Fly Me To The Moon by Kabuki Kaiser - a lunar hex crawl that I grabbed because it looked like a combo of old school gaming and space antics. Broadly pitched as what you find if the vision of the moon from the early 1900s had it right - a steampunky, fin-de-siecle vibe - but I found it much broader (and perhaps more useful) than that. The vibes I was getting was 'fairy tales of that time' - the kind of thing Rackham would have illustrated or Wilde would have written about. It also feels like a different tree grown in the same soil that got us Barsoom, so fine fodder for sword-and-planet escapades too.
Very much wearing its OSR-allegiance with pride, I initially thought this was an older book given its back-to-basics clean set up and introductory approach - it has been a while since I have come to something with quite this flavour of 'let me briefly explain the concept' approach, calling back to the OSR vernacular of "BX or use whatever system suits" in contrast to declaring for one of the many retroclones - OSE, OSRIC, etc. Reminded me of some of the grand old group projects like Petty Gods.
I got a print-on-demand version from DriveThruRPG and received 166 pages worth of neat little soft cover with a sort of black, blues and white scheme throughout. General format is two columns per page with some singe- and double-page art spreads mixed in. All the writing and design credits are at the back - this had been done up pre-AI OSR style with a bunch of artist credits, public domain art and photography. It gives a nice somewhat Art-Nouveau-in-blue look to the whole thing.
So what's actually in here?
A page of an intro section
A page with the hexmap
Four pages of rule mods, denizens and system use comments
A page Lists of linked locations
131 pages of hexes from the hexmap
18 pages worth of spells
A page discussing lycanthropy on the moon
A page of notes on the Lunar wars
Four pages on cats of the moon
Four pages on the moon-bound balloon the Phalene Celestial
A page of an appendix
A page of credits
Going through this in chunks:
The intro page sets the flavour and describes how the book is put together - storys that span the hexes of the hexcrawl depicting a moon from this fin de siecle era. The guidance on how to use the book is important because otherwise one can arrive at the Moonwalk hexes and be faced with what can seem like an indigestible lump. Here the suggestion is pick a handful of hexes and assume the players arrive by whatever means, run those few and then depart again.
The hexmap is a white grid on blues and greys - nice to read, tricky perhaps to replicate for a player version but hardly a major issue.
The page of rules mods focus on magic and dying - direct damage dealing is muted, mind-affecting spells are more effective, dying is ... unlikely to take, with you probably reincarnating as a lunar species. Magical items are also less effective - all reflecting the muted, dimmer atmosphere of the moon.
Two pages of "Lunatics" give us all the various odd denizens of the moon both for encountering as NPCs and potentially becoming through lunar reincarnation. Bat-things, spider-things, cloud centaurs and giant beavers are some of the odd folk to be found. These are of a BX level of simplicity with a few minor bonuses or an infrequent spell effect as the mark of their heritage.
We get a page with notations saying how the book uses a generic old school system and talks about how to read Armour Class, Alignment etc. in the stat blocks to be found in the book, helpful to get definitions nailed down.
The "Convergences" list of linked locations gives us three groups - the dozen cultural groupings, the half dozen major paths and the eleven noteworthy settlements. These are handy to follow the threads that span multiple hexes, particularly the paths which are often the most far-reaching. Which are the hexes with the forgotten road? Where can you find the moon beavers? Where are the various cities? That is a useful index - worth a bookmark or sticky tab.
Then we get to the meat of the book - the section called Moonwalk. At 131 pages total this is the guts of the book - guts like a very, very large creature - just getting stuck in without a plan is going to be a mess. The size of each hexes entry wholly depends on how much is in that hex. Some descriptions are quite expansive - powerful NPCs seem to get a lot - the Parallax Consort is 3.5 pages including art or Jupiter Pluvians is 2.5 pages excluding art - while Palladion, capital of the Moon, gets only a page and a half - the same as the pavillion of Aurora Nocitilian which is just a hut in the hinterlands.
Some hexes put a big focus on the "whos" and "whats" - the NPCs and monsters to be found plus their gear - with less on the "where" of the hex, others are wholly about hexes that are mostly terrain hazards or strange locations to be plumbed. Where there are foregrounded NPCs, locations get few good lines of description but depending on how much is happening in the hex, this gives you less for the big locations than the small. You get some interconnection between hexes, mostly faction based, which you can unearth as you read through it.
The individual hexes or clusters of hexes linked by culture or terrain or the like make sense together and I would recommend approaching things by using those as hooks. Trying to read the Moonwalk section end to end would be a hard slog that would leave you a worse impression of the whole than the individual parts deserve.
Following that, we get Moonspells - 18 pages worth of spells, with a strong flavour of twiddling reality and illusion as befitting the moon and a good chunk of standard utility spells too. I will put my hand-up to not being the best judge of the quality of a spell section but these seem good and flavoursome to me.
Next comes discussion of extreme shape-shifting - cataloging a half dozen odd lycanthopes like were-owls and were-ibexes.
There is a page about the lunar wars which is somewhat esoteric but gives a sense of the types of conflicts and personalities involved, a grandiose almost fey marshalling of everything and anything to a conflict.
Cats of the moon get four pages pages on cats because a large cohort of them is sojourning on their way to Earth and you may stumble across them at any time. Summon a familiar? Get a cat from this selection. By in a place where it would be inconvenient and unlikely to find a cat? Get a cat. All watched over by their guardian cat lord and generally in keeping with the whimsical side of the Moon.
Next we get the Crew of the Phalene Celestial, a crashed balloon from Earth. Four pages worth of the vessel and its crew - this can act as a reservoir for NPCs with knowledge of proceedings or as a source of new PCs. I thought initially this was a vessel that had made it to the moon and a possible route for coming and going as opposed to a past wreck so I think that has potential. The crew are useful and flavoursome, use as pre-gens or NPCs as needed.
Then you get an Appendix N and the credits; Appendix N is particularly useful in this case to frame up the context - not your standard fantasy source material but a different base of inspirations. From Bowie songs to operettas, D&D planar supplements to fin de siecle novels, we get a novel web of sources that justify their listing here.
Overall what you get is a box of tools to do lunar adventures without the hand-holding of an adventure. The list of linked locations, these 'convergences' are the structure that is provided but otherwise this will take a chunk of reading and digesting to get a handle on the whole. Of ~ 170 hexes on the map, ~ 100 of those appear in one convergence list or another. The great city of Palladion appears in multiple but as noted above, you don't actually get a whole lot about Palladion in the end. I think one would almost need to print out a copy of the hexmap and annotate it yourself to begin to get a handle on all the content.
The individual hexes are interesting and fit to the dream-like tone - there are dangers and treasures to be found but more of it are odd and evocative happenings. A good source for delving into for odd inspirations, one that I think I will be pulling from to populate various odds and ends of space that players might find themselves rather than trying to pull off a sustained hexcrawl across this moon.
If chunky, evocative unstructured hexcrawls are your thing, this is well worth the look. If you are looking for a structured adventure or big hooks to carry you through all the content, this is not for you.
For more reviews see tenfootpole.org, Vorpal Mace, Andrew Girdwood on GeekNative or Age of Dusk.
Sounds interesting!
ReplyDeleteSounds pretty cool. Do you think you'll run it?
ReplyDelete