Review: Eclipse Phase Second Edition

Eclipse Phase is described as a” pen & paper roleplaying game of post-apocalyptic transhuman conspiracy and horror.” The first edition was released in 2009 and originally published by Catalyst Game Labs but now the game is published by its creators, Posthuman Studios. The first edition won an Origin award and several Ennies. 

The second edition of the game is available as a PDF following a successful Kickstarter, which launched waaaay back in April 2017. At the time of writing, physical books are still incoming to backers, but a few copies were reportedly available at GenCon 2019. 

I’ve read a couple 1st Edition Eclipse Phase books but never played the game (apart from a FATE conversion): when I discovered Eclipse Phase, I devoured the lore in the rulebook but my enthusiasm was cooled when I reached the rules and found them incredibly dense, not merely too crunchy to be a good side game or mini-campaign, but problematic in regards how it interacted with the world. The success or failure of the 2nd Edition really depends on how well the game addresses these problems. 

What It Is

Eclipse Phase Second Edition is a 434-page rulebook with full colour illustrations. Like the 1st Edition book, the PDF makes liberal use of hyperlinks throughout the book: every time it references a rule on another page, it gives a page number and that number is a link to that page. The pages are clean: mostly white with a splash of colour on  the side, which changes depending on the section of the book (it’s mostly dark red but the middle lore section is blue). At the edge of the coloured side flair is a small white triangle, that gradually moves down the page as the chapters increase, allowing you to potentially glance at the pages and spot the changing chapters. (Theoretically, one will be able to hold up the book and guess the chapter.

While the book is only available as a PDF at the time of this writing, there is a hardcover incoming. 

Included in the rulebook are all the rules for character creation, playing the game, and running the game including information on the Mesh (read: internet) psi powers, common tech, and gear. There are 46 “morphs” in this book, a couple dozen NPC adversaries, and a hundred pages on the setting of the game.

Also out for the game are the Quick-Start Rules, as well as a seperate document with the pre-generated characters included in this book

The Good

Appropriately for a game about the future of the Information Age, the game is released under Creative Commons Licence, (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) It’s an open source RPG. The gamebook encourages you to freely share the rulebook among players at your table. This also means you can “hack” the game and freely release homebrew content and conversions of prior edition material. I think most gamermasters end up sharing PDFs across their table rather than forcing their players to buy the books, so it’s nice not to feel like a criminal for passing a digital book to someone whom I’d also loan a physical book.

Right off the bat, the game looks simpler than 1st Edition. This doesn’t mean it’s a rules lite narrative game: it’s still a crunchy game with a skill list of 20 options and fairly heavy amount of options and rules. But the game doesn’t feel oppressive with its rules. Tellingly, there’s a two-page cheat sheet with the absolute basics of playing, and this doesn’t cover most actions or skills. If you liked the heavier system of 1st Edition, this 2nd Edition shouldn’t seem barebones or incomplete. NPCs seem fairly similar, with the math being *fairly* close and a lot of the same terminology. However, character creation seems quicker and less like a chore.

Specifically morphs. 

For the uninitiated, Eclipse Phase is set in a world where cortical stacks (like the ones seen in the book or Netflix TV Altered Carbon) record your memories, personality, and experiences. These can be easily swapping between bodies, allowing you to change what you are while retaining who you are. What your are is your “morph”, while who you are is your “Ego”. This is the core concept of the game, and means you can die horribly and still continue to play the same character…repeatedly. And given you can have a complete back-up, the party can unrecoverably TPK in a nuclear fire and it’s only an inconvenience. But this was a chore in 1st Edition: changing your body meant changing a lot of the numbers on your character sheet, making it a slow process. It was significantly faster in-world to transfer your mind from a humanoid robot body into the body of a genetically modified octopus than it was to actually make the change at the table. You were subtly discouraged from swapping bodies. Not so in 2nd Edition. Very few morphs change more than a few stats (and that’s a choice), and morphs have their own distinct & separate mechanics, making them largely independent. The character sheet even reflects this, with the morph section being off to a corner inside a dashed box, implying modularity. Mechanically, each morph has its own rules and pools of roll-modifying points making it pretty easy to change bodies, but still making morphs useful to the relevant tasks. The character built and kitted for combat will still potentially be effective in a morph not designed for combat, but their odds of success and the reliability of their actions will be better in a battle-ready Fury. It’s very elegant while also customizable. 

Because morphs are designed around modifying resource pools, this allows the game to incorporate a “Flex” pool into morphs. Flex points are the narrative manipulation mechanic in Eclipse Phase, the equivalent of Story Points or Plot Points, and allow you to do such things as add an NPC or define the environment. This allows people to take less combat focused or “optimal” morphs without being overly penalized, instead having a different way of getting bonuses or contributing to the team. If you don’t want to get the good morph, or modify the morph, or buy extra gear, you get Flex points. It’s a slick option. 

Flex points also tie into a character’s Motivations, which connects the role playing aspect of the game to the mechanics. Having some RP-facing mechanic that encourages action based on your character’s goals or values is a standard part of most modern games, but I still appreciate it’s inclusion.

Eclipse Phase 2nd Edition looks really cool. It’s not just better than the system in 1st Edition, but it makes me excited about the game. You want to swap bodies and try different types of morph, because even taking the same base model has some levels of customization and variability. 

The game system is based on percentile dice. Most tasks are skill checks, with your skill being a number between 0 and 99. The game encourages you to learn skills as multiples of 5 and modifiers to checks are +/- 10s. Despite this, you couldn’t just replace the d100 with a d20 as critical—both successes and failures—are tied on rolling doubles, such as 44 or 77. Eclipse Phase is a rare game that treats a 00 on 2d10/ 1d% as a zero, which is important as you want to roll low (i.e. under your rank in the skill). Kinda. The system also has varying degrees of success based on how high you roll while still rolling under the target number. I’m always fond of games where success isn’t just a binary succeed vs fail. In this edition you can succeed, succeed with one or two superior results, or succeed a critical result. Or get a superior failure or a critical failure…

The book begins with 10 pages of short fiction, which is useful for establishing the world and the tone of the game. In this case, it emphasises the feeling of reesleeving while also giving an infodump on events. Reading a few pages of fiction can efficiently convey a lot of tone and flavour, and ten pages is a relatively small percentage of the book. After this essential set-up it moves right into the rules. 

Similarly, the middle lore section of the book is also presented as a series of in-world articles. But these are fairly tightly focused and informative, presented as in-world information pieces, so they’re not just flavour. It doesn’t feel wasteful or like padding, forced realia.

The game is very much for mature audiences. It doesn’t hesitate to slip in a few eff-bombs here and there, and references adult entertainment and drugs. But it generally feels more mature than other “mature audiences” games I’ve read of late. It doesn’t force as much adult content into the book. It’s mature without being “edgy”. 

What really drives me to Eclipse Phase is the setting, which is just cool. The world is heavily inspired by a lot of modern transhuman fiction, knowledge of which helps explain some of the world and setting choices. The game wears its inspirations on it sleeve and you can see many elements of Ghost in the Shell, Altered Carbon, The Expanse, and The Matrix. The writing of Iain M. Banks, Charless Stross, Alastair Reynolds, and so many more. Which, admittedly, can make the final product seem a little redundant, or even unoriginal. It’s basically a mash-up of concepts and ideas. But I’d argue it does this in much the same way D&D is a mash-up of pulp swords & sorcery and high fantasy fiction, taking inspiration from a wealth of fantasy sources and blending them together. 

As mentioned, the principal hook of the setting is a world where your body is just hardware than can be upgraded and replaced, and even your mind can be altered and edited. And yet humanity’s extinction is looming, as Earth has fallen to AIs and a possible exovirus, which killed 90% of the population, excluding those who could escape offworld. Earth is quarantined and the remains of humanity makes its home across the solar system, on planetary colonies, space stations, asteroid shelters, or flotillas of spaceships.

The baseline campaign of the game is fighting against humanity’s extinction, combating the remaining enemies that might end the lives of the final 10% of humanity. You work against threats— both human and nonhuman—to preserve humanity. Or… not. That’s not the only way to play. The core book provides three types of “core campaign” to players: firewall, gatecrashing, and criminal. Firewall campaigns are the aforementioned “good guys” campaign about saving humanity. Criminal campaigns are self explanatory. Gatecrashing is a little different and mashes up Eclipse Phase with Stargate, and adds exploring exoplanets via alien wormholes, exploring strange and hostile worlds devoid of intelligent life yet full of mysteries. Each of these gets a few paragraphs, but five other types of campaign also get name dropped and receive a small paragraph. You could easily use Eclipse Phase to tell the story of gritty beat cops on Mars dealing with future crimes or a group of Firefly-esque travellers moving in a beat-up ship, always looking for jobs, or rebels fighting for freedom against the Military-Industrial complex on Jupiter . 

The Bad

The biggest problem with Eclipse Phase is inherent in the genre. Science fiction is simply trickier than fantasy in a roleplaying game perspective. You simply need to know and be comfortable with the science and how the physics works, especially the physics of microgravity and space travel. Just knowing the level of tech is tricky. When I ran a game, I had trouble remembering gravity wasn’t a thing in most spaceships (as artificial gravity doesn’t exist, unlike in most TV shows & movies), and my players assumed you could do things like “scan for lifeforms” or employ FTL communication, which are staples of stuff like Star Trek. There’s a lot of stuff that would be common knowledge for the characters but just isn’t there for the players. 

The combat system uses opposed rolls, which is a little slow, doubling the number of rolls for each attack and requires a little extra communication for each action. Plus, it introduces the opportunity for a great roll on the part of the player to be countered by a better roll from an NPC. Getting a couple superiour successes but still failing is deflating. 

The game is mostly based around percentile dice, but not exclusively. It uses other dice for damage, which is odd. The d6s aren’t used for much else and might just float around the table until combat comes up, or have to be fumbled from a dice bag when a sudden combat occurs.  

Speaking of weapons, these are located in the book’s combat section and not gear, which is funky and not where you’d expect to see weapons if coming from most D&D-type games. Heck, most RPGs in general. 

There’s limited art for gear. Art is pretty sparse at times in the book, being both expensive and hard to fit into a game book this full. But knowing what some of the fancy devices look like would have been nice. Having seen Aliens I have a good idea what an “Atlas Loader” might look like, but my knowledge likely isn’t universal. 

There’s very limited rules for spacecraft, and none for spaceship combat. You can’t have ship to ship battles easily, or even shipboard encounters where you navigate a debris field or are desperately escaping detection. They can’t function as morphs, so someone can’t “play” the ship, which feels like a huge missed opportunity. (But ships are assumed to have limited AIs, which do most of the flying and might have some personality.)

The setting has a lot of mysteries, which is a huge feature/bug. I like the idea of mysteries because the answer can be anything, which is always more interesting than something, which is inherently limited and finite. But just because the answer could be whatever I want in my campaign doesn’t mean my ideas are good and a team of writers familiar with the setting might not have better ideas. And it’s always tricky to know what mysteries are teases that will be answered in a planned future product (and thus you shouldn’t answer if you don’t want to run afoul of continuity) and what are unanswerable mysteries left for the GM. In fairness, Eclipse Phase is significantly better than many RPGs in this respect, having a two-page “secret history” section that reveals some of the hidden background details, but leaves it open to the gamemaster to retain this lore or ignore it.

Similarly, there’s a lot of content gaps. Elements that are introduced (like the Iktomi) but only get a handful of paragraphs of detail. Which is the problem with game systems produced by small publishers, who can release a very limited numbers of books each year. Being a setting that spans multiple solar systems, there’s ample room for sourcebooks and gazetteers, but only a handful will end up published. Still, there’s quite a few rules-light books for 1e that can flesh out the details if necessary, but new adversaries and NPCs will be few and far between. A GM planning a longer Eclipse Phase game will need to be prepared to homebrew and be comfortable with some game design. Thankfully, monsters and gear is pretty similar, so converting between 1e and 2e shouldn’t be too difficult. 

The Ugly

The rules are super late. The PDF of the core rulebook came out in July 2019 and the physical books haven’t shipped yet, but the Kickstarter was meant to be fulfilled in 2017. I didn’t really expect to see the books in 2017 (I know how small RPGs work) but was expecting 2018 fulfilment. Getting the PDFs a year later is a bit of a harsh delay. But it does make it seem less likely the game will receive additional support anytime soon, and makes me wary of supporting future Kickstarters. I would absolutely prefer to have a good product than one rushed out the door to meet an arbitrary deadline, but the delay is still worth noting. 

The pregens are neat but don’t have as much information as I would like. You can’t run the character easily with just the pregen, and there’s stuff on the sheet I’m not sure I understand. I had to spend quite a while trying to hunt down some aspects. 

Characters start off almost as experts. You can pretty effortlessly hit the 80% skill cap at character creation, being the master of a skill, leaving you less room to expand. There’s not much room to get that much better at your chosen skill or niche. If your players need to constantly advance and level up, the system might not be as satisfying as a level based system. 

The Awesome

The rulebook starts out right away with a message about gender and the use of pronouns. And later sections of the book discuss sexuality and gender. By its very nature, Eclipse Phase is very genderqueer and genderfluid. Which isn’t new to this edition: 1e used the “singular they” back in 2009.

The introduction also lays out the politics and bias of the authors, which the game wears on its sleeve. Eclipse Phase can be a very political game, and the authors self-identify as “radical, liberatory, inclusive, and antifascist”. What I enjoy is that they come out and declare “If you support bigotry or authoritarianism in any form, Eclipse Phase is not the game for you.” 

There is an expansive list of recommended reading & viewing. Two full pages of fiction, comics, movies, and even other RPGs. 

I like that the setting is divorced from an actual year, with dating being tracked by the time since “the Fall”. It’s at least 90 years in the future, but could easily be 110 or even 150. Not being tied to a hard year makes it more future proof (unlike, say Star Trek, that had to wrestle with the absence of a 3rd world war in 1990 or Cyberpunk 2020, which has to continually shift the date forward despite the date being in the title). 

The Gamemastering section includes the usual tips but also includes advice on how to handle the issues created by future tech and potential player abuse (likely from dealing with past attempts at abuse), such as creating an army of doppelgangers or gaming the system to rapidly gain skills in VR. 

Final Thoughts

I loved the world and style of Eclipse Phase when I discovered the ruleset back in 2011. But, at the time, the rules felt too heavy and character generation too dense for a game I would likely use for mini-campaigns and one-shots. With some reluctance, I set the game aside and moved onto other systems. 

With Eclipse Phase 2nd Edition, the game is not only back on my radar, but has been simplified enough that it has jumped right to the top of my “to run” list. Very likely the next time I need a one-off game session or need a two or three session game between campaigns I’ll look to Eclipse Phase.

The setting is excellent and bursting with story ideas. The concept of body swapping is engaging. The execution and world building is top notch.

I think fans of the 1st Edition of the game will still like this edition. (At least I hope so.) The world and setting is unchanged and the game seems much smoother, but retains the basics of the system. Just by trimming down the skill list and ease of character creation & morph changing, the game feels much more accessible to new players, and easier to run for side campaigns or mini-games.

Shameless Plugs

If you liked this review, you can support me and encourage future reviews.

I have a number of PDF products on the DMs Guild website, including a bundle of my Ravenloft books including the newly released Cards of Fate and my FIRST adventure on the Guild, Smoke, Snow & Shadows. Others include my first level 1 to 20 class, the Tactician, Rod of Seven Parts, Traps, Diseases, Legendary Monsters, a book of Variant Rules.

Additionally, the revision of my book, Jester David’s How-To Guide to Fantasy Worldbuilding is on DriveThurRPG, available for purchase as a PDF or Print on Demand! (Now in colour!) The book is a compilation of my worldbuilding blog series, but all the entries have been updated, edited, and expanded to almost two-hundred pages of advice on making your own fantasy world.

Plus, I have T-shirts available for sale over on TeePublic!

Five years after the Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set launched the 5th edition of D&D, publisher Wizards or the Coast has released a new introductory boxed set, the Dungeons & Dragons Essentials Kit. Unlike the Starter Set—which was designed more for introducing established players to 5e—this product is designed with new players & Dungeon Masters in mind. It contains everything you need to get started with D&D, both playing and running the game.

What It Is

A $25 boxed set, the Essentials Kit has two 64-page softcover books, a single small poster map (double sided with an overland map on one side and two map on the other), a thin cardboard DM screen (not quite full sized), and eight cardstock pages of perforated cards. There are also several blank character sheets and a foldable box to hold the cards once they’ve been separated. There’s also a full set of dice and a flyer. 

The several pages of cards include nine sidekicks (with a picture on one side and a personality on the other), quest cards (that repeat the quest text), cards for all the magic items, condition cards, and even an initiative cards. There are also a few combat step-by-step cards, like you often seen in board games, which spell out your options each turn. In total there are 81 cards printed on nine pages of cardstock. 

Both books are full colour and have slick, glossy pages, although the rulebook is a mix of full colour art and sketched line art. The pieces in this book are a mixture of new pieces and recycled artwork. The first book has rules for character creation and the rules for playing the game. The second is the adventure Dragon of Icespire Peak. This “adventure” is really a collection of small quests and encounter locations: three starter quests for level 1-2 characters, 3 follow-up quests for level 3-4 characters, and 3 later quests for level 5-6 characters. By the end of the adventure, PCs should be at or nearing 7th level. There are an additional five encounter locations that might be encountered on the travels or based on how encounters unfold. 

This adventure booklet ends with 33 monster statblocks: all the monsters featured in the adventure, including three NPCs. Most of these monsters are in the Monster Manual and most feature recycled art alongside the monsters. 

The Good

I’ve been critical in the past of starter sets for 3e and 4e for being “cheap” $20 products that barely provide a long weekend of gaming, making the cost high for the time spent playing. Small boxes that only get a character through a couple levels and a handful of encounters. A mere taste of the game. In stark contrast, the Essentials Kit is great value for the price, which is just $5 more than the Starter Set. In addition to all the other odds and ends, there’s the two large books plus a full set of dice including 4d6, 2d10, and even a second d20 for dis/advantage. With five classes, each with two subclasses, the rulebook even has more classes and subclasses than the Basic Rules! And unlike the Starter Set, which relied on pregens, this product included character creation! 

The rulebook contains the fighter, cleric, rogue, wizard, and, of all the potential fifth classes, the bard. I’m not sure why they went with the bard, which feels like an odd choice. But oh well. 

The rulebook is pretty useful, being a nice, small version of the core rules. This would be handy for many Dungeon Masters to keep by their side, even after moving onto the full rules, allowing them to reference the rules while leaving the Player’s Handbook in the player’s hands. Especially if you plan of DMing while travelling (such as to a convention or in-store Adventurer’s League game), as it’s much lighter and more portable than a 320-page hardcover.

The included DM screen is really focused on the basics, with a description of the common actions along with what you can do each turn, conditions, a summary of Concentration, and the usual tables. Very useful for new DMs and it has a small presence at the table. I actually rather like the small size and reduced footprint on the tabletop. 

The “adventure” is less of a single story and more of a series of small 1-3 page micro-adventures. You can easily knock out two or three adventures in a medium length game session. This means the product is a useful source of maps and inspiration, as the quests and locations can be recycled or modified for use in a home game. It begins with a quick introduction to DMing and running the game as well as a very nice description of what a DM is and does. There’s even a quarter page of quick tips for DMing and a few paragraphs on handling improvisation. 

Like the Starter Set, the adventure takes place in the small village or Phandalin. You could probably combine the two sets nicely, mixing and matching quests and dungeons and making things more of a sandbox. If doing so I’d replace the green dragon in that book with the white one here and maybe slow advancement down a smidge.

Prior to the adventure is a small one-page description of the Forgotten Realms and area around Neverwinter in the northern Sword Coast. This isn’t limited to the area of the adventures, leaving some room for Dungeon Masters to add their own adventures following this box, moving to Neverwinter or the Mere of Dead Men. And if they don’t, following the adventure is a description of most of the published storyline adventures to date, giving each a blurb so new DMs have an idea of where to look for inspiration next.

The initial three adventures also seem designed to introduce new players to D&D elements, like secret doors (the dwarven quest), exploring and hunting for an enemy (gnome quest), and negotiating instead of fighting (midwife quest). There’s hidden treasure, and traps, and NPCs to interact with. There are a couple fun NPCs, like the mayor who hides in his house and slides coins under the crack beneath the door.

Like the Starter Set, this product features a dragon. Because the game is Dungeons & Dragons. Unlike that earlier box, the dragon doesn’t just appear in the middle of the adventurer unannounced. The dragon is a continual presence that is disrupting the area, causing monsters to be displaced and townsfolk to quake in fear. It’s the common element that connects all the disparate encounters without being a constant physical threat. So when the time comes to fight the dragon, you’re prepared and it feels climatic. 

I like how each monster entry has the illustration by the monster. I disliked how the monster pictures in the Starter Set were randomly scattered throughout the book.

Included in the rulebook are the newly published rules for sidekicks, which allow for for 1-on-1 play. Encounters often have a variable amount of opponents, with one creature for every player. And if you don’t use the sidekick for their intended purpose, they’re useful for rounding out the population of the village. The sidekick rules are fun, and might be interesting to hack for other games, being useful for hirelings or squires. Or even guest PCs dropping into a campaign.

The Bad

While I love that the rulebook lets you build and customize your character, it would have been nice to also have some pregens for quicker games where you want to jump right into the adventure. Not everyone wants to spend the first session just building characters.

As characters can choose their first quest from a list of three, each of the starter missions could be the group’s first encounter. As such, none of these encounters really gives a “first encounter” walkthrough. It might have been nice to begin with a random encounter on the road that could have served as a template for encounters and running fights.

Phandalin doesn’t get any more attention or details in this product, and there are no new residents or inhabitants. There’s actually fewer, as this product doesn’t try to work in a contact for each of the five Adventurers League factions. 

Most of the adventures are a little too simple and entirely combat focused. No puzzles or riddles, no investigation or mysteries, few traps, and very limited exploration. There’s few that make use of creative thought, problem solving, or even diplomacy. You complete most of the quests by smacking things until they stop moving. And while there’s some magic by way or items and spells, there’s few magical places. Locations of wonder. 

Encounters are often fairly hard, especially for one player. Most of the 1st level encounters are against CR 2 creatures that can drop a player character in a single solid hit, especially if previously injured. The CR 3 manticore is particularly deadly, and could take out a party of three 1st level characters in a single round. Ostensibly, this should be a social encounter where you negotiate with the beast, but it’s presented as an immediate threat and new players are unlikely to realize how deadly it is until they’re halfway to a TPK. When running this encounter, my player never even considered the flying lion-beast could talk. And even if they had, the encounter is presented as one with an innocent in immediate jeopardy.

Similarly, there’s not a lot of alternatives to high DC checks. In a regular party, you have two or three changes to roll well and recover from a failure. With one player… less so. 

There’s also no travel encounters or side encounters on the road. A page of encounters on the road would have been nice, even if they recycled monsters or were just interesting locations or travelling merchants. Moving rapidly between quests feels like a video game: you fast travel to a location, hit things until they explode in treasure, then bamf back to the homebase for your reward.

The Ugly

I’ll start by whining: this product was exclusive to the United States for the summer. From almost two months, this product was only available in Target stores. However, Target closed all its Canadian stores several years ago, so this product was unavailable in D&D-loving Canadia for the entirety of the summer vacation window. (Or towns with a Wal-Mart or some other box store instead of a Target.) Which means kids on holidays with ample free time (i.e. the perfect audience for this product) could not buy a copy. Ditto this seasonal working father who had the summer off with his 8yo son, which would have been great for some geeky indoctrination and paternal bonding. 

I’m a little sad the image of the Dungeon Master screen isn’t included in the digital file on DnDBeyond. That image would be fan-tucking-fastic as a desktop wallpaper. 

I also wish the sidekicks had been more imaginative rather than just slightly weaker adventurers. You can easily imagine a horse or wolf sidekick or a juvenile owlbear. (Or a miniature giant space hamster.) Pets are super popular with younger players, and it would be neat to have an Ash & Pikachu dynamic between the PC and their sidekick.  And despite exclusively being humanoid, the sidekick statblocks use “it” as a pronoun rather than the now standard singular “they”. “It” is fine for most monsters, but not people.

The Awesome

The adventure makes regular use of common magic items, so players can regularly receive magical treasure without upsetting the balance of the game. Plus, most common magic items are just fun and can evocatively define/flavour a character. Similarly, there’s a friendly skeletal horse! Getting a unique undead mount is fun and the kind of unique, memorable treasure people will talk about for years.

