A Review of the Role Playing Game Supplement Hero Kids – Fantasy Premium Adventure – Reign of the Dragon

Hero Kids – Fantasy Premium Adventure – Reign of the Dragon by 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 an eleven encounter adventure with a rating of hard.

The PDF is available from RPGNow for $5.99 and at a reduced price as part of the Hero Kids Complete Fantasy Bundle but was actually received for free due to an introductory special offer.

This is a 57 page PDF in landscape format and comes in two variants, a standard version and a printer-friendly one that comes without the parchment backgrounds. One page is the colour front cover.

The adventure begins with a standard list of what is needed to play; the core rulebook, pencil, eraser, d6s and print outs of hero and monster cards, stand up minis and encounter maps. It starts with the usual brief adventure overview, about how an injured dragon arrives at the heroes town and demands help.

There’s a page on Running This Adventure, as it is slightly different to most. Firstly, it is longer, and it’s suggested that play be split into several sessions. Secondly, there are many areas where encounters might have an unexpected outcome, and the story will need adjusting. Finally, the structure of the different encounters is listed; three encounters have two variants, depending on what the players decide to do. Different encounters also have different ways of solving them.

Following the adventure is a full page map of the Brecken Vale, 13 pages of encounter battlemaps, two pages having seven monster cards on them, some of which are duplicated from the Monster Compendium (but it’s useful having them here if that supplement isn’t owned), two pages of minis, another page of monster cards and minis, a page of four items, Bombs, and a final page with two new heroes.

Hero Kids – Fantasy Premium Adventure – Reign of the Dragon in Review

The PDF is well bookmarked, with all the major and minor sections linked, although the battlemaps, cards and minis aren’t. Navigation is pretty decent. The text maintains a two column format and appeared to be free of errors. There are a number of illustrations, but most are either images from monster and other cards or smaller reproductions of encounter maps. There are a lot of these and, even though none are in colour, presentation is pretty decent.

Like most of the Hero Kids adventures from Hero Forge, this one is fairly combat heavy and almost all of the encounters do have instructions for scaling them, which is simply increasing the number of opponents based on the number of heroes. There are encounters where players could try something other than combat with enemies, and certainly they shouldn’t try and fight the dragon when it arrives and asks for help. Even if it does so in an incredibly arrogant manner (that could do with tweaking). One of the encounters is with an NPC previously met in Curse of the Shadow Walkers.

Many of the encounters, both combat and non-combat, have ability tests to perform to assist or complete them, and there is usually a range of different ways in which these can be done. The possible downsides are few encounters that can be solved by anything other than combat or ability tests; some puzzles, with different options for completing them based on players’ age, would have been good. Hero Kids – Fantasy Premium Adventure – Reign of the Dragon is a decent adventure in the Brecken Vale setting and it can be found by clicking here.