Can we run this in a classroom or a library?
Yes. The notice in every book lets you print and copy Brave and Bonkers for your own table, classroom or clinic, so a school, a library or an after-school club can run it without asking us and without paying anybody. Print all seven hero sheets for each table, so the kids can read through the whole set and pick. What we ask is that you do not sell it or pass it on as your own.
What the license lets you do
Print it, copy it, and hand it to the kids in your room. Nothing has to be bought, registered or renewed, and there is no institutional edition at a different price.
Portions of the game derive from the System Reference Document 5.1 under a Creative Commons licence, and the full terms and attribution are on the license page if your school needs to see them before signing anything off.
A room with twelve kids in it
The game is built for three to five kids and one person running it, so twelve kids means three tables and not one big one. Twelve at a single table is where sessions go wrong, and no amount of enthusiasm at the front of the room fixes it.
If you have twelve kids and one adult, hand a table to each of your eleven and twelve-year-olds. Most of them are already asking to run a game, the module prints the words they need to say, and the page written for them covers the rest. Three kid-run tables with one adult circulating is how plenty of clubs already run games like this one.
Running it inside a fixed period
Forty-five minutes covers the sixty-minute core if the hero sheets are already spread out on the tables as the kids come through the door. Choosing a hero takes ten minutes at a table of five, and it is ten minutes you want to keep, so find the time at the front of the session and not in the middle of the story.
Each scene is marked with the parts you can drop and the parts you can draw out. That is what lets you land the ending on a bell instead of stopping halfway up a well, and a group that will not be the same group next week should finish the story today.
What the hour actually contains
Reading aloud, waiting through four other turns, agreeing a plan with people who disagree with you, and comparing one number to another. Every kid has a hero with something only they can do, and nobody is eliminated or left watching.
Kids who cannot read yet, and kids who arrive late
Whoever is running the table reads out loud anyway, so a kid who cannot yet read their sheet plays with everybody else. The sheet is one page and the art tells them which hero is theirs.
A kid who arrives twenty minutes in picks a hero and walks into the scene. There is nothing to recap: what the party is doing now is the whole of what anybody needs to know.
What to print for a group
- All seven hero sheets for every table, even a table of three. Kids pick by reading through the whole set and passing it round.
- How to Play, printed on the back of the sheets or laid in the middle of each table.
- One adventure. Read it once before the session.
- The bestiary only if you want it. The monsters you need are already printed inside the adventure.