I took my eight year-old daughter, Thing One, down to the game room.
“We’re going to play a game this summer,” I said. “An adventure game. With dice. And math. We need to work on your math — especially your subtraction. We can do this… or flash cards.”
She said she preferred a game. With lots of dice.
I opened the RPG closet and revealed 20+ years’ worth of my collection. She thumbed through the Farscape RPG… Dawnforge… Castle Falkenstein…
“I like fantasy,” she said. And then, reading sideways off the spine: “The… World of… Darkness. What’s that?”
Uh oh.
That, I did not tell her, was a book so full of adult themes and language that I could not let her read it. That was a game of vampires, werewolves, and broken people, soaked in angst and gore. That was, aside from KULT, the least kid-appropriate game in my collection.
“It’s a horror game,” I said. She flipped through the pages and admired the moody, dangerous artwork.
“Cool,” she said. “I kinda like being scared. I want to play this.”
I might be in for a very interesting summer.
