GM Tips - Dealing With Doomed Kids

Recently, I had to figure out how to have a player revisit the day his character's younger brother died without breaking my own GM rule: NO HARM TO CHILDREN.

I am the GM for an ongoing game of Blades In The Dark that I play with my partner & two friends. When we started the game in the Spring of 2025, none of us had very much experience with TTRPGs. My friends had played a few sessions of D&D years ago & my partner & I had zero experience. As a person who enjoys a good story, I knew that the characters were the make or break. If I wanted my players to to truly inhabit the roles they constructed for themselves, I would need them to start thinking of their characters a bit more deeply. So I had them fill out a questionnaire. One of the questions was, "Has your character lost any loved ones? (Examples: Death? A falling out? Long Distance? Infidelity? A series of bad choices?)" and their responses gave me a lot to work with. I just had one problem... One of the players wrote about a dead younger brother.

As stated at the top, one of the rules at my table is NO HARM TO CHILDREN. I adhere to this rule so strongly that most of the games I GM just don't feature children at all. We did have one kid in our earlier sessions. He & two adults were trapped in pods that drained their blood. It was a vampire thing that is not super important other than to say, the kid got out unscathed while the two adults more closely resembled a pod full of Mountain Dew Code Red by the end. Just like the cockfighting bodega guy from Seinfeld, "Even I am not above the policy."

So there I was, rereading the player's questionnaires & planning out a session where they would relive a painful memory from their past & once again trying to figure out how to deal with a small child NPC in a way that doesn't break my rule & is still narratively satisfying. The plan was to have the powerful being they met in the previous session, mess with their heads by presenting them with twisted versions of their own memories. I had decided the powerful being fed off the pain & anguish of humans. I didn't want to tug on the player's heart strings, I wanted to yank them like they were Beyblade launchers.

I had it all lined up. Player 1 accidently killed his best friend with a college science project then covered it up. That was easy enough to play with. Player 2 abandoned her family & her former lover to start a life of her own. Plenty of fertile ground there as well. Player 3 & his damn dead brother hung over my head for weeks. Could I have asked my friend how old the brother was? Yes. Could I have asked him to the make the brother older? Also yes. However, I didn't want to do that. Asking my players to rethink their backstories just so I wouldn't have to think of something interesting didn't seem like the right solution. So I resigned myself to just figuring it out at the table. Like I said, I had been on this for weeks & I was ready to be done thinking about it.

It wasn't until the night before the game that an easy & effective fix surfaced in my brain like a flower breaking through the soil to bask in the light of a fresh idea. What I decided to do was have the brother age up by a few years every time we cut back to Player 3. It was such a simple solution that I was kind of mad it hadn't come to me sooner. The day of the game, I was frantically adding handwritten notes to go with the session notes I had already typed up. After the game started I asked Player 3 how old his brother was when we died. He said "I imagined him being between 9 and 12." Now picture me smiling like that GIF of The Grinch or any meme where a person gives an evil smirk straight to camera. So his brother was a kid the first time he interacted with him. I put that on pause to check in with the other two characters. Player 1 realized she was in a false memory & pushed back against it. Player 2 fell into the spiral of denial, determined for things to play out differently than they had before. The next time we checked on Player 3, he was at a park with a teenage version of his brother discussing their future. (Not going to lie, knowing I had plans to fully and unambiguously snuff out his dream brother made role playing that park scene very emotional. Still we persisted). The brother was still covered under my No Harm To Children rule but we were far from done. Player 1 boarded a train to leave home & she was nearly forcibly taken off the train by her boyfriend's henchmen. One got a face full of slumber essence, the other suffered a headbutt straight to the nose & bullet to the shoulder before deciding his boss' anger at his failure was far less dangerous than dealing with Player 1. Meanwhile, Player 2 moved from denial to acceptance & delivered a shocking confession. Last but not least was Player 3. His brother was now in his early 20s & ready for his trip from the frying pan into the fire. Player 3 convinced his adult dream brother to leave town with him. Unfortunately, that player made a habit of skipping out on gambling debts & bar tabs & his ways finally caught up to him at the train station. Five men known as "The Wrecking Crew" showed up to make sure he didn't leave unless his debts were paid or a clear message was sent. Player 3 unleashed violence like never before in an uncharacteristically heroic attempt to save his brother. In the end, his dream brother didn't make it, but more importantly, I technically didn't kill a kid & it is my strong belief that saving a fake version of an imaginary child is literally the best anyone can do.