My Little Pony Roleplaying Game: Dark Skies Over Equestria—Nailed it.

The My Little Pony Roleplaying Game supplement Dark Skies Over Equestria is a 162-page sourcebook that adds Changelings to your My Little Pony game. The majority of this book is about adventures that tie back into a larger campaign. There is advice for running your My Little Pony game outside of the current timeline for Equestria. There is also information about where you can place your campaign if you watch the show: I have not seen much of the show, so I skim both sections.

Changelings

So, Changelings are part plants, have a little insect in them, and hatch from pods. Before opening the book, I had no idea what these were, so imagine my surprise when I saw their appearance. They’re all black and have torn wings. They almost resemble beetles, and I find them incredibly cute for some reason. Their Origin Perk allows them to gain benefits when pretending to be another pony, such as an earth pony. Changelings are shapeshifters, and their Origin plays into that well.

There are also rules and suggestions for how you run the Changeling Society. I ran it exactly as it was written and my group loved it but you can give them a more individualistic society and it’s not going to hurt anything. Another thing to note is that these guys feed on love and friendship and I think that’s absolutely metal: Changelings did not grow up in your average pony culture, so they developed their understanding of the concepts of love and friendship. Don’t worry though because your Changeling can break out of this if they learn to love their forms change.

I introduced Changelings into my game by having the town where my main group plays fall into a state of sadness and despair. See, because Changelings feed on love and friendship, they make the communities where they live sad. Changelings don’t leave marks so the introduction saw my players figuring out that something was wrong in their town and investigating the cause.

Before I dive into everything else included in this chapter, I have to say that I love this. Like I have said before, I don’t watch the show so this is my first introduction to these creatures and I adore their lore. This portion of the chapter is also beautiful throughout, and there are a couple of boxes that tell you where to jump into the show and or comics if you want to see the Changelings for yourself.

There are some new Influences:

• Hivemind
• Infatuated
• Outsider

The new Influences are great for making a Changeling character but can also work with a normal character too. We didn’t get a chance to test these, but they’re written in the same way as the Influences in the core rulebook. Along with these new Influences, you get a host of new General Perks. The new spells included in this sourcebook have everything to do with disguising yourself and various utility spells that go along with the idea of Changelings sort of invading towns. For example, one spell allows you to call upon newspaper headlines to get information about a target.

I like the new options just fine. You get enough to make a complete Changeling character plus all the options work with the normal options presented in the core rulebook. The writing is nicely done, and the artwork is superb.

The Adventures

Each of the adventures is meant to be part of a bigger campaign called the Dark Skies campaign. I am not going to give any major spoilers here because I liked this campaign and I think that you need to experience it for yourself.

There are some things I want to call attention to. First, I was nervous about using a premade adventure because I can be very picky about the way they’re written. If you’re like that too, you have nothing to worry about. The flow of each adventure is great and easy to understand. I did some tweaking because we are already in the middle of a sandbox campaign. It was easy to insert the first adventure right into that campaign, including all the new NPCs and locations. With some minor name changes, everything was seamless. This was extremely apparent when I dissected the adventure called Day Becomes Night. Each NPC is written just enough to give the game master a proper indication about how they would play but is also loose enough that you could insert them into any city without causing confusion.

Second, these adventures have something for everyone and I don’t say that lightly. The social encounters are great! We had a lot of fun playing around with the NPCs and the group dynamics. The puzzles were a bit easy for my oldest group, but I have no problem with that. My youngest group got a kick out of them, especially in chapter 4. My favorite part of all the adventures is the last one where you have to defend the throne room. We had so much fun with the combat in the last chapter.

The dialogue options are cool, and there are some branching trees where the dialogue changes depending on the actions your players take throughout the campaign. Honestly, this set of adventures is a great way to introduce what is essentially a new race into your game world.

Final Thoughts

The My Little Pony Roleplaying Game: Dark Skies Over Equestria sourcebook is amazing. I ran these adventures for a group of 9-12-year-olds and a group of people all over the age of 23. In both groups, we had a terrific time. My younger group loved seeing familiar NPCs come into play, and you can find all of these NPCs and more in the back of the book. The complete list of NPCs is another thing that I appreciate because it makes them easy to insert into other adventures. My older group had fun making the adventures their own and expanding on the custom world that we were playing in. Regardless of how you play this sourcebook is easy to understand, extremely fun to run, and a must-have for any My Little Pony Roleplaying group.

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