Review: Starlight Arcana

tl:dr; chunky, gorgeous book - great ideas, somewhat heavy to prep but has made it to my table where lots of other stuff has not

I spotted this on Kickstarter and tagged it as a kind of Spelljammer substitute - it was marketed as Voyage Across the Astral, Adventures Across the Starlight Arcana Astral Plane - I read that as something in the "Planejammer" space and was definitely on board for what I didn't get from Spelljammer - ship combat and actual planets to go to. With this coming out of Krakow, Poland I was also happy to support my local game developers.

Art by Joanna 'Dusky Cat' Trzesniewska

First impression of Starlight Arcana is that it is a huge chonky book. About an eighth is the setting crunch, another eighth are the campaign mechanics, a third is the three acts of the campaign and then the back half-ish is the bestiary. It should probably be best conceptualised as a campaign book that comes with its own setting, bespoke mechanics and companion bestiary.

It is a gorgeous book, the artwork and production values throughout are very very nice. This is a beautiful piece of kit with some great work in here. There is a tarot-themed sorcerer and there was a whole tarot deck with campaign appropriate art as part of the kickstarter. The tarot is also used for a tarot-driven divining of the fates and implementation of game effects while adventuring across planets in the sandbox part of the campaign. I like the idea but my shelves groan with tarot decks so I could not justify getting this one, even if beautiful.

Reference d20 for scale

There is a lot of content in here, that maybe could have benefited from a grizzled editor snarling 'kill your darlings' at the writers. The layout is two columns per page for most of the first half of the book, the bestiary varies from two column/two monster to single monster/stat block per page. Comparing it to something else recent - 5e Spelljammer - you get more for your page count - smaller margins, smaller font, more words on a two page spread. I spotted a couple of typos but overall for a first publication out of a new outfit, pretty damn good. I might have liked things boiled down more in OSR style but stylistically it cleaves to 5e house style.

Actual Play: Goblin Mail

I tested out the Goblin Mail - a zine about a chaotic goblin post office I reviewed recently. Written up to follow Gorgon Bones first best practice: "Record your hobby experience".

Cover by Evlyn Moreau

Run as an open table at our regular Friday night sessions using 5e, this was a seven player table and we ran a ~4hr session, half of which was Goblin Mail.

Characters were:
Maxi the Tabaxi - a rogue
Gwensora - a cleric
Giovanni Giovanni - a rogue
Hyperion IV - a barbarian
Thomas Wetsack - a cleric
Archie Gruble - a fighter
Balthus Darkcloud - a cleric

Session Report: Goblin Mail

Our heroes received a letter from the Merchant da Pra, whom they helped previously in Pesto Alla Lungarvese. They ask that a package be delivered to their aunt out in the Penumbria borderlands - with the catch that the package needs to first be retrieved from the goblin post office.

Venturing into town our heroes find the ramshackle goblin post office, barge into the office and are directed to customer service. They point them to the boss. After scrambling up the stairs to find a loud and horrible break room they interrupt a card-game-argument to get directions up to the boss. Forging their way through drifts of letters and thieving gremlins they arrive at a second more civilised breakroom and thence to the bosses office.

[DM Commentary - initial interactions with the goblins went well, a lot of barging past the queues of locals but getting to the front did not make the goblins much more helpful. The coffee and snacks in the break-room proved an unexpected attraction and the gremlins among the letter drifts were a good hazard. I played those more as 'save vs effect' hazards rather than combat since the gremlins were so out matched. One was captured and hauled around for the rest of the adventure cursing its captor.]

The boss queries them then sends them to customer service, where the party splits. Half deciding to just try searching the next room - special package storage - and the rest returning to customer servce. Archie decides to follow the 'faster service' ladder and finds Griselda the All-Seeing. Directed from their to the basement and Agatha then venture down and find Agatha who despite the irregularities, directs them towards the special package storage.

[DM Commentary - by this point 'you need to go see the boss' was causing eye-twitch reactions among some of the party as they were failing to distinguish between who is in charge in this room and who is in charge of the whole building. There was much running up and down to try and out-pace the package. The party split into a group led by Archie who followed the Boss instructions and another of Giovanni, Thomas and Balthus who decided to just start searching for the package themselves.]

Arriving first into special package storage, Thomas, Hyperion and Giovanni poke about in the giant stacks of parcels and when Thomas casts a Detect Magic, filching one or two. As the others arrive, and finally bring some light to the gloomy room, a giant book worm is revealed nibbling packages in the far end of the room. Returning (most of) its packages, they are told the latest delivery has already been sent to the roof.

