Picked this up on kickstarter, part of my 'back the locals' approach and wow, this was something else. From Nerd Sirens based out of Poland, this is an expansion of Corny Groń a solo/micro rpg, with lots of random tables for wilderness and mountain adventures and mechanics referencing Knave but fitting any old school system.
Art by Alicia Wiśniewska
The strongest wow-factor out of the box of anything that I've gotten my hands on recently - it was both larger format and thicker than I was expecting and the cloth and foil cover pops impressively. Inside is cleanly and clearly laid out with a consistent wood-cut/lino-cut art style throughout. There is a really nice touch in the right page border has the chapter list with the chapter you are in bolded - great for quick reference and keeps with the spare, clean style.
There were also four postcard with sites and encounters for mountains and caves bundled in from the kickstarter. These replicate what is on the inside covers, front and back, along with a nice woodcut art piece on the front.
So what is all this stuff you get in the box?
Introduction - 8 pages
Character Creation - 22 pages
Mountain Exploration - 18 pages
Cavern Exploration - 16 pages
Factions in Karpaki - 14 pages
Tables - 24 pages
Treasures - 26 pages
Bestiary - 180 pages
Appendix - including their Chieftan ruleset - 18 pages
So what is in here chunk by chunk?
Introduction - "Welcome to Karpaki" - short section describing the authors view of creating this quasi-historical Polish Carpathian setting with lightly-reskinned real places and factions. Mostly this is supposed to extract the flavour but keep it generic enough to be dropped into anyones campaign.
Character Creation - interestingly starting with a bunch of appearance tables which we normally find only for NPCs then we get backgrounds, flaws and virtues to build up character connection to the setting. Starting gear tables are two bits of mountaineering kit, two other things to reinforce the setting flavour. The setting runs of silver standard, the dukti, but otherwise you could use any other old-school gear lists and char-gen processes (or port in old-school adventurers from elsewhere) without much difficulty.
Mountain Exploration intend for at-table random generation of locations to DMs can also participate in the surprise of discovery; the book proposes to explain the mechanics for discovering new places to players to get them invested in exploration for its own sake - things like climbing sufficiently to get good views or following tracks allows you to adjust the score on the roll to find the place you are looking for. This is a neat set of exploration mechanics, some of the better that I have seen that give players some control in their exploration while not requiring the DM to have pre-genned everything to know where everything is.
Cavern Exploration follows the same format with adjustments for the underground creating an underground exploration template that is another very useful tool to have.
Factions in Karpaki - outlines eight factions ranging from mighty but distant empires down to the local bandits - with some background for each and what they want and do not want to happen in Karpaki. As mentioned before, a glance at a history book will unmask the faction but the lightly-drawn sketches we get here make them easier to plug into wherever you like - along with the benefits of you could pretty easily screw them together with other 'look-a-likes' from other settings - drop this into Midgard and the Antolian Empire snaps onto the Dragon Empire.
Tables - for naming places and things and for generation encounters - these are the tables used in the previous chapters handily stashed here. I think it is a useful split to put these likely frequently used tables in a separate chapter as opposed to within the Mountain and Cavern exploration chapters - your mileage may vary.
Treasures - split into 'common', 'valuable' and 'precious' findings, covering supplies, tools and weapons as well as more classic coins and gems. Nice to have these tied to the setting.
Bestiary - 180 pages, over half the book - by page count, this book is a bestiary with some extra rules. We get some description for each monster, a piece of art and some tables to hook them into the adventure. The stats are HD based so should be readily adaptable to most old school systems. Each creature comes with a table of 'what it is doing as the encounter starts' and another table that suits to the type of creature - how a fey spirit is known, what this goblin is feared for, what the learned hope to learn from it - great, flavourful stuff that show how these creatures connect to the world around them and differentiate them from one another.
Appendix - including their Chieftan ruleset, guide to flora and a pronunciation guide. The Chieftan rules have some interesting wrinkles - Wisdom is your ranged attack ability, you get an extra damage die when you use a weapon that matches a foes weaknesses, XP for silver found and exploration - but will be familiar to anyone who knows older editions and/or OSR mechanics. They get a lot packed into a few pages, including some sound game-running advice.
To wrap up we get a neat flavourful setting with a really cunning set of exploration rules - part controlled depth crawl, part push-your-luck. The cavern exploration mechanics would combine neatly with any number of other cool underground settings - Reach of the Roach God, Veins of the Earth or standard Underdark like Out of the Abyss. With the two elements - mountains and caverns - we get a pretty directed setting which is nice, focus is a strength.
Thanks for the review! :)
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