In addition to the few magic items, there is also a charm: a small boon that can be used a few times before its magic fades. I love when adventures give unique powers like that. (Even if, as a consumable, most players will hoard it rather than use it and risk “wasting” the power.)

The back side of the included product flyer has several QR codes, one of which unlocks a digital copy of the adventure on DnDBeyond: the 5th Edition digital toolset. And there’s a discount code for 50% off the Player’s Handbook. (Or rather, 50% off the checkout price when you buy the PHB; I’d purchased a few subclasses and options already, so my PHB was already discounted, so I received slightly less of a discount than if I had never bought anything. But that’s getting nitpicky.)

Theoretically, there will be three follow-up adventures online as well, for adventurers of levels 7, 9, and 11. At the time of this writing these are still forthcoming, but it’s a neat way of expanding the content of the box into an adventure that rival the length of most of the hardcover adventures. It expands the scope of the adventure & product without increasing the cost on the box.

I like that the box includes condition cards. I am stunned that neither WotC nor Gale Force 9 has done an official set of condition cards. That seems like a no-brainer product that would be an insta-buy for most DMs. (I find them so useful, I ended up making my own.)

In the section describing “Continuing the Adventure”, the page not only mentions the official site and DnDBeyond.com but also the Dungeon Master’s Guild. I like that they’re pushing the Guild as a source of content, which also encourages new players to homebrew and share their designs.

Final Thoughts

The D&D Essentials Kit is a decent starter box. Arguably one of the best starter boxes D&D has ever done. Because it includes character generation and tries to walk brand new players through the game, it’s an excellent product for players new to RPGs in general and D&D in specific. And the sidekick system and design of the adventures is a novel addition that nicely distinguishes this product from prior attempts. Unlike the Starter Set, which was a rote product designed to hit checkboxes of what was expected in a new player kit, the Essentials Kit innovates and tries to add some surprises, such as the quest and magic item cards and the sidekick rules. Even the adventure tries to innovate slightly, being a series of connected quests that can be knocked out during a lunch break. 

Sadly, the included rulebook doesn’t make it easier to consume the rules or start playing than downloading the free Basic Rules. You still need to read through one or two dozen pages of solid text. The box doesn’t present the rules any more simply, or make playing any easier.

I do wish a little more work an imagination could have been put into the quests. A little investigation and problem solving and perhaps a puzzle or two. Highlight the different ways of playing D&D and different types of adventure you can run. As presented, the quests are not only generic but a tad repetitive. While a skilled dungeon master should easily be able to take what’s written in this product and turn it into a memorable and interesting encounter, the whole point of starter sets is that the DM isn’t skilled and needs that extra hand.

Despite these complaints, this product really raises the bar for D&D starter boxes, and is one of the best boxed sets for new players D&D has ever produced. 

Shameless Plugs

If you liked this review, you can support me and encourage future reviews.

I have a number of PDF products on the DMs Guild website, including a bundle of my Ravenloft books including the newly released Cards of Fate and my FIRST adventure on the Guild, Smoke, Snow & Shadows. Others include my first level 1 to 20 class, the Tactician, Rod of Seven Parts, Traps, Diseases, Legendary Monsters, a book of Variant Rules.

Additionally, the revision of my book, Jester David’s How-To Guide to Fantasy Worldbuilding is on DriveThurRPG, available for purchase as a PDF or Print on Demand! (Now in colour!) The book is a compilation of my worldbuilding blog series, but all the entries have been updated, edited, and expanded to almost two-hundred pages of advice on making your own fantasy world.

Plus, I have T-shirts available for sale over on TeePublic!

Review: The Sassoon Files

Newcomer to the RPG scene is the indie publisher Sons of the Singularity. Founded in 2018 by two gamers who met while living in China, it makes sense that their first book would also be set in China. The Sassoon Files is a set of four adventure scenarios. It’s identified as “A sourcebook for the Call of Cthulhu and Gumshow Role Playing Games” and was funded by Kickstarter, where it raised $25k over its goal of $5k. 

The book gets its odd name from real world historical figure Victor Sassoon (1881-1961), who is the primary quest-giver for the four scenarios, making him the common element in each story. Sassoon is a particularly famous figure in the area, and is a member of the important and wealthy Sassoon Family. (Of which, hair stylist Vidal Sassoon is not a member as far as my research revealed.) Victor serves as the bridge, if you will.

Disclaimer: A complimentary review copy of the PDF was provided by the publisher.

What It Is

The Sassoon Files is a 209-page product that is currently available as a PDF and will be available as a physical printed product. The book is technically in colour, however, much of the art along with the page backgrounds are greyscape so the colour is very muted. Much of the artwork in the book is black-and-white photographs: actual photos from the era and of the book’s setting. 

This is clearly an indie publication in appearance. It doesn’t look amateurish and a lot of work was clearly put into the product, but it does lack the higher production values of larger publishers. But it’s not a slick, high quality work like you’d expect from a Paizo, FFG, or Modiphius. But this doesn’t affect the quality of the adventure or the writing.

The book uses Gumshoe SRD, which makes use of the Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution Unported License. Partnered with Chaosium Inc, likely to use the Call of Cthulhu logo and some intellectual property. Trail of Cthulhu was designed by Kenneth Hite using the Gumshoe System, which was created by Robin Laws, and is very focused on investigation. It also simultaneously supports Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition.

It begins with four-pages that very quickly summarize the real world history of the city of Shanghai. From there it jumps right into Lovecraftian lore with two-pages of Mythos adventure hooks set in the city. There’s then a two-page timeline, which focuses on the last hundred years, placing emphasis on 1924-27. A very short four-page description of the city and key locations is included, with many of these places being featured in the later adventures. There’s also three pages of “Dramatic Personalities”, which are divided between historical figures and ones created for the adventure. 

The bulk of the book is the four investigations: Strong Gates, Hidden Demons; Let Sleeping Dogs Lie; There is This One Girl; Curse of the Peacock’s Eye. Each adventure is around 40-pages. 

At the end of the book are some optional rules. The investigator faction rules provide advice for using some of the other noteworthy groups in the setting as the protagonists, such as members of the local Communist group or the Green Gang. There’s three pages of “Campaign Drivers”, which are additional scenes that can prompt story-related events and activities. Lastly, the book has four pages of lore-sheets, which are informational handouts the players can read. 

The Good

The adventures make good use of the setting, taking advantage of Shanghai’s status as an international city as well as Chinese history. They’re not generic scenarios that happen to set in Shanghai, or are Chinese in name only. You could maybe convert some of the adventures into being set in a Western city with a pronounced Chinese population, such as San Francisco, but you’d have to make significant adjustments to explain some story elements.

The book uses magenta ink to differentiate rules text for Call of Cthulhu from the mechanics for Trail of Cthulhu, which are the regular black. This has the benefit of making the mechanics and rules really pop, making it easy to find on a page. This might be something even larger publishers could take away from this product in terms of adventure design.

The first adventure features a neat flow chart for its scenario. This is neat and visually shows the flow of the narrative and side scenes I wish the others also did this.

I quite like that each scenario includes optional encounters and scenes. You don’t need to hit each scene or talk to every NPC to get all the clues or solve the mystery. It’s always better to have more clues to follow than you need.

In addition to their read aloud introductions, the information known by NPCs that can be relayed to the investigators—provided they ask the right questions—is nicely formatted as simple bullet points. This is direct and concise, and works very well with investigation-focuses adventures. 

Each of the four scenarios includes five pregenerated characters, with their rules for both game systems. These pre-gens are a nice mix of ethnicities and genders, and are a very multinational group. There are replacement investigators if one dies or goes insane, or you have a mix of players doing the adventures allowing the investigators to rotate in-and-out. Having 20 fully statted investigators with a moderately detailed backgrounds is useful for many Cthulhu-mythos games, because you never know when you’re going to need a quick replacement character.

While the art is mostly black-and-white public domain photographs, these are very evocative. It really emphasises the reality of the city. You’re looking at an actual place, full of actual people.

The Bad

The biggest issue with this product has little to do with the product itself and more with the content. This book and the setting really focuses on a time of racism and when the scars of European colonialism were still pretty fresh. Colonialism in gaming is something of an issue in recent years, so this book is one big trigger. But in fairness to the product itself, it didn’t seem to romanticise the colonialism of Shanghai or ignore the racism, and there is even a sidebar on page 10 drawing attention to this fact.

The book provides some history for the city and very, very brief descriptions of the various parts of the city, focusing on landmarks and key locations. I would have appreciated some more. Little descriptions or other elements to help me bring a city I have never visited to life at my game table. 

Most of the scenarios are Investigation heavy and combat light. This is fine if the players know what they’re getting into, but sometimes the players need that incidental encounter as a change of tone. If you know that going in, this shouldn’t be an issue, but it’s something to be aware of if using these adventures to introduce someone to Mythos-based games.

There are some pretty big boxes of read aloud text. There’s a finite length you can make read aloud text boxes before the players begin to tune out the description and get antsy. Be prepared to take breaks between monologues and give the players brief opportunities to take minor reactions or otherwise respond. Because in an investigation, read aloud text can have vital clues,c and it’s easy for players to miss key information as their attention wandered. 

The stat blocks are rather plain: just walls of text. Which is fine for the short NPC sidebars, but the pregenerated characters could have used some more formatted. They would have really benefited from some shading or stylized tables. 

The fourth scenario spends a lot of time outside of Shanghai. Which is a tad awkward given the selling feature of the books are adventures in Shanghai.  But it still starts in Shanghai and is still focused on the region.

The Ugly

One of the adventures features a Doctor Henry Bones. Groan. That’s going to derail the session as people begin quoting Temple of Doom. I know that movie began in Shanghai (albeit a decade later), but maintaining the mood in a horror game is a finicky thing. This is pretty easily fixed at the table by referring to him as “Professor” Bones instead. 

I dislike the map. It’s very artistic and matches the tone: which makes sense as it’s an actual map of the city from 1935. But it’s not not easy to read or particularly useful for running the scenarios, as it’s very busy. It works, and the locations are easy enough to identify, being written in red, but there’s a lot of extraneous details. Without asking a small indie publisher to pay for an expensive map, I think I would have preferred a fully detailed map on one page for reference (or handouts) with a second version that was partially transparent so the locations really stood out from the background. 

But, as complaints go, this is one fixable with 5-minutes in Photoshop before running a scenario.

The Awesome

I wasn’t familiar with the history of Shanghai prior to reading this book. Which is a pretty big gap in my knowledge given it’s the second most populous city in the world. But after reading this book, I’m curious to find out more. It’s fascinating to me that there was this multicultural international city a little under a thousand kilometers from Beijing. 

Because of this, I appreciate how much the book makes use of actual historical events and people, as seen in the Dramatic Personalities section. The gangs listed were actual gangs of the era, such as the Green Gang. It blends the truth and the fiction together quite nicely, while also striving to be respectful of real world personages. When it does portray a long-dead historical figure as “evil” it even includes a sidebar discussing their choice to do, and how that individual is seen as villainous locally (while also acknowledging scholarly dispute). 

I love that in addition to four fully written scenarios, there are also ten one-paragraph adventure hooks expanding out the city. These are very useful for side quests, red herrings, or expanding out the four scenarios into a longer campaign. And these are an opportunity to show how other aspects of the Mythos work in China and the city.

A couple scenarios begin with brief flashbacks, with the players taking the role of expendable and short-lived NPCs. It’s a technique for providing necessary background information that I’ve long been fond of, and is very useful in an investigation style adventure. Especially when the characters should have some background knowledge of local events and the world that the players might be missing. 

The adventures are self-contained, but can work together, with a few story threads and characters that appear in multiple adventures. And the fourth story is particularly dramatic and climactic in terms of scope.

Final Thoughts

It’s hard for me to be too critical of The Sassoon Files because it is written and published by two new creators, with few RPG publishing credits. So I can’t come down hard on little things like some poor formatting and layout choices. The fact that they published a book is praiseworthy and no small accomplishment, let alone something as audacious as Lovecraftian adventures in a setting very, very different from Essex County, Massachusetts. 

The Sassoon Files does what it sets out to do. It’s four scenarios for Cthulhu-focused games set in the traditional era but in an nontraditional location. It provides enough information to run the adventures, with a little additional details for the city. There’s not quite enough here to run an extended series of adventures, it’s an adequate baseline and a little online research should be enough to fill in any gaps. And the information provided does expand the reader’s knowledge of the era and city in surprising ways. After reading a few loresheets, the players might feel like they possess more of their character’s common knowledge regarding politics and current affairs. (Current as of the 1920s at least.)

If you want to run a one-shot Cthulhu game in a setting as far away from Masachussas as possible, this will be a good choice or product. Similarly, if you want to try out a game of Trail of Cthulhu to see how that system handles while also supporting a fledgling RPG publisher, this is also a good product.

Shameless Plugs

If you liked this review, you can support me and encourage future reviews.

I have a number of PDF products on the DMs Guild website, including a bundle of my Ravenloft books including the newly released Cards of Fate and my FIRST adventure on the Guild, Smoke, Snow & Shadows. Others include my first level 1 to 20 class, the Tactician, Rod of Seven Parts, Traps, Diseases, Legendary Monsters, a book of Variant Rules.

Additionally, the revision of my book, Jester David’s How-To Guide to Fantasy Worldbuilding is on DriveThurRPG, available for purchase as a PDF or Print on Demand! (Now in colour!) The book is a compilation of my worldbuilding blog series, but all the entries have been updated, edited, and expanded to almost two-hundred pages of advice on making your own fantasy world.

Plus, I have T-shirts available for sale over on TeePublic!

Review: Eberron – Rising From the Last War

Way back in ye old days of 2002, publisher Wizards of the Coast launched the “Fantasy Setting Search”, a competition to create a new world for Dungeons & Dragons. The winner was Keith Baker’s Eberron: chosen out of the 11,000 entries. Eberron is pitched as “D&D meets Indian Jones and The Maltese Falcon.” Eberron was mashed together with choice elements from the top 3 settings of the search and released in 2004. A minor revision of the setting was released in 2009 for 4th Edition D&D. And now there’s a 5th Edition update, Rising from the Last War. 

For the uninitiated, Eberron is a dungeon punk world. The dungeon punk world really. It’s often mistaken for steampunk, but clearly used magic rather than psuedo-science. It’s a world where magic dominates the world rather than technology, creating many modern conveniences. The setting takes many cues from the 1920s, with a gritty noir aesthetic and a world recovering after a brutal and lengthy war that left no one happy so another war is looming. It’s a nice, big setting where you can have a campaign as urban detectives working to solve crimes in the big city, relic hunters exploring trap-filled ruins for treasure, plucky reporters travelling the continent for the next big scoop, former soldiers trying to find a new life during peacetime, and so much more.

What It Is Rising From the Last War?

This book is effectively an update of the Eberron Campaign Setting, which was originally published for 3rd Edition. Rising From the Last War is your standard full-colour Wizards of the Coast product. It uses a mix of modern and recycled art, pulling a few pieces from the vast catalogue of Eberron art done for 3rd and 4th Edition. These are modern enough it doesn’t stand out as recycled. 

In its 320-pages, Rising From the Last War contains four new races—the changeling, warforged, kalashtar, and shifter—along with reprinting the goblinoid and orc racial entries. There are also twelve “subraces”, which are the various Dragonmark Houses. These let you take the house as your race/subrace, swapping out racial features for the powers of a dragonmark. 

Included is the artificer, a full level 1-20 class with three subclasses: the battlesmith, the alchemist, and the artillerist. This is the first new official class for 5th Edition in a physical book. Following this in the character creation section is Group Patrons, which details allied organizations that could sponsor adventurers. This is a surprisingly hefty 38-pages.

A decent chunk of the book is a description of the setting, which occupies 48-pages. Each nation roughly gets a page of text, with some description of the other continents. There’s a description of the city of Sharn here filling 32-pages. Also in this section is a section on faiths, including different pantheons and philosophies, filling 10-pages. Advice on building adventures that fit the setting fills another 76-pages; this section details the themes of the setting, along with various factions and a few key events and regions. A short introductory adventure for a party of 1st level adventurers takes up 17 pages at the end of this chapter.

There’s also a small 7-page chapter on treasure, with descriptions of Dragonshards, some of the common magic items that make everyday life in Eberron so different, and some magic items for daring adventurers. The book ends with a Bestiatry that contains 30-odd new monster stat blocks, plus 7 new generic NPCs.

And at the end of the book is a poster map, which is bound into the spine and needs to be torn out along the perforated edge. One side has a map of the default setting of Khorvaire, the main continent. The flip side has the rest of the (tiny) globe. 

Wayfarer’s Disclaimer/ Rant

Content Warning: Negativity. If you just want to read a review of the book, skip this section.

In July of 2018, Wizards of the Coast released the Wayfinder’s Guide to Eberron on the Dungeon Master’s Guild. This 175-page e-book was designed to serve as an introduction to Eberron with a price of $19.99 on the Guild and $20 on DnDBeyond.com. WotC hyped it significantly, with WotC staff saying they would update it to include the artificer when that was released and update the races and dragonmark houses in that book to reflect the results of the playtests, before releasing the book as Print on Demand. Staff said that IF they did a hardcover Eberron book, the two products would be complementary, and have a different focus. That while the Wayfinder’s Guide focused on Sharn a theoretical Eberron book would focus on another part of the world or the Five Kingdoms as a whole. 

I snatched up the WGtE immediately. As relatively cheap PDFs seemed like an excellent way of offering support to the many, many past settings TSR released, and enabling those fans to set new campaigns in old settings without having to release numerous hardcovers into stores. (And because I had loose plans to run an Eberron campaign for 5e “eventually”; at the rate I get to play, this will be 2021 or ’22. Likely later.)

However, less than a year later, WotC announced Eberron: Rising From the Last War. A product which also does the deep dive into Sharn. A book which is NOT complementary and does NOT have a different focus. Instead, it largely reprints the material from the PDF, copying large sections of text word-for-word. I effectively paid $20 for playtest material—which was released free on the website. This was effectively early access to the Rising From the Last War, with no reduction on the final price for my $20 investment. Even on DnDBeyond https://www.dndbeyond.com/marketplace/source/eberron-rising-from-the-last-war , which has a system for reducing prices based on past investment & purchases, they’re treated like separate products. (I’ve heard from one person that owning Wayfinder’s Guide gave the buyer a $5 discount on Rising From the Last War, but I’ve seen no official statement from, DnDBeyond on this. But even then, just getting the races and subraces—which are provided by both—would be a $14 purchase.)

This upsets me greatly. First, because there’s so many classic D&D settings that haven’t been updated or received books—some for two or more editions—and we’re getting the same setting twice. Secondly, it makes me feel lied to and deceived by Wizards of the Coast and its staff. It makes me feel like I wasted $20 on a redundant PDF. This also negatively impacts my interest in future setting PDF products, which I almost certainly will not buy. 

BUT, all this drama is unrelated to the actual book, Eberron: Rising From the Last War, and thus is not relevant to a review of that product, and so will go unmentioned. While feeling exploited does impact my opinion of this book, I’m striving to keep my review seperate and focus on evaluating the product itself. 

I’m including this disclaimer in case any extra negativity slips through. If a passage seems extra snarky, this is probably why. 

The Good

I quite like Eberron, and this book is some good Eberron. While not my favourite setting (or even in the top 3), it’s a wonderful setting I’d recommend players old and new. It’s not Dark Sun, which is “D&D for people who hate everything about D&D but the rules”, instead twisting things just a little bit in unexpected ways that still make perfect sense. The setting is a fun mash-up of  Indian Jones and film noir, with a dash of Cthulhu Mythos slipped in for good measure.

In many ways, it’s D&D where it doubled down on a lot of the tropes while pushing others to the side. Alignment is sidelined, while magic and adventuring are turned to 11. And by design there are no established big heroes or high level noble NPCs running around. The PCs are the only heroes one needs to concern themselves with.

It’s also a big world with lots of different stories and adventures. It’s not Dragonlance where the world was designed with one story and one threat in mind, and every other story is added on later. There’s so many different areas and places, each with their own drama and adventures. You could run a half-dozen different Eberron campaigns that are all deeply enmeshed in the world and never touch on the same aspects. 

Most of the races seem more balanced than their playtest iteration. The warforged in general has been brought closer in line with other races (much to the chagrin of anyone currently playing one). The kalashtar retains its psionic flavour despite there being no psion/mystic class available at the moment, which probably helps the race as it works for other classes and archetypes. I’ve always been a fan of the shifter, viewing them as a decent take on the “weretouched” trope, the half-lychan, and these are decent, with some nice diversity among the different types of shifter.

I was initially unimpressed with this iteration of the artificer, but it has grown on me. I think it balances the desire to have the class function as a crafter, without having it churn out magic items effortlessly, or require the Dungeon Master to provide constant supplies of gold so the class can use its key abilities. The ability to just make a free magic item from a limited list works. And while I’m sad the alchemist loses the ability to make flasks of acid or fire,  it’s pretty easy to reflavour the acid splash or fire bolt cantrips. The designers even stepped back from having every build include a pet, which greatly improves the class, and it should appeal to more players.

This implementation of dragonmarks is also workable and balanced. A player won’t be broken or overpowered compared to the rest of the party because they have a dragonmark, nor are they required to sacrifice a rare feat/ ability score boost and they can be acquired at 1st level. By making them subraces, the rules also tie the dragonmarks to the appropriate races who make up that house, which is nice. Prior versions used the feat system, with races potentially being a prerequisite, but there was always this pressure to make the rules more open—as that’s how feats worked in 3e and 4—and there were often ways to qualify as other races. 

Patrons are a nice addition to the campaign setting. These feel like the book’s “new thing”, the addition to the game offered by this product (like the focus on Ravnica’s Guilds).  I like the idea of organizations, which can give players a goal for membership and advancement, while also providing adventuring hooks and easy antagonists. Each listed patron provides their allies & enemies as well as benefits of working with that patron, advice on building appropriate PCs as well as any related information like headquarters or even mission types.

The Bad

I’m less impressed with how the dragonmarked rules intersect with half-orcs and humans, where it feels like an entirely separate race and not  a subrace. Dragonmarked humans have little in common with other humans. You could reflavour the racial traits of someone with the Mark of the Sentinel and turn them into a brand new race (say, wardlings or guardiners) and no one would know. Which sounds silly until you remember the kalashtar, who are an independent race from humans, but are human in every way except mechanically. There’s not much separating how the book handles the kalashtar from how they handle a member of House Deneith (a Deneithian I guess).

(Flagrant Self-Promotion: I have my preferred way of handling dragonmarks. See the Shameless Plugs section at the end for a link.) 

There are no gnolls in the book. While orcs and goblinoids have a big place in the lore, mechanics for these have been released before (twice in the case of goblins). Eberron gnolls can be less evil than in other worlds as they lack the normal demonic ties, which was the reason they were previously excluded from books like Volo’s Guide to Monsters, and they’re a favourite race for many players. This would have been a nice place to slip in some gnoll love. 

The races are generally fine, but the changelings are a little anemic. Their primary power is still their shapechanging, which is almost a flavourful ability. It’s great in game, but doesn’t really affect the character’s balance. And while shifters are probably balanced, their signature shifting ability feels too short and overly focused on combat. I would have liked it to be 10 minutes and include some exploration features, like tracking. 

I’m disappointed by the lack of feats in general and racial feats in specific. Xanathar’s Guide to Everything added these for the races from the Player’s Handbook, but it seems unlikely a later expansion will offer a warforged feat and assume purchasers own this book. With options like the warforged juggernaut removed for players, this could have been a feat. 

(DMs Guild Adepts: Get on this!)

Evaluating the artificer, the base class is fine but I’m not wowed by all the subclasses. The alchemist is so-so: it’s low level feature is awkwardly random, and doesn’t scale well at higher levels. It’s presented as the “healer” subclass, but the amount of hit points it can restore just doesn’t keep up. The artillerist is also weird, being shown as the “wandslinger” in art, but is all about creating magical turrets.

Several of the trap magic items haven’t been changed since playtesting, and new ones added. For example, newly added is the prosthetic limb, which is basically flavour and lets you be an adventurer despite being down a limb. But using the limb costs an attunement slot, so you can use fewer magic items. You’d almost be better off with a mundane non-magical prosthetic. Likewise, the wand sheath is useless. Yes, it prevents the wand from being forcibly removed, but that’s a super niche situation. However, producing a wand from your belt or bandolier is an object interaction, while with the sheath it’s a bonus action. It’s a magic item that requires an attunement slot to make drawing a wand slower with the “benefit” that you can’t be disarmed of your wand. 