[DM Commentary - the random package generators came in very handy here as the room was searched and random packages pocketted. Eventually someone cast Dancing Lights and the bookworm woke up - they assumed it was staff and did not fight it.]

Scrambling up the ladder they find a giant stork in its nest and a baffled goblin staring in, with a sack of packages abandoned nearby - and a trio of hogmen sneaking up to grab it. Shooing off the hogmen, our heroes attempt to reconcile the stork and goblins confusion over the hatched winged lizards in the nest before Balthus manages to grievously insult the storks parenting skills and they are chased off.

Archie and Giovanni grab the package they are looking for and dash back down the inside of the post office while everyone else follows the hogmen back down their grappling-rope.

[DM Commentary - the random roll for the Stork and Goblins disposition had them confused over the strange hatching of winged lizards - so I made the mail bandits be a group of sneaking hogmen in place of a loud attack. The players managed to intimidate off the hogmen then tried to help the stork figure out what was going on. This turned into an effort to persuade the stork to give up the hatchlings for adoption by the party that was going ok for a bit until it was blown by implying the stork was a bad parent for building their nest here. Cue angry chase off]

Abandoning their plan to deliver the package today, our heroes return to the Golden Cockerel with two packages - one for the Wizard da Pra and another covered in ancient return addresses and warning stickers. Giovanni cuts this open and find a mysterious animated bug which speaks a strange tongue. They give it a lute and it plays music unlike any they have heard before. Deciding not to worry about it, they leave the bug at the Golden Cockerel and set out again to deliver the package.

Session report for Goblin Mail ends

Overall view - it ran more quickly and less violently than I might have thought, people did not dig into the 'why are there goblin post offices' at all. It very much got across the kafka-esque run-around of being endlessly pointed to different desks. By the time the party left they needed to go for an in-game drink.

All in all a nice little drop in module - use it the once for a sessions of have it in the background to be used and re-used. No reason more goblin post offices might not be encountered in the future.

Review: Goblin Mail

tl:dr; neat troika zine about a chaotic goblin post office - a short-ish kafka-esque run-around, drops nicely into settings or adventures.

Backed on the Kickstarter - had a surprisingly chunky feeling 40 page zine turn up. Art by Evlyn Moreau, text by Sofia Ramos, layout by Luna P. I got great mileage out of the Kobolds Art Exibition (play log part I, part II, part III, part IV, part V, part VI, part VII and part VIII) and hope this replicated that 'goblinoids at work' model.

Cover by Evlyn Moreau

First impression - artwork is as ever a joy. This is all statted up for Troika / Fighting Fantasy but is fairly system neutral until you get to the NPC states in the Appendix. A bit of work calibrating off whatever a goblin stats as in your system of choice will make this useable for whatever you care to run.

In the zine you have three sections really with the central one being split into four.
First you have 8 pages of set up - intro, hooks, direction for exploring the place
Next you have the largest part with 20 pages covering the four floors of the post office
Lastly you have a 12 page Appendix with a bunch of useful miscellany

Running through this chunk by chunk:

STarting with the set up - intro, hooks, direction for exploring the place. The mission is always the same 'get your package back from the clutches of the goblin post office' but what the package is and who you are doing this for can vary. We get six example patrons in the intro then the rest is, in no particular order, what the goblins will sell you, what they think their workflow is and then what you will probably have to do to track down your missing package. These are really helpful for setting up the place and knowing what will be happening where as your players get there. We also get the general table for 'goblin mien' once you enter any room and the map of the whole place. Each level has two to three locations within it.

The floor guides - mostly room descriptions take up most of the zine. Going floor by floor we get
First Floor - reception, customer 'service' and delivery/triage area.
Basement - treadmill triage and customs desk.
Second Floor - first break room, letters room, rented room
Third Floor - second break room, boss' office, special storage room and the roof

Each of these locations comes with some flavourful illustrations and random tables of things you can find there. Given the likelihood you may traipse over and back through a few of these more than once trying to make sense of the goblins chaos, these are good tools to have to refresh locations on a repeat encounter. I found it suffered a little by not having a pithy one-liner of what each room was at the top of each entry - when flipping over and back between rooms during play, along with juggling the chaos of a table, that killer one-liner of what the impression of the place is was buried in the text sometimes.

