So, here we have the Macaronicon. It is basically a collection of all the stretch goals from the initial Brancalonia crowdfunding campaign - which is where I got it originally. This was bonus content for me and I have gotten a ton of use out of it. Brancalonia is a "spaghetti fantasy" campaign setting for D&D 5e "based on Italian tradition, folklore, history, landscapes, literature and pop culture" that lets you be a band of roistering Knaves and ne'er do wells out for their latest job. I have reviewed the Brancalonia Core book and Jinx's Almanac before - both great books and the Macaronicon is a close third.
It begs comparison to Jinx's Almanac which are both books of mixed lore, adventures and mechanics. Macaronicon is the more expansive and free-roaming of the pair, coming earlier and being that collection of stretch goals. There is some good stuff in here and plenty of inspiration for DMs thought it has not yet gotten that extra polish to the adventures which comes in Jinx's Almanac, the later book. Not to say that this is not very worthwhile.
As with all the books in the range, the art is great and the book has an aesthetic of old paper ill-used. Pretty like the rest of the range, with great, consistent, evocative art and good clear lay-out.
So what is all this stuff you get in the book?
New Knaves of Brancalonia - 36 pages on races and classes
New Money and Equipment - 7 pages on gear
Additional Insight - 36 pages of pieces of setting lore
In Search of Quatrins... Again! - 68 pages with seven adventures and more setting detail
Breaking that out block by block we start with New Knaves - a bunch of sub-races, new races, a new class, a bunch of new sub-classes, a bunch of new personalities and backgrounds. Of the books available, this is definitely the 'players expansion' with about a quarter of the book being stuff that players can use, which you don't get in Jinx's Almanac. Some standouts in this are the races - you get the Wolfcat, amazing, the Non-Existent and Puppet and the Pantegan mousefolk too, is great. These to me are core Brancalonia races, I mean, what are you doing if you can't have Puss in Boots in your campaign?
New Money and Equipment - some new equipment and spells, and this being Rancolonia, new magical junk - not lots, nice to have.
Additional Insight - a block of what is basically setting lore. Little bits and pieces of briefings talking about the professional arms, talking about some odd caravans, different rules for playing Penumbrian football, a local A-ish type thing, and stuff that you, yeah, basically lots of elaboration on different bits and pieces that are kind of lying around, like the Holy Friars relics and so on. And you also get a bunch of recipes, six or eight recipes. The recipes do note substitutes for their mystical meats, so you could try them in real life.
In Search of Quatrins... Again! - the meat of the whole thing, which is a block of adventures. This is in a different format to what we find elsewhere - this is kind of like the alpha version. Here you get an adventure set in a place, and then you got a briefing of the place, which includes a map, major locations within the city, extra information about whatever makes that place unusual, that type of thing. Then go to the next one, another adventure, and then more lore. All pretty good stuff - this approach did get refined in the later Jinx's Almanac to group the adventures in one bit and the lore in another section which is probably easier to access. Here, after you have run the adventure, you will still be flipping over and back past it as you continue to use the gazetteer section.
These adventures are a bit wider of a range here than in other books - spanning from:
- Fairly exploration focussed and hazard and event driven like Red Carnival, where a lot of it is a giant extended chase with a bit of a chaos clock thrown in there, which is excellent.
- Through to Black Rose Rising, which has you creeping around in a haunted house where some pretty bad nasties and a really bad big nasty in the middle. A chunky combat and very little way to avoid it - a surprising challenge after many other adventures let you slither your way past fights.
- Ancient Urn is a good traipse across the wilderness, chasing up on leads, visiting locations - a solid adventure there.
- Criminese Novel was the only one that I did not actually run because it centers on in-game football, and I thought anyone who sat down to play D&D and then found themselves ending up playing fantasy football, like literally football with football rules, would not be super impressed.
I got good mileage out of these adventures, and I ran most of them.
1. The Red Carnival ran really well, after getting started this is an extended chase with lots of fun running around in the mist and chaos
2. Divine Sorrow ran really well; the players got so involved this turned into two sessions; the second a little beefed up with additional encounters along their journey. NPCs were beloved.
3. Pesto Alla Lungarvese went fine, averagely good, where many of the rest of them were very, very good - tracking down a guy in a town followed by a fight on a mountain.
4. Ancient Urn ran really well - an alliance with a hag along the way led to the party trying to pull a triple-cross and mostly succeeding
5. Black Rose Rising ran very well - I was nervous about it being a combat heavy game but through luck I ended up with a combat-leaning party that night, went very well
Each of the sessions above was done in ~5 hours at my local open table games, thirty odd hours of gaming off these books given it took me two sessions to get through Divine Sow. They are well laid out for reading through and getting stuck in - I would not like to be a completely green DM, there is quite a high chance of player derailing given the Brancalonia playstyle but for me, looking for low-prep adventures to run they were great.
If you like Brancalonia, this is a great expansion - it has some cool races for the players, it has a bunch of solid adventures for the DMs. I would say if you want a range of more light-hearted, less combat-centered adventures for any 5e table you could find this worth your while too. My copy has the honourable battle-scars of being carted to-and-from games sessions, which few books on my shelves get.
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