The Ugly

The biggest complaint is that there is no index! This is a game reference book. It’s something meant to be used at the table to hastily look up names of famous NPCs or cities. A lack of index makes it harder for DMs to use this book at the table and look up setting details. If using this book is significantly harder than using the Eberron Wiki then this book is problematic. 

Rising From the Last War greatly favours allies and antagonists over world lore and setting details. This is a feature/bug, as more knowledge of opposing forces and the bad guy’s motivations is undoubtedly better for making adventures. But setting details are what distinguishes Eberron from other worlds. You can transplant organizations to other settings (as 5e has demonstrated with elemental cults moving from Greyhawk to the Forgotten Realms) but moving locations and cultures is harder. 

A good DM can invent world details if they desire, but the principal reason you buy settings to avoid having to create the whole setting and locations. Plus, sometimes you’re just not inspired as a DM, and need to look-up details for a location. While you can always choose to ignore the book and invent places, this product doesn’t provide many details for the alternative. This book has significantly less lore and details on each of the Five Nation than either of the 4e and 3e campaign settings. Sometimes less than half as many words. 

For example, say your party of adventures leave Sharn for the adjacent King’s Forest. I can find nothing on the wood. Is it an enchanted forest of fey, and a manifest zone of Lamannia? Is it literally the forest of the king and a nature preserve? Or is a sparse wood that has been heavily felled to build the city?

The patrons are nice, but each takes-up 3 to 4 pages (with art), which feels excessive. I imagine they could have pulled that back to a page apiece, like the dragonmark houses, reducing that section from 38-pages (larger than the section on the nations) to easily half that size. And the adversary entries are also fairly long: I don’t know if we need as many words on the Aurum as on Breland.  

It’s a retcon, but I also wish they would have corrected the scales of the world, added a bit more distance between Khorvaire and Xen’Drik. As presented, the world of Eberron has a circumference of 16,000 miles, opposed to the 24,000 miles of the Earth. It’s under half the size of Earth. It’d be as small as Mars! 

The Awesome

It’s a small detail, but the fonts in this book are different but fun. They have an art deco vibe, that gives this book a very different feel. Just by looking differently than you expect from a fantasy RPG product you know Eberron is something else. 

There are little newspaper sidebars throughout the book, providing the view of the common people on certain dramatic subjects. These also subtly emphasize the 1920s vibe of the setting, and the general tone of the world. They also often provide small like adventure hooks and gossip, that can be common knowledge but may not be entirely reliable. 

There are some amazing pieces of art. There’s a lot of recycled pieces (mostly from the 3rd Edition book), but lots of new works that really show the world and places. Art that provides a tone for the world. 

There’s not only rules and a monster stat block of a jaeger-sized warforged colossus… there’s also a map of the interiour. 

Final Thoughts

If you don’t own a prior edition’s version of the Eberron setting (or the Wayfinder’s Guide to Eberron) but the setting sounds interesting, then I heartily recommend that you buy this book. There’s multiple new mechanical options as well as a great campaign setting that can send you on endless adventures. It’s a great setting and this is a solid introduction. 

Even if you’re just curious or use a homebrew setting there’s a lot of stuff here to inspire you or to steal. Changelings and shifters effortlessly fit into virtually every campaign setting. Even warforged can be made to work with a little imagination, be they tinker gnome created constructs in Dragonlance or twisted hybrids of flesh and steel in Ravenloft. And the artificer is a decent class, and arguably the best official execution of the concept. This is without mentioning the many patrons or antagonists that could be pulled out of the setting and placed in a homebrew world. 

However, while it is an excellent Eberron book, I don’t think it’s the best, let alone the most comprehensive. If you have the 3e Eberron Campaign Setting and/or the Wayfinder’s Guide, then it probably depends on your financial situation. There’s a lot of original content in this book, including more on the various organizations (both good and bad) along with new monsters. But you can find equivalent amounts of world lore in Wayfinder’s Guide, and significantly more lore in books from previous editions. If you have a shelf of Eberron books  then this book is going to give you little that you don’t already know. Ironically, the cheaper PDF might be the better option for those with extensive Eberron libraries. That said, you’re still not going to regret the purchase: it’s an excellent book with a focus on different aspects of the setting. You’re bound to learn something new or rediscover some old fact that you missed the first time. After reading this book you might come away with a renewed appreciation for some faction or look at a patron with a different light or even consider presenting a group you’ve never used before as the adversary of a campaign.

Shameless Plugs

If you liked this review, you can support me and encourage future reviews.

I have a number of PDF products on the DMs Guild website, including Spellscars, which doubles as my subsystem of choice for using Ebberon’s dragonmarks. Others include a bundle of my Ravenloft books; my adventure, Smoke, Snow & Shadows; my first level 1 to 20 class, the Tactician; and a book of Variant Rules. I also have a book with new artificer subclasses, a revision of an older product. 

Additionally, the revision of my book, Jester David’s How-To Guide to Fantasy Worldbuilding is on DriveThruRPG, available for purchase as a PDF or Print on Demand! (Now in colour!) The book is a compilation of my worldbuilding blog series, but all the entries have been updated, edited, and expanded to almost two-hundred pages of advice on making your own fantasy world.

Plus, I have T-shirts available for sale over on TeePublic!

Review: Alien Roleplaying Game

At the gaming table, no one can hear you scream. 

Okay… one to five other players can hear you scream, as well as the GM. But the GM doesn’t care: your screams sustain them.

I’m referring of course to the Alien Roleplaying Game by Free League Publishing, based on the movie franchise of the same name by 20th Century Fox (and now owned by Disney), while also incorporating and acknowledging prequeles by Ridley Scott (the director of the original film): Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. By default, the game is set three years after Alien 3, which means it’s also 200 years prior to Alien: Resurrection.

Free League (also known as Fria Ligan in their native Swedish) is a relative newcomer to the tabletop scene, but they came in with gusto. In the last five years they’ve published: Mutant: Zero, Coriolis , Tales from the Loop, and Forbidden Lands. And in the process they’ve collected a number of awards. They’ve often partnered with Modiphius Entertainment for publishing & distribution.

What It Is

A hefty 392-page book, Alien: The Roleplaying Game is a full colour hardcover with moody black pages, atmospheric art, and the majority of the text in small sidebar-like boxes. The book is basically presented as a lengthy series of largely self-contained sidebars. 

In addition to the book, the game makes use of custom six-sided dice and a deck of cards, but regular d6s and playing cards can be used in a pinch. 

The first dozen pages are a super brief introduction to the world, the tone, and the setting, which pretty much assume you know what the titular “aliens” are. Which is probably safe bet. From there we get 140-pages on characters and the rules of playing the game, including character creation, combat, gear, and the like. 

The book then delves into the setting, dealing with the technology (like FTL travel and cryogenics) as well as colonies and general lifestyle information. The world of 2183. There’s sections here on money, religion, law enforcement, and more. As this section deals with spaceships, there’s also space combat here. 

Then we move onto the 15-page section on “Your Job as a Game Mother”, as the system uses GM but tweaks the meaning. Then the book returns to the setting for 60-pages, with a lore dump on the government, hypercorps, and systems. There are something close to 16 planets briefly described in this section, most with a small adventure hook or a reason to visit. Some are horrible and some are pleasant and one is certain death. This is followed by 40-pages on alien species, including both the Engineers (of Prometheus) and a few new aliens, most of which are insect-based. (Possibly to explain the phrase “another bug hunt” in the early minutes of Aliens.) 

The book ends with a chapter on Campaign Play, with three types of campaign (space trucker, colonial marines, and colonists) followed by table after table for generating occupations, planets, solar systems, and more. Plus a few NPCs for good measure. This chapter includes a few locations and a mico-adventure set in Hadley’s Hope, the colony in Aliens.

The Good

The book features lots of moody art and super high production values. The book is very dark and atmospheric. There’s only a couple images set on brightly lit locations. Most images of the titular xenomorph are heavily shadowed, making it this dark, imposing figure. 

The rules are somewhat similar to the publisher’s earlier success, Tales from the Loop. The action resolution system for both games is seemingly simple: you roll a pool of dice equal to an Attribute + a relevant Skill. As few as 1 die and as many as 10 d6s. If you roll a “6” you succeed. Unlike Tales from the Loop, you only need a single success by default. This means you can just roll and say you succeed, rather than rolling and waiting to see if you hit the unknown target known by the GM.

A side effect of this, is it also allows the degree of success to be described narratively: such as succeeding with flying colours if you roll many 6s, or barely succeeding if you roll 8 dice with only a single 6. There’s also some nice added complexity with stunts, where you can trade additional successes for bonus effects. This might require a cheat sheet for new players (as there’s a lot of different options) but it’s something you can slowly introduce.

Characters are fairly simple. Like Tales from the Loop, characters possess four Attributes and twelve related Skills (three for each Attribute). In this game, PCs also have a few small talents, plus a few roleplaying elements. This is a rules-light narrative-heavy game, but with enough complexity to customize your character. You can specialize, without that choice being strictly flavour. 

The game uses custom dice, with special symbols on the “6” (a success symbol) and Stress dice with a symbol on the “1” and “6”. But easy enough to use regular d6s. I like having fun, customized dice as an option, but hate being forced to buy sets of expensive custom dice for the entire table. Thankfully this isn’t the case.

The game’s Stress mechanic is awesome. This is what really jumped out at me and made me pay attention to the game: as a horror game, you want to put fear and tension at the forefront, but this is tricky when you’re safe at a table with friends. In this game, you can add Stress by pushing a reroll .This lets you roll your entire dice pool again (increasing your chances of the vital success, or trying for more success to use for stunts) AND also adds additional dice to your pool that further increases your odds. However, this added die can cause you to panic when it come up as “1”. This leads to the neat effect that your odds of success get better when you’re stressed, but with the constant risk of total failure. As a system I’m reminded of Hunger dice in the new edition Vampire, but using them is a choice creating a risk/reward element. You’re rewarded for choosing for your character to become stressed, which also adds stress to the player every time they roll. 

Also employing dice is the game’s system of tracking resources, which is also pretty nifty. You track your air, food, power, and water at set times, rolling a number of dice equal to the current rating, which decreases when you fail a roll. Statistically, your resources decline quickly at first, and then slowly near the end, creating some immediate tension. The game doesn’t use the same system for ammunition, but this would be a very simple hack. 

The initiative system is card based, and players draw from a small deck of 10 cards to determine when they act in a combat round. It’s a system I don’t believe I’ve seen before. Cynically, it feels like an excuse to sell another accessory to make more money to pay off the expensive licence, but it has some neat effects. Like how you can swap cards with other players, allowing the limited opportunity to rearrange your initiative. And you can spend successes in combat to swap initiative with an enemy, which opens up some interesting strategic moves. And it’s relatively fast, so you don’t roll and consult or sheet, you just need to draw and display a card. 

It’s hard enough finding time to roll the pretty math rocks with friends, and there are so many amazing RPGs out there, it’s hard to play them all without committing to a long-term campaign. And so many games really excel as campaigns or expect to be your primary game system. The Alien RPG lets you choose if you’re doing a one-shot adventure (Cinematic play) or running a multi-session campaign, with variant rules for both styles of play. This is excellent. While I’m impressed enough by this game to want to try it and do a short game, I also know there’s a lot of game competition and multiple people jonesing to run campaigns, so doing more than a couple sessions of Alien might be hard. The book mostly confines itself to the four “canonical” movies, ignoring the crossovers with the Predators as well as the most comics and novels. It mentions that a few of these exist and gives a short suggesting reading list, and gives nods to a few stories, such as Aliens: Fire and Stone, while also mentioning Sevastopol Station, the setting of the video game Alien: Isolation. And I’m sure there are many more Easter Eggs that went over my head.

The Bad

You only succeed when you roll a six. This means 83.3% of the d6s you roll for a check are irrelevant. You need a dice pool of at least six dice to really feel comfortable with a check, which implies a high degree of competence and skill. According to the chart of probability on page 59, if you have a dice pool of 4 dice, you have a 50/50 chance of success. That said, this does encourage you to push the roll, which encourages the Stress mechanic. 

At 400-pages, the book is large for a one-shot. Large and thus expensive. But it’s not really as dense as you’d expect a 400-page tome to be. It’s really not space efficient. Because the book makes use of text in boxes (which are akin to sidebars) there’s lots of negative space. Each box has its decorative framing, and there’s space between the boxes and within the frame. The words per page is low. 

This sidebar formatting does make the entire book a relatively quick read, and keeps every subject relatively terse and focused, because sidebars rarely continue across pages. As an example, the standard (read: obligatory) “What is an rpg?” section is maybe a quarter-page. 

However, I felt I could have used some more information in a few places. Some clarification or extended examples. There are quite a few rules and mechanical elements listed once and then never really described elsewhere, and I’m uncertain if these are just understated aspects, or remains of vestigial design that never got edited out. As an example, page 103 describes the ways you can gain Stress, and most are fairly obvious and described elsewhere. Except one. You apparently also gain Stress if “You suffer one or more points of damage”. I dislike this, as it partially negates the choice aspect of gaining Stress, but it’s also not really mentioned elsewhere.

Meanwhile, the matte black pages are vulnerable to fingerprints. If you touch a page and haven’t just wiped your fingers on a sterile cloth, you will leave a mark. If you’re highly concerned about the quality of your books and keeping them pristine, you might want to wash often and watch how long you touch a page. Or invest in archivist gloves. 

I’m uncertain how I feel about ship combat being in the chapter on employment and lifestyle. It makes sense it’s by the starships, and it’s useful having it off to the side as an optional side-system. As you don’t expect dogfights or space naval battles in an Alien campaign. But it was a weird transition reaching that. And had I not noted where it was, finding those rules might require a lot of flipping. 

The Ugly

The character sheet in the back of the book looks like the rest of the book: light-grey shaded boxes overtop a black background. It’s the type of character sheet you print when your printer has offended you and you want to punish it.

Edit: There IS a printer-friendly version. It’s just on the Fria Ligan site and not the Alien RPG site. It’s here.

Because the book confines itself to the relatively canonical, it doesn’t delve too much into the fate of the USCSS Covenant nor is its destination planet of Origae-6 detailed, leaving that for a theoretical movie that might never occur. So how the Xenomorph XX121 species gets from that colony to the rest of the galaxy (including Sevastopol Station or even LV-426) is unknown. A side effect of this decision is that there are few good hooks for where xenomorphs or eggs could come from or be encountered, apart from tying them to the one known ship on LV-426. 

The Awesome

The gamemaster is identified as the “Game Mother”. It keeps the same initials, but means the pronouns “she/her” can be used. I like anything that subtly implies women have a role at the game table. Especially in a franchise as largely gender neutral as Alien. Plus, “Mother” is a neat reference to the ship’s computer in the first movie. (Aka MU/TH/UR 6000; which I will admit to having forgotten until I rewatched the film a few weeks back.)

Characters have a lot of little roleplaying hooks. Each character has a “signature item”, which is just this little useful or emotionally significant item. One example is actually a tattoo, so it doesn’t have to have a firm mechanical use. Likewise, each character has an Agenda. This is your goal, but favoured in a nice, ominous way. You’re also expected to have a “buddy” and a “rival” in the party. This does push some PvP aspects, but creates appropriate drama and tension that maps to the movies. Such as Ripley being initially antagonist to Bishop, only to grow to appreciate him.

There are four Attributes, each with three associated Skills. I appreciate the symmetry. It’s the little things that make a neat RPG system…

The need for a printer friendly version aside, I rather like the whole look of the character sheet, especially the landscape format. It’s non-traditional. The paired attributes/ skills also makes for an interesting character sheet with those aspects front and center, right in the middle of the page rather than off in a corner. 

Final Thoughts

A month ago I had little interest in the Aliens Roleplaying Game. It looked okay and sure did get a lot of hype, but I generally thumb my nose at licensed RPGs (despite owning many);  the hit : miss ratio is unfavourable and there have been some pretty bad licensed RPGs over the years. Plus, I always felt the Aliens universe was better off being limited to a couple movies—so the story can have a beginning and an end—rather than being a big, sprawling franchise. 

But then a friend got the book and let me flip through their copy and read the rules.

And I realized I had been so completely wrong. After just a few minutes I was damned if I didn’t just want to get my own copy, but also run a game session or two in the Alien universe. And I knew I had to write a review, sharing my wrong-ness with the entire Internet. 

While the concept of the game is just what you’d expect, the execution blew me away. While I’m an ardent proponent that “system doesn’t matter” and that you can have fun playing any RPG with the right people, this game was a firm reminder that a good system makes you WANT to play that game. You choose to play it over other systems. And this system makes me want to run a story using its rules. 

The feedback system for the Stress mechanic is great, and I want to steal it for my own design so badly. I adore that it primarily relies on player choices and risk/reward to build tension. The growing unease as your character’s stress increases, like a game of Dread with dice instead of the Jenga tower: a mechanic I’ve toyed with a few times but never managed to work satisfactorily. And this game nails it. (This ruleset would work really nicely for many other genres, and I’d like to port the rules into a zombie apocalypse game or other horror genre.) And the rest of the game seems quick and easy to learn with just a dash of customization.

Meanwhile, the book really works hard to capture the diverse types of Alien story, from space horror the action, from blue collar truckers in space to heavily armed colonial marines, while referencing several past sources both film, novel, and comic. The titular aliens are only the beginning.

Shameless Plugs

If you liked this review, you can support me and encourage future reviews.

I have a number of PDF products on the DMs Guild website, including a bundle of my Ravenloft books including the newly released Cards of Fate and my FIRST adventure on the Guild, Smoke, Snow & Shadows. Others include my first level 1 to 20 class, the Tactician, Rod of Seven Parts, Traps, Diseases, Legendary Monsters, a book of Variant Rules.

Additionally, the revision of my book, Jester David’s How-To Guide to Fantasy Worldbuilding is on DriveThurRPG, available for purchase as a PDF or Print on Demand! (Now in colour!) The book is a compilation of my worldbuilding blog series, but all the entries have been updated, edited, and expanded to almost two-hundred pages of advice on making your own fantasy world.

Plus, I have T-shirts available for sale over on TeePublic!

Review: Witcher RPG

In recent years, the Witcher Saga has moved from the sidelines of popular culture to smack in the forefront of nerdom. 

The origins of the series are Polish. The first short story, Wiedźmin (which translates as “The Witcher”), was published in 1986 for the magazine Fantastyka‘s short story contest. From there, author Andrzej Sapkowski wrote numerous additional short stories, which were collected in two anthologies (The Last Wish and Sword of Destiny), published in the early 90s in Poland and translated into English in 2007 and 2015 respectively. These stores led to a series of five novels, published between 1994 and 1999 and followed by a stand-alone novel in 2013. This series was translated into English and published in North America between 2008 and 2017 (with the 2013 novel being translated in 2018). 

Yes, this does mean the anthology that led directly into the novels was published seven years after said novels.

From this literary foundation, video game company CD Projek decided to make video games in the world, set after the events of the novels. The Witcher was released in 2007 with sequels released in 2011 and 2015. 

The overwhelming success of the third game, The Wild Hunt is likely what led to small RPG publisher R. Talsorian Games licencing the franchise and releasing a role-playing game in 2018. 

What It Is

The Witcher RPG is a 335-page book available in hardcover and PDF, although at the time of writing physical copies are almost sold out. The book is full colour with slightly textured page backgrounds and simple headers. It features a lot of full colour art, but much of this seems pulled from the novels and video games—the lion’s share likely from Gwent cards; the characters and details like their clothing match their appearance in Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

The game makes use of its own roleplaying system rather than borrowing an existing system. It makes use of both 10-sided dice and 6-sided dice, with the d10s being used for most action resolution (skill checks) and the d6s being damage dice. No d20s required. (Although I do wonder why it went with 1d10 rather than 2d6 and just requiring the one die.)

The book uses a standard class/ profession & species/ race method of character creation. There are 4 races (Witchers, Elves, Dwarves, and Humans) and 9 professions (Bards, Craftsmen, Criminals, Doctors, Mages, Men At Arms, Merchants. Priests, & Witchers). These professions are mostly packages of known skills and some gear. Each profession also has a “signature skill”, along with a simple skill tree of three paths of three skills that characters can specialize in.  

Character creation also features an extended Lifepath system where you randomly determine your background, including the number of your siblings and their fate. 

The book includes a fairly expansive description of the world. 30-pages is spent detailing the nations and regions of the setting (aka the Continent). This includes both religions and organizations. The default era of the game is between The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings and Witcher 3. (Witcher 1 is set five years the end of the novels, with Witcher 2 following immediately after and 3 being six months after that.) Despite the default era, enough information is present to loosely play in earlier eras; if one is familiar with the setting based on the novels or even the TV series, there’s enough information here to adventure a generation or two before “the present.”

Following the gazetteer is 24-pages on gamemastering. This is mostly full of fairly introductory GMing advice such as avoiding “invisible walls” and a reminder that the GM’s relationship with the players is not adversarial. This isn’t going to teach remotely new GMs anything new, but is an adequate introduction for anyone new to gaming that finds this book.

The book ends with 20 monsters plus some additional animals (all from the Witcher 3) and a short 12-page adventure. 

The Good

The writers did their research, and it shows. This is especially true for the setting, both its history as well as its regions. The Witcher books throw out a lot of proper nouns, and this is a fairly easy-to-read guide of locations and small kingdoms. It’s almost useful as a non-gaming reference to figure out locations and places when reading the books or when early in one of the video games.

Most roleplaying games assume large parties of mixed skill sets. While the Witcher RPG does assume some access to a Doctor and a Craftsman, you don’t need a “balanced” party. While there’s no accommodations for “imbalanced” parties, it also doesn’t assume you have a specific party compositions. It might work really well with a smaller group of 1 to 3 players, such as a Witcher and a Bard (like Geralt and Dandelion/ Jaskier) or a wandering crew including a Man at Arms, a Mage, and a Criminal. 

In part this is because the game is not just a combat simulator, but also includes rules for verbal combat and a variety of tasks between battles. The system employs opposed and countering skill checks, which means there’s decent opportunities for conflict that mechanically function like physical combat but don’t require literally stabbing people. 

Similarly, the book really tries to work in all the subsystems of Witcher 3. This includes crafting, damaged equipment, and alchemy. A lot of character advancement in the game comes down to having access to crafting and enchanting, as there are fewer magic items. However, what few magic items (read: Relics) are in the game are all given a fairly lengthy backstory, which is written in-character. I quite like that level of detail and focus on story.

The book includes lots of sidebars; because of the way the book is laid out, there’s room for sidebars on the outer edge of every page (a formatting style that can be very effective when done properly). These give additional details on the tone of the game while also providing variation rules, gameplay suggestions, bits of lore, or rule clarifications. These sidebars also include optional rules for when the lore of the books differs from the lore of the video games (which is the default). Such as some monsters being vulnerable to meteoric iron rather than silver. 

Reputation is a big part of the game. Status is a key part of the Witcher universe, as is people’s opinions and biases. Witchers are unpopular and feared and there is a lot of bigotry. Plus characters can develop reputations for good or ill. The game reflects this. 

The Bad

Despite gnomes and halflings being a part of both the books and the video games, neither is in this game. Similarly, the monsters are all the more generic foes in the game. There’s none of the unique critters that drive a full hunt, like a botchling or hym, but also no striga or dopplers. Nor are there really rules for making unique hunts or modifying monsters (although, in fairness, there is a little advice in the Curses section). 

Dopplers in particular would also have been a fun idea for a hybrid Profession/ races, like Witchers.

Characters are meant to experience a number of random events in their life, which are rolled. But not all life events are equal, with some being better for your character concept and others being worse. Players can be seriously penalized and hindered for a random roll during character creation. It’s one thing to have a roleplaying flaw or cosmetic penalty, or to choose a mechanical flaw, and it’s another to have a roll permanently reduce one of your Statistics. 

Because of the varied types of character, the game will likely be tricky to run, and building adventures that involve all the diverse Professions might be tricky (let alone adequately challenging them all). You don’t want everyone to play a Witcher, but if someone plays a Craftsman or Merchant they might end up sitting out of a hunt-focused session. Or the reverse, where you have a city-focused adventure, where the Bard, Merchant, and Criminal can get involved in all manner of shenanigans, but the combat-focused Man at Arms and Witcher are just bored. Or worse: become disruptive and get into plot-derailing trouble.

