I just used these for a kids birthday party; the youngest was 7 and the oldest 11. One player had never played D&D at all before, while the other three did have some experiance. Everyone was able to follow allong with what was going on! I gave them a "tour" of the character sheet at the beginning, summerizing what each "color" contained. Having it all on one page, and simple like this is fantastic!

Of course the spells take up more room and need to have a seperate page, but they are are also set up as simply as possible.

I HIGHLY reccomend these character sheets for kiddos just starting out, or even veteran kiddos who can use a bit more clarity.

I had a little bit of a hard time finishing preparing this module as I was laughing so hard. Watchman Locks is so awesome! I have him "narrate" extra bits with random similies as we go through the story. (As the Xanathar was threatening him) "The detective is having second thoughts about his carrer choice, as a warm liquid leaks down his leg like a burst fountain." The players look at me asking, "Is he saying that aloud?" My answer is, "Of course!" and everyone cracks up.

Other than my fits of giggles, this module was actually quite easy to prepare. The story flow, options, and layout all made sense.

The puzzles are all thought out and well prepared. I just love the feel of the module. It's not too railroady, not too sandboxy, and has a lot of setting flavor. I have to point out; this module doesn't have all the errors that I've come to expect from AL modules. This one was well proof-read and edited!

I've run this adventure twice. My players and I really enjoyed it. A lot of ad-libbing does need to happen on the spot though so YMMV. It does pay to prepare! This can make a huge difference with how much page flipping you have to do. Some tips of things to prepare follow:

Have some simple boss / interesting person / roleplay challenges prepared on cards ahead of time. They players can ignore them, or encorporate several elements to make a BBEG. Also, tab or otherwise prepare some basic baddies that follow the archtypes presented. If you have some handy already it speeds up the process of getting stats to match.

Example: One of the games had an "evil 2' tall dwarf", "beserker", and "[name] tuber monger" while the interesting person was the inventor of "tuber juice" from a previous game. So we had a whole fight for the right to vodka sales rivalry going on in addition to the main plot. The beserker was one of my suggestions so I already had my monster card ready to go!

I used 3 different colored index cards cut in half for the 3 catagories to vote upon. If a player gets stuck they can also take a pick from one of your pre-prepared suggestions.

Also, I took highlighters and different color pens and marked all the various plot points so I could find them easier. If I ran this again, I think I would probalby cut & paste the plotlines to follow the villan type and just set aside the two not used. It would reduce a lot of page flipping.

The last note is that in "pretty" 1a version of the mod in part 2: mastermind the textbox of what is on the note is missing. You can find it in "preview" version 1. I just screenshot it and made it into a scroll and handed it to my players.

This is a excellent resoruce for ToA DMs! Why gloss over the journey, when the journey to Omu is half the battle (and fun)! This Companion is easy to read and follow. Each of the 30-days includes reminders for navigation checks, foraging for food and water, and interesting encounters. They're full of variety and keep the players on their toes. $5 is a bargin.

This was a good sandbox adventure with lots of plot. I like how much control the players had over important events in the game, and I love that they brought back some past favorite NPCs. This was the first adventure I encountered that gave much such detailed stratagy as to how the baddies would react to various situations. It was both helpful, yet a bit limiting, too, as those stragagies got them killed a bit faster. lol

With so much going on I really appreciated that the writers broke this up into 5 sections. Bite sized pieces if you will.

This was another fun module to run. Its the climatic ending to our Teir-2 adventure in the Underdark. The allies we recruited before, plus some possible new ones encountered in this adventure, all came together for a great battle. I pre-rolled 4 random encounters (2 allies, 1 potental ally, and 1 fight), then I pushed through the recon mission with our stealth rogue. Then I had the party work out tactics for their group and a warplan for their allies. Then I did a sort of montage as to what all the allies were doing and moved the group to the boss battle, which was tough as I didn't adjust it to their lower APL. But with creativeness they were able to defeat the boss anyway. A fun time was had by all, and that is the goal after all. :)

For this adventure I had a rather unique point of view. I printed this out with the intention of running it last-minute (regular DM canceled; I'm back up DM) so I had skimmed the beginning of the document. When the group arrived I found out one of my players had already run the module, so I had him run it instead, with me giving DM guidance where needed. So I got to sit down and play.

Having some foreknowledge of what was to come, I sat out of the decision making for the group. However, my character is a HUGE knowledge nerd (sage; professor) and also too curious for her own good. So she walked right up to the bloody..thing and asked who/what it was. When he said Heartkiller she immediately fan-girled and told everyone who he was. That was so much fun to roleplay. Haha!

Then the group chose which way to help him and they chose the "stronger being" as they like a challenge, and that was the Beast of Talos. I hadn't read the fight so I did go into that part blind. Oh, boy it was harsh. It chewed on our sorceror/fighter pretty hard and I had to use my character's creative smarts to try to give him something else to want to chew on with my Greater Image. It was very close but the sorcerror made it.

