I am a big fan of encouraging kids to make their own stories in tabletop RPGs, and Jacob Shelby’s A Young Heroes Guide helps young folks with structuring their ideas into a playable campaign in this awesome adventure building aid. 

Jump to: 

• What is A Young Heroes Guide about?
• Who would A Young Heroes Guide be great for? 
• How A Young Heroes Guide helps with adventure writing
• Overall thoughts on A Young Heroes Guide
• Find a copy of A Young Heroes Guide

What is A Young Heroes Guide about?

A Young Heroes Guide is a step-by-step adventure building process made specifically for helping young and new players with creating their first TTRPG story to GM for others or to play as a whole group.  

It comes with two core steps that are broken down into smaller steps for assisting the new writer in fleshing out their awesome campaign ideas and setting these ideas into a basic storytelling structure that works for a playable quest or set of quests. 

It uses medieval fantasy examples, but the structure is system and genre agnostic, so it’s not going to be relegated to one particular set of mechanics or type of story.

Who would A Young Heroes Guide be great for? 

A Young Heroes Guide gives excellent advice for just storytelling in general, but it is made with the intention of being accessible to kids (by means of language and examples used, the way the worksheets are laid out, etc).

There’s different formats for storytelling that give different feels or have different focus.  Some are going to focus on action, character development, worldbuilding, etc.

This one is going to lean a bit into action (with action being solving puzzles, fighting, social encounters) by getting hooked into the plot, vanquishing some villain or facing a challenge, and then earning a cool reward for your hard work.  It’s going to work best for something like a questing party setting out on a particular quest versus, say, a slice of life focused game.  

How A Young Heroes Guide helps with adventure writing

When I’m playing TTRPGs with my kiddo, who is currently just about 7 years old, the biggest challenge with kiddo-lead games is the structure.  My kid has a WONDERFUL imagination and wants to cram SO MUCH into the adventure, but… it can be really hard for both of us to keep track of what’s going on.  I can sometimes see kiddo wanting to lead us from point A to point E on bigger ideas, but not really knowing what to put for points B, C, and D.  

Typically, I’ll ask questions to, as the player, subtly help GM kiddo fill in the gaps, but where A Young Heroes Guide comes into play is in asking all of that up front and laying it out on a couple of worksheets.

It asks creators the who, what, when, and where necessary to establish a solid outline for the setting and characters involved in the story.  It also uses the 5-Scene Dungeon structure to give one easy method to follow for having one action scene leading into another, from the adventure’s start to the treasure at the end. 

And it gives examples!  There’s examples next to explanations of each step (which are, themselves, clear, concise, and effective), then there’s a full example adventure that uses steps from the guide.  This can be used to test out GM’ing or have a parallel to write alongside.  

In testing this out, we used a setting from our review of When the Walls Fall but now, thanks to the worksheets here, have added more characters and a plot based on the hooks left from the previous review.  It worked out GREAT!

Overall thoughts on A Young Heroes Guide

I think this is an excellent handbook for creating a first TTRPG adventure.   A Young Heroes Guide provides just the right amount of structure, balancing creativity with coherence, and is easy to fill out and follow. 

The whole document is sprinkled with helpful tips, examples, and different ways to look at problems or villains, plus there’s a couple cool roll tables, so it also gives plenty of sparks for adventures as well. 

I enjoyed getting to check this out, and I can imagine this being a fantastic tool for folks who are making their very first adventure.

Find a copy of A Young Heroes Guide

You can find A Young Heroes Guide for free on the Jacob Shelby Patreon

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