In this section there are no stats, just numbers of things encountered at most. It is pretty clear how things connect, especially with the whole site map in the intro, so it all feels pretty playable straight out of the book. It bears careful reading at least once to spot where all the bits and bobs can be found - one person is missing a thing and it is mentioned in the description of another place but if you were skimming you could miss it and be confused.

The Appendix contains the Labyrinth, generators for packages, clients and goblins and finally a bestiary/stats for everyone to be found in the post office. When I took this to table they ended up arguing with everything so never got in any actual blade-drawn fights - which meant I was not going for the nice little mien tables attached to each of the entries. The random package generator tables got a work-out, especially when players got sticky-fingered while searching for the package themselves.

All in all this went over well at the table when I played through it - they got into the spirit of things and argued with the goblins as opposed to getting violent and killing everything. There is a ton of stuff packed in here, worth marking up with sticky-tags or something for the random patron table and the page with all the maps as you will end up flipping over and back to those a lot. A neat addition to the shelf and potentially re-useable in-game if the players return to the post office or encounter another one elsewhere.

I took it to a 5e table, that worked fine despite it being statted for Troika.

For another view, see Playful Void.

Review: Feather, Beak + Bone and Claw Atlas

tl:dr; awesome map-labelling game, build a city together, perfect for a collaborative session zero.

So I got Feather, Beak + Bone and the Claw Atlas expansion as part of the 'Details of our Escape' Kickstarter. I picked them up as add-ons but it can also be found on itch.io. I recall it seeing it crop up with people saying "hey yeah this is cool" a fair few times and particularly talking about map making so I thought "sounds like my kind of thing". A slimmer pamphlet than I was expecting, definitely in the zine class of game, really punchy, with nice presentation.

Cover by Austin Breed

So all told this is a nice straightforward game with the usual zine high content to weight ratio in here. Fully self-contained with good line art that gets the whole feel across. Good stuff.

It comes bundled with three blank maps and you get another example of the map inside the front and back covers of the book - so strictly five blanks of the map come with it and then you could photocopy for further versions.

Review: Dr. Grordborts Scientific Adventure Violence

tl;dr: steampunk planetary romance 5e conversion kit, heavy on the gear, lighter on the setting details.

This was a kickstarter I backed because a) I rode in on the 90s steampunk wave back in the day - Abney Park, the Difference Engine - all that jazz and b) I seriously contemplated getting myself a Weta Workshop raygun once. When Dr. Grordbordts Scientific Adventure Violence dropped on Kickstarter I backed it more on that nostalgia kick than I was expecting something mindblowing but now that I've gotten to reading it I've been pleasantly surprised.

Cover art by Max Chow

This is a 5e conversion book; following a similar course to what I have seen elsewhere of very much running with the system as it exists and applying mods through new conditions, tags and the like. The art is fun, the production values are very good indeed and there is lots of the original Dr. Grordbort material turning up in the pages which is neat. This is a toolkit to do this type of game in 5e, a mod-pack for familiar players, rather than an entry to the hobby for new folk. I would say you would need to be fairly familiar with basic 5e D&D to get the most out of this.

Review: Where Evil Lives

tl;dr: MCDM action-oriented monsters in their lairs - 22 lairs with neat set-piece battles for a range from level 2 to 20.

"Where Evil Lives: The MCDM book of boss battles" - does what it says on the tin. I got this because I went in on the Flee, Mortals! kickstarter and they succeeded so hard the project blew out to create another book. So I more or less got this at cost of postage only - and despite that being ridiculous rates to Europe, at that point as per Shakespeare "I am in blood/ Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er." So this one landed with next to no expectations on my side and from looking at Flee, Mortals! this is cool stuff but not the style I am taking to my fluffier tables just now. Seeing that it is being sold on D&D Beyond I thought it might be good to take a second look and get it reviewed.

Cover art by Grace Cheung

First impression - as with Flee, Mortals! very glossy and impressive, a chunky book with nice binding. The first of the MCDM books to forgo the dust-jacket and become more like the usual 5e format. The art is, as ever gorgeous - but somewhat familiar in that there is a fair amount of duplication between this and Flee, Mortals! This makes the book either usefully standalone or annoyingly duplicative, depending on how you get to it. I will assume you do not have Flee, Mortals! for the purposes of the rest of this. The art itself is very nice and we have the interesting choice to completely abandon descriptions of monsters in favour of the illustrations - with lesser art this might be an issue but the work in here is just great for that.

OSR Kickstarter Trends

Ben Milton of Questing Beast did some neat work tagging kickstarter projects as OSR or not and played out some of the trends over time - see video. He generously shared his data - [edit: building upon the original dataset by Hans Messersmith] and I wanted to dig through and see what else we can see.

