After chasing a white rabbit through the wood and falling down a strange hole, a group of young adventurers meet the Dodo, who asks them to engage in the oddest obstacle course ever!
Welcome to Adventures in Wonderland, a mini-adventure path for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game! Chapter 3: e Dodo’s Race is a family-friendly mini-adventure suitable for 2nd level characters. By the end of the adventure, all characters who have played the first two chapters of Wonderland should have earned enough experience points to take them one third of the way to 3rd level. The entire Wonderland adventure path takes characters from 1st to 5th level.
While the Dodo’s Race was designed to be part of a mini-adventure path it can be played alone or even as part of another adventure entirely. The Dodo’s obstacle course can add a wacky and fun element to any quest. For example, the yeti in Madam Margareth’s Magic Potion (another After School Adventure from Playground Adventures) could challenge the party to a race in the Dodo’s place instead of simply attacking them!
Adventures in Wonderland: The Dodo's Race is an After School Adventure. After School Adventures are adventure shorts designed to only take a few hours of time to complete.
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The third installment of the kid-friendly adventure-sequence intended to be played in a single session after school clocks in at 9 pages, 1 page front cover, 1 page editorial/SRD, 1 page advertisement, leaving us with 6 pages of content, so let's take a look!
After #2, the players should have reached 2nd level. This being an adventure-review, the following contains SPOILERS. Potential players should jump to the conclusion.
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All right! Having passed the door, the PCs meet the dodo, whose speech patterns in the read-aloud text contain numerous malapropisms, i.e. wrong uses of "big" words - which can make for a fun mini-game, if the kids are so inclined...but anyways, the dodo enlists the PCs in partaking in his "Combat and Obstacle Race of Amusement and Doom." There are a couple of rules: once the race is begun, you can't leave the track; if you do, you're disqualified. Only one member of each team has to overcome an obstacle for the team to proceed and the team has three tries to complete the race - on each failure, they are teleported back to the start and lose one mark. As a minor inconsistency, the pdf mentions 5 such tries once, 3 at another time - I think 5 is correct, but ultimately, it doesn't matter since the challenges are pretty easy to overcome.
The first potential combat obstacle would be a red gelatin cube - if defeated and eaten, the PCs can thereafter swim through the lava pit that represents the first challenge. This is pretty much the leitmotif here - the next obstacles, a loop de loop, requires climbing and defeating an optional black cube may net the PCs a similar angle here. The final obstacle also features an optional blue cube, which may be eaten to gain electricity resistance, for the final obstacle is a jelly fish tank, where some are electrifying, while others aren't. The truth can be analyzed via detect magic or Perception.
Whether or not the PCs succeed, the dodo'll be happy and reward them, though victors obviously gain more.
Conclusion:
Editing and formatting are very good. Layout adheres to Playground Adventure's beautiful 2-column full-color standard and the full-color artworks provided are kid-friendly and nice. the pdf comes with basic bookmarks, in spite of its brevity.
J Gray's Dodo Race is a bit of a misnomer - it is less a race, more of an obstacle course, considering that there are no contestants but the PCs. If you actually make jello-cubes and hand them out when the PCs defeat them, it'll certainly generate some fond memories. From a design perspective, this one feels a bit trivial, even considering the target demographic - during my test-run, the PCs pretty much aced the module without needing to partake in the combats at all. Sure, this is intended as an alternate solution...but still. I don't know, it's perhaps due to the title that I expected some competitive aspect. And indeed, the set-up would carry a full-sized adventure: More obstacles, competing teams, the like - the idea's great! While I hence entered this module with the wrong mindset and ended up being slightly disappointed, the players enjoyed it, though less so than #2. Since it would not be fair to penalize the little book for my expectations, my final verdict will hence clock in at 5 stars.
Pathfinder Maps Subscriber; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber; Starfinder Superscriber
I've added 1-3 to my cart, but before I buy and introduce my elementary-aged kids to Pathfinder, I need to know when/if the rest of the Adventures in Wonderland series will come out. I don't want to leave my kids hanging!
