A Review of the Role Playing Game Supplement ASA: Madam Margareth’s Magic Potion by Justin Andrew Mason

ASA: Madam Margareth’s Magic Potion by Justin Andrew Mason and published by Playground Adventures is an adventure for 2-4 characters of levels 1-2 for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. Playground Adventures specialises in making family friendly game supplements that are aimed at children in particular, for several different role playing game rule systems. This adventure fits into two categories, that of After School Adventures (which are intended to take around 1-2 hours of play) and Fun & Facts educational adventures (in this case, focussing on Chemistry and Science). The supplement is covered by the Open Game License and so some would be considered to be Open Game Content

The supplement is available as a PDF from RPGNow for $1.99 although it was purchased at the reduced price of $1.00. This is an extremely short, five page PDF, of which one page is the full colour front cover and one page the Open Game License, leaving three pages for the adventure itself.

The adventure requires some prep work on the part of the person running it, stated as being around 30 minutes for the actual preparation and 3 hours to wait for the props to be ready. Several ingredients and items will need to be owned or purchased – these are to make the “magic potion” and the “frost stones” that are added to it. This requires cooking, straining, and then freezing the result.

The premise of the adventure is simple; a child has gone missing and, when the players and the town healer find him, he has eaten a poisonous mushroom. The healer (the titular Madam Margareth) needs a missing ingredient to be added to the base potion, and the players have to go and obtain it, with a couple of combat encounters to do so.

ASA: Madam Margareth’s Magic Potion in Review

The supplement may only have five pages, of which only three are actual content, but it still has two bookmarks; one for the front page and one for the content. Truly, these aren’t really needed.

The layout is two columns throughout and the supplement is in full colour. There are only a couple of small, but relevant, illustrations in the adventure itself, other than the cover, but the page design is quite extensively illustrated itself, making this a very nice adventure to look at.

The stats for the people, creatures and a magical item are not provided; instead there are links to the relevant pages on the d20 PFSRD site (if internet connection is going to be a problem, jot the stats down before running the adventure). Access to a freezer during the adventure is a must for the props.

The science and chemistry part of the adventure is the making of the potion, which changes colour when the “frost rocks” are added to it. This is explained at the end of the adventure, and is a practical experiment in pH.

There is also a safety message in the adventure – “don’t eat random wild mushrooms if you don’t know what they are” – which could possibly have been emphasised a bit more, to make it clear to the GameMaster that there was a message (in real life, anyone eating a death cap mushroom is unlikely to come out of it as well as the child in the adventure does).

This may be a short adventure, but ASA: Madam Margareth’s Magic Potion is really a nice little adventure whose lesson is integrated into the adventure itself and which should prove interesting for children to witness.