One of the classic OSR books giving "65 pages of mayhem and wierdness in this Slavic mythic-inspired (with an acid fantasy twist) mini-sandbox". I picked this up a while back and then continued to collect the rest of the series - Fever Dreaming Marlinko, Misty Isles of the Eld, and What Ho, Frog Demons. Each one has been a joy to read.
cover art by David Lewis Johnson
This is a great, strange little setting where a bunch of odd factions are dwelling in the bizarre terrain of the dunes. The Dunes themselves are nigh-untraversable and following the paths between and around them is much simpler. Therefore the region is presented in the point-crawl fashion with sites linked by the routes between them and an assumption that each route takes ~ 30 mins to travel. Aside from the content the book is a guide to the mechanics of point crawls and exemplar of how this method can be used.
So what have we got in here? By sections we have:
2 page introduction to the Dunes
6 pages detailing 4 factions
2 pages explaining point-crawling
3 pages with the Chaos Index
13 pages on 25 sites within the dunes
20 pages covering 2 dungeons
12 pages with 15 monsters of Slavic myth
4 pages unlockable character options
2 page Appendix of hirelings
What this all gives you is the group of factions present - each driven by different impulsts. The Old Smith (lawful good), the war-bear followers of Medved (chaotic good), the were-shark Ondrj (chaotic evil) and his minions, and the Eld (lawful evil) seeking something lost. The interplay between these offers ample opportunity for the players to get involved. The factions are happy to find someone willing to help them against the others or try to maneuver them in the (currently cold) conflict within the Dunes. In describing each faction there are good pieces about how each faction relates to one another and more unusually and very useful, how each faction will likely interact with a party - to welcome, use or attack them.
The Dunes themselves are a strange place and the rumour table provides a number of hooks that could potentially draw a party in. There is no linear trip through it all but instead a number of sites and factions to encounter and one or two places of significant danger where a party might be best advised to plan very well before entering, if they enter at all.
The introduction suggests that a DM planning to run it familarise themselves with the section on how point crawls work and also on the chaos index. This is a great engine to represent the mythic weirdness aspect of the Dunes. At the start of each session in the Dunes a check is made to see how much the factions have increased the Chaos Index through their actions. Then the party actions are factored in and then events are rolled - ranging from strange visions at the lower end to incursions from beyond and changes to the tides of magic as things get really weird. This is a great mechanic to evoke how things are strange and getting stranger in the Dunes - the conflict between the factions heating up over time on its own accord.
The sites that form the play-ground for all of this to happen are original and evocative; some of them are merely strange, for a few of them, it is possible for the players to touch off some real havoc by disturbing things. There are some great hooks for potentially wide-spread campaign-driving mayhem within the descriptions. The two larger sites detailed out as 25 and 32 room locations are a Golden Barge of the mysterious Eld and the Glittering Tower of Medved the Master - steward of the Dunes. Each of these gets a map in the back of the book. The Golden Barge is the thing the Eld have come to this part of the universe seeking and contains everything you might expect in a lost extradimensional vessel from their necromancer-king epoch and a few surprises on top. The Glittering Tower is another old Eld site but here we have Medved the Master living in one end, a bunch of the old inhabitants scattered throughout and Ondrj the Reaver dwelling in the other. None of these groups would shed tears to see the others gone and the party has ample opportunity to profit from this.
To round this out we have some interesting new spells, a bestiary with everything the players may encounter among the Dunes and a wonderful appendix of hirelings who do a great job of reinforcing the tone of the place.
All in all there is a great set up, with a self contained drive that is the rising Chaos Index and the hostility between the existing factions while also leaving a bunch of hooks dangling for DMs to build on if their tables bite. Even if the setting is not particularly of interest, the lay-out of this books is a masterclass in getting things across brilliant sequencing of the sections and nice design touches like bolding the one or two key things in any room or site to ensure they are not missed.
If you want some other reviews try Dungeons and Possums, Ten Foot Pole, Age of Dusk, Dungeon of Signs, Necropraxis, Dysons Dodecahedron, DM from Outre Mer or Reviews from Ryleh. The sheer number of other available reviews should also give a sense of how well esteemed Slumbering Ursine Dunes is.
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