What to avoid, part 1 (subject matter)
When you first start creating and running your own campaigns, you might not be thinking about whether certain subjects should be avoided. If you don’t, a parent will usually remind you quickly.
In my case, that parent was the mother of my son. The party had just entered a dungeon below a graveyard, where they encountered a ritual sacrifice and were just too late to stop the summoning of some devils. They defeated the cultists, sent the devils back, and retrieved the victim’s body. That was where the session ended.
On the ride home, my then eight-year-old suggested the party should try to bring the villager back to life. He mattered to the people of the village. Not only was that a great show of empathy—it led to a nifty adventure hook.
If resurrection is freely or too cheaply available, danger loses its edge. So I ruled that the material component for the resurrection spell was sap from a tree grown from a seed of Yggdrasil—a Lifaskr Yggdrasilbarn in game terms. (The campaign was set in a Viking-era Scandinavia analogue.) The next adventure became a race to a remote grove, past its guardians, and home again in time.
But when my son told his mother about the cultists, she told me I had stepped over a line. She was right. I hadn’t been graphically horrific, but I should have been more careful about subject matter.
Thankfully, she gave me a clear list. There was to be no:
- Sacrifice
- Torture
- Killing people
- Maiming and dismemberment
- Evisceration
- Decapitation
- Extensive bodily harm, such as burning alive
- Elements or suggestions of sex
- Implied or outright inebriation or drug use
If you need a quick list of taboo subjects for younger tables, there you go.
As kids get older, boundaries can loosen a bit—always subject to the wishes of the parents. In retrospect, the list of taboo subjects should be defined by the end of session zero, if not before.
And in case you were curious: the adventure at the start was a Scooby-Doo-style homage. The cult leader was using the cult to power a summoning; the “demons” were meant to terrorize townsfolk so they’d leave, freeing the leader to plunder the town’s gold mine. A pay-what-you-want version is on DMs Guild: The Undertaker’s Garden of Destruction.