From the data-sheet - classification was done by:
Original = Adventures/supplements/etc. explicity for old forms of D&D; New games that are direct or near directly clones of D&D (e.g. OSE, OSRIC); adventures, supplements for those direct clones
Scene = new games considered to be part of the "OSR scene"; new games inspired by older forms of D&D; adventures/supplements/etc for those games
If a project is listed with multiple systems/games, it will be categorized as Original if at least one of the systems is Original, otherwise Scene
Reprints of actual older D&D products (e.g. the recent reprint of Caverns of Thracia by Goodman Games) are included in Original
Includes projects that started between January 1, 2014 and December 31, 2023, inclusive. Therefore, some projects that started late in 2023 and ended in 2024 are included.
Listed year is the year the project started, not ended

Sticking on my analyst hat we can pull out some interesting trends. First, to recap what was shown in Questing Beasts video and give ourselves a baseline, we see an overall increase in projects for every category.

I did some work to extract the median and top quartile values of project per category to get a sense of what most projects are doing, conscious that the very large projects at the high end skew things significantly otherwise. These are in tables at the bottom of this post. We have seen the median value of project jump about but broadly converge towards the lower end of the $5k-10k bracket.

This I found somewhat surprising - I would have thought that 5e or 'other' categories, representing broader pools of players, would be higher.

Review: Jinx's Almanac (Brancalonia)

tl:dr; a solid adventure anthology that has been a reliable source of one-shots

Is wear on a book from being carted too and from games nights a tragedy or marks of heroic purpose? If we take the latter then Jinx Almanac is one of the most useful books I have gotten my paws on anytime lately. Taking note of the points about whether one can review an RPG that you have not played, this is one book that I have surely earned the right to review.

This is a collection of digital magazine articles, special editions, modules and all sorts of ancilliary stuff that was published for Brancalonia and then collected during the second crowdfunding campaign. It is a big grab bag of stuff that has a surprisingly dense amount of gameable content. I got mine from the second Kickstarter campaign along with the Empire Whacks Back.

Cover art by Lorenzo Nuti

We are well past first impression territory here - we have the same Brancalonia art style - old paper with wine stains on it, consistently pretty and evocative art both new and public domain with nice clear layout from a design sense, even if some decisions about the sequencing of information are a bit odd.

Review: Flee, Mortals!

tl:dr; a toolbox for building intricate, challenging combat encounters with gorgeous art and tons of encounter ideas.

The MCDM Monster Book - built around 'action oriented monsters' - the revamp of the 5e monster manual that MCDM has been talking about for a while prior to launching the kickstarter. I backed it since I agreed with the thoughts about some of the issues and was interested to see what solutions they came up with.

Gorgeous book, great art, slightly glossier, lighter paper than the standard WotC book but it makes a bigger book not take up more space. The dust cover really makes it stand-out on the shelf. All the little quality elements are great - sewn pages, ribbon, dust cover - the finish is very good. Getting my hands on a copy here in Europe involved shelling out ridiculous shipping fees but in for a penny I guess.

Review: Beyond Corny Gron

tl:dr; a focussed mountains and caverns setting with great exploration mechanics, world invoked via bestiary and old-school style

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.

Review: Skyrealms

tl:dr; a neat little setting for exploration, with a whimsical tone but some real teeth to adventure hooks here.

I backed the kickstarter as part of Zinequest #4 I think? First peered in for the Evlyn Moreau art then backed it when I saw floating islands.

Art by Evlyn Moreau

First impression is of a surprisingly chunky set of zines in a stuffed packet of things. The cardstock is nice, the whole thing has a great tactility. As mentioned multiple times throughout the zines, these are also meant for colouring in and they have that arty feel. The interior lay outs have lots of white space and easy to absorb. The art by Evlyn Moreau is a treat, as always. Favourites for me were the Emobeast, the Crystal Kingdom and the Goosedemon.

Review: Uncharted Journeys

tl:dr; well regarded journey mechanics plus a worlds worth of encounters.

I grabbed this off a kickstarter vaguely understanding it was the ripped out and expanded 5e version of well regarded journey rules from Cubicle 7's Middle Earth game. That coupled with 'support your European game houses' got me to lay my money down.