Because the skill packages are locked-in for many professions, it’s hard to build a hybrid character, or play against type. Such as a former Doctor that became a Criminal (or vice versa) or a Bard that has some magic. It can be done, but you need the right Abilities and some system mastery. It’s also harder to differentiate characters, who will be very similar in build. 

The rule system is unremarkable. It’s not bad but doesn’t particularly innovate. In fact… it feels almost retro. This is a system that wouldn’t have been out of place in the 1990s, alongside some 3rd edition GURPs and 2nd Edition D&D. It lacks any roleplaying or story manipulation mechanics, and despite hunts being a big part of the game there’s no Gumshoe-esque investigation mechanics. There’s not even Sanity mechanics, let alone the emotional roleplaying, which was highlighted so well in the recently released Alien RPG.  

In the Witcher, you have nine base Statistics that can be used to make checks, which are augmented by skills for seven of your Statistics. There are 51 skills in total, plus the extra class skills. You add your points in an ability to a relevant skill plus a d10 roll. Statistics range from 1-2 (Inept) to 13+ (superheroic), with DCs ranging from 10 to 30. A starting character might be rocking a 12 to a 16 in a decent skill, so they can ace an Easy check automatically and have good odds and an Average DC check. Meanwhile, Geralt, the eponymous witcher, has a Dex of 10 and a swordsmanship of 11, so their average result on a sword attack is a 26.5. He’s practically invincible against a starting character. 

It’s also a finicky system. It’s the kind of game where after every hit you determine hit location while also tracking damage to your weapons and armour over a combat.  There are several pages of modifiers in the combat chapter. Charts of attack modifiers, fumble results, critical damage, and special effects. You’ll be consulting a lot of tables. 

Combat is comprised of opposed skill checks. You attack and your opponent tries to dodge, block (which damages their weapon/ shield), or parry. On a success you determine where you hit, which alters the total damage. Then reduce damage based on your armour—which are resistant to certain types of damage—and reduce the damage a second time as your armour takes some of the hit (damaging the armour). Then lose health. It’s a lengthy process for each attack. But it does mean you can have a fight with lots of blocking and dodging and several hard hits without a character being injured while also having an unlucky ambush that rips a character apart. 

The Ugly

The layout of the book is—and I say this not trying to be mean—amatuer hour. It’s what an RPG book would look like if you took a simple no-frills book template that came with your publishing software and made as few modifications as possible. 

There’s not even any bookmarks on the PDF! This stunned me when I first noticed that, as turning headers into bookmarks is literally just a checkbox in InDesign. While I don’t expect hyperlinked cross-referencing or indexing in every product, bookmarking is a minimal requirement for a multi-hundred-page core rulebook.

Edit: I need to add a correction/ retraction here. Bookmarks ARE in the product. I neglected to check if there was an updated copy of the product and relied on my existing download, which was apparently fifteen-odd months out of date. This was an unprofessional mistake and I apologise.

The book has a simple two-columns layout, with the aforementioned sidebars. But the sidebars aren’t in boxes, coloured differently, or even separated by a dividing line: they’re just to the side with headers that are centered rather than left justified. So at a glance the pages just look like they have three columns. But despite the relatively narrow columns, the tabs/ indentations are huge. 

This weak layout is doubly apparent in the character sheet, which is just a wall of boxes. There’s no graphic design to the character sheet at all. 

The above details paired with the recycled art really make it seem like an unofficial product released by a dedicated fan, rather than being an officially licenced product. 

There’s also inconsistent editing. In the introduction to character creation, pick-up skills has a hyphen, but when these skills are described it doesn’t. So when trying to quickly look-up that section, my keyword search came blank. Similarly, in the combat section on Page 151 the sidebar on your actions includes the reference “see Combat Resolution”, a subheading that doesn’t exist. Tyops happne but those were some key sections of the book and really needed extra attention to detail.

Making referencing the rules harder, neither of the above are in the index, which is also pretty lacklustre and barebones. And also features the abysmally large tabs.

The Awesome

GMing section does touch on consent and making sure players are okay with the topics being presented at the table. This is a highly useful reminder given the game is dark and gritty and horrible things can happen.

There’s little in-character bits of dialogue in the sidebars. This sets the tone of the setting and gives a little extra personality to the book while also providing some lore in a less dry fashion. 

Throughout the text, keywords are called out with bold and coloured formatting. This includes conditions and certain effects. This easily catches the eye and draws attention to the key mechanic inside the paragraphs. Always useful in a rules reference product. 

The game’s alchemy system is both complicated and fiddly but rather interesting. There are nine key ingredients that can be harvested from a variety of sources, and each are given a unique coloured icon. The recipe for each craftable item requires some combination of these shared ingredients. It’s probably more complicated than I need, but if you’re playing a craftsman and alchemy is your thing the subsystem keeps gameplay interesting. It’s abstract without just reducing all alchemy to a single pool of common resources or having a lengthy list of unique components. 

Final Thoughts

At a quick, casual glance the Witcher RPG looks good. Gorgeous art and a clean layout. But once you look closer or hit the rules the game begins to seem clunky and dated, potentially slow and fiddly with a surprising amount of imbalance and almost retro design. The more you look past the art and actually at the book, the uglier the product seems. The layout is clunky and boxy, simply lacking the extra detail and care one expects of a professional roleplaying game product from the late 2010s. 

Frankly, I’ve seen better looking products on the DMsGuild or given away on /r/unearthedarcana done by literal amateurs; there are unofficial products done by fans for fun that simply have more care put into their design. 

Prior to writing this review I was unfamiliar with R. Talsorian Games, and assumed they were a newcomer to the industry, building a catalogue of products by updating older games—I was familiar with the names Cyberpunk 2020, Teenagers from Outerspace, and others but had never played them or looked at who published them. But having paused to do some extra research/ fact-checking at the end of my review, I was a little surprised to find out R. Talsorian Games has been publishing games since 1985. 

Which, honestly, explains the Witcher RPG. It’s not a retro roleplaying game designed like it was being published in the early 1990s. It’s a game designed by a publisher as if the RPG industry hasn’t changed or evolved since the 1990s. It’s an old school RPG that just happens to have been published in modern times with an art budget borrowed from a AAA video game studio. 

I’m not sure how to evaluate the game with that new information. Should I praise R. Talsorian Games for sticking to their tried and tested design? Or should I condemn them for not keeping with the times and modern standards?

At the end of the day: does the layout affect the quality of the gameplay at the table? No, that is a merely cosmetic issue. And is this a usable game that will provide a framework for entertaining game sessions? Probably. That’s much harder to evaluate. The game system is still quite fiddly, but a few cheat sheets or a GM screen can mitigate that, and if you want that level of detail it’s a big plus. Furthermore, with only a single combat encounter likely in each session, you almost want that to be detailed and complex. And while you can end up penalized with bad life events during character creation, that’s a theoretical problem. 

A skilled GM should be able to design adventures that engage a party of mixed roles. Especially if you have a small number of players. The game might work best if you have two or three players and one gamemaster rather than the expected table for four to six players. It would work very nicely as a game about a Witcher and their Criminal sidekick or a Mage and their Man-at-Arms bodyguard. This game might work very well as an “alternate game” played when you’re missing half a regular gaming group but still want to get together with friends and roll dice. 

That said… with the Witcher TV series having caused a surge of Witcher-related attention and print copies of this game becoming harder and harder to find, it wouldn’t be a bad idea for R. Talsorian Games to do a revised edition instead of a straight reprint, tightening the rules and overhauling the layout. Perhaps even expanding the content in a few places, such as additional skill trees or monsters. 

C’mon doppler race/profession!

Shameless Plugs

If you liked this review, you can support me and encourage future reviews. My disposable income, which is necessary to buy RPG products, is entirely dependent on my sales.

I have a number of PDF products on the DMs Guild website, including The Blood Hunter Expanded. Others include my bundle of my Ravenloft books, the Tactician a level 1 to 20 class, Rod of Seven Parts, Traps, Diseases, Legendary Monsters, a book of Variant Rules.

Additionally, the revision of my book, Jester David’s How-To Guide to Fantasy Worldbuilding is on DriveThurRPG, available for purchase as a PDF or Print on Demand! (Now in colour!) The book is a compilation of my worldbuilding blog series, but all the entries have been updated, edited, and expanded to almost two-hundred pages of advice on making your own fantasy world.

Plus, I have T-shirts available for sale over on TeePublic!

Review: Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount

In a surprise move, Wizards of the Coast partnered with the streaming show Critical Role to release a campaign setting product detailing the continent of Widemount, the location of campaign 2 of the Critical Role live stream. While they had previously teased in Descent into Avernus that the world of Exandria was part of the D&D multiverse, this was still a bit of a twist as far as products go. Although not entirely unprecedented, as there were a number of licenced D&D products in 2019, including Acquisitions Incorporated, Rick & Morty, and Stranger Things. 

For the unaware, Critical Role is the popular actual play livestream game where a bunch of nerdy-ass voice actors get together to play Dungeons & Dragons. The cast spends much of its four-hour sessions speaking in-character and having extended in-character discussions or lengthy roleplaying scenes. At the time of this writing, campaign 2 just passed it’s 100th episode a few weeks back 

Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount is the second Critical Role campaign setting, following the Tal’Dorei Campaign Setting, published by Green Ronin in 2017 (but as of a few months ago the licence expired and that book is no longer in print). 

What It Is

Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount is a 304-page hardcover book that acts as a gazetteer to the continent of Wildemount on the planet of Exandria. It’s the standard full colour WotC product with a poster map at the back. 

Included in the book are a whopping twelve reprinted player characters races, four brand new new subraces (one elf, one halfling, two dragonborn), three new subclasses (one for fighters, two for wizards), sixteen new spells, thirty-odd magic items plus a few “artifacts”, a couple dozen new monster stat-blocks, and four small introductory adventures in the middle. 

Each D&D book tends to have a new mechanic as a centrepiece, such as the patrons in Eberron: Rising from the Last War and factions in Guildmaster’s Guide to Ravnica. In this product, the new addition is the Heroic Chronicle subsystem, which is a method of randomly generating a character’s origin: producing a number of allies and rivals, fateful moments, a prophecy, and your favourite food.  

The book starts with a five-page introduction to the setting; 23-pages on history and the gods; 21 pages on factions—such as the various empires and other noteworthy groups—including the names and backgrounds of important NPCs in those factions; a gazetteer that fills a good hundred pages (!); 40-odd pages of character options; 50-pages of adventures; 15-pages of magic items; a bestiary covering 21-pags, and ending with a two-page glossary and a one-page index. 

For the curious, this book was written around episode 50 and doesn’t contain any details of events that occur after that episode. But the book does have a few revelations that could be considered spoilers (such as the nature of the Traveller) and many, many other details that haven’t been revealed or occurred in the campaign.

The Good

The quality of a campaign setting product very much depends on how good the setting itself is. So the big question is “how is the setting of Wildemount?” 

It’s… okay. 

That may seem overly harsh, but WIldemount is pretty generic. A generic high fantasy kitchen sink homebrew campaign setting with a very minor twist. In this case, the twist is that the eastern “evil land of evil” dominated by drow, duergar, orcs, goblins and the like—which is slowly covering their land in an unnatural magical darkness—(spoilers) isn’t really all that evil. And the western “good kingdom of good” ruled by the wise human king is actually rather intolerant to other peoples and religions. It’s actually a rather slick bit of subverting tropes and expectations, while simultaneously countering complaints regarding evil races in D&D (which has been around for many decades, but has certainly come to the forefront of gamer’s minds in recent months). 

In many ways, Wildemount is your generic high fantasy kitchen sink homebrew campaign setting done for the 21st Century, retaining much of the classic elements while jettisoning some of the inherent racial baggage of the 1970s. While other D&D fantasy words have had the “civilized kingdom of monsters”, such as Droaam in Eberron, the kingdom is still often presented as evil and negative. In this setting, the Kryn Dynasty is no more evil or good than the Dwendalian Empire, and the conflict between them isn’t one of Good versus Evil but a much more familiar clash of opposing cultural values and manipulation of outside interests. 

Moving on, the book features both the actual names for the gods as well as their titles. The campaign uses the “Dawn Pantheon” from 4th Edition D&D with the addition of one god from Pathfinder. Previously, this meant Green Ronin’s Tal’Dorei book could only use titles for the gods and not the names. As this book includes both, you can easily find out who is who and compare the two. The book also includes Raei, the Everlight. Also known as “Sarenrae”, this god was pulled from the Pathfinder RPG (owned and published by Paizo) and thus needed a rebranding. The book also includes several lesser idols, which are basically warlock patrons, but can serve as cleric deities in a pinch. There are some nice nods to the past here, such as Vesh (who was the god of a guest star’s cleric in campaign 1).

The book features several city maps, which are an often forgotten part of campaign settings. There’s three maps of the major cities and a few smaller maps in the adventures. And while on the subject of the maps, this product returns to the full colour maps seen in past D&D products, and doesn’t make use of the simple monochromatic line-art maps we’ve seen in the last few D&D products. I much prefer the full colour maps.

As the land is divided into factions, it makes sense that each of these is given some extra attention. Each factions’ histories and goals are described, as well as their relationships with other factions. This is nice and it means the factions don’t just stand alone, but are connected in the world and have alliances and rivalries. 

As you would expect from a 100-page chapter that occupies a full third of the book, the gazetteer includes lengthy descriptions of the regions and nations. This section is subdivided into the seven major regions of the continent, with descriptions of key features in each region along with settlements, city demographics, relevant local information, and occasional sidebars on small elements like types of wine or famed mercenary companies. Most large locations and cities have a couple adventure hooks provided, which are categorized as low, mid, or high level to give you an idea of where they should fit into a campaign. This is very similar to how this information was presented in the Tal’Dorei Campaign Setting. The book tries to find the “goldilocks zone” between giving you endless details that serve no purpose and having too few details forcing you to invent large swaths of the world, all the while helping you tell stories and make campaigns. It doesn’t just try to be a guidebook of the world and is very aware this serves a game purpose. Even if you have zero interest in running a game in this world, the sheer amount of hooks will inspire you to some degree. 

As a game product this book is rather useful. There are plenty of player races, including reprints of a dozen races from multiple different books. Wildemount is arguably the book to get for more PC races. Included in these reprints is the aarakocra (previously only found in the digital Elemental Evil Player’s Companion and tortles, from the digital product released for charity.  Given tortles are a fan favourite, having a physical copy of them might be worth checking out the book. 

The three subclasses are fine. The echo knight is by far the stand out, being a magical fighter subclass that allows you to teleport or attack from multiple spaces. It’s very unique, flavourful, and setting specific—but not so setting specific that you couldn’t justify having it in other worlds. (For example, it’d be effortless to reflavour the echo to be their shadow and call this the “shade knight.”) The wizard subclasses are chronurgy magic and graviturgy magic, both tied to dunomancy, the magic of possibility. Although how graviturgy connects is pretty tenuous at best. The chronurgy subclass has some neat ideas and should be balanced, but it’s not the best chronomancer I’ve seen. I didn’t walk away wanting to play one like the echo knight. Probably because by focusing on manipulating die rolls it feels a little too similar to the school of divination. The graviturgy subclass is more interesting in that it does more unique things, but being a “gravity mage” just feels like a subclass better suited to a science fantasy setting. 

The product makes heavy use of artists from the Critical Role fan community. Because not all of these artists adhere firmly to the Wizards of the Coast house style, this can be a little uneven. But I never saw any bad pieces of art and there are some fantastic bits of art. Too many campaign setting books only show the world though it’s inhabitants, and that’s not the case here: there are many landscapes and illustrations of settlements or the terrain. 

The presentation of NPCs in the book is also excellent. In the adventure, the antagonists have motivations and personalities, so they aren’t just nameless monsters. They have personality traits and quirks. Unsurprisingly, there’s a decent mix of genders in terms of NPCs and not all the people with authority are white cis males. In fact, there are multiple gender neutral NPCs who are just part of the world.  

The Bad

While I praised the book for striking a balance between being a large guidebook and gaming supplement, I suppose this comment can be seen from the other perspective: for Critical Role fans who don’t play D&D this book will be an interesting guide to the world but will contain a fair amount of useless game text. It’s not just a big fantasy travelogue. 

Like the Tal’Dorei Campaign Setting, the blood hunter and gunslinger are not included. Also, the cobalt soul monk (from the no-longer available Tal’Dorei book) isn’t in here, despite that subclass having been revised since it was printed AND one of the characters of the campaign being a monk of that order. That feels like a more irritating exclusion. 

The big new mechanic in the book is the Heroic Chronicle, which is so-so. This was hyped in a few places and I was excited to see what it offered, and was rather disappointed that it was just another random character generation method. It’s useful for randomly picking a background, home region, hometown, and the size of your family but it’s not very exciting. It’s simply not that different from the random background generation in Xanathar’s Guide to Everything. There are too few fateful moments, making it easy to get doubles. And some of the benefits are much stronger than others, with some basically just being straight penalties.  

The orc race is updated here, removing their intelligence penalty in an attempt to address complaints of racism. (Which is good.) The book mentions the “curse of ruin” which is rumoured to make orcs violent, but the text on page 178 makes it explicit that it doesn’t exist and orcs are no more prone to violence than humans. The curse of ruin is just a negative stereotype. But earlier phrases in the book imply the curse to be factual. This feels like a last minute revision. Meanwhile, four pages earlier, there’s a lengthy sidebar on the “curse of strife,” which affects goblinoids and is the reason they’re innately evil. Having a curse affect goblinoids rather than orcs isn’t any less problematic. 

The Ugly

The following complaints are pretty much 100% pet peeves.

First, because it’s published by a different company, this book doesn’t match the Green Ronin version on my shelf. I like matching and consistency. 

I’m also not sure why this book was published by Wizards of the Coast rather than Green Ronin. WotC has a wealth of classic settings they could have published that are just lying fallow. Settings only they can publish. Unlike this tome, which any book publisher could have handled. And WotC doesn’t need multiple generic kitchen sink fantasy worlds; this book means a new Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk book is much more unlikely. D&D didn’t need the Critical Role sales boost. But had they stuck with Green Ronin, they would have helped a small publisher make money in an industry when everyone but WotC and Paizo has trouble sustaining sales. Plus, by changing licence partners, the Tal’Dorei book was forced out of print and newcomers to the stream (or the forthcoming Adventures of Vox Machina animated series) won’t be able to purchase it now. 

Here I’m going to trudge into the weeds of worldbuilding and get nit-picky here. (As I wrote a book on the subject this is something I care about and it’s hard for me not to notice the flaws; if you don’t care, please skip the rest of this section.) 

Frankly, the nitty-gritty design of the world is a lot shakier in Wildemount than in Tal’Dorei 

The continent is pretty damn small. This was a problem in the Tal’Dorei book as well, as that was really the “island” of Tal’Dorei. This book goes so far as to offer a stealth re-sizing, doubling Tal’Dorei’s size. However, at 1600 miles north-to-south, Wildemount is a little smaller than the continental United States of America. Which wouldn’t be a big deal if the southern region—the Menagerie Coast—wasn’t hot and tropical while the northern Greying Wildlands were cold tundra. (Ah yes, everyone is familiar with the lengthy stretches of permafrost covering Washington state.)

Rivers are a repeated problem in the book. Big cities tend to form by the coasts, or on rivers by the coast. Especially since large cities need a lot of water. Many of the big cities in this book (Zadash, Rexxentrum, Rosohna) are nowhere near water.

Meanwhile, there are several impossible rivers. No fewer than three rivers flow from one ocean to another (marked in yellow) and another river flows uphill through a mountain range before emptying in the ocean (marked in blue). 

Apparently, the sea level to the southeast is much lower than the sea level in the north. 

The Awesome

Did I mention the amount of world lore? Because there’s a lot. Arguably more than Eberron: Rising from the Last War and definitely more than Guildmaster’s Guide to Ravnica. This setting book is probably more akin to the many campaign guides that came out in 2nd and 3rd Edition than the recent products by WotC. Which is probably necessary; while there is a whole library of sourcebooks on Eberron and a wiki and several novels for Ravnica, this might be the only book of lore Wildemount receives. It has to stand alone.

And it’s not just places where the campaign has gone. It’s not a who’s who of famous NPCs from the stream. There’s factions we’ve barely seen, important NPCs in the nations who have never come up, places that were ignored or circumvented, and so much more. 

I’m really fond of a lot of the naming in the book. There’s a good mix of real world terms and fantasy made-up names. But the fantastic names all flow nicely. You can tell they were made to be spoken aloud and were written by someone who talks for a living. There’s no R.A. Salvatore gibberish names. 

There are several Easter eggs and references to the campaign, but nothing in this book seemed to require viewing. You could easily come into this book not knowing anything about roles, critical or otherwise, and walk away with an understanding of the setting. In the book I saw five references to Vox Machina from campaign 1 (in largely unavoidable places), which averaged roughly one every 50-pages. Probably less than some famous groups in the Forgotten Realms. And I only saw a single reference to the Mighty Nein (the heroes of campaign 2), which isn’t very surprising as they were only level 8 during the timeline of the book 

Speaking of the book’s timeline, it picked an excellent starting point. The book takes place when the Dwendalian Empire and the Kryn Dynasty have gone to war. An active conflict between two nations opens up a lot of stories for adventurers but wartime campaigns are rare. It instantly creates stories, character motivations, and tension. Even if the war is just in the background or the characters are neutral, having the main army of the kingdom occupied means fewer soldiers saving the day and leaves more room for adventurers.  

Unsurprisingly, there’s a few custom monsters in the book that appeared in the stream. Gloomstalkers, the devil toad, and moorbounders aren’t surprises, but I love the addition of the gearkeeper construct. And the horizonback tortoise is just neat.

Final Thoughts

Wildemount isn’t the best campaign world, or the most interesting setting for 5e, but Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount is probably the best 5th Edition campaign setting product to come out of Wizards of the Coast. It’s a nice, generic setting that can easily serve as the foundation for many campaigns. It’s simple and classic, yet also modern. And most importantly it actually has a decent amount of information on the setting, rather than just giving each nation 2-3 pages, and it does so without losing the focus on adventure.

For people uninterested in the setting, it’s a useful book for character races. You can safely declare Volo’s Guide to Monsters a DM-only book and not take away much content from the players. It’s just a handy book to have on the shelf. 

For Critical Role fans, this book is an interesting read that will give you a better grasp of the world, it’s history, and various locations in the world. Most of the book can be consumed with no knowledge of the game and with limited risk of being spoiled. And if you want to set your campaign in Exandria and have adventures off to the side of the Mighty Nein, then this book is just perfect. This and the Basic Rules or Essentials Kit would make for a great introduction to the game.

For non-Critters, the book serves as a decent campaign setting and a source for inspiration on plot hooks, characters, locations and more. You won’t be lost reading this book or feel you need to watch hours of content to understand the world. If you want a simple, classic fantasy world then this is an excellent choice. It doesn’t redesign the wheel or flip every trope on its head, but it makes enough changes to feel fresh and less culturally dated.

Shameless Plugs

If you liked this article, you can support me and encourage future reviews. My disposable income, which is necessary to buy RPG products, is entirely dependent on my sales.

Seriously. I’ve been unemployed for 3 months, in part due to Covid-19 and my ability to pay for and review books is dependant on sales. Plus, y’know, making rent and buying food.

I have a number of PDF products on the DMs Guild website, including Who’s Doomed, a book of 5e stat blocks of darklords for the Ravenloft campaign setting, which is a huge passion product. And if it sells well, I’ll add additional darklords to the product.
Others include the Blood Hunter Expanded, my bundle of my Ravenloft books, the Tactician a level 1 to 20 class, Rod of Seven Parts, Traps, Diseases, Legendary Monsters, a book of Variant Rules.

Additionally, the revision of my book, Jester David’s How-To Guide to Fantasy Worldbuilding is on DriveThurRPG, available for purchase as a PDF or Print on Demand! (And now in colour!) The book is a compilation of my worldbuilding blog series, but all the entries have been updated, edited, and expanded to almost two-hundred pages of advice on making your own fantasy world.

Plus, I have T-shirts available for sale over on TeePublic! The art of which can also be put on cloth masks.

Review: Mythical Adventures of Theros

The second hardcover campaign setting adapting a plane from Magic the Gathering to the 5th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons, Mythical Adventures of Theros was released in July 2020. The physical release was delayed due to the Covid-19 pandemic, but the digital release on DnDBeyond.com came a few weeks earlier, maintaining the original street date. Which was a nice way to satisfy anyone eagerly awaiting the book or had preordered the product.

