A Review of the Role Playing Game Supplement Hero Kids – Space Adventure – Tyranny’s Shadow

Hero Kids – Space Adventure – Tyranny’s Shadow 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 age 4 to age 10 and this is a six encounter adventure with a normal difficulty rating.

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 25 page mostly landscape PDF (some of the printouts are portrait) one page of which is the front cover. The supplement comes in two versions, one of which is a printer friendly version that lacks the parchment coloured page backgrounds.

Hero Kids - Space Adventure - Tyranny's ShadowThe supplement starts as usual with a list of items that are required to play. This space adventure, like the other two, requires, as well as the standard items of core rulebook, d6s, pencil, eraser and printouts of encounter maps, stand up minis and monster and hero cards, some Space Expansion Hero Cards, as no space hero cards are provided with it.

Next is the background and adventure overview. The players have to investigate a cargo ship which has landed, during the process of which they discover that it is intending to attack.

The adventure into is then followed by a section on Running this Adventure. This is a bit more complex for a GM to run than most Hero Kids adventures, as there are various encounter areas that will be revisited and three different ways of completing it.

It starts with the characters discovering that there are droids on board the ship (the planet they live on is near to the border with the tyrannical Droid Authority. They make their way through the ship, possibly taking control of some of the droids with some control scarabs (which will make it easier) until they confront the final boss and defeat him.

Next are seven pages of encounter maps, larger versions of the GM’s maps which lack any labels. Two pages have four monster cards and four stand up minis, one page has four identical Equipment Cards and two pages are full of stand up minis.

Hero Kids – Space Adventure – Tyranny’s Shadow in Review

The PDF lacks bookmarks and, although it is quite short, they would have been appreciated. There is no table of contents either. Navigation is as a result poor.

The text maintains a two column format and no errors were noticed (bar the adventure name at the bottom of the pages; see below). The only illustrations are the various encounter maps, monster and equipment cards and stand up minis, but this is all that is required.

This is definitely one of the more complex adventures to run. As well as the usual choice of combat encounters that can be scaled for more characters, there are different ways that players can play it through. The various ability tests lack the multiple different ways of accomplishing them that is normally seen, which is a bit more limiting, making this one of the less flexible adventures.

There is a strong Star Wars influence to this adventure. The representative of the Droid Authority, the Dark Binder, is quite clearly a Sith Lord when his abilities are looked at. The influence isn’t really hidden though; the phrase ‘roger roger’ which enemy droids in the prequel trilogy used is mentioned very early on. Players may or may not realise the influence of Star Wars, as it is more noticeable for the GM. The Droid Authority is clearly the Empire – this is made obvious by the fact that the name of the adventure printed at the bottom of each page is “Empire’s Shadow.” If players do notice the Star Wars connection, they will probably like it, but it isn’t really setup for them to notice this.

This is a rather more challenging adventure at least when it comes to running it, and in some ways a lot less linear and more flexible, and it’s good to have a change. Hero Kids – Space Adventure – Tyranny’s Shadow can be found by clicking here.

 

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