A Review of the Role Playing Game Supplement Amazing Tales

Amazing Tales by Martin Lloyd is a role playing game supplement published by Amazing Tales. Amazing Tales is a kid-friendly RPG system, aimed at children of age four and over, together with their parents.

The supplement is available as a 96 page PDF from RPGNow for $5.95, a hardcover standard colour print on demand book for $19.95, a hardcover premium colour print on demand book for $27.95, PDF and standard PoD book for $21.45 or PDF and premium PoD book for $29.45. The PDF is the version reviewed and it was purchased at the reduced price of $2.38 due to an offer. The supplement will also be available as a hardcover in stores at some point. Two pages are the colour front and rear covers, six pages are the front matter (with several blank pages), one page is the Contents and there is another blank page.

The first section is Amazing Tales. It explains what the game is and why play it and mentions the four included settings. How to actually play the game is covered in a single page. Creating settings and heroes, how to tell an amazing tale and using the dice is covered.

Tips and Tricks covers how to use magic, run fights and gaming with children. Often children will come up with ideas that don’t fit into a traditional system; rather than telling them no, the idea is to essentially say “Yes, but…” and then go from there.

Amazing Settings has four different settings, the Deep Dark Wood, Magical Kingdoms of Long Ago, Adventures on the Pirate Seas and Adventures Among the Stars. Each has a description of the setting, different character types, filling in the character sheet, suggested skills, with explanations, creating the setting, including sights, sounds, smells, tastes and feelings and ten adventure hooks, each of which has a potential twist.

There is a two page character sheet (which is also available as a free download) and a single page Afterword, thanking various people and providing links.

Amazing Tales in Review

The PDF lacks bookmarks and the Contents covers the major sections but not the subsections. Navigation is quite poor. The text maintains a two column format and appeared almost free of errors. The book is extensively illustrated, with many custom full colour full page and two page illustrations, as well as a number of sketches and a colour background. Presentation is excellent, but be aware that a substantial amount of the content is illustrations – they are intended to help tell the tales.

Amazing Tales is more of a narrative-based system than a dice-based one. Dice are used for some things, but these can always be overridden or avoided if needed. The aim of the game is to tell a story, not get hung up on things like the actual game mechanics, and the story is told jointly by the parent (or adult) and the child (or children). The child is allowed mostly free reign in what they can come up with; the parent then throws problems in the way of that to see what they do. This aims to essentially stop a child hand-waving everything, yet still allow them to be creative. Amazing Tales is rather different to Hero Kids, which game is much more mechanically based.

This is a really nicely presented book that provides a way of telling a story within a role playing game framework. Amazing Tales is a fun game for those who really want to let creativity flow and it can be found by clicking here.