A Review of the Role Playing Game Supplement Adventures in Bayhaven – Night of the Living Gourd

Adventures in Bayhaven – Night of the Living Gourd by Brian Benoit is a role playing game supplement published by Roving Band of Misfits Press for use with the Hero Kids system. This is an adventure set in the publisher’s town of Bayhaven.

This is a fifteen page PDF that is available from RPGNow for $1.99 but was purchased at the reduced price of $0.99 as part of the Adventures in Bayhaven Ultimate Bundle. One page is the front cover and one the front matter.

The first page is a standard one on what is needed to play, what is useful to play, how to use the adventure and the optional Time Units rule. Time Units are not actually used in this adventure, so this part is irrelevant.

The next page has a standard location background for Bayhaven as well as a synopsis of the adventure, and a possible way of continuing afterwards.

This is a Halloween-themed adventure with three encounters and a conclusion. Unusually, all three encounters are combat ones. The first is a fight with jack o’lanterns in the town square, the next with animated vines on a farm and the final one with animated vines and the great pumpkin. The conclusion just gives the characters a new item as treasure.

The next page has a map of Bayhaven, with the encounter locations marked, the one after that has four copies of a new item card, two more have minis for the new monsters, but no monster cards, and the final two have colour battlemaps of the encounter areas which appear to have been drawn in coloured pencil.

Adventures in Bayhaven – Night of the Living Gourd in Review

The PDF lacks bookmarks and, although they are not essential in a short supplement, they would have been useful. Navigation is below par. The text maintains a two column format and is almost error-free. The illustrations are copies of the monsters and battlemaps but presentation as a whole is decent.

This is a short, holiday adventure for the Bayhaven setting. It lacks the usual variety of encounter types seen in this series, but fighting Halloween monsters is perhaps more thematically appropriate for the genre. This could be used as an interlude between a couple of larger adventures and it includes new magic items and monsters that, at the time of writing, hadn’t been incorporated in the Bayhaven setting book. Adventures in Bayhaven – Night of the Living Gourd can be found by clicking here.