Review of The Bullywug Bullies, a Family Fantasy RPG adventure!
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The Bullywug Bullies is a TTRPG adventure made for ages 4+
The Bullywug Bullies is recommended for ages 4+, and that’s about right with the story and mechanics level. The mechanics have a tiered system that allows for different levels of rules complication for different ages (i.e. tier 1 has no dice or math, just tracking abilities, tier 2 adds in dice, and tier 3 approaches D&D 5e mechanics). Because of this, there’s not much barrier by way of mechanics to playing the game, and kids who are still math or reading are able to play.
The story is also on par with the 4+ age range AND is great for teaching some lessons about bullying and talking before assuming intentions. There’s multiple ways to solve problems with each milestone in the quest, giving players options to talk to or fight The Bullywugs before getting to the final encounter, and it has plenty of social interactions and exploration options to give variety in the game.
The Bullywug Bullies is set in a land of fairies!
This adventure is part of the Fairies of the Mistglade series (I reviewed the overall system and the first two stories here), which all takes place in the world of fairies. Characters are fairies, and they generally interact with other fey creatures, like boggles and talking frogs!
In this particular tale, characters are hanging out around a pond and witnessing some mischief that a group of Bullywugs are causing. Players will need to have their characters help NPCs and also find out what’s really going on with The Bullywug Gang before facing off with a mysterious mastermind who may be the one bullying the bullies!
Your Fairies of the Mistglade character for The Bullywug Bullies
In The Bullywug Bullies, you’ll be using the same character creation tools and build guide that you would for the rest of the Fairies of the Mistglade system, however, there is a new class option introduced! There’s added mechanics for playing a druid, which is the character I chose for the charity stream that I was in, and it was a lot of fun!
Character creation is pretty easy to walk through for any class and regardless of the mechanics tier that you choose – you’ll name your character and pick your class, which comes with a premade list of abilities, spells, and stats on the character sheet. You’ll also need to color in their picture! After that, you’re ready to go!
Mechanics in The Bullywug Bullies
Because this uses the same system as Fairies of the Mistglade, I won’t rehash everything, however I do want to highlight a few cool points that I think are worth mentioning again or that were unique to The Bullywug Bullies.
First off, Fairies of the Mistglade, as a whole, has a ton of elements that help with keeping kids engaged throughout the adventure. There’s collaborative map creation, tracing activities, word puzzles, and more that both teach kids core skills for real life and are fun little breaks between major parts of the adventure. The Bullywug Bullies incorporates these as well, and I remember having a lot of fun and laughing with everyone else as we all did the tracing mini-game using my computer mouse on the streamed show!
The tiered system is also great, especially since it can work with multiple tiers involved at the same time. This means that a 4 year old can play at tier 1 in the same game as an 8 year playing at tier 3, and everything still interacts the same between everyone’s skills. This was demonstrated in the World of Corde blog (which, Miranda from World of Corde was also in the charity stream) some time ago when the whole family played an adventure together using different mechanics tiers at the same time.
Lastly, this system significantly promotes teamwork by having each of the classes specialize in a particular skill, so you can’t have one character who is a jack-of-all-trades that can do everything. When rolling for skills in tier 3, you either have advantage or disadvantage on your rolls, there is no in between, so you HAVE to work together to make up for those gaps. While playing The Bullywug Bullies, we really had to rely on each other to play to the strengths of our characters during the various social encounters, and because this one was particularly social and investigative focused, this skill balance came up quite often. It’s a good system for helping players learn to take turns, strategize on working together, and actively hand off the attention and spotlight to others, when appropriate.
Overall thoughts on The Bullywug Bullies
I had a lot of fun playing this! The game I was in was with friends, both known (Colin from Family Fantasy RPG and Miranda from World of Corde) and new (JudgyDM), and it was interesting getting to try a game with everyone playing at tier 3 since I previously was running my Fairies of the Mistglade games with kiddo at tier 1 or tier 2. We had a blast playing off character’s personalities and trying to figure out what was going on with the bullies until is all made sense and we were able to face the final challenge! The Bullywug Bullies a great game to try out with kids, and it’s also great for helping to teach some social-emotional skills while having fun!
Find a copy of The Bullywug Bullies
You can pick up a copy of The Bullywug Bullies and the whole Fairies of the Mistglade adventure bundle on DriveThruRPG
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