Theros follows the Guildmaster’s Guide to Ravnica as a physical 5e D&D book, although there were a number of other PDF releases prior that can still be found for free on the DMsGuild under the “Plane Shift” label, which adapt other MtG planes. Mixing the D&D chocolate with the MtG peanut butter. (The reverse will also happen in the summer of 2021 when the MtG Core Set is being replaced by a Forgotten Realms themed set. Which might be the first MtG cards I buy since 1997.)

What It Is

Mythical Adventures of Theros is a 256-page hardcover product with an alternate cover limited to game stores. (Or game stores with online stores like Miniature Market) Mythical Adventures of Theros describes the Ancient Greece-themed land of Theros. Like all 5th Edition D&D products, it’s full colour, although the trade dress of this product is fairly different and the whole product has a slightly different feel. Wizards is going to greater effort to make each of their products look distinct while still instantly being identifiable as 5e books. Like Guildmaster’s Guide to Ravnica it uses a heavy amount of art recycled from Magic cards; however,  if you’re not a Magic player, you’d never know. 

The new mechanic—because every new D&D hardcover has to have a brand new mechanical hook—is the supernatural gifts. There are nine gifts, each of which is kinda-sorta equivalent to a feat, as you can choose to have a feat in place of one. There is also the new Piety subsystem, which is a variant of the faction mechanic from Guildmaster’s Guide to Ravnica and Dragon Heist, which measures how much a god favours a particular hero. Like Guildmaster’s Guide to Ravnica, this book assumes a specific tone for your campaigns: the adventuring party are the champions of a god—or number of gods—doing great tasks in their name(s).  

Rounding out the book are five new (or reprinted) PC races, the centaur, leonid (lion-person), minotaur, satyr and triton; two new subclasses, the bard college of eloquence and the paladin oath of glory; and the athlete background. It ends with forty-odd new monsters plus three “Mythic” monsters that make use of the also brand new Mythic rules. 

As mentioned, Theros is a setting based on Ancient Greece, or rather the Greece of the surviving myths and legends. As the gods play a significant role in the setting, Theros is less “ancient Greece” and more akin to the Disney take on Hercules. Or, dating myself, like the cheesy ’90s TV Hercules: the Legendary Journeys. Theros isn’t a true world. The land on the accompanying map is pretty much the entire world, as beyond the known region is a small unexplored wilderness that ends with a void. (Is this typical of Magic planes? Was Ravnica like that as well and it just not mentioned?)

The fifteen described deities most map nicely to the known Greek gods, or related mythological figures (such as Athreos, god of passage, being an analogue of the Charon, boatman of the river Styx). Presumably they also have some tie to the Magic the Gathering mana colours as well, but that’s not clear in this book and my MtG lore is too limited to make a decent guess—especially as how my guess on how the guilds of Ravnica mapped to the colours of mana was completely off. Possibly five high gods, each related to one colour and then ten blended gods? I’d have loved a “behind the curtain” sidebar on how that aspect of the lore.

The Good

The flavour of the book is excellent. Everyone knows Greek mythology to some degree. It’s familiar but a type of era that hasn’t been explored much in D&D prior. Mythical Adventures of Theros draws from the same archetypes, but presents a more fantastic and slightly sanitized version of Greek Mythology, while retaining some of the grey morality as any god could be either a patron or an antagonist. Because it is similar to but not literally magical Ancient Greece, this also allows it to surprise people who are deeply familiar with Greek mythology while also allows Dungeon Masters to tell their own adaptations of classic myths, perhaps with a twist. And it allows people to fudge historical details, and handwave those discrepancies away as being how Theros differs from actual Greece. Like how the statues and buildings are all clean white and not garishly painted; Theros is how we imagine Ancient Greece and not how Ancient Greece actually was.

The hook of playing larger-than-life heroic figures is appealing. D&D often has a power fantasy element, and being mythical heroes like Hercules, Achilles, Perseus, or Theseus is a very attractive idea. And the Grecian era works with this idea of mythical heroes more than many other settings and worlds. That said, the base mechanics of playing the champion of a god or a hero that is beyond mortal could easily be adapted to other settings. You could easily port it over to the Realms and use it for playing a Chosen of a god (as seen in the Sundering event). This means even if you don’t want the setting, the Piety rules and heroic boons can be borrowed.

The divine gifts are also easy to customize, as they’re basically feats. This was an excellent bar to set the power level of the boons, especially as many DMs let players start with a free feat, and because its a known quantity, it’s easy to homebrew. It also means you could just let someone boost one of ability scores, such as letting the Hercules wannabe double down on Strength. 

Each of the racial entries includes how to calculate their height and weight in the racial traits, rather than a seperate section later in the book (which is occasionally forgotten with new races). This is minor but I like it enough to call it out.

Unsurprisingly, there’s lots of new monsters. With 50 pages of new critters, this doubles as a big book of monsters. This makes sense, as Magic the Gathering is known for having ample numbers of summoned foes, meaning there’s plenty of art for monsters that can be appropriated for this product. And given classic Greek mythology was used to inspire so much of the D&D bestiary there’s lots of neat variants for existing foes. This is very useful, as DMs often pick monsters for adventures or encounters based on their lore or how they fit into the narrative, and more variants means they can work at different level bands or have powers that surprise experienced players. It’s pretty handy to have a CR 12 hydra (in addition to the CR 8 in the Monster Manual) to give tough adventurers a familiar foe.

The monster section also gives information on incorporating some classic D&D monsters into the setting. These are mostly explaining the lore of Grecian monsters that don’t receive a new entry and stat block, like the basilisk or cyclops. But this is still good, as one of my complaints of Guildmaster’s Guide to Ravnica was not knowing how many D&D monsters named in the world actually fit in or how they looked. Also in the book are eight new magic items. This includes the flying chariot and a helm of the gods. Classic, iconic stuff. Or molten bronze that covers your body like a second skin but functions as a breastplate. (Very timely, given I just finished reading Jim Butcher’s novel Battle Ground). Also in this section are five new artifacts. I love this! Artifacts are too often a forgotten element of the game, and godly magic items feel like a big part of the setting and idea of mythic adventures. These are pretty cool and have extra powers tied to a character’s piety score, so the more closely connected you are with your god the more badass your unique magic hammer becomes.

The Bad

This book just contains the framework of a setting. The big nations/ Poleis (read: city-states) each get around 3 pages. Other locations get less. Entire cities, like Neolantin, get one or two sentences. The entire gazetteer is just 25-pages. Like Ravnica, more effort and pages are put into how to tell adventures and story hooks—with each god getting a four-section complete with an adventure/ encounter location. The book gives you ample ideas for adventures and adventure hooks and then requires you to create a setting and locations for said hooks. Which is problematic for DMs who might be bursting with story ideas but have few ideas for interesting locations. 

Like Ravnica the forced campaign tone grates on me. It’s not letting you make the setting your own, but instead it’s telling you how to use the setting, which I instinctively chafe at; I like to go through a list of different campaign ideas and find the one that excites me the most. The hook of playing mythical champions is a good campaign idea… once. But there’s so many other ideas for Ancient Greece. Hercules is all well and good, but what about the rest of the Argonauts who aren’t blessed? What about Odysseus who isn’t blessed by the gods but cursed? Or a Xena: Warrior Princess who flouts the gods and is a mortal champion. 

The setting itself also feels small, as it is basically just Greece. There’s no nearby Italy or Egypt. No Troy to besiege or invading Persia allowing you to replicate the battle of Thermopylae. This applies both as locations for adventure as well as playing anyone from a non-Greek culture or ethnicity. You can’t play a Celt or Viking that travelled from far away, or even a nearby Egyptian from just across the sea. You can cram a lot of adventure into Greece, but people should know ahead of time this is a bubble setting.

While the idea of mythic monsters—unique monsters of legend that are a step beyond legendary creatures—are neat, the book only has three mythic creatures. There’s not a lot of examples to draw on or use to make your own mythic foes. I was quite excited to see what made these monsters special and it was a big draw of the book for me. But mythic monsters just have a single trait that basically lets them regain all their hp, and unlock a few new legendary actions. It’s basically just a two-stage video game boss fight. Inarguably useful, but not particularly innovative or requiring a new keyword or tag. (In Rime of the Frostmaiden, the goddess there is basically a three-stage boss fight and requires no new “mythic” keyword or sidebar.)

Like Guildmaster’s Guide to Ravnica, which completely stole the thunder for a possible Planescape/ Sigil product, this book makes it slightly harder to design a Dragonlance product. The Tyranny of Dragons adventure already took some of Dragonlance’s thunder, but it still had the idea of mortal champions of the gods as a campaign through-line. Immortal conflict by proxy on the mortal world. But now that box has been checked.

The Ugly

Let’s get to what will undoubtedly be a controversial complaint: this book is pure cultural appropriation: people from outside a culture using or exploiting said culture to sell a product. Yes, there’s a “Cultural Consultant” listed but there’s no other Greek names in the credits. 

There’s no good definition of when cultural appropriation applies. Informally this is when “whites people” borrow elements of “non-white” culture, but I’ve also seen it described as when colonial cultures use or benefit from colonized cultures. Both definitions would apply, as Greeks weren’t considered “white” or “Caucasian” until well into the middle decades of 20th century, and targeted by systemic discrimination by North America for much of the same period. And the Greeks spent much of modern history being the oppressed vassal state of the Ottoman Empire and subject to severe ethnic and religious persecution, with Greece only becoming an independent nation in 1830. Greeks were the oppressed victims of imperialization. Meanwhile, Greece is famous for having their culture stolen and robbed by other European explorers and archeologists. The most noteworthy example being the Elgin Marbles  but the number of Greek statues, vases, and other historical artifacts held in overseas museums is staggering. But it feels different because everyone knows about Greek mythology and Greek philosophers, with the history of Ancient Greece often taught in schools. Mythical Adventures of Theros is a heck of a lot like doing a book on a fantastical East Indian-themed world with a focus on Hindu-esque mythology but having no Indian writers. (And after watching Baahubali I totally want to play in fantasy India and would buy that book, because that looked freakin’ awesome. But I never will because that’s not my culture and I have no right to use it as my playground.)

The Awesome

I love the art in this product. Specifically the star pattern on divine beings, which instantly identifies them as non-mortal while also just looking cool. It’s not particularly original, as anyone who reads Marvel comics will identify it as the Eternity look, but it’s still a great way to convey divine/ celestial power. 

Each of the gods has a short half-page on their myths. These are brief little synopsis of the god’s tales, but they’re evocative and iconic in just the right way. And there’s lots of similar little myths and stories tucked away in sidebars throughout the book. This really helps capture the “mythic” tone of the book and the idea of a land filled with legends that are (probably) true.

Not all the monsters statblocks are generic variants. Some are individuals rather than a sub-type, like the harpy Aphemia or the surprising CR 19 Polukranos hydra. Which feels appropriate as so many Greek monsters weren’t actual species but individuals. 

The sphinx entry has a handful of riddles. This is such a small addition that makes the monster that much more usable on the fly. I can think of five times I could have used this. 

The chimera is designed to be customizable, so you can mix-and-match heads and other body parts. This is just cool.

It’s nice to see the return of nymphs. These are a classical monster who are fairly well known but have purposely been omitted from 5e to date. While not the traditional D&D nymphs with their particular idiosyncrasies (blinding beauty) these are more mythologically accurate, which feels more appropriate while also conveniently being less sexist. 

Similarly, it’s nice to see the hippocamp again, which I’m surprised hadn’t shown up before. A very useful addition for aquatic campaigns.

Final Thoughts

I really wanted to enjoy Mythical Adventures of Theros. While it relies too heavily on the single hook and primary campaign concept for my tastes, that hook is different enough to be desirable while also filling a narrative gap otherwise present in the game. Greek Mythology and Ancient Greece is such a familiar and yet relatively underused setting for Dungeons & Dragons campaigns. 

But the content of the book just felt a little sparse. There are only three new mythic monsters. There are five holy artifacts: barely enough to fill a single party (and if you have a six player table, someone doesn’t get a cool magic toy). There’s not even one artifact per god! There are only two new subclasses and a couple races we haven’t seen before. There barely feels like enough world for the standard level 1 to 14 storyline adventure, let alone multiple tales. There are more than enough hooks to get you started and have a couple adventures assisting a god or two while opposing another few gods, but little to sustain you after. It feels less like a book for a campaign and more the book for an extended adventure. A mini-campaign.

Which wouldn’t be so bad if WotC hadn’t released Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount a few scant months before this product, which showed you can do a big expansive world guide while also having numerous plot hooks and multiple campaign threads. 

Now, the limited scope isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It depends what you’re looking for out of the product. If you just want to do a quick visit to an Ancient Greece style world for a mini-campaign or quick adventure, then this product will work just fine. If you want help with a series of one-shots or short adventures to hook Magic the Gathering players into D&D then this will work as well. And if you’re a fan of Greek mythology and Ancient Greece already (or the aforementioned cheesy TV shows set in the era), you probably know enough already to fill out the gaps in the setting and flesh out its locations. In that regard, Theros is better than Ravnica as the source of inspiration is more accessible, and there are numerous books, websites, television shows, movies, and even video games that can be turned to for inspiration.  

But if you want to spend a lengthy period in a Greco-Roman world with multiple campaigns then this product might not be your best option. You might be better served looking at Arkadia, which is also small but features a larger world. Or Odyssey of the Dragonlords, which has a variation on the Grecian theme and is also a much larger setting. This gives you more room to explore and more mortal factions to generate stories. 

I don’t think Mythical Adventures of Theros is a bad book. And as a bonus book done primarily by the MtG team and freelancers rather than the D&D team, it’s a nice extra bit of D&D in the early part of the year. It’s good at what it does and you can easily buy this book and run a decently lengthed heroic campaign. But it also didn’t blow me away. It just compares unfavourably to other campaign settings I’ve seen, including the prior D&D book Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount. And as the third of three official campaign setting books released in the last eight or so months, it is easily the weakest despite bringing so many new ideas to the table.

Shameless Plugs

If you liked this article, you can support me and encourage future reviews. My disposable income, which is necessary to buy RPG products, is entirely dependent on my sales.
Seriously. Having only recently returning to work after being unemployed for 4 months, in part due to Covid-19, my finances and ability to pay for books to review is dependant on sales.

I have a number of PDF products on the DMs Guild website, including Who’s Doomed, a book of 5e stat blocks of darklords for the Ravenloft campaign setting, which is a huge passion product. And if it sells well, I’ll add additional darklords to the product.
Others include the Blood Hunter Expanded, my bundle of my Ravenloft books, the Tactician a level 1 to 20 class, Rod of Seven Parts, Traps, Diseases, Legendary Monsters, a book of Variant Rules.

Additionally, the revision of my book, Jester David’s How-To Guide to Fantasy Worldbuilding is on DriveThurRPG, available for purchase as a PDF or Print on Demand! (And now in colour!) The book is a compilation of my worldbuilding blog series, but all the entries have been updated, edited, and expanded to almost two-hundred pages of advice on making your own fantasy world.

Plus, I have T-shirts available for sale over on TeePublic! The art of which can also be put on cloth masks.

Review: Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything

A surprising three years after the last D&D rules expansion, Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, and Wizards of the Coast has finally released the next player-facing book for Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition. Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything. As the similar name implies, the contents are much the same, with new subclasses and spells along with several pages of… other. 

Like past books with new player options, the content in this book was previewed in Unearthed Arcana over the past year, with classes revealed & reviewed, tested and tweaked. Some of the ideas made it in and some of the classes were rejected for one reason or another. This means the player content in this book has been reviewed and playtested, which is something that can’t be said for much of the player content in past versions of D&D (other roleplaying games). 

What It Is

Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything is a relatively svelte book. Only 192-pages. The same length as Xanathar’s but two-thirds the size of the Player’s Handbook while being comparable in cover price. Unsurprising, it is a full colour hardover book, with an alternate cover that can be found in local game stores. (Or non-local game stores that have an online presence.)  

(Like all modern D&D books, this is not saddle stitched, and the book may need to be gently broken in to ensure its longevity.)

The book has new and newish subclasses for every class in the game, including the artificer, which has been entirely reprinted. There are four artificer subclasses (one new), two subclasses for the barbarian, two for the bard (one reprinted), three clerical domains (one reprint), three druid circles (one reprinted), two fighter archetypes with some new manuevers and fighting styles, two monk subclasses, two paladin oaths (one reprinted), two ranger conclaves, two rogue subclasses, a couple sorcerer bloodlines, two warlock pacts, and two wizard specializations (one new). Phew. 

Also in the book are group patrons (semi-reprinted from Eberron: Rising from the Last War); a handful of spells; 45-plus magical items, with many being potent artifacts;  sidekick rules for the Dungeon Master, semi-reprinted from the Essentials Kit; supernatural terrain and hazards; and ending with 20 pages of puzzles.

The class section of the book also includes some alternate features, granting players the ability to swap out cantrips or slightly customize their class by swapping in an alternate feature. In a few places, these are designed as subtle balance tweaks to “correct” issues (such as the ranger) without entirely redesigning the class. 

The Good

As mentioned, the classes and content here is well balanced and well thought out. Because the D&D team has been relatively stable and one of the creators of the edition is still working on the game, the people who wrote this book are very well versed in the subtleties of the design and why things are written the way they are. 

As mentioned, the book contains a stealth rebalancing for some classes and new small powers. Some seem less necessary–like the barbarian gaining more skills and a movement power or the rogue feature to grant themselves advantage—but others do fill in gaps that have emerged, such as the 2nd-level bard inspiration variant that works with a caster-heavy party or the druid ability to finally get a pet. The ranger alternate rules have been especially requested, giving first level rangers an actual combat feature while providing a fairly substantial alternative for  the beastmaster ranger’s pets. There’s even an attempt to give something for the monk’s Way of the Four Elements, but this isn’t as successful. 

The book begins with common rule reminders. Handy clear and simple clarifications for oft forgotten or subtle rules. It’s nice to have these, even if this page was also in Guide to Everything—you don’t know what rules expansion will be someone’s first.  

There’s also rules for customizing races, letting you swap around some proficiencies, such as replacing proficiency with medium armour or battle axes with longbow and rapier proficiency. This allows you to play a character like a high elf that wasn’t raised among elves and doesn’t know how to use a bow, but was adopted by orcs and knows how to swing a greataxe like a champ. I’m not the biggest fan of the absolute freedom offered by these pages (for reasons I’ll get to in the next section) but I am aware not everyone feels comfortable with the idea of physical and cultural bonuses being baked into races. And because some people are uncomfortable with it, I applaud WotC for listening and including this section. And for people like me who have issues, I’m thankful the preceding spread that reminds DMs that everything in the book is optional and I can just ignore that.

The fifteen feats here are decent enough. Many are a way to build a hybrid character without multiclassing. They’re very workable. And Skill Expert will be very useful for a lot of character concepts. 

I enjoyed the idea of sidekicks in the Essentials Kit, which allowed me to play some one-on-one games with my 10-year-old son. I was happy these were being reprinted here and it’s great that they were expanded out to full 20-level classes. Sadly, they didn’t reprint the generic statblocks, but the concept was expanded to include any monster that is CR 1/2 or lower. Which is simply brilliant, as it not only allows humanoid creatures like the scout, thug, or cultist to be used but also a war horse or mastiff. Or even a blink dog. I expect whole books to flood the Dungeon Master’s Guild with CR 1/2 pets, like young faerie dragons, juvenile owl bears, and hatchling couatls.   

With nineteen pages of new magic items, this is the biggest loot drop of 5th Edition to date. Some time ago I had predicted the next rules expansion would expand the gear in the game, as new magic items have been rare and treasure is a pretty vital reward. When Cauldron of Everything was announced, I just didn’t expect the magic expansion to be this book. And I certainly didn’t expect a half-dozen new artifacts. 

The patron rules are… fine. They’re fine. They offer some decent advice and quite a few roleplaying hooks. This section is largely common sense and advice rather than concrete rules. If you were already thinking about what it would be like having the PCs working for the king or thieves’ guild, this probably won’t give you many new ideas. I rather expected more, especially after hearing about the perk system and seeing what was done with reputation in Guildmaster’s Guide to Ravnica. I anticipated perks to have more heft than just “you are protected from the law” and “your patron covers your expenses). This would have been a neat way of adding some minor new options and benefits for characters, because it doesn’t imbalance the party as every member would have the same perk. 

I quite like several of the subclasses in this book. The armourer is a nice, simple addition to the artificer, and an idea I’m surprised I didn’t consider. (And I worked hard to think of new artificer ideas when working on my DMsGuild artificer book). The Path of the Beast for the Barbarian is just cool. Multiclassing dips aside, I haven’t played a barbarian before, but this moves the class to the top of my “to play” list. And I’m very pleased with how the Phantom rogue subclass evolved. The Soulknife is also a nice update to this classic concept, first being seen in 3rd Edition. And it could be easily house-ruled into something non-psionic by swapping the psychic damage for necrotic and naming it the “shadowblade”. (Shadeblade? Gloomblade?) And I adore the take on the Genie patron for the warlock. I’ve done my own take on this in the past, but this is really interesting and I love how it makes use of the genie’s vessel.

The Bad

While not my biggest complaint, let’s get to the pet peeve I teased earlier. Customizing ability scores. Glad they did it. Not entirely happy that it’s so unrestricted and not swapping a physical ability score boost for another physical, or choosing to swap one, or mandating +2/ +1. Mostly because of elements like the mountain dwarf who gets a +2/+2, because their second boost is to Strength—which benefits martial classes—but they also get medium armour proficiency, which is redundant for paladins and fighters. The double twos keep them desirable for that trope. But if you can freely swap the Strength bonus to +2 Cha or +2 Int then the mountain dwarf becomes a fantastic spellcaster. The ability score bonuses were designed to encourage tropes and playing to type but making them unbounded encourages min-maxing and actually limits the potential choices of races to the few origins deemed “most optimal.” 

This is mostly a complaint for my table and likely Adventurer’s League. Where the optional rule won’t be used to tell creative stories and make interesting characters with fascinating backstories but instead be used to see how many bonuses can be accrued.

The fighter section has a page-and-a-half of Battlemaster Builds. Suggested designs for characters using that subclass. I’m not sure who this is designed for, as making an archer or duelist with the fighter wasn’t particularly hard already. 

The book has almost twenty-pages of puzzles including handouts. It’s nice to have some quick puzzles handy, but it’s unfortunate they’re in a book that is generally player facing and will be referenced by the players at the table. I wouldn’t use these puzzles for anything but inspiration. The difficulty listed in the puzzles also feels exceptionally arbitrary; the very first puzzle is listed as “easy” despite being functionally equivalent to the last puzzle, which is “hard.” And this is despite the latter puzzle being more overt in its solution. 

Testing the options with Unearthed Arcana is inarguably a good thing for the quality of the book. The best ideas (read: the most popular ideas) get published and the stuff that is problematic is left out. However, as class content is “previewed” everyone has favourite classes that didn’t make the cut. I was excited for the College of Spirits bard as a tarokka bard sounded awesome and Ravenloft A.F. And I’m sure someone was excited for the wizard arcane tradition of onomancy/ truenaming. 

The clerical Love domain didn’t make it in either. Neither the original version or the revised “Unity Domain.” For anyone unfamiliar with the internet drama regarding this  subclass, people became upset on Twitter over the presentation of the Love domain (because people are alway getting upset on Twitter; it’s basically a platform design to enrage you or let you rage), with the complaint being how the subclass focused on enchantment, and forcing someone to like you isn’t love. Not an unfair criticism but, Twitter being Twitter, people came down HARD on the authors, quickly becoming abusively critical. The document was quickly pulled, reworked, and re-released with the aforementioned Unity domain. But the damage was done and unlike other rejected subclasses, the document isn’t available online. Because of moral outrage, a D&D subclass was effectively censored. Which is a big trigger for me as I value the freedom of information. And, y’know, like options for D&D games, and the concept of an enchantment focused clerical domain (a lust domain if you will) is a nice narrative gap and fits many gods in classical mythology (like Aphrodite, Freyr, Ishtar) and D&D deities like Sune.  

This book introduces a few psionic classes. The fighter has the psi warrior, the rogue has the soulknife, and the sorcerer has the aberrant mind bloodline. I’ve been a longtime fan of psonics since 2nd Edition, so I’m a little sad they didn’t manage to get a full psionicst class done for this book. Including one later will unfortunately mean having psionic options spread out over multiple books. 

