A Review of the Role Playing Game Supplement Hero Kids – Fantasy Adventure – Fire in Rivenshore

Hero Kids – Fantasy Adventure – Fire in Rivenshore by Brian Benoit and Justin Halliday is a role playing game supplement published by Hero Forge Games for use with the Hero Kids system. Hero Kids is aimed at children between 4 and 10 years old and this supplement is a five encounter adventure with a rating of difficult.

The PDF is available from RPGNow for $2.99 but is also available at a reduced price as part of the Hero Kids – Complete Fantasy PDF Bundle, which is how it was purchased. It is also one of the adventures included in the print on demand compilation softcover Hero Kids – Fantasy Adventure Compendium.

This is a PDF in landscape format which has 27 pages, one of which is the colour front cover. The PDF comes in two variants, a standard one and a printer friendly version which lacks the parchment-style page backgrounds.

The adventure begins with the standard introduction listing what is needed to play it; the core rulebook, pencil, eraser, d6s and print outs of hero and monster cards, stand up minis and encounter maps. It begins as usual with a brief adventure overview – the town of Rivenshore, where the Hero Forge Games characters are based – is on fire and the players need to help out before giving the introduction. There is also a comment on difficulty, which can be increased by not letting characters rest between encounters.

There are various different encounters where characters have to help stop the fire. This includes an optional combat encounter and confronting the individual who caused the fires in the first place.

There are then eight pages of encounter maps, large-scale versions of the GM’s maps with labels, one page of four monster cards, two pages of monster stand up minis and finally a single page with two hero cards, one blank and one with the fire starting NPC on it.

Hero Kids – Fantasy Adventure – Fire in Rivenshore in Review

The PDF is well bookmarked with all the major and minor sections linked. As usual, the only things which aren’t bookmarked are those that need printing out, which isn’t a problem. The supplement lacks a table of contents but navigation is on the whole above average.

The text maintains a two column format and no errors were noticed. The only illustrations are the maps, one of which has a touch of colour – red for fire – for once, and those on the monster and hero cards and stand up minis, which are all that are needed.

This adventure has rather less combat than is usual. There are only two encounters that can involve combat. One of these encounters is optional, although the players do get a reward for doing it. The other combat encounter depends on how the players solve a problem; there are more role-playing options for this encounter than combat. The optional combat encounter is scalable; the encounter which may or may not end in combat is not.

Many of the encounters require the usual ability tests, with there being multiple different ways of solving most of these, allowing flexibility. Players can come up with their own ways of solving these problems, but several are provided if they need help.

The final encounter is the most interesting, as it presents a bit of a moral dilemma. The person setting the fires is a bullied homeless orphan who is getting back at her tormentors. Players can choose whether or not to fight her, talk to her, turn her in to the authorities or let her go. There is no penalty for whatever method they choose, but it may cause older children to think.

Hero Kids – Fantasy Adventure – Fire in Rivenshore is a bit different to previous adventures, perhaps from having a different author (who has written Hero Kids adventures for Roving Band of Misfits Press) and it can be found by clicking here.