We had a "weak" party so the Beast was turned down an awful lot. I'd love to play this one again some day where he is in all his glory. :)

I DM D&D for my family and friends, but my younger kids and their friends want to play, too, and it is just over their heads. Hero Kids is simplified enough where the kids can grasp the concept, yet versitile enough that they can bring their own flair to the premade characters, or create their own custom characters. The system is well thought out and balanced fairly. I like how the hit points are simplifed and are "knocked out" instead of killed (Though I have some kids with huge imaginations that want the deaths to be cartoon bloody. lol).

I bought the completel package with extra heros, bad guys, and adventures. They're all awesome. I absolutely love that every hero and mob comes with a paper mini, too, that can be colored in for personalization. :)

I like how this module let players see some of Plan's history in the form of buirial fads; it gives more depth to the world they are playing in. I also liked the variety of encounters and tactics in this dungeon. Undead are always fun, but then deciding what to do about the theives is interesting, too!

I love an adventure that makes my players squirm. This one did just that! It starts off that they are Volen-TOLD by their factions that they need to go meet a contact and help him out. The fact that the contact ended up being an illithid made them more than a little uncomfortable.

I love the whole concept of the Rogue Thought. My players caught onto it, too, and also enjoyed it. The puzzle was fun and the NPCs very interesting. My only complaint is that the boss was too squishy, but that may just be because I need to practice playing caster-bosses stratagies more.

This adventure had some of the best NPCs. Haha! The madmen and the suspicious inbred villagers where a hoot. Elisande is an amazing character to play with - she and the groups rogue, a former urchin himself, really clicked. She doted on him and he became very protective of her.

Sadly the plot itself was very confusing. There was too much secret stuff going on; a mystery hidden inside a mystery, smothered in secret sauce. It made it hard to follow and I had to rexplain to my players several times as to where the second boat came from, even after I had the villagers confess what they did. If a plot is going to be this convoluded there needs to be some sort of "...and I would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for you pesky kids and your dog." (Even now I am still not sure what "the adventurers already did to break the pact.") The confusion took away from the story.

As a DM I really loved this adventure. Its all a big mystery that the players have to solve. Unfortunately if Velma isn't in the group your Scooby gang will probably be a little confused by a few of the missing pieces, namely the ghost that was pulling certain strings. I had to give them that meta knowledge part at the end for them to get the ah-ha moment. That's the only reason why I didn't give this one 5 starts. If you can work that more smoothly with your DM skills then this is a really awesome adventure.

I enjoyed running this adventure and my players had a lot of fun. 5 different mini adventures with a variety of styles, each one introducting a different faction. The fifth one contains one of my favorite monsters to run so that's always a plus. If you're not sure where to start this is a good taste of what is to come. :)

This was my first foray into Ravenloft (see note) and I quite liked it! The NPC Jeny Greenteeth was probably my favorite part. It was fun forcing the players to work with a hag. Haha! The goblyns were also qutie fun! I enjoyed making them knaw on the players.

I had some help from one of the players (another DM) to understand how the end boss was supposed to work, then I finally understood the hype. She was hard. The group had run down their resources by the time they got to her and they had to pull out everything they had left. She was fun for me to play with but at least one of the players was getting frustrated (the sorcerror) as she was immune to his remaining attacks. In that case I reccomend having Jeny "whisper" in their head a reminder to use the special item and have it appear in that character's pocket (no matter where it was previously).

This took no where near 4 hours - it took my group about 8 hours. Granted some of that was because I ran this short-notice and I'd not run a boss fight with legendary actions before this. So I may have added an extra hour from that. My group was also role-play heavy and pretty thorough (though towards the end we tried to press a on a bit harder and skipped 1 room.)

Summary: Good mod and fights, same old editing issues and underestimating time. Reccomended.

*We wanted to play a module and one of my players had to stay in CoS season. So I obliged him.

Part 1a was a bit confusing and overly flowery. The writer was trying overly hard to impress and crammed metaphor after metaphor into the descriptions. Now, I like metaphors but this was way too many and confusing. I had to pause several times to "translate" for my players what the heck I just read. I do like the snowmen concept though, and their captain is an enjoyable character.

Part 1b (Festival Grounds) was a riot. My players had so much fun goofing around with the games. Haha. They had a lot of fun role playing. :)

Reguarding "the Middle": It took me a long time to figure out as it really wasn't stated (or I missed it). My understanding is that "Middle" a small village where the two sets of workers met as the road repair was complete. I also interpreted that the fireworks display took place at this small village and the portals were made so both of the cities, and the village, could all celebrate together.

Part 2 was fun for me, but confusing for my players. They couldn't figure out what the little guys were up to and felt a bit helpless to stop them. Overall it was enjoyable I think, but it dragged long - possibly because the players kept rolling low. I had to hand-wavium and move on to keep the pace up.

Part 3 It took my players some time to figure out the ?? Once they did they had several creative ideas and the end was very rewarding.

Unfortunetly the plauge of bad editing continues. Sigh.

To sum up; the trying-too-hard language looses a point, the confusion in part 2 and the bad editing looses a point, but the awesome carnaval experiance regains an extra point. 4 stars.