The Missing Dragon by Makeham

This is a module aimed at very young children - the creator says it was created for a five year old girl. As such, in order to be kid friendly at that age it concerns itself very much with a colourful world full of interesting things to pick up. There is no combat in it which makes it a hard play for adults and maybe older kids but there is still plenty to admire.

The main character is called Fiona ( although you can play any character you like). As such all the items in Fiona's room are names after her. Interestingly, the author provides an rtf file with detailed instructions on how to change the module in the toolset to accommodate whatever your own child is called. A nice touch !

After collecting all the colourful baubles and some dresses from Fiona's cupboards ( not all of which suited my male barbarian PC as you can see from the screenshots !) you visit some rooms in her house adding to your collection of pretty things. This area, as indeed the first few areas, was beautifully thought out and filled with colourful items. The area outside Fiona's house is well decorated with gardens and you can see that this seems to have been a bit of a labour of love for the author to great effect. The array of colours is impressive and just what a young child might like to look at. 

The final surprise for me on Fiona's farm was the availability of horse riding! I'm always a sucker for riding a horse although it seldom seems to make sense after a while. It is handled in this module without having to use the radial menu by allowing to to mount through a conversation while also employing a dismount token to step down from the horse. This worked nicely. Anyway, nothing much else seemed to happen so I headed off to the next area, the village. 

The village is filled with quite a few buildings, most of them shops of various kinds where Fiona can pick up some more interesting baubles. none of them offer magical items or armour because it isn't needed so I found myself buying rather than selling. Here you can pick up a quest which I did but after exploring every corner of the area I became baffled as to where the young lad I was looking for could be. For a first quest aimed at a five year old, which would usually be very simple,  it made me feel totally incompetent . I decided to go back to the garden and investigate the other exit. 

And that is pretty much that. Having really enjoyed getting the feel of this module and the care with which it was built I now began to feel it starting to lag. I visited another four or five areas, none of which were built as fully and picked up another three or four quests none of which I could solve. A good example was the unicorn who came running up to me saying he could hear sounds of somebody crying in the dragons' den. Having, I thought, thoroughly investigated the aforementioned den I heard nothing and could find nobody in distress. So , about three areas later I gave up.

Positives -  The first ten minutes of this module were without doubt among the most interesting I have seen in any module. Beautifully built areas with some small assets I hadn't seen before built a very good impression. I liked the attempt by the author to explain in the separate file how anyone could customise it to suit the names of their children and I'm sure youngsters would like that. Colours have been used very well.  I also loved the horse system, stopping off in the village to buy myself a new black horse. Incidentally, the tea room in the village is a must see. Lovely arrangement with paintings on the walls and a curtained door I spent a while in there looking at the detail. This might also be all that a 5 year old girl needs in a module. After all, it wasn't intended for me. . .

Less so - About 20 minutes in I began to wonder where the story was and why I didn't feel I was any further towards solving any of the quests. Now there is every chance, as I've said in other reviews of kids' modules, that I've missed ways to solve all four or so quests that I was given but for me to miss ALL of them? So, eventually I was left moving to area after area really pretty aimlessly. The module was called The Missing Dragon but another quest was a missing small boy (Cody) and I spent ages on it searching every nook and cranny of the village where I received the quest without success. Do 5 yr olds who presumably won't be doing the pointing and clicking themselves with a mouse need anything more than a well built new world to explore? Possibly not. I know that it wouldn't satisfy my 9yr old granddaughter - but then maybe she'd be better at resolving the quests !

This module was last updated in 2016 and is available on the Vault here.