This is a tale of a princess summoned by a fairy, Ciqui, ( Tinkerbell?) to the Plane of Fairytales where the fairy wants her to compete with Little Red Riding Hood to become Princess of the Plane. She is given tasks to complete to decide if she wins it. As you can tell from this, it draws on more than one fairy tale and puts them together into one module.
My first impression of this was a good one. I'm assuming the movie didn't work (shouldn't be an issue if you change it's file format to WBM) so we went straight to a cutscene but straight away I got the impression that this was created by someone who knew what he/she was doing. Intro The intro of Ciqui ( the fairy who takes her to the Fairy Court) was good and dialogue entertaining enough, although I found myself unable to guess what the correct answer was to and went round in circles a little until I stumbled across the correct response.
Not sure the point of that. Anyway Anyway, after some conversation I was sent to the fairy plane via a portal which looked good. After some conversation between the fairies, where there was obviously some tension regarding who should end up as Princess, I was tasked with curing the problems of Hamelin without resorting to violence, a nice touch in a kids' module. Before setting off I went to Mini's shop but didn't have enough to buy anything. That was a touch disappointing as I'm not sure why there was a shop at this early stage if none of the goods were affordable.
As expected it turned out to be the story of the Pied Piper and I'm ashamed to say, again I found the correct responses hard to come by and ended up with them dragging the Pied Piper outside and stringing him up on the gallows ! This was where I parted company with the module I think. I even found the sudden demise of then Piper shocking - no you don't see him dangling just his dead body beside the gallows but I'm not sure that was necessary or how that might affect youngsters. anyway. At that point I returned to the Fairy court disappointed and expecting to be booted out of the Fair Fairy Plane. However, at that point the story took an unexpected and interesting twist...
Summary :
Positive - I liked the approach in this module. Well enough built, pretty good idea for a story and Ciqui (Tinkerbell) looked good. I liked the cutscene at the start and I'm sure the movie would have been decent. I found myself wanting to see how the challenge with LRRH would have developed and how my father would have reacted at the end to my failure to turn up to the important dinner. As the princess at the start I was encouraged to be a bit of a rebel and the kids might like that. I particularly liked the twist in the story as it went on but enough about that.
Less so - Up until the Piper's demise I thought I might play this with my granddaughter but now I'm not so sure. That might be the only death in the module but it was the sudden nature of it that shook me, especially as there was also mention of torture! If I were a youngster and saw someone dragged off and executed because I'd made the wrong choice I'm not sure how I'd feel. I'd probably have preferred it to have stopped at the order to take him away - or maybe back to the cells. However, if I'd been more on the ball with my responses maybe that whole scene could have been avoided. Or maybe I'm being unnecessarily picky.
For a children's story I did find it hard to tell even as an adult what the correct response might be. I tried to steer a reasonable compromise between the Piper and the Mayor and still ended with the Piper strung up although I understood why later! After my return to the Fairy Court the module did become more interesting but I'll leave you to find out in what way... It did still have the problem with conversation going round and round though, at least for me.
Link - to the project page with module on the vault is here. Last updated in 2015.