I ran this for the wife and kids yesterday and we all had a great time playing it. It made for a nice change from some of our recent adventures, as my daughter (who's been a bit put off by some of the previous antagonists - werewolves, ghost pirates) loved visiting the fairy realm.
The adventure was at a good level for the characters, and having the NPC Chimera along allowed me to help drive the narrative and help keep the combat on an even keel as necessary. I hate deus ex machina NPCs, but in this instance the character could allow the GM to adjust the difficulty appropriately for new players or more experienced characters.
My family also had a great time thinking of innovative ways to deal with the Sadnesses; a great addition to the story which made for a novel change from just hitting things with a sword or magic bolt.
Best of all, there were only a limited number of combat encounters, which allowed us to play it through in a comparatively short period of time on a Sunday afternoon. Combat always takes a long time to run through, so having encounters that were roleplaying and/or problem solving allowed me to keep the story ticking forward.
On the downside, I agree with some others here that the printed sizes for the character/monster (and equipment from the Armory1 supplement, which I must admit I felt impelled to buy from its inclusion in the story) card elements don't match those of the original Hero Kids game, which is more annoying than a problem.
I didn't appreciate the layout - I run these from my laptop rather than print out the adventure, and the portrait orientation made it difficult to see everything from the same page on screen at the same time. The main font was too ragged to read easily, and the page layout felt cluttered.
I would have liked to see combat location grid pages - I understand it's difficult when the game highlights the chaos of the Mindshatter, but the combat is based around character position and movement, which makes grids essential. In the end, I used locations I'd printed out from other Hero Kids adventures and they worked well so it wasn't a huge issue.
Finally, given the story requires two Sadnesses (I increased it to 3 for my players), it would have been good if there were two of these character cards or stand ups on the one page, so I didn't have to print out the Chimera card multiple times. I tried putting the PDF into Photoshop to create my own single page printout, but it's (understandably) password protected, so that didn't work.
Overall though, these are small things compared to the fun we had playing this game. It's opened up an interesting part of the world of Hero Kids that we hadn't previously considered, and has already started to trip the kids's imaginations for future stories. I'll be looking for more of Travis' work, because it's high quality, a very inexpensive price, and just all round fun for the kids to play.
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