stuffed animals. "Böna" is Swedish for bean, so when I searched and got baked beans, this was the entry she landed on initially, and she just winged it from there.
All in all, a very fun session, and I envy her creativity!