Cover art by Antonio de Luca

First impression - unexpectedly chonky! Great art, nice interiors, good printer smell. Lots and lots of stuff in here. After reading through it I realise this is a giant nouveau cuisine hexcrawl - all the good stuff you need to populate hexmaps in a wide variety of terrains are just shifted into lists instead of a map key. Even if you never use the journey rules, 5/6ths of the content in here is great inspiration for populating your worlds.

So what is all this stuff you get in the book?

Review: Historica Arcanum - The City of Crescent

tl;dr: a dense setting book for 19th century Istanbul by a local team celebrating their own myth and legend, combined with an interesting free-form adventure and delivered in a gorgeous package.

I have just had my hardcopies of Empires of the Silk Road and City of the Crescent arrive a week ago. I went through the pdf of City a while back and found a big slab of inspiration. I like it a lot because it is a team from the region writing about their neighborhood and while it works with the 5e mechanics it takes a refreshingly original approach to presenting a setting book. It is up on Bundle of Holding (until 4/9/23) and at ~$6 a pdf, I think its pretty decent value and I'm all for supporting games studios in non-standard places.

Cover by Yağmur Kıyak

It is compatible with 5e but not in the typical 5e structure. The team writing it leaned hard into the lore, art and presentation and came up with a gorgeous book - with one caveat. The cover art above is iconic and probably the most gruesome thing about the book. To maintain harmony in my household I have had to wrap my own copy to hide it, but the rest of the interior is just gorgeous - different flower borders for every chapter, public domain art pieces for chapter breaks and lots of care and attention gone into the layout.

The really nice, crisp, clean feel to it which is especially impressive when you realise how dense this book is. There is a huge amount of material crammed in here which might not suit everyone - this is not a skim-and-go supplement.

Review: Reach of the Roach God

tl:dr; a creepy cult and lots of great sites fill this (final) underground expansion for A Thousand Thousand Islands, arriving with bitter news.

This was the juggernaut kickstarter from the Thousand Thousand Islands crew - getting 10x on its target and gifting us this beautiful hardback book to go sit with the Stygian Library and the Veins of the Earth as classics of the OSR. This blog is a long-standing fan of the Thousand Thousand Islands so having this arrive and then not two days later watching Zedeck and Munkao go daggers drawn and declare A Thousand Thousand Islands dead really took the shine off it.

Hardback arrived

First impression is that this is a beautiful artefact even before you crack the cover. The design work is fantastic from the creepy roach legs to the ribbons to the custom Thousand Thousand Islands typeface. Our overarching theme is the struggle against the Roach God Odoyoq - starting with signs of his cultists, then the spread of his influence through underground communities.

Review: Home - A Light In The Darkness

tl:dr; a neat, curated set of modular hex-crawl rules for a more faction-oriented game with a focus on securing resources.

I backed the zine 'Home - A light in the Darkness' which is billed as a sandbox toolkit for TTRPGs. Given the mileage I've gotten out of the d30 Sandbox Companion I thought this was worth a look.

This is a lot packed into a 36 page zine, a little sparse for someone coming new to the concept but a great, taut workflow for those who know the basics already.

What do you get in it?

Review: Demiverse

tl:dr; a zines of planes, full of interesting variety from the many contributors. Add a few to any game or form a feywild/shadowfell campaign from all of them

Backed this one by Gnome Mage Games on Kickstarter looking for some planar action, something a little different. I had been tracking Fernando Salvaterra through his hex-art and that lead me to this one - pitched as "loosely connected fantasy demiplanes are all that's left of a fractured multiverse" for Those Who Wander and 5e systems. The various contributors of the individual planes were a who's-who of interesting creators so this whole effort harkened back to some of the great works of the 2010's OSR like Petty Gods.

Cover design by Joshua Mendenhall with art by Fernando Salvaterra

What we get is an 80 page book that covers 15 demiplanes and 6 pocket planes await in this original fantasy campaign setting." Each demiplane is a fragment of reality from a multiverse that shattered - each ranging from dungeon-sized to a few thousand square miles at most. These are all connected by interplanar gates to allow marvel-seekers to pursue adventure across these reality splinters.

Review: Path of the Planebreaker

tl:dr; a great, highly polished planar supplement crammed with locations and finished with two adventures to let you bring them to the table.

We have long standing form here for planar supplements - when I saw Monte Cook kickstart Path of the Planebreaker it was a 'take my money moment'. I went in hard on early Numenera and the Strange hoping for what I finally got in this book. I am a bit behind the curve on this as I was waiting for the Bestiary to become available so I'd only get walloped by shipping the once. Finally, all is here.

