What do we need, and how long does it take?
Dice, pencils, a printer and about an hour. A seven-dice set costs a few dollars and a free dice app stands in for one, the sheets print on ordinary letter paper, and the first adventure runs sixty minutes with a two-hour version of the same story if the table wants more. The download itself is free and asks for no account and no email address.
And how many people
Three to five kids and one grown-up to run it, which is the size the adventures are written for. Two kids works, and so does one kid on their own if you give them a second hero to run. Above five, the wait between turns starts to show.
Which dice, and what if you have none
Ask for a seven-dice set, sometimes labeled polyhedral. It has dice with 4, 6, 8, 10, 12 and 20 sides, which covers every roll in the game, and it costs a few dollars at a game shop or online. The twenty-sided one does most of the work, so at a full table a spare or two saves passing it around.
If there are none in the house tonight, a free dice-roller app does the job. Kids want real dice by a wide margin, so put a set on the shopping list and start on Saturday anyway.
If you do not have a printer
The sheets print on ordinary letter paper, one page each. A library or a copy shop will run a set off cheaply, and one set lasts: kids write in pencil and the sheet gets reused, or you print a fresh one when somebody wants a different hero.
Most of the kit was never meant for the table anyway. The rulebook, the adventure and the bestiary are yours to read from, and a laptop or a tablet propped against something does that as well as paper does. Print the sheets, read the rest off a screen, and it is nine pages at the copy shop instead of ninety-four.
The How to Play page is meant to go on the back of every hero sheet, and a single copy in the middle of the table works nearly as well.
What it costs
Nothing at all. No account, no email address, and no larger edition sitting behind the free one.
The notice in every book lets you print and copy it for your own table, classroom or clinic, so you can print another set whenever you need one. What we ask is that you do not sell it or pass it on as your own.
How long a game takes
Adventure 01 has a sixty-minute core: one fight, one rescue, one treasure, and a proper ending. The same adventure has a two-hour version with an optional beat and built-in expansions, and you pick which one you are running as you sit down. Adventures 02 and 03 run about ninety minutes.
If there is a six-year-old in the party, take the hour. Nine and up will ask for the long one and then complain when it ends.
If your kid loses interest halfway
Go to the ending. The module marks what can go from each scene, so the rescue is about ten minutes away from almost anywhere in it, and a kid who left the table happy at minute forty is the one who asks to play again on Sunday.
Attention usually goes on the walk between two exciting things, so that is the piece to cut first.
Do you have to play every week
No. Every adventure has a real ending in it, so stopping after one leaves nothing hanging. Weekly is lovely if you can manage it, and so is picking it up again months later.
What a hero picked up last time is already on their sheet, penciled onto the Equipment line when they found it. Hand the sheets back out and everybody is where they left off.
If your table does want to keep going, the three launch adventures work in any order, and none of them assumes you played the others.