There are always some less impressive subclasses. There’s always got to be a last pick. The Rune Knight is so-so. Because of the design, by the time you hit the subclass’ cap you’ve chosen five of the possible six runes. For 10th and 15th level you’re just picking between the options you already chose not to take last time, which is somewhat unsatisfying. Neither ranger subclass really seems great compared to the interesting ones in Guide to Everything. 

The Ugly

I hate the name. 

This book was always going to be “Proper Noun’s Noun of Pronoun”. Elminster’s Volume of Stuff. Warduke’s Collection of Trophies. Because that’s how they’re naming things this time round. But “Cauldron” is a weird choice and repeating “of Everything” makes it easy to confuse with Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, which I often shortened to “Guide to Everything” so I don’t have to remember how to spell “Xanathar.” I’m going to continually see people confused while referencing “Guide to Everything” and “Cauldron of Everything.” And I expect some kid over Christmas is going to ask his parents for “the new D&D book… the Everything one” and get the wrong book.

Like Guide to Everything, the titular character—the witch Tasha—makes comments throughout the book. This worked well in Guide to Monsters and Tomb of Foes but Xanathar was more annoying than insightful and frequently anachronistic. Tasha is somehow worse. Her little 1-3 sentence blurbs feel less like commentary (“insights, guidance, threats and critiques” like her introduction suggests) and more forced meta-jokes. It reads far less like an ancient witch offering thoughts on a subclass or option and more like someone trying to compose witty PR tweets or make amusing captions for a brochure. And unlike the small sidebars in past products, which seemed designed to fill negative space and flesh out pages, Tasha’s Tweets came before every subclass and section, leaving more gaps at the bottom of pages, while also making the little comments more forced. Mandated distillations of humour. When reading some I could just picture the D&D team brainstorming them at a meeting.

Having read many, many other RPG products with in-world text and a first person speaker, I have seen this done significantly better. Good use of a narrator can turn a mundane book of monsters into one of your favourite RPG books.

The book features a LOT of reprinted content, including subclasses published earlier this year! Eight of the thirty new subclasses—a full quarter of the class options—are reprints. This also includes the entire artificer class and all three subclasses published in Eberron: Rising From the Last War. 

This unfortunately makes the Magic the Gathering D&D books (Ravnica and Theros) trap purchases for people who just want the new crunchy rules options. And anyone who bought those books for the rules options to add to their game rather than the setting material  (raises hand) completely wasted their money. It’s definitely going to make me reconsider purchasing future MtG settings when I know I can just wait and get that content elsewhere.

Now, in fairness, this does mean those class options are now easier to make available in Adventurer’s League. Which will be nice for the small minority of players running in organized play games.But that’s probably a very small minority of players. 

Ditto the artificer. While I appreciate having the full class here (even if it means I’ve purchased it three times, including Wayfarer’s Guide to Eberron) they could have chosen to only reprint one or two artificer subclasses, so people who owned the Eberron book would have something exclusive to that tome.

The Awesome

The picture of Tasha on page 82. That is just amazing. And while discussing art, I know it’s just a throw-away Easter Egg, but I loved seeing Azalin Rex in the Patrons chapter. And there’s a Planescape reference as well. 

There’s a table listing all the new spells on page 105, and it very concisely says what school they are, their level, and if they require concentration. This is pretty handy. (Curiously, there’s also a column saying if they can be cast as a ritual and for all of them it’s “no”, so that feels somewhat redundant.) 

Included in the new spells are a handful of new monster conjuring spells that make it much simpler to be a summoner. While I like being able to summon specific creatures as an option, these are much more useful in play and don’t require the player to slowly flip through the Monster Manual to find an appropriate fey or elemental (especially when the creature by type table is in the DMG). 

Baba Yaga’s mortar & pestle!

They removed the attunement requirement from the prosthetic limb magical item (and this is also the case for the next print run of Eberron, already being in its errata). This was a complaint of many as it made receiving a prosthetic detrimental as you could use fewer magic items. (As I mentioned this in my review of the book.) Nice to see that WotC agrees. 

Similarly, the armourer artificer lets you have magical armour that functions like a lost limb. Contrary to a recent webcomic, I do like the idea of enabling people to play adventurers with disabilities. The armourer artificer is awesome (even if it is a tad too Iron Man, if that’s possible). 

I like that you can take the psi warrior fighter subclass, beg your DM for a flame tongue, and play a Jedi in D&D. 

The collection of supernatural terrains is nicely done. And I quite like how they handled the activation, offering suggestions rather than hard rules but situations that are likely to happen but not be too regular. There are some good ideas in here, and it’s easy to read through this section for inspiration or a neat magical feature to place in a location.

Included in the terrain section is a funky page on mimic colonies. This isn’t just noteworthy for the juvenile mimic statblock (conveniently <CR 1/2, so… sidekick!) or the lair actions, but the absolutely bonkers art at the top of page 167. I’m just sad we didn’t also get a stat block for a Large or even a Huge mimic. 

While I’m not wowed by the puzzles I think it is worth noting how this book really focused on aspects of the game other than combat. There’s patrons, which drive the actual story and offer great roleplaying hooks. There’s the encounter terrain that feeds into the exploration pillar and makes overland travel or just being in a strange place more interesting. And there are the puzzles, which encourage the players to be challenged with something other than tactics and strategy. This is great to see and probably should be encouraged. Because it’s too easy to make a book like this and only focus on combat encounters or have “puzzles” reduced to the characters making a quick Intelligence check.

Final Thoughts

For a book people have been expecting for three years, it feels like I should have more to say about Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything. That my review should be somehow even longer. But it just doesn’t feel like there’s much here. Yes, there’s a newish class and thirty subclasses but there’s only 22 options we haven’t seen—fewer both in total and number of new options than Guide to Everything (and a matching number of feats). That’s a book I described by saying “with so little official content released this small smattering of appetisers feels like a feast.” A statement that also applies to Cauldron of Everything. 

What’s here is generally good. There’s not any outright bad options or weak pages. And it certainly doesn’t have the endless tables of Guide to Everything. But I also didn’t finish reading and have five or six new characters I was burning to play. I had one. And I still wish we’d see a lot more optional and variant rules for Dungeon Masters. Advice on Session Zeroes are all well and good, but that’s information you could find on a dozen blogs or YouTube advice channels and all over Reddit. Rules on mass combat, other methods of gaining experience, variant crit & fumbling rules and the like will have a much larger audience in an official book. 

But if everyone who gets this book ends up with one beloved character and plays that character for six or even eighteen months, then that’s pretty good for a gaming book. And unlike past editions, every subclass here will probably see play at a few tables. There’s no options that will never see use and only exist to fill pages.

Shameless Plugs

If you liked this article, you can support me and encourage future reviews. My disposable income, which is necessary to buy RPG products, is entirely dependent on my sales.
Seriously. After returning to work after being unemployed for 4 months (in part due to Covid-19) I’ve found myself quarantined after a potential exposure and unable to work for another fortnight. My finances and ability to pay for books to review is dependant on sales.

I have a number of PDF products on the DMs Guild website, including Who’s Doomed, a book of 5e stat blocks of darklords for the Ravenloft campaign setting, which is a huge passion product. And if it sells well, I’ll add additional darklords to the product. And it’s newly released companion Allies Against the Night, which takes classic Ravenloft heroes and makes them into sidekicks.

Others include the Blood Hunter Expanded, my bundle of my Ravenloft books, the Tactician a level 1 to 20 class, Rod of Seven Parts, Traps, Diseases, Legendary Monsters, a book of Variant Rules.

Additionally, the revision of my book, Jester David’s How-To Guide to Fantasy Worldbuilding is on DriveThurRPG, available for purchase as a PDF or Print on Demand! (And now in colour!) The book is a compilation of my worldbuilding blog series, but all the entries have been updated, edited, and expanded to almost two-hundred pages of advice on making your own fantasy world.

Plus, I have T-shirts available for sale over on TeePublic! The art of which can also be put on cloth masks.

Review: Candlekeep Mysteries

On March 16th, Wizards of the Coast released a collection of 17 adventures that run from levels 1 to 16. (If they had one fewer adventure, that would have been some lovely symmetry.) Each level between 1st to 16th receives one adventure, except for fourth, which receives two adventures. 

Candlekeep Mysteries is an adventure anthology. Unlike past collections of modules, these are all new adventures rather than reprints from earlier editions of the game. Each adventure is a short one-shot that begins in the famous library of Candlekeep in the Forgotten Realms, made extra famous as the starting point of the classic 2nd Edition video game Baldur’s Gate. 

Like most recent RPG hardcovers, there is a regular cover and a collector’s edition cover that is exclusive to game stores. This time, the deluxe variant isn’t a soft-touch cover but gilded and slightly embossed, resembling a classical mystery novel.  

What It Is

Candlekeep Mysteries is a 224-page hardcover book collecting seventeen short adventures. Adventures range in length from as few as nine pages to as many as fourteen pages. Each adventure is relatively short, potentially only filling a single four-hour session, making this a book of one-shots; while you could play each adventure in order and turn this into a campaign, you would likely need to supplement it with additional adventures between each published tale. Each adventure shares its name with the title of a book, which acts as the hook or initiating event for the adventure. As mentioned, each of these books is assumed to be found in the library of Candlekeep. 

At the start of the book there is also an 11-page description of the library of Candlekeep, the premier source of books in the Forgotten Realms. This includes the names of several NPCs who could be encountered inside along with a brief description of their duties (while also leaving their gender, ethnicity, and background open for the Dungeon Master to customize). At the end of the book is a single-sided poster map of Candlekeep. 

The adventure also includes twenty-odd new monsters, including classics like the grippli (my preferred frog person) and the nereid. Monsters from sources other than the Monster Manual are reprinted. Many of these monsters are NPCs and there are a number of new variant monsters in the book, such as a lightning golem, which is basically a flesh golem that punches electricity. Stat blocks are included in each adventure where they’re encountered rather than being collected at the end in an appendix. 

The Good

The book begins with a reminder to be a sensitive Dungeon Master. Likely a disclaimer we can expect at the start of all new adventures. It’s always a good idea to check with your players to find out what their comfort zone is and what kind of adventures they enjoy playing. Which extends to elements they find boring but also what they find hinders their fun (or even makes them uncomfortable). 

Candlekeep features more prominently in this adventure than past compilation’s framing devices, such as the Yawning Portal tavern from 2017’s compilation. This is lovely, as I’ve been hard on past product’s framing devices for being relevant in name only. Here, each adventure starts with a book found in the library, and a few have added hooks for what the party could be doing in the library prior. While the vast majority of these adventures are only loosely tied to said book—being is little more than the adventure hook that could be replaced by a travelling bard or a location encountered on the road—at least three adventures are actually set in Candlekeep while a couple others are set nearby and assumed to start in the fortress-library. Thankfully for those not playing in the Forgotten Realms, Candlekeep isn’t mandatory: most adventures set with the keep’s walls are only loosely connected and could be moved to other locations with minimal effort. Only one (Kandlekeep Dekonstruction) is heavily focused on Candlekeep, and even that could work just as well in the city of Sharn or Greyhawk. 

Speaking of which, the book even suggests other libraries that could replace Candlekeep, mentioning examples in Exandria, Eberron, and Greyhawk. (But curiously not Ravenloft, an odd omission given it’s the next hardcover book. I guess the libraries of Il Aluk or Port-a-Lucine don’t rate.)

The book features a recolouring of elves. There’s a very copper sun elf, a blue moon elf, and a wood with green hair. I like that they’re trying to give each elf subtype a more distinct look, while also making ashen drow less unusual as the only non-white elves. (Having the typically evil drow be “paler” than sun and moon elves feels like a good move.) Ten years ago this might have been seen as copying World of Warcraft with its red-pink Blood Elves and blue-purple Night Elves. But, eh. Elves that look completely human are overrated. 

There’s quite a few interesting adventures in the book. And a surprising amount of demiplanes and pocket planes.

A Deep and Creeping Darkness was the first adventure that really jumped out at me. While the non-standard use of traditionally evil monsters in Mazfronth’s Mighty Digressions was engaging, I simply enjoyed the effective use of evil fey and creepy atmosphere of A Deep and Creeping Darkness. It caught my attention and made me start to take this book more seriously. 

I’m also fond of the Shemshime’s Bedtime Rhyme, with its unique take on a book and a creepy omnipresent threat that can’t be defeated through stabbing. And kudos to this adventure for not only listing the objects that could be used to end the threat, but providing multiple options. While an adventure set in Candlekeep, this could easily be moved to almost any location, either other libraries or just a generic tower in a city. The fact it focuses on being quarantined and locked-up is extra amusing; I’m uncertain if this was intended or coincidental, but given the long lead time official D&D books have, I expect this was planned and/or written in 2019 or early 2020, before the lockdowns really hit North America.

Another adventure that makes creative use of the “books as adventure hooks” theme was Book of Cylinders, which stretches the definition of “book” in a neat way. This is one of the many not-mystery adventures, but at least the party is investigating the cause of a village ceasing trade. 

Lore of Lurue had a neat take of pulling people into the narrative in a literal sense, which elevates an otherwise unremarkable adventure. It might be a nice choice to run for younger or new players, where you don’t want to penalize people too much for dying. And I just appreciate that the author of this adventure decided to make the shared theme of books more than just an adventure hook, and have the plot of the book itself be the adventure. 

I prefer serious adventures. My players are perfectly able to be silly on their own, so I seldom feel the need to make anything purposely goofy. And I tend to gravitate to darker, horror tales anyway. But there’s just something joyful about the absurdity of Kandlekeep Dekonstruction, and its reproducing clockworks, mad gnomes, flying towers, and repeated use of farmyard terminology. And just the possible conclusion where, if you fail, the hapless antagonists escape into outer space until they run out of food and descend into cannibalism. The adventure knows it’s light, escapist fare and just embraces its own ridiculousness. 

I enjoy the cursed book aspect of The Scrivener’sTale as a hook, along with the time limit it subtly places on the adventure. It’s unfortunate that the PCs might not be aware exactly how long they have, as a harder limit might really prompt them to action. But some uncertainty is a good thing. This adventure really makes use of locations in the Forgotten Realms; while trickier to move, I appreciate it being set in actual canonical places rather than just generic locales. The final adventure in the book, Xanthoria, is just a pretty bog standard dungeon delve. The initial investigation elements almost feel reluctantly tacked-on. And it’s almost the opposite of The Scrivener’sTale and Alkazaar’s Appendix as it doesn’t even try to locate itself in a specific location in the Realms. Just “a forest.” But after defeating the final monster, the adventure offers up a final unexpected twist regarding their enemy’s immortality. Honestly, this adventure will live or die based on the DM and the player’s ability to roleplay and interact at the table. With a good willing and able to break out their acting chops, this adventure will be deeply entertaining.

The Bad 

Not all the adventures are really investigations. Many are closer to site-based adventures where you’re just meant to kill everything in sight, and the final encounter reveals some hidden truth. It’s an investigation by way of Scooby Doo, where you catch the monster and then find out what was behind the problems. 

While I was impressed by some of the adventures, others fall prey to the traditional problems of investigation adventures. The Book of Inner Alchemy jumped out to me in this regard, with a couple instances of narrative leaps. You can investigate an assault and deduce they were killed by people hiding in the Cloak Wood. Despite none of the evidence or related bullet points leading to the Cloak Wood. And once the PCs reac said 2,500 square mile wood, they’re just meant to wander in and encounter the bandit-monks. The PCs aren’t investigating so much as stumbling in the direction of the plot, and being carried by the narrative to the next encounter. 

A few investigations could have also used a little more DM guidance. For example, The Price of Beauty is a neat freeform investigation that you could drop in the path of any adventurers on the road and the players have to realize that something isn’t right. But the DM isn’t given much guidance, they just have to know the adventure and respond to the character’s actions. It’d be a little too easy for the adventurers to pop in, murder the nereid and medusa, then wander off while missing the real threat. (This adventure is actually rather interesting, and a moderately skilled DM could easily make it a memorable investigation. It just needed a dash more guidance.)

It’s useful at the table to have the stat blocks of monsters in the text rather than at an appendix at the end. But this comes at the expense of making it more difficult to find said monsters when not running that module. There’s no handy list of stat blocks or index of creatures. If you want a cloud giant ghost or lichen lich for a homebrew adventure, be prepared to flip. And because the new monsters are scattered throughout the book, it’s not apparent how many few creatures are actually featured until you count; when I finished the book I only recalled seeing four or five new foes and it wasn’t until I went back to count that the number of new stat blocks jumped out. 

Apart from the map of Candlekeep and one in-world handout, all the maps are simple monochromatic line art. A few have the extra hand-drawn detail of Dyson Logos, while some seem like clipart assembled in a graphic design program like Illustrator or Corel Draw (or a free Open Office variant). These maps aren’t bad… but they also don’t look like art you’d find in an expensive product by the hobby’s market leader, instead resembling budget art produced by a small publisher. Ostensibly, these maps are easier for DMs to draw at the table, but you can choose to ignore added detail as a DM. And these simple maps are especially jarring in the Age of COVID when online play is the norm: these maps would look odd when compared to people’s bright and detailed tokens and character art.

Speaking of maps, only part of the Candlekeep poster is reprinted in the book, with half the keep not shown. I have literally no idea what the rest of Candlekeep looks like because there’s no way I’m removing my map from its perforated position at the back of my fancy collector’s edition.

Master sages of Candlekeep have fireball memorized, despite being unable to cast it inside the fortress-library, due to its wards against fire. And it’s not just one spell on their list, but one of the few spells fully written out in their stat block for ease of use.

New to this book, monsters stat blocks are now omitting alignment. Apparently this is the new default. I understand the reasoning for this with mortal humanoids, but fey creatures, undead, and constructs are different (to say nothing of fiends and angelic beings). As a DM it’s useful to know what the baseline alignment is at a glance, to know how to portray a creature. Especially when dealing with mooks and not named villains, as the former might only have the briefest of motivations. 

I’d really prefer simply modifying alignment with an adverb, like “usually” or “often.” So a nereid is “commonly chaotic neutral” and the lichen lich is “typically neutral evil.” It just makes it easier as a DM, so you know if you need to explain why this is a good ____ opposed to explaining why this is an evil ____, or just skip the motivation altogether. When roleplaying fey literally created out of fear and spawned by the torture of living creatures, I’d prefer to quickly know if they’re disorganized and chaotic, organized and coordinated lawful beings, or self-centered neutral beings.

The Ugly

The Book of the Raven adventure is just a mess. It’s less an adventure and more a series of things duct taped together. There’s the adventure hook book, which details lore on the Vistani. How is this relevant to the adventure, you ask? It’s not. Because the adventure is about a treasure map found in the book. Which sounds cool: following the locations and deciphering clues and identifying the correct landmarks. But all that is a single two-paragraph mini-section where you’re told to flesh out the journey. Most of the adventure is spent describing the Chalet found at the end of the map, even though the secret society of wereravens residing there (who are devoted to keeping evil magic items from bad people) can tell adventurers there’s no treasure inside. Oh, and the map was placed in the book by the founder, because a secret society dedicated to hoarding evil treasure totally wants to direct treasure hunters to their hidden base of operations. Then, at the end, the adventures can cross over into the Shadowfell and encounter a mausoleum where the treasure surely must be hidden. And there they find… an uncommon magic item that makes people better at mounted combat. So… the real treasure was the lycanthrope you contracted along the way?

I could write a whole blog post on how Book of the Raven is a poorly written adventure and you shouldn’t design adventures like this. 

I might be more forgiving if this was a first time contributor to D&D—this is something like fifteen contributors’ first D&D product—but this adventure was written by Chris Perkins, a long time D&D designer whose sole job is managing and working on adventures. 

While I praised the elves being re-hued, it feels inconsistently done. In addition to the azure moon elf, there’s a blue wood elf in another adventure. It almost feels like it was a last minute change that they didn’t fully plan out before implementing. Or that elves are now like tieflings and can just be any colour.

Similarly, the book deliberately doesn’t list the gender of NPCs in stat blocks, with the intent that DMs can make them whatever they want. However, as almost all the NPCs use gendered pronouns they still have a gender, it’s just less obvious. All this does it draw less attention to the couple NPCs who use they/them pronouns, making it harder to spot this vital representation. It’s a little like omitting ethnicity and having all the NPCs have yellow skin—like Lego minifigures or Simpson characters—it doesn’t erase assumed ethnicity and just removes the ability of visible people of colour to identify characters like themselves. I’d prefer if they just mention pronouns with the NPC write-up. I.e. Neutral evil elf, he/him or Chaotic good human, they/them.

The magical gloves at the end of The Book of Inner Alchemy adventure strike me as possibly the most broken magic item I’ve ever seen. Even for a Legendary item. They make you Constitution 20 and add 2d10 force damage to each unarmed strike. That’s all good, but you can also regain hit points equal to the force damage an unlimited number of times per day or gain advantage if you’re maximum health. Holy crap that is good. Especially for a monk that might throw four fists a round, potentially gaining 6d10 extra damage and healing an average of 22 hit points each turn. And even more on a crit.

The Awesome

That alternative cover….oh man. I’m over the idea that every book needs an alternate cover; it was fun for a while, but now that it’s just become mandatory and expected, it feels less special and fun. But this cover is just lovely. The binding on this version also seems better. To get technical, the alternate cover is case bound (with several sewn folios glued to the spine) rather than the perfect binding of most 5th Edition D&D books. 

-edit: I checked the Standard Edition at a couple FLGS here, and all were also featured sturdier case bound spines. I appears WotC has finally listened to feedback and improved the binding of their books.-

One of the adventures is set entirely in a Mordenkainen’s magnificent mansion, and features a map of said mansion. This is super handy to have for anyone who uses said spell but doesn’t want to make their own floor plan.

I love the meenlock adventure. This is exactly the type of small investigative monster hunt I would personally write and like to run. I’ve never really paid attention to meenlocks before, but this adventure not only utilizes them to good effect, but sells them to be as a monster. If you’re looking for a quick Ravenloft one-shot in two or three months, you could do a heck of a lot worse than this tale.

Chris Perkins’ adventure includes a brief section of lore on the Vistani. This continues the “rehabilitation” of the Vistani, moving them away from the negative stereotypes that plagued Curse of Strahd and will likely be emphasised in van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft. While largely superfluous to this adventure, I like how the Vistani were handled here and are presented as found throughout the Shadowfell in addition to just Ravenloft. It’s a nice bit of additive canon. And once could easily justify Vistani in Ravenloft being slightly different than free Vistani not trapped by the Dark Powers.  

As mentioned, the grippli see their return to the game. I’m sad there’s no rules for them being a player race/ lineage, but nice to have a classic monster back. They were in the Monstrous Manual where I got my start with the game, so they’re my preferred non-evil frog race (and the grung feel like cheap knock-offs). 

Fan favourite, chwingas return. This time, the tiny fey/elementals are in desert form. 

There are thirteen modrons working in the library. The idea of free willed beings of pure law rummaging around through the library acting as pages amuses me greatly. 

An exceptional guest at Candlekeep is the ogre, Little One, who has a headband of intellect and thus an Intelligence of 19 (and an alignment of chaotic good). I’m uncertain how I feel about the idea ogres only being evil because they’re, well, stupid. Especially because at Int 8 they’re within the range of human intelligence (Forrest Gump would be a 7 or 8). But I’m probably overthinking things and should just roll with the idea of a genius ogre. 

Final Thoughts

I’ll be honest, I wasn’t particularly interested in this book. A bunch of short adventures by untested rookie authors attempting to do mysteries, which are among the hardest genre of adventures to write. But that limited edition cover… that was a thing of beauty that needed to be owned. Regardless, my expectations for the contents were not high.

Very early on I was quickly impressed by the imagination and tone of the adventures. And while not every adventure is a winner, there are some excellent adventures that I will seriously consider running in the future.

Final Thoughts

I’ll be honest: I wasn’t particularly interested in this book. A bunch of short adventures by untested rookie authors attempting to do mysteries, which are among the hardest genre of adventures to write. But that limited edition cover… that was a thing of beauty that needed to be owned. Regardless, my expectations for the contents were not high.

Very early on I was quickly impressed by the imagination and tone of the adventures. The extra effort that comes with being an untested rookie that doesn’t want to throw away their shot. In fact, many of the best adventures in this book were far superior to the efforts by the established authors with dozens of credits to their name. And while not every adventure is a winner, there are some excellent adventures that I will seriously consider running in the future. And even many of the weaker adventures can be easily run and turned into memorable game sessions by a competent Dungeon Master. 

