Review: Rackham Vale Paintbox Edition

tl:dr; gorgeous art decorate a surprisingly cunning DM's toolkit

Supported the kickstarter - Rackham Vale: Paintbox Edition - for this "award-winning, fey-filled TTRPG setting" which is built around "the art of master fantasist Arthur Rackham" and statted up for OSE. All this done by the Crowbar Collective, Brian Saliba and Craig Schaffer.

I am a fan of Rackhams art from the original fairy tales and other places they turned up and I have always liked how his art has cropped up through-out the OSR - out of copyright and right up our street. When I backed this, I had in fact already picked up a copy of the slimmer first edition through Print on Demand but it was still no question to back the kickstarter for the bonus extra goodness.

Rackham Vale Paintbox Edition with cover by Arthur Rackham

Pulling it out of the packing, it was wrapped in stamped brown paper, and then within the book was wrapped in a fabric printed map! Delightful and entirely on theme. The book itself was a neat A5 hardback size, 196 pages. Originally the fruit of Zinequest, it charmingly continues to refer to itself as a zine despite now being a chunky hardback.

So what is in the book anyway
Intro - 5 pages on prepping and what is and isn't in this zine
Key Features - 44 pages including a 2 page map
Factions - 4 pages on the local powers
Adventure Hooks - 8 pages on general Vale and creature specific hooks
Bestiary - 78 pages covering 24 beasts
Tables - 7 pages for creating settlements and creatures
Backers - 2 pages
Arthur Rackham - 2 page biography
Appendix A: Expanded Bestiary - 10 pages covering 3 more beasts
Appendix B: Dungeons - 12 pages covering 3 locations
Appendix C: Magic Items - 6 pages of magic items

So what is in here chunk by chunk?

Intro - Rackham Vale is an alpine valley mini-setting and we get three blocks in this intro; a preparation checklist of game-masters, what to do before your first session in the Vale and a list of what is not in the zine - some of the creatures, etc. - to prevent fruitless searching for things mentioned only in passing. Time, particularly the passing of the moons plays an important part as do secrets so tracking when and with what secrets the players enter the Vale is an important part of the set up. Certain activities like abusing hospitality, using arcane magic, deception or wittiness will attract attention from some of the creatures of the Vale. I like that the major attention attracting behaviours have been compiled here rather than being hidden in the depths of the creature descriptions. There is also a prioritisation guide to direct time-limited GMs to the entries they need to read depending on how their players are entering the Vale (by river, over land, etc.)

Key Features - opens with the 2 page Map and details 19 locations, each with some art, 'who/what is here', 'what is interesting about it' and an encounter table, mechanical effect or other specific rules for the place. Appendix B: Dungeons - expands three site locations from Key Features. These are fleshed out with 6-8 pages each on the Alchemists Tower, Copper Mine, and the Old Keep. Each has a keyed map with room descriptions and in some cases random encounter tables, in others direct links to the creatures in the bestiary that lair there.

Factions - mostly taken up by a two page spread with everyone present in the Vale and their opinions of one another - a complex weave of who trades with who, fight who, loves who and what the generally held opinions about any given bunch are. A neat way to do it, lots of ideas on a single page.

Adventure Hooks opens with a page of eight hooks to get adventurers from outside the Vale to visit it and then five pages of creature specific hooks tied to the individual creatures listed in the bestiary. Each of the hooks has handy tags like combat, investigation, RP which is a clever touch to help you pick the ones that will go down best at your table.

Bestiary - each of the 'beasts' comes with a big illustration, role playing note, who they are, what they are like, what they hate, what they want, allies and enemies, a stat block and any mechanics like madness effects they induced, the forms they take per phase of the moon, the types they can be, etc. Appendix A: Expanded Bestiary provides another three monsters in the same format - not all these are automatically hostile, many can be worked around in the best Old-School style with a little finesse but one need to have their wits about them. My favourite is Smok the Tufter a dragon being manipulated into being more rapaciously terrible than it wants to be by the skull of a giant sorcerer. Many of the creatures are unique within the Vale with their own personal agendas, specific lair locations and adventure hooks detailed in the previous section.

Tables has three sets - mortal sites and settlements, fey sites and settlements and creatures. Each of the settlement sets has d20 tables of what it is, who is here and what is interesting about it; tons of inputs for vast amounts of wandering fun. Really useful and flavourful stuff.

Next we have Backers (lists of all who supported the first and second kickstarters) and two pages on Arthur Rackham himself.

The other appendices we mentioned in the sections they fit with. Appendix C: Magic Items - eight magic items with associated illustrations, nice whimsical faery tale things with powerful effects that are not combat oriented but are going to drive adventuring to deal with them.

To wrap up - I like this a lot; both for the cunning recycling of Rackhams art together with the old-school style spinning of a world by implication and also for the neat design choices throughout that make this a really useable book for DMs. Much of this is doable because it is a tight, focused setting - the hooks are collected and interwoven, the monsters refer to one another, the locations include the lairs of various creatures - but there is a lot of clever stuff in here that should be standard in anything. Any adventure book that is not a complete railroad would benefit from the tailored encounter tables we get here and all the tools we get to generate endless fey encounters in these wild woods.

For other reviews of the original edition see The World of Philosopher Zeus, PM Schramm on r/osr and Monsters and Manuals comments as part of an overview of Four Eras of OSR Publishing.