The premise of the book/setting is that the mysterious moon the Planebreaker smashes through the boundaries between planes and creates a link that can be traversed by those who know the art of it. The book is about the places so connected and the people who know how to walk this path - giving you all need for a planar campaign.

A chunky book, gorgeous production quality, a great distinct aesthetic to it - excellent stuff. We have a tour-de-force of MCG standard indexing, cross-referencing, world-building through random tables, all the good stuff. Details throughout like DCs for the checks to know parts of the text are woven in making it all very easy to use. This is a very high gloss production, obviously MCG in a groove, delivering solidly into an area of expertise. Just details like the chapter striping on the outside edge that lets you find a section while the book is closed are really handy touches of polist. I have one or two personal preferences that aren't aligned with how MCG does things but the quality of the stuff that I do like is really excellent. It has been a long while since I read through an RPG supplement this big with such sustained interest.

So what is all this stuff you get in the book?

Review: Where the Wheat Grows Tall

tl;dr: atmospheric adventure, tons of disquieting details to keep a party twitchy and an intriguing mystery to unpick.

Where the Wheat Grows Tall is "an old school faery adventure for low level characters" from Evlyn Moreau and Camilla Greer. I backed the kickstarter as a long standing fan of Evlyn's work - see the great mileage we got from the Kobolds Art Exhibition . After significant procrastination on my part managed to organise myself and order my hardcopy from Exalted Funeral.

What this is is a point-crawl around a big site - a farm with fey presence - split into 'the farm buildings' and 'the walled field' with lots of interesting sites and monsters/NPCs for the players to puzzle out.

Cover by Evlyn Moreau

This is a neat little zine - gold print on green cover, it looks very pretty and I was hesitant for a while to unpack it and maybe damage the print but then I decided that adventures are meant to be played so here we are. I am glad I did because this is a great example of setting things out neatly for the dungeon master to give a mini-sandbox.

Review: Ruins of Symbaroum (5e) Gamemaster's Guide

tl:dr; a solid GMs guide to an interesting mod of 5e to deliver the flavour of the Symbaroum setting. Very flavoursome with neat mechanics for where Symbaroum differs from typical 5e D&D. Lots of good practical advice in here too.

This came from backing the Ruins of Symbaroum kickstarter, I liked what I previously got from Free League as part of the Forbidden Lands project so I went for one of the juicy tiers and in came a nice cache of stuff.

The unpacked Kickstarter haul

For this I wanted to take a look through the GMs guide to see how, if at all, Ruins of Symbaroum differentiated from every other dark fantay setting out there. The dark fantasy setting niche being somewhat stuffed, starting from grand-daddy Ravenloft up through the original Midnight d20 through to European contenders like Shadows of Esteren and the original Symbaroum. Original Symbaroum has good word-of-mouth so when I saw this 5e adaptation I jumped for it.

First impressions of the whole package once unboxed? Gorgeous. Great finish, lovely evocative art, a harmonious style to the whole thing. Throughout I found a level of polish that was reminiscent of Worlds Without Number - it felt like an extensively tested flag-ship settings where the team had a clear vision of how it should feel.

So what do you get in the book?

Review: Fateforge Encylopedia

tl:dr; a new take on familiar races, a rich history and lots of interesting sites to explore and civilizations to encounter, delivered with 'naturalists sketchbook' art that makes it feel real.

I backed the Studio Agate Encyclopedia kickstarter - having backed just the pdf during the Creatures campaign, I used the opportunity to get a hard-copy of Creatures and the Encylopedia... and some other stuff. Creatures I reviewed before and liked its new angle on classic fantasy and the 'sketches of real fantastic places' art style.

The treasure trove that turned up.

This time around we take a look at the Encyclopedia - the world book which describes four civilizations found in the world through history, locations and items. First impression is that this is very good looking - as before lots of art and a great deal of graphic design work to make the text look like an in-world scrapbook. The art throughout is really nice, there is a distinctive house style that I like quite a lot - very naturalists notebook with pencil sketches, cutaway diagrams, and maps mixed with classic fantasy art spreads. It looks great and conveys a lot of the sense of the world.

We get lots of lore - this is a world delivered in character which is an interesting choice. Most books give us perhaps an chapter opener or some snippets of in-world character text but the proportion is much higher here - say approx 1/4 of every 2-page spread is an in-world note or quote. These vary from text from books to tales told by campfire.

In the loops and repetition you see a realistic construct of things that have importance, compared to the things that are practically lost to time, only known as legends. This gives nice flexibility to tune the world as you need since all these facts were just heard as tales.