A Review of the Role Playing Game Supplement Hero Kids – Space Adventure – Secret of the Crystal Cave

Hero Kids – Space Adventure – Secret of the Crystal Cave by Justin Halliday is a role playing game supplement published by Hero Forge Games for use with the Hero Kids game system. Hero Kids is aimed at children from 4 to 10 years old and this is a six to eight encounter adventure with a normal difficulty level.

The supplement is available from RPGNow for $2.99 but can also be purchased at a reduced price as part of the Hero Kids – Complete Space Expansion PDF Bundle, which is how it was bought.

This is a 31 page PDF that is mostly in a landscape format – the monster cards, equipment cards and stand up minis are portrait – one page of which is the colour front cover. The supplement comes in two formats, a regular one and a printer friendly version which lacks the parchment-style page backgrounds.

The supplement starts with the usual list of required items; the core rulebook, pencil, eraser, d6s and printouts of the encounter maps, stand up minis, monster, hero and equipment cards plus, as for all space adventures, some space hero cards.

Next is the background and Adventure Overview. The characters have to explore a cave system in order to claim a ‘weave shard’ which is used for the path of Nadi (the Force basically).

Next is the Adventure Intro and then the cave system. There are eight caves in the system but only six need visiting to pass through the system, although the other two can be visited if desired.

The caves have a variety of combat and ability check encounters, with monsters, hazards and traps to overcome, before they reach the final cave and can choose their own crystal shard. There are different shards, each a piece of equipment with different benefits.

Following the adventure are eight pages of maps which are large scale versions of the GM’s map[s found in the text that lack labels. There are two pages with three monster cards and three stand up minis, two pages with six equipment cards and two pages of stand up minis.

Hero Kids – Space Adventure – Secret of the Crystal Cave in Review

The PDF lacks bookmarks and, despite it not being a particularly long book, they would have been appreciated, especially as it lacks a table of contents as well. Navigation is as a result quite poor.

The text maintains a two column format and no errors were noted. There are no illustrations apart from the various monster and equipment cards, stand up minis and encounter maps, although these are all that is needed.

The various combat encounters can be scaled should more characters be present and the various ability checks can usually be done against several different abilities. Combined with their being several paths through the caves, this makes the adventure quite flexible.

This may be a space adventure but it is quite easily adjusted to a fantasy setting as well. Going into a cave complex to recover what are essentially magic items fits well with the fantasy genre. Should fantasy be the preferred setting, don’t discard this adventure simply because of it being one of the space ones.

This is a decent adventure, as it provides different ways of accomplishing things and allows the players to choose their path. Hero Kids – Space Adventure – Secret of the Crystal Cave can be found by clicking here.