A friend (and player in my Skull & Shackles game) and I met up at UK Games Expo 2019 with our pre-school children in tow to play some board games and start indoctrinating a new generation into gaming. Spying colouring artefacts at the River Horse booth our kids set to enjoying their first taste of character creation whilst the grown ups were pitched Tales Of Equestria.
We each walked away with both the Starter Set and the full Storytelling Game, and a nefarious plan to have our spouses play TRPG’s too…
The Starter Set comes complete with a set of polyhedral dice, three pre-generated Pony character sheets, a map, 31 tokens (including one for each of the three pre-generated ponies) and the starter adventure. The adventure booklet and character sheets contain all you need to know of the game’s mechanics in order to play through the starter adventure, except for one crucial detail – of which, more below.
In the starter adventure there’s a few pages of introductory material with the adventure proper starting on p9 and filling the rest of the book (up to and including p57). It’s written in a choose your own adventure format, where there’s a set of descriptive text for the storyteller to read aloud and some options for the players to choose between. Each option has a corresponding section to turn to in order to continue the adventure. When a Test or Challenge must be made the section to turn to differs for success or failure. This is an ingenious way to lay out a starter adventure, especially one aimed at new players and new storytellers. It means that an inquisitive player can learn and play the game by themselves, it also means that parents who’ve never played a TRPG before can be the storyteller for their children without having to read more than a few pages before play can commence.
We opened the box and just started playing with my wife (who’s never played TRPGs before) as storyteller and my eldest and I as pony adventurers. Many of the descriptions were far too wordy for a pre-schooler’s attention span, but in River Horse’s defence the box does say ages 6+.
I plan to produce an edited version of the starter set adventure which uses far fewer and much simpler words so that it’s easier for a pre-schooler to follow, as I think the starter adventure format lends itself well to reuse.
Apart from the verbosity of the read aloud sections my only real criticism is that the Starter Adventure refers the reader to p50-61 to understand Tests or Challenges, only what that’s really referring to is p50-61 of the Storytelling Game book. The Starter Set has no description of Tests or Challenges! That’s fine for me as a TRPG player of 20+ years, but not so good for the target market of players and storytellers who’ve never played a TRPG before. That’s a real shame as I think this set could be a great intro to TRPGs for families with younger children. In fact I plan to gift a copy or two, I’ll just have to include a copy (or recreation) of the relevant pages from the Storytelling Game book.
The Tails of Equestria game mechanics are simple – characters have three primary aspects (Body, Mind, Charm) that have an assigned die value, the stronger your character is in these aspects the larger die you get to use when rolling Tests of that kind. Each Test calls for a roll against one of these aspects and the success requires rolling equal to or higher than the Difficulty value of the Test.
There are further nuances through Tokens of Friendship (spend one to re-roll a die, two to re-roll a larger die or three to auto succeed at a Test), Talents (roll extra dice for Tests related to the Talent) and Quirks, but other than Talents these don’t seem to be used with the 0th level starter set characters.
All in all a solid and simple system for young and new players with a nicely laid out starter adventure, with an editing snafu that weakens the product for its intended audience.