I really wanted to DM a fun campaign for my kids. We tried to play a round and they made it very clear they don't want to kill anything. I adjusted by just having the goblins they defeated run away instead of die, but they don't actually even want to pull swords on anything. The idea of fighting monsters scares them and/or makes them feel bad for the monsters. Then they asked me if they could have unicorns as mounts and make flowers grow.

My challenge is, I need a premise for an adventure/campaign that is more like a My Little Pony episode than a standard D+D adventure. Anyone have any interesting ideas for introducing eight year old girls to D+D, or is it just wishful thinking on my part?

If you have access to a DDI account there is a Dungeon adventure that is made for a party of level 1 Pixie characters that are on a mission to save a captured Pixie princess from a witch who has captured her. There's surprisingly little violence if the players want to avoid most conflicts other than maybe a fight with some animated kitchen/living-room furniture.

The adventure is in Dungeon #211 and is called Glitterdust, by Will Doyle.

Even if it happens to not be the Edition you are using, it's pretty easily convertible.

Legos!

Just kidding, the dnd legos sucked.

That sounds absolutely adorable. Kinda cheesy, silly and possibly sexist, but adorable.

~SE++

You also can save a bunch of enslaved river otters whose voices have been stolen by the wicked witch in order to force them to troll the river for the junk that she uses in her magic to ruin people's lives. They can also help a guy whose lover was stolen by the witch and made into her personal slave. Honestly, he can perpetrate much of the story's actual fight scenes while the Pixies help him out with their Pixie magic.

This sounds most promising. Thanks Azure!

I was thinking about going with an old tomb that was mostly traps as well, but opening up the idea that the girls can be fairies will have their eyes as wide as saucers.

If you don't have access to a DDI account, let me know and I'll e-mail you a copy of the PDF or something.

I do not have a DDI account, I would love a copy of the PDF, and what is a DDI account?

D&D Insider Account. It is a subscription service that WotC offers that gives you access to all of the Dungeon and Dragon digital magazines as well as access to a character builder and other resources. But yeah, if you want to pass on that for now, just PM me an email address for you and I'll see if I can't just email you the whole Dungeon #211 PDF.

Here's a few tricks I picked up from gaming with my kids when they were smaller (although mine had no problems fighting monsters):

- They want to be faeries and pixies and stuff? Use "elf" for the rules but write "pixie" on the sheet. Tell them their wings aren't strong enough yet to fly completely, but they can glide, float over holes in the ground, etc. Then just handwave that away when you need to.

- They want to ride unicorns? Spiffy, my daughter did too. I used a basic horse and told her it was a unicorn. It didn't have any of the abilities in the monster manual, but when she asked, "Can my unicorn do X?" I sometimes said, "Yes, but doing that will make her very tired for a day. She'll help you if you need it, but decide carefully if you can let her sleep for a day." Then I'd write it down so that I wouldn't forget.

- I never used humanoid NPCs as villains. Or, at least, I never presented them as humans, elves, etc. The stat blocks I used behind the screen didn't really matter.

- things like plants and oozes make fantastic enemies, especially in your situation. They don't want to kill monsters, but they don't know what an assassin vine is. Tell them that the weeds are suddenly alive and are wrapping around their legs. Everybody kills weeds. The fact that you're using stats from a monster in the book doesn't matter - it's just a bunch of crazy weeds, so let's pull them out of the ground or cut them with a sword or whatever. An ooze of some sort can be a patch of tainted water that they need to purify so their mermaid friend can swim in her lake again. Let them find creative ways to purify it, and treat that like hit point damage. Once the ooze is "dead" the water is clean again.

- once they get the hang of roleplaying, you can use a humanoid creature. Make him misguided - he's cutting down trees because they block his view of X - but not exactly evil. They have to work to show him the error of his ways, and then they work together to fix the problem - replanting trees, etc.

- find lots of reasons to have them roll dice. Trust me.

- be willing to play fast and loose with the rules at times. Sometimes the whole adventure.

4th Ed comes with a Pixie race already, so that helps. Re-skinning monsters as other things is a great idea though.

The race thing works other ways, too. My son wanted to, basically, be The Thing. So I used dwarf and told him his skin was made of rocks and that was that.

Zherog, this is adorable.