Furthermore, what makes an engaging adventure is very much based on what excites a particular DM. While I like the dark creepiness of A Deep and Creeping Darkness I know other DMs might enjoy the subverted expectations of Mazfronth’s Mighty Digressions or The Price of Beauty, the Indiana Jones style delving of Alkazaar’s Appendix, or the old school dungeon crawl of The Canopic Being. This might even be a decent book for rookie DMs who are experienced with the game but have never run before. The Joy of Extradimensional Spaces or Book of Cylinders would both be decent for someone’s first published adventure.

The usefulness of this product isn’t as immediately obvious as a full campaign spanning 1st level to 10th or 15th level. But it’s the kind of product that is useful to have, for those times when you have an impromptu game, want to test out a new mechanical option, just need a break from the regular campaign, or had the week from hell and just did not have time to prepare. And unlike past compilations, the adventures in this book are short enough to only fill a single session, rather than derailing the campaign for two or three nights.

Shameless Plugs

If you liked this article, you can support me and encourage future reviews. My disposable income, which is necessary to buy RPG products, is entirely dependent on my sales.
Seriously. After returning to work after being unemployed for 4 months (in part due to Covid-19) I’ve found myself quarantined after a potential exposure and unable to work for another fortnight. My finances and ability to pay for books to review is dependant on sales.

I have a number of PDF products on the DMs Guild website, including Who’s Doomed, a book of 5e stat blocks of darklords for the Ravenloft campaign setting, which is a huge passion product. And if it sells well, I’ll add additional darklords to the product. And it’s newly released companion Allies Against the Night, which takes classic Ravenloft heroes and makes them into sidekicks.

Others include the Blood Hunter Expanded, my bundle of my Ravenloft books, the Tactician a level 1 to 20 class, Rod of Seven Parts, Traps, Diseases, Legendary Monsters, a book of Variant Rules.

Additionally, the revision of my book, Jester David’s How-To Guide to Fantasy Worldbuilding is on DriveThurRPG, available for purchase as a PDF or Print on Demand! (And now in colour!) The book is a compilation of my worldbuilding blog series, but all the entries have been updated, edited, and expanded to almost two-hundred pages of advice on making your own fantasy world.

Plus, I have T-shirts available for sale over on TeePublic! The art of which can also be put on cloth masks.

Review: Ptolus – City by the Spire

Ptolus: City by the Spire was first published by Malhavoc Press way back in August, 2006. At the time, it was arguably “the most deluxe roleplaying product ever published,” being a staggering 672 pages with an embossed cover and multiple extra features. An update was funded by Kickstarter in March of 2020, with 5,621 backers pledging a modest $782,923 to produce a new printing of this mammoth RPG setting, for 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons as well as Monte Cook Games’ Cypher System.

PDFs of the book have hit backers, with physical books currently being available to preorder. And while there are many more products that have stolen the title of “most deluxe RPG product” (including the Star Trek Adventures Borg Cube, Monte Cook’s own Invisible Sun, and anything by Beadle & Grimm) Ptolus is still a very, very impressive book. 

I’m unfamiliar with the Cypher System, so while I have access to that PDF I haven’t opened it. This review will focus on the 5E D&D update. Although, I imagine the majority of my comments and critiques will apply equally to both versions of the product.

What It Is

This massive tome is a hefty 672-pages. The physical copy is a full colour hardcover book with three cloth bookmarks sewn into the binding. (And extra cardstock bookmarks you can download.) The PDF is fully bookmarked and hyperlinked. Not just in the table of contents, but page references in every sidebar. And boy howdy are there sidebars. 

Each page of the book basically has three columns. The two standard columns of text and a third sidebar that runs the length of the page and has page references and sidenotes. Every time an NPC, item, spell, or historical event is referenced in the main text, the page number where they’re detailed is listed at the side. The sidebars also contain GM tips, personal notes, trivia regarding the world, NPC statblock tweaks, and so much more. 

The book advertises multiple “special features” that are included separately. In the physical product, these were in a separate envelope. For users of the PDF, these are separate downloads. Special features include numerous handouts and maps, a menu form the tavern, a list of equipment from a store, several official documents (for when guards demand “papers, please.”), a wanted poster, several flyers, and a calendar. It also includes campaign journals from Mr. Cook’s own home game, some serialized fiction, character sheets, graphics and art, and a year’s worth of “this week in Ptolus” events. Curiously, these aren’t included with download of the Core Rulebook and aren’t listed anywhere on the webstore. Thankfully, there is a link on page 11 of the PDF that takes you to these files.

The book starts with a 26-page introduction to the city and history. Also called out as the “Player’s Guide“, this whole chapter is free online as a separate PDF. If you’re at all curious about Ptolus the book or Ptolus the city, I encourage you to check this out.

From there, the book delves into the larger world surrounding the city, species, cosmology & religion, history, and organizations. Then it spends 245-pages (!) detailing the city proper, with each district receiving several pages that describe key locations and inhabitants. The start of each district has several pages describing the tone and how to use that district in adventures. Many locations have an adventure hook or scenario included, incentivizing the GM a reason to include that location as well as providing a rapid encounter if the PCs wander into an unexpected store or tavern. 

Part IV delves beneath the city and describes the many dungeons and ruins beneath Ptolus, including the sewer, an abandoned dwarven city, several natural caves, and more. Part V is “Above the City,” and describes the two locations on the Spire: the impossibly tall tower that stretches upward a few hundred feet. The first of these, Goth Gulgamel, is an evil fortress that serves as a higher level dungeon crawl. The second is Jabel Shammar, which is meant to be an “end of the campaign” location. The climax of a by-the-book Ptolus campaign. (If there is such a thing.)

Part V is dedicated to life in the city, with chapters on being a resident, the delver lifestyle, law & crime, technology, and some proprietary Monte Cook magic-tech items known as “chaositech.” This goes into such details as the cost of living, rent, and other expenses (from taxes or a massage to funerary costs).

The book ends with Part VI: Running a Ptolus Campaign. Six chapters offering campaign advice as well as suggestions for urban campaigns, four small adventures, eighteen new monsters, and 20 NPCs (most being generic but a few being named characters). There are also some character options with five (!) new cleric domains in the magic chapter along with 30 new spells, 50-plus magic items of various rarities. There’s also a new bard college (Knight of the Cord) and a paladin oath (Knight of the Pale).

There’s a LOT in this book.

The Good

As mentioned, the layout sets this book apart and is to die for. Even fifteen years later, this is still “the bar” by which I judge the usability of an RPG book. The sidebars make navigating the book and finding referenced elements easy. The layout is also colour coded, with each Part having a different colour for its the headings, sidebar text, and the coloured tab at the edge of the page. The tabs and colour coding isn’t quite as delineated as the original, but it’s still usable (and arguably easier for people who may be partially colourblind). 

While I’ve seen prettier RPG books (Shadows of Esteren) this is still the best layout in the hobby.

There’s a ridiculous amount of plot hooks and campaign ideas. Half of the locations get their own plot hook, and every NPC has a story and goal. Each organization (and there are many) serves a similar purpose, potentially acting as a rival, supporting ally, misguided enemy, patron, or aspirational goal for a PC. There are strictly villainous groups like chaos cults and the undead loving Forsaken, as well as semi-evil demonic Fallen who could be presented as allies for tiefling PCs or fiendish villains to curbstomp. The city is home to multiple assassin’s guilds, with not all being evil allowing for potential PC membership. And there’s even a whole group of vigilante Sister Nights: the Sisterhood of Silence. Because what’s not to love about peacekeeping warrior nuns?

Speaking of organizations, the Brotherhood of Redemption is devoted to converting “evil” humanoids into productive members of society. A neat idea, and an interesting way of disposing off antagonistic creatures without killing them. However, their methods are also questionable, raising further moral issues. But if you handwave the (undoubtedly unintended) similarities to conversion therapy, this group is a fun patron that allows you to subvert murder-hobo tropes.

Similarly, there’s also a sidebar at the end of chapter 3 regarding evil humanoids and encouraging DMs to ignore certain peoples automatically being evil—such as drow— if it makes players uncomfortable. While DM’s don’t need permission to change things they don’t like about a setting, it’s nice to have a reminder of that from the author. 

(Sidebar aside, this is still very much a book written in the early-2000s with assumed evil drow, orcs, ratfolk, sahaughin, etc. No effort is made to change this in the text. If you’re uncomfortable with an entire group of elves having an evil culture, be aware you will have to ignore or change those sections.)

On the surface, there’s an intimidating amount of content in Ptolus. But you don’t need to know it all. While working through the book, readers will very quickly gravitate to something that catches their interest, and a campaign develops. The criminal aspects might catch your eye, prompting you to run a campaign inspired by Gangs of London, where the prologue of the first session features the death of crimelord Menon Balacazar. Focusing on that means you don’t need to do more than skim the entries on the wicked Vladaam evil noble family or the adventurous Delver’s Guild, religion or politics in the city, or any of the dungeons beneath Ptolus. 

As the city was designed with delvers (read: adventurers) in mind, many of the iconic adventuring locations have great flavour. Like blacksmiths that focus on arms and armour. And a tavern haunted by a ghostly bard producing phantom music. Most of these locations are fully mapped, providing an interesting inn to drop in any game. Each district also has a map of a typical apartment or house found in that district. This is not only useful for describing a residence during an investigation, but as a floorplan for when the PCs purchase property: the DM has a map they can pass to the PCs to customize and make their own. 

Several characters are featured in multiple pieces of art. (Or a thumbnail of the character is reprinted in multiple places.) It’s not just a generic commoner in the bar but Jevicca Nor, a member of the inner circle of the Inverted Pyramid. She’s just one of the many high level NPCs running around Ptolus, but (like Eberron) not all of these high level characters are adventurers and willing to save the world. They have their own concerns. To help you keep track, the book has a chart of low, mid, and high level NPCs that could be allies, and a similar list of foes. There’s even a sidebar with a list of the high level clerics able to resurrect the dead.

The book doesn’t just cover the city or place it in a generic location, but sets Ptolus in a world with its own history and events. Enough is presented here to have Ptolus be the launching point into that larger world, which has its own troubles and danger. There’s not a huge amount of information, but more than enough to build atop.

In several places the book encourages customization. Despite having a ridiculous amount of detail and options, DMs are still encouraged to make Ptolus their own. New gods in particular are encouraged. There’s a fairly expansive pantheon included in the book already, but it still encourages you to invent new cults and gods, adding their temples and shrines to the city’s “Street of a Million Gods.”

The Bad

This isn’t a REAL update of Ptolus. It doesn’t update the setting based on the changes to fantasy gaming and world design over the last decade-and-a-half. It doesn’t make a concerted effort to fix the “problems” of the setting, like innately evil drow or its overwhelmingly white populace. Similarly, it doesn’t try to convert Ptolus to 5th Edition so much as reprint Ptolus in a different rule set. Races added in 5th Edition—such as dragonborn—are not included. Warlocks are only briefly mentioned with only a single NPC called out as being that class. Subclasses aren’t given a role and subraces aren’t apparent: there’s no discussion of different types of gnome or halfling, and the subtypes of elves and dwarves don’t match those in the rules. There’s no attempt to tie backgrounds into the world, and the table of PC backgrounds doesn’t even try to connect with a character’s background (and should really have been renamed something else to avoid confusion). 

Not all of the mechanical conversions are good. There’s several references to using Sleight of Hand to pick locks, rather than Dexterity (Sleight of Hand) or a Dexterity check requiring thieves’ tools. There’s also numerous sidebars with information that can be gathered with a check, but this tends to use Investigation rather than Persuasion or History. 

The economy and presence of magical items is also still rooted in 3rd Edition, where magical crafting was a much larger part of the game and characters were expected to have a wide array of enchanted items. NPCs very much still have a Christmas tree of magical items.

I’m a little disappointed that there are so few unique NPCs. You’d expect some of the key characters, like Sheva Callister or the Iron Mage, to have unique stat blocks. Instead, they’re just base NPCs modified in the sidebar. (But, annoyingly, these customizations don’t modify their CR, despite increasing the character’s power.)

Meanwhile, the setting just feels less special now. When the Ptolus campaigns were originally running in 1999 and 2000, having a fantasy setting that was based on the game’s tropes and conventions rather than those of fantasy fiction was revolutionary. This was a world designed for D&D rather than a world you just happened to play D&D in. But even when Ptolus was published in 2006 this was starting to change, as Eberron had done similar things in 2004. We’ve now seen numerous other settings built with D&D games in mind, or even designed specifically for 5th Edition (like Wildemount). And many of the conventions and assumptions of the game have even changed; the tropes of D&D have evolved. What made Ptolus the setting special now feels commonplace and unremarkable. Almost dated.

The setting also doesn’t feature any added diversity. No additional gay, trans, or ace individuals. This is very much NOT saying that the book made no improvements concerning value changes in the last decade-and-a-half: the reference to homophobia among dwarves was removed and the Species chapter gives some nonbinary names to all included species. But there’s no enby characters in the book and still only the single gay character. And there’s precious few people of colour. The standout non-white NPC is the Holy Emperor of the Church, Rejpboth Ylestos, who is basically the King-Pope, and very much black in his picture on page 91. But there are few other notable people of colour in the book. This feels very much like diversity in the early 2000s, when movies would have overwhelmingly white casts but have a black man as President. Sure all the protagonists, antagonists, love interests, comedic sidekicks, and background extras were white, but the cameo-in-chief was African American so the film was progressive…

The art in general is sadly of mixed quality. The vast majority of art pieces were found in the original, with a small few added with Kickstarter funds. Even when the book was published, gamers were moving away from black-and-white art and some of the pieces were so-so. But it was an indie publication, so this was acceptable. Now, with standards higher even for 3rd Party books, there are still a few stinkers that date the product. (Thankfully, there’s no low-rez artwork like other reprints of 3rd Edition books.) That said, many classical pieces hold up nicely. And for a 3rd Party book there is a LOT of art; there’s something on almost every page.

The Ugly

As mentioned, this book is very much a product of the 2000s in terms of portrayal of drow. By default, dark elves are not only unwelcome in Ptolus, but being one within the city limits is a literal crime. Punishable by death. And harbouring a dark elf and providing one aid is punishable by imprisonment for two years. Yes, playing a core PHB race is a crime, as is having one in the party. Why? Unclear. It’s not even because they’re assumed to be evil slavers. Because slavery is called out as being accepted in the city! Owning a slave is somehow legal, even though selling them is illegal; buying another sentient being is apparently fine. There’s even a reference that nobles “use ogre slaves to carry palanquins.” 

While most of the art is passable, the maps have not aged well at all. They scream out “early 2000s Photoshop with default textures.” They’re bad. The Monte Cook Games web store sells an oversized vinyl map, which is undeniably a neat accessory for a game, but not something I could personally look at without fixating on the dated quality of the image. I can’t unsee the awkward bevelling at the cliffs that make them look like they’re floating, the uneven global lighting, simple texture to the forest, and the like. 

(That said… I think I still prefer the maps in this book to some of the line art found in recent official D&D adventures.)

The PC rules for the Cherubim elf are just terrible. It overvalues flight and stacks on disadvantages to compensate, making a race unusable. It’s wholly weaker than the aarakocra from the Elemental Evil Player’s Companion in every metric. Don’t use this race. 

As mentioned, many of the NPCs are still laden with magic items. Which is odd but not dealbreaking. However a few have four or more items requiring attunement, which is an irritating oversight. 

On page 502, the oft-mentioned “leather coat” has its stats awkwardly tucked at the very bottom of the page as a footnote. It’s very awkwardly placed. But it doesn’t matter as there’s no reason to wear a leather coat rather than a chain shirt. Ever. Which is a shame because, as a child of the ’90s, I do like a badass leather longcoat.

When a monster is referenced in the text, often the sidebar will list its hit points. I’m uncertain why, as this is typically the exact same hit points found in the Monster Manual. I don’t see the benefit.

The Awesome

Chapter 3 is renamed “Species” rather than “Races.” And the book anticipated the recent change to races/ lineages in D&D, with Ability Score Increases not being set but instead being the player’s choice.

I do love that there are multiple thieves guilds at play in the city, with the Balacazar Crime Family, Killraven Crime League, and the classical Longfinger’s Guild all competing and somewhat at odds. This allows you to have the traditional thieves’ guild that believes in honour among thieves and trained the heroic rogue character as well as the evil, murderous guild of thieves that would steal from an orphanage. You can do a story where the various guilds go to war with the city (and PCs) being caught in the middle or the story where the PCs try to take back the streets for their guild. Or even a story where less moral PCs work their way up the ranks of a crime family in a D&D version of Grand Theft Auto.

Similarly, the omnipresent arcane guild also runs the coolest magic shop ever, with the Dreaming Apothecary solving so many of the problems of having stores filled with expensive and dangerous bespoke magic items but lacking firm security against mid-level adventurers with loose morals. There’s no cheating the Dreaming Apothecary. There is another magic item store, Myraeth’s, but this is presented as a pawn shop full of items recovered during adventures. The book even includes a list of typical stock, which is amazing. There’s also a table to determine odds the shop has a particular item desired by the PCs. (Unfortunately, this is based on price not rarity, and clearly was not updated to reflect the prices of magic items in the 5e DMG.) 

On page 133 there is a full-page flowchart showing connections between the organizations. This is a neat reminder that these groups don’t all work in a vacuum and might support or rival other factions. This is emblematic of Ptolus as a whole: the book is full of such connectivity, which really makes the setting work. A character in Old Town might be the son of a tavern owner in Midtown and associated with the House Sadar in the Nobles Quarter. Each chapter isn’t stand-alone and dissociated from the rest of the book.

Page 154 has a chart of travel times between districts, allowing you to tell at a glance how long it takes to get from Midtown to the Docks or Oldtown.

The book is filled with little bits of GM advice and stories from the original Ptolus campaigns. Sometimes these are adventure hooks or peaks behind the DM Screen, while other times they’re reminders to describe the smell of a region or the potency of a trap.

I love the cross section of the areas under the city on page 385. It’s both a visual of how high the spire is as well as how deep things go beneath the city. It’s one thing to read how deep the caverns stretch underground and another to see it compared to the height of the city proper. 

There’s a large two-page spread on “Vices”, including alcohol, magical drugs, and gambling. It’s always good to know the view of intoxicants in a location, as well as what people do for less than legal fun. Another spread even has a brief description of some games of chance played in the city. There’s also a sizable chart of crimes and their punishments, so you know just how much to punish the players for stealing or having a bar brawl. 

Speaking of crimes, the book makes it apparent casting mind-altering enchantments in the city IS a crime. Which makes sense in a fantasy world based on D&D: you don’t want wizards going around casting charm person on storekeepers. Enchanters have been getting some negative attention of late, given how they intersect with consent, and Ptolus having laws against enchantments feels accidently topical but still appropriate.

Returning to vices, the book doesn’t just detail illicit fun, but good ol’ family fun with a spread on a local holiday, complete with events & games you can engage in during that festival. Yet another spread has a description of food and common meals. Minor details like the meal being served at the tavern can really make a game come alive. 

The equipment section has a rat harness. Which is a slightly less silly version of the “bag of rats” where you strap a rat into the harness and then use it to trigger traps that detect living things. Ridiculous, but you can pretty much envision a game session where a player had that item commissioned.

Final Thoughts

If you want a generic fantasy setting built around the needs of a Dungeons & Dragons party but don’t like Eberron OR want to avoid standing in the shadow of Matthew Mercer by using Exandria, then Ptolus is an excellent choice. It’s classical in tone but less well known, so you can do what you want with the setting. It’s fantastic without being as gonzo as Eberron or Planescape. It’s classical without being as awkwardly retro as Greyhawk or the Forgotten Realms. And it’s simply bursting with adventures. You could easily run three or four full campaigns in Ptolus, that are all thematically different and touch on different styles of adventure, and still never see everything this book has to offer. There will still be NPCs that are not met, locations that aren’t visited, and adventure hooks not encountered. 

It’s a large book, but it is a book that is surprisingly easy to reference and run. Despite its size, it’s fairly easy to find content you need, with the sidebars, expansive table of contents, and multiple indexes. Plus the added digital extras, like the expanded table of contents and various handouts and maps.

The wealth of content not only makes Ptolus useful for a more scripted campaign where you research and plan in advance, but also for sandbox games where you react to the player’s spontaneous wishes. Because when the players do the unexpected and decide to find a shop that sells… let’s say pottery, you can choose to flip to the South Market section and find Salora’s Pots. (Page 339 for the curious.) Or you can invent something on the fly, knowing that there’s plenty of room on the map for extra shops.

If you’ve never read Ptolus before and have the money, it’s a worthy addition to your gaming shelf. It’s a centerpiece book that stands out as a conversation starter or display piece. And you’re guaranteed to find some use for the book, as it’s a wealth of locations you can just strip out and drop into your world. Need an inn or a sewer or a prison? This book can provide.

If you’ve already read Ptolus it’s a harder sell. The key content is the world, and most of that doesn’t require updated rules. I have the 3.5 Edition version, and I might just stick with that and crack the 5e PDF for when I absolutely need an updated magic item. 

And while this book is expensive at $149.99, it’s almost cheap by the standards of some modern gaming products. It costs less than the D&D Core Rulebooks Gift Set and is much cheaper than a Beadle & Grimm platinum box. And while it’s less fancy, it contains far more content and support for games than a B&G boxed set. Plus, after spending that kind of money on a single book, you’re almost incentivized to find a use for it: you will find an excuse to run a one-shot or mini campaign in Ptolus. Because while Ptolus: City by the Spire is no longer “the most deluxe roleplaying product ever published,” it’s still arguably the most deluxe roleplaying book ever published.

Shameless Plugs

If you liked this article, you can support me and encourage future reviews. My disposable income—which is necessary to buy RPG products—is entirely dependent on my PDF sales.

I have a number of PDF products on the DMs Guild website, including Who’s Doomed, a book of 5e stat blocks of darklords for the classic version of the Ravenloft campaign setting, which is a huge passion product. And if it sells well, I’ll add additional darklords to the product. It’s companion product is Allies Against the Night, which takes classic Ravenloft heroes and makes them into sidekicks (based on the rules from Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything).

Others include the Blood Hunter Expanded, my bundle of my Ravenloft books, the Tactician class, Rod of Seven Parts, Traps, Diseases, Legendary Monsters, and a book of Variant Rules. Phew.

Additionally, the revision of my book, Jester David’s How-To Guide to Fantasy Worldbuilding is on DriveThurRPG, available for purchase as a PDF or Print on Demand! (And now in colour!) The book is a compilation of my worldbuilding blog series, but all the entries have been updated, edited, and expanded to almost two-hundred pages of advice on making your own fantasy world.

Plus, I have T-shirts available for sale over on TeePublic! The art of which can also be put on cloth masks.

Review: Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft

In the fall of 2020, Ray Winninger—the new Executive Producer of D&D—teased that three classic campaign settings were being updated to 5th Edition. The first of these is Ravenloft with the newly released van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft. 

Named after Castle Ravenloft, the centerpiece dungeon of Curse of Strahd, the world of Ravenloft is a land of horror. Formerly gothic horror but now all flavours of fright. Ravenloft is the setting where the monsters of choice are typically pulled from Universal Horror movies or classical European literature of the 18th and 19th centuries rather than millennia-old folklore. (And now also the horror movies of the 1970s and ’80s.) It’s primary inspirations are Dracula and Lovecraft rather than Greek mythology mashed with King Arthur.

Unlike traditional campaign settings, Ravenloft isn’t a planet or literal world, but a demiplane. It’s a pocket dimension tucked away in the Shadowfell (formerly the Deep Ethereal in 2nd and 3rd Edition). It’s accessible from multiple other worlds, with characters either born in Ravenloft or pulled into that world from any campaign setting. And each region could be pulled into the Shadowfell from other worlds creating a patchwork quilt of lands.

What It Is

Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft is a 265-page hardcover book. It’s features full colour art and regional maps with black-and-white maps of the House of Lament for the included adventure of the same name. Like all new D&D releases, it’s available with two covers: the regular cover and the limited edition that is only available in game stores. 

(I’m hoping this book features the improved binding of Candlekeep Mysteries i.e. case bound rather than perfect bound. But my LGS had their shipment delayed, so I don’t have a physical copy and am reviewing the content as read on DnDBeyond.)  

The book contains three new lineages, which are rebranded races that you can ostensibly gain during play. These are the dhampir (half-vampires), hexblood (half-hags), and reborn—which can be either diet flesh golems or zombies/ revenants. There are two new subclasses as well: the bardic college of spirits and the warlock pact of undeath. Rounding out the new character options are the Dark Gifts, which are the 5e update of Dark Powers checks. Sorta. (They’re really closer to the 2nd Edition kits from Champions of the Mists.) There’s eight different Dark Gifts in total.

The book spends 20 pages with advice on creating your own domain and detailing the different types of horror tales. It features full write-ups for 17 domains and brief descriptions for 21 smaller domains, which receive a quarter-page summary. Pretty much a single paragraph. There’s 15 pages on running horror campaigns, including holding a session zero, setting the mood, making use of a Tarokka Deck and spirit board, curses, fear & horror, traps, and more. There’s the aforementioned 20-page adventure, the House of Lament. Then the book ends with 23 new types of monster with 30-odd new stat blocks.  

There’s also a super deluxe fancy Silver Edition by Beadle & Grimm that contains… stuff. They haven’t specified. But it had better include a spirit board or I’m sending them a flaming bad of cat poo…

The Good

Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft tries to retain the tone of gothic horror that defined the setting while also leaving behind many of the problematic aspects that come with literature from the 1890s and films from the 1930s. And, to an extent, RPG game books from the 1990s. It keeps the positive tropes and drops the negative tropes. Wizards of the Coast has really focused the publicity campaign of this book on its increased diversity and removed stereotypes. Seven darklords have their gender flipped and at least four characters are now black. 

The book also uses the term “lineages” rather than “races.” It’s unclear if this will be the standard going forward or just for these three variant types of origin, which can gained after birth/ character creation. Each of the lineages allow you to keep some past traits, such as skills or movement speed. It’s unclear if weapon and armour proficiencies are included: does a mountain dwarf dhampir still get heavy armour? It’d be odd to forget how to swing a sword because your were altered by a hag.

The lineages have been slightly tweaked. They no longer have two creature types (which makes the paragraph on types and list a little odd) and it’s clearer that the bonuses from the dhampir’s bite can’t be boosted by other sources (like sneak attack or divine smite).

Dark Gifts are an amalgam of older editions’ failed Dark Power checks and story focused feats/kits. They’re very similar to the Dark Shadows mechanic I introduced in Heroes of the Mists, but with heavier mechanical effect and the bonuses balanced against a negative. I’m really uncertain how I feel about these: balancing a mechanical buff with a negative is tricky in play as it really rewards min-maxers who can pick a Dark Gift that makes them better at something they’re good at while penalizing something they don’t care about. However, the nature of Dark Gifts means they’re something the DM assigns rather than the player picks, making it harder to game the system. And the implementation works here, as the penalty often comes as a result of choosing to gain the bonus. There’s a nice feedback loop.

The book features a decent amount of content on creating darklords and their domains. This is easily the most comprehensive section on this topic in any Ravenloft book. Even fans of the older versions of Ravenloft (Grognardloft?) will find this advice invaluable when creating personal domains. This chapter is also useful for knowing what to focus on when presenting an existing darklord and exploring an established domain. There’s also a fair number of atmospheric tips here, which can be incorporated into any game. 

The tone of horror is expanded. Previous versions of Ravenloft tried unsuccessfully to cram the entire setting into one subgenre of horror. Gothic Horror in the first two versions of the setting and Fantasy Horror for Domains of Dread Far too many domains were square pegs that refused to work with that tone’s round hole. Predominantly Bluetspur, which was desperately trying to be Lovecraftian Horror. This book doesn’t try for a one-size-fits-all categorization, and domains are assigned 1-3 subgenres that fit that domain. Each of the six key types of horror receives a couple paragraphs and some bullet points of key details along with small tables with possible monsters and villains, adventure sites, and plots. There’s also brief discussion of four other types of horror. Sub-subgenres.

The seventeen primary domains each have a relatively comprehensive write-up. There’s roughly a page that describes the land, one on the darklord, and another on various adventure hooks. The focus here is really on adventure locations and the land as the PCs might encounter it; very little attention is paid to the populace, trade, and landscape. It doesn’t focus on elements like the natural inhabitants when it can give a description of the monsters the PCs might encounter. There’s often a small sidebar on native PCs that asks some questions players should answer if they want to be from that domain. Each darklord has a lengthy description of their backstory along with a list of their personality traits. This is always appreciated. Their curse and how they seal their domain is also called out. 

There’s a mixture of old and new characters that can aid adventurers, as well as a few organizations. The Keepers of the (Black) Feather return, and the book brings back the Order of the Guardians. I’m overjoyed the Weathermay-Foxgrove Twins returned, as they were an essential part of the setting in 3rd Edition. Fan favourite character Ezmerelda d’Avenir reappears, now calling herself Ez d’Avenir. For reasons. Also returning is Jander Sunstar. It’s nice they brought him back to the setting he originated in (he was first seen in the Ravenloft novel Vampire of the Mists), and somewhat attempted to reconcile his appearance in Hell during Baldur’s Gate: Descent into Avernus. The how is a little funky and handwavey. (And, really, given how much this book rewrites the past I’m surprised they bothered to do that.)

An included NPC that is particularly a deep cut is Larissa Snowmane. She was featured in the novel Dance of the Dead as well as the supplement Champions of the Mists She was never a particularly well known character but as one of the more likable protagonists in one of the less bad novels she has a lot of fans. 

The list of additional domains is fine. These are barebones, but they provide a framework to expand upon using the earlier advice for creating domains. Cyre 1313 is a particularly great idea. It’s the perfect way of incorporating the classical ghost train into Ravenloft. Who doesn’t like a classic tale of a spectral locomotive? 

The Bad

With Dark Gifts being strictly PC boons untied to morality and actions, this version of Ravenloft lacks Dark Power checks and any corruption mechanic. The Dark Powers no longer offer a temptation with power and there’s no increasing corruption and descent into evil, which was a central theme of the setting. 

And the Horror Adventure section really advises against altering a player’s character without their consent. Which I’m on the fence about. Gaining a player’s consent to do things to their character during a session zero is a good idea, and checking in after bad things happen is also strongly advised. But you shouldn’t have to stop and ask “is it okay if I curse your PC?” That’s being a tad over cautious. 

The advice for creating domains tells you not to “get bogged down with the particulars of a working society. It doesn’t matter how a village in a domain of endless night grows crops,” which makes the worldbuilder in me break out in a rash. This advice is fine for a short one-shot but is terrible for any game that lasts more than a session. It’s death to the logic of any attempt at a long term campaign in Ravenloft. Because any player that spends more than three sessions in Dementliue is going to ask “Hey… there’s practically no farmland around Port-a-Lucine. Where is the food coming from for these weekly balls? ” (Especially as the text literally says “no goods arrive from beyond the city.”) When a player asks where their steak came from the DM should NOT have to shrug and say “I dunno” or “a wizard did it.”

The maps are filled with undetailed places. Several are crowded with place names. Meanwhile the actual descriptions might only describe two or three key locales. This is a feature/bug. You’re given names to inspire you, or encouragement to have the party explore that locale. But you’re also required to do the work, defeating the purpose of buying a prepublished setting. The coolest part of a domain shouldn’t be a map tag.

I’m entirely uncertain how I feel about the NPCentry on Firan Zal’honan. It’s a fun Easter egg for fans in the know, but doesn’t really definitely tie into the lore of the appropriate domain. And without the secret, it’s harder for DMs who don’t know to properly use the character. It’s all set-up and no follow through. And it seems a little pointless for the book to keep it a secret when it’s spoiled by 5-seconds on Google. 

Ezmerelda d’Avenir now goes by the preferred name of “Ez.” I’m uncertain why. It’s such a random change. Ez has undergone a heavy retcon across her entire backstory. Her story is now uncharacteristically happy, featuring her found family as she joins the extended van Richten clan. It’s oddly un-tragic for Ravenloft. Almost off-putting really. Being genre savvy, I kept expecting the book to end with her brutal death: characters don’t get to be that happy in horror fiction except right before they die.

Speaking of Ez, while I didn’t personally have a problem with her hiding her artificial leg—it felt like a character choice more than a deliberate editorial from the authors—I respected the decision to remove that line from the reprint of Curse of Strahd. It upset people, so editing it out was the right move. Unequivocally. But this book goes a step farther referring to Ez “replacing her leg with a splendid prosthetic after a werewolf attack.” Emphasis added. Wizards of the Coast really, really want readers to know they’re sorry for even accidentally implying people should be ashamed for having an artificial limb. You can almost picture the author proudly gesturing to the page like a child eager for praise and a pat on the head.

I’m sorry WotC. The people attacking you on Twitter for ableism aren’t going to stop. They’ll just find some other reason to be mad at you. Online critics who have found an audience from being anti-D&D aren’t going to change their position.

Additionally, Ez was born “Ezmerelda Radanavich”, a criminal family who pretended to be Vistani when they kidnapped van Richten’s son. Which is a very odd retcon. Obviously it’s problematic and undesirable to have all Vistani (who were inspired by fictional portrayals of the Romani people) be villains and thieves. But having all Vistani being good and noble is overcompensating. They should be as much a mix of sinners and saints as any group of humans.  

In a related weird plot point, the book restores Madame Radanavich’s curse on Rudolph van Richten. That he must “live among monsters.” Except in this instance, van Richten doesn’t kill the Radanavich clan with Azalin’s borrowed undead but “delivered them to justice.” It seem like Irena Radanavich was a “wronged party” and thus able to impart a curse (as per the advice in this book). And the idea of van Richten “shattering [a] criminal operation” is super weird. He’s a scholar that dabbles in monster hunting, not Batman. 

Alanik Ray and Arthur Sedgewick—the analogues for Sherlock Holmes and Doctor John Watson—are a married couple and Ray is in a wheelchair. I dislike this… but not for the reason you might think. 

First, there’s a lot of ‘shipping of Holmes and Watson. This is not a bad thing per se (who hasn’t engaged in a good ‘ship?) but I dislike taking two close male friends and assuming they must be in romantic love to have strong feelings for each other. It feeds into the stereotype of toxic masculinity that men cannot have close, emotive bond that aren’t based on physical attraction or physical urges. Furthermore, Holmes is often presented as asexual, and ace characters are highly underrepresented in Western media. As Watson is often portrayed as being married and having a life outside of his partnership, having Sedgewick married to a man would have been preferable.

Second, given Watson is often portrayed as having a war injury, it feels much more appropriate to have Sedgewick in the wheelchair, being the marksman and bodyguard while Ray is fully mobile yet less adept in a fight. 

But this is a very, very personal quibble.

Last is Seeds of Fear and Stress. Which are really additional flaws, that your character can have and gain inspiration for roleplaying. These are fine. Unremarkable. But the chart of suggested fears is comically small. A mere dozen examples. Many other roleplaying games (like Dread or The Alien RPG) have found ways of making the players afraid at the same time as their characters. Adding real emotion to the table (in a safe way of course). Just tacking on a small penalty due to Stress is terribly unimaginative. 

The Ugly

The biggest complaint with the book is that there are no stat blocks for the darklords or NPCs. Instead, there are suggestions from the Monster Manual. Darklords feel like they should be these unique, special beings with personalized powers, Lair and Legendary actions, or even Mythical traits like in Mythic Odysseys of Theros. If we can have statistics for gods, demon lords, archanomentals, and more then darklords should be possible.

It’s less problematic for the NPCs who are less, well, unique. Some work while others are a bit odd. Like Gennifer Weathermay-Foxgrove who suddenly becomes a druid when she was an arcane spellcaster. Others are downright weird, like the fey/eladrin Isolde using a cambion’s statistics.

Larissa Snowmane “avoids rival riverboat captain Nathan Timothy and his ship, Virago.” Which is a genius connection; I love giving those two characters a rivalry. But anyone who isn’t a Ravenloft scholar, the book doesn’t say who Nathan Timothy is! His former domain (and that of his son) aren’t in the book. It’s a nod to a canon that has been erased.

As mentioned earlier, this book drastically alters the campaign setting. If you’re a big fan of the original, this makes some serious alterations to the world in general as well as individual domains. Pretty much every domain. It’d probably be easier to list the elements of each domain that weren’t revised than all the changes made.

Now, changes are sometimes necessary. Several lands feature stereotypes that are no longer acceptable including examples of colonialism, cultural appropriation, misogyny, racism, and other problematic elements. And the setting could use more interesting characters who are non-white as well as more strong female characters (especially female darklords whose curse & crime were not related to their femininity). The Vistani are also noteworthy as an element that needed to be changed. 

None of this is bad in and of itself.

However, not all the changes were made for reasons of social progress. Many were altered largely because the designers personally didn’t like them. Pet peeves revised because the authors could, regardless if fans liked them. Change for change’s sake.

The big change is that there’s no longer the central continent—the Core—which was a collection of over twenty-five domains. This removes trade, politics, and the shared history of the lands and makes Raveloft feel less like a single, cohesive world and more like a collection of adventure sites. Especially as most domains have been focused on their central story. It just diminishes the idea of the native hero born into the land and fighting for their home. 

Even the tone of the setting feels drastically different. It’s bleaker. More nihilistic. Previously, many lands had a semblance of normalcy: horrors were present, but they were lurking behind the surface. To the common people, things weren’t always that bad. Life in Ravenloft wasn’t that much more terrible than the Forgotten Realms, where dragons and giants stomped across the countryside. In this book, life in most lands is terrible. Things are not good and society is often at the verge of collapse. There is no “normal.” Which just makes the horror the PCs need to confront less of a contrast. It’s harder to make the scary stand out when everything is awful and the entire populace is on the verge of one apocalypse or another. Ravenloft in 3rd Edition was native heroes fighting for their land because it was worth saving and the people worth protecting. Ravenloft in 5th Edition is about heroes just trying to get the eff out of the demiplane because everyone is screwed. Because it doesn’t matter if the PCs save the day and kill the darklord, they will just return from the dead and everything will start over. There’s no winning only surviving another day. Just… bleak…

The well-publicized domain of Falkovnia is the best example. It’s leader was a very obvious pastiche of Vlad “the Impaler” Tepes. The designers felt another “Dracula homage” was boring, so the land is no longer an example of human evil amid the supernatural, but now a domain besieged by the walking dead. And the new darklord is… a slightly less obvious pastiche of Vlad “the Impaler” Tepes but female. Meanwhile, the land is overrun with the undead and only a single city remains that is besieged each night by the undead and is on the verge of succumbing.

If the Core remained then revising this domain could somewhat be justified: Falkovnia clearly marked on the map. But there is no Core. They didn’t need to update Falkovnia at all. If the designers didn’t like Falkovnia or felt its lord was redundant… they could have just skipped it! And if they wanted a land themed around a zombie apocalypse, they could have just invented a new domain (the zombie infested Ainvoklaf) and left Falkovnia alone for fans on the DMsGuild to update and expand. 

But there’s so many other examples of huge changes. Dementlieu isn’t a land of mesmerism and illusion starkly divided by the nobility poor, but a twisted take on Cinderella and a focus on grand masquerade balls. Isolde, the leader of the Carnival, is now a fey eladrin rather than the ghaele eladrin she was originally, not only losing her tragic “angel trapped in the Mists” story but now also becoming a victim of the Carnival’s true darklord. Darkon is no longer ruled by a resurrected Azalin (or his magical creation Death) but is a dying land collapsing into the Mists. Tepest is now ruled by a single hag and the Salem-style inquisition against dark fey has been replaced by creepy celebrations akin to the Wicker Man. Richemulot is now a land depopulated by a plague spread by rats. Kartakass is three times the size but is full of werewolves rather than wolfweres and its darklord, rather than being a beast pretending to be a man and desiring greatness just wants to be a celebrity. And so on…

This isn’t to say these altered domains are bad or poorly written, just that if you were a fan of the old—such as the oppression and human “evil” of Falkovnia—then tough luck.

Even if you accept the need to completely revise and overhaul the world of Ravenloft, it’s not particularly well done. Instead of making Falkovnia “Zombie Apocalypse Land”, the walking dead could have been added to the domain of Nidala, as Elena Faith-hold bears more than a passing resemblance to Vladeska Drakov and her shtick was already keeping the populace in line out of fear. (Plus, the dead rising out of the Phantasmal Forest surrounding Nidala was already a part of the lore.) Kartakass and Verbrek could have been combined to make a richer domain, with Alfred Timothy contrasting with Harkon Lukas and different packs of werewolves being at odds. As Richemulot has become a land gripped by plagues, it could also incorporate elements of Nosos and Sanguinia. 

Oh, and Harkon Lukas is missing his monocle. Unacceptable.

The Awesome

Several of the domains that were less completely overhauled include Bluetspur, Borca, and even Har’Akir. While not completely free of retcons and changes to lore, these were only lightly altered and really show how lands can be tightened and improved without being completely rewritten. For the most part, these feature additive changes rather than revisionary ones, that could be included into existing Ravenloft campaigns with little impact. I much prefer iterative change and the setting evolving and growing rather than resetting and starting anew.

Equating Bluetspur with alien abduction style stories is great, and the God Brain’s motivation works. It always needed something more. I really enjoy that the Borcan chapter actually lists the other noble families rather than presenting them as present but unmentioned. While Pharaoh Ankhtepot looks like a Power Rangers villain, Har’Akir also mostly features several great new additions, like a city of the dead and a vast labyrinthine underworld beneath the sands.

Another example is Chakuna, the new darklord of Valachan who brings her own flavour to the domain. As she killed the previous darklord, this revision is much easier to incorporate into previous canon (if you ignore the map, the locations, and much of the chapter). Baron Urik von Kharkov was never very popular and a replacement that can be “dropped in” is useful. Chakuna and the idea of hunting the “dangerous game” makes for a cool adventure.

I’m so happy to see the bard College of Spirits return. I assumed it hadn’t made the cut for Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything and was disappointed. A bardic subclass focused on fortune telling and the stories of the dead is so very evocative. And I adore the art where the sample bard is holding up an official Tarokka card.

The Mist Walker Dark Gift is useful and a nice way to explain how some people can travel between domains. Having it be the method some Vistani have of travelling between lands is a nice nod to the past while also removing the inherent magic from the Vistani if undesired. 

The section on backgrounds has variant personality traits, ideals, bonds, and flaws. This is such a small addition that can really make characters feel like the fit in a horror campaign rather than a heroic fantasy story. Similarly, there’s a chart of a 100 horror trinkets you can roll on instead of the chart in the Player’s Handbook. 

The concept of Mist Tokens is inspired. For those unaware, if you hold an item that symbolizes the domain you wish to reach and enter the Mists, the token will allow you to reach that realm more reliably. This allows for travel and trade and solves the deus ex machina of the Mists depositing the players in just the right domain. It’s another neat and simple addition for any Ravenloft campaign.

I love the art of Jaqueline Reinier with a formal shawl of rats. That’s inspired. 

There are several Mike Schley maps, which are fantastic as always. (And I am now bereft that we won’t get to see him do an entire map of the Core, which would have been glorious—Ravenloft has a long history of unappealing world maps.)

The Survivors subsection in the Horror Adventurers chapter is just brilliant. These are basically 0-level characters partway between a PC and a commoner (and they’d arguably work well with the sidekick rules). These allow for a fun mini-campaign of 1 to 4 sessions, where non-adventurers have to survive a horrifying situation. Two of them have a little too much magic to really work as “everyday people” but it’s nice to have as an option. You could also use these really well in a flashback or aside, where the PCs get to experience the horrible thing they’re investigating rather than just having you describe it to them. After all, the first rule of RPG storytelling is “experience don’t tell.”

Using the House of Lament of the included adventure was inspired. This haunted house was always more of an adventure than a domain or darklord. This is the full description and spotlight it always deserved. 

There’s a few new monsters. The bagman is creepy and evocative, and seems to be a favourite around the WotC office. And the canonical inclusion of “nosferatu” as ugly and aged vampires is appreciated. I always preferred this to using the name “nosferatu” for 2nd Edition’s daywalker vampires inspired by the Dracula of the book (and Francis Ford Coppola movie).

There’s a spirit board template at the back of the book you can photocopy for personal use. And Wizards of the Coast was cool enough to provide this online in both a black-and-white and colour version, so you can more easily print out the board without the crease of the book being visible in the scan. 

Final Thoughts

Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft is a Ravenloft campaign setting for people who liked the idea of Ravenloft but disliked the past execution. It’s a Ravenloft book for people who hated Ravenloft.

It’s certainly possible to reconcile the old and the new. I’ve seen several threads and discussions in various Ravenloft communities where they try to pretend the next book is an update and force the old lore into it. Or suggest taking the best ideas and incorporating them into the old setting. I’m less a fan of this approach because it requires you to heavily rewrite the entire setting; which is a lot of work, and defeats the purpose of purchasing a pre-written world (i.e. saving time and energy). If I had wanted to write my own custom version of Ravenloft, I would have done so a decade ago. (Heck, when I wrote Heroes of the Mists, I purposely chose NOT to rewrite the world and make as few changes as necessary.) 

Reading the book, I was reminded of the 4th Edition update of the Forgotten Realms; Wizards of the Coast also radically reworked that setting to arbitrarily fix the authors’ pet peeves. Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft feels very similar in terms of being a revision rather than an update. Only moreso, because instead of having the changes be the result of a Realm Shaking Event they just rolled back the timeline and declared that the world was always that way; instead of having Chessenta in the Realms replaced by Akanûl, Chessenta was always a land of earthmotes populated by genasi. It’s the year 1357 DR again, but Drizzt and the original Companions of the Hall are running around alongside Havilar and Farideh of Brimstone Angels, as well as Minsc & Boo.

All the old continuity, novels, and adventures? No longer canon. That time you spent learning the lore? Wasted. (Well… it was always arguably not time well spent. But now it’s extra useless.) 

For established Ravenloft fans, this book offers little. There are no darklord stat blocks. No new races. Only a handful of monsters, with a full third of the 23 new types being brand new. It offers very little to convert the content you already own, instead providing replacement lore altering the content you already own. Skip the book and just buy individual options on dndbeyond. 

If you’re a classic Ravenloft fan who loves Victor Mordenheim and were looking forward to updating Adam’s Wrath to 5e, well your taste in darklords is bad and you should feel bad. 

For readers who never owned or consumed any of the old setting material then NONE of the above matters. Not remotely. For you, this book is the only Ravenloft. If you want a horror themed version of Dungeons & Dragons, then this is fine. Adequate. It provides plenty of tools for horror one-shots where your party is snatched up by the Mists, confronts a darklord (although not necessarily in combat), and then escapes. You could even try a campaign in the Mists, bouncing from domain to domain, confronting the major menaces of each before fleeing into the Mists. There’s ample tools and advice for creating horror campaigns as well as giving your characters a touch of corruption. It has cool additions like the survivor rules, fear seeds, curses, and haunted traps. However, it is really dragged down by the lack of stat blocks for darklords who should be unique monsters with lairs and legendary actions but instead might just be a CR 5 wraith who can cast a single mid-level spell.

Shameless Plugs

If you liked this article, you can support me and encourage future reviews. My disposable income—which is necessary to buy RPG products—is entirely dependent on my PDF sales.

I have a number of PDF products on the DMs Guild website. Completely coincidentally, this includes Who’s Doomed, a book of 5e stat blocks of darklords for the classic version of the Ravenloft campaign setting. Which is a huge passion product but also really handy for anyone who wants actual darklord statistics. If it continues to sell, I might add some of the new darklords to the product. There’s also the companion product Allies Against the Night, which takes classic Ravenloft heroes and makes them into sidekicks (based on the rules from Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything).

Others include the Blood Hunter Expanded, my bundle of my Ravenloft books, the Tactician class, Rod of Seven Parts, Traps, Diseases, Legendary Monsters, and a book of Variant Rules. Phew.

Additionally, the revision of my book, Jester David’s How-To Guide to Fantasy Worldbuilding is on DriveThurRPG, available for purchase as a PDF or Print on Demand! (And now in colour!) The book is a compilation of my worldbuilding blog series, but all the entries have been updated, edited, and expanded to almost two-hundred pages of advice on making your own fantasy world.

Plus, I have T-shirts available for sale over on TeePublic! The art of which can also be put on cloth masks.

Avatar Legends Quickstart Review

Having celebrated its fifteenth anniversary this year, the world of Avatar: The Last Airbender has demonstrated surprising longevity. Especially as it’s spinoff, The Legend of Korra, didn’t even air the second half of its final season. (It was moved online.) In addition to live action remakes, spin-offs, comics, and novels Magpie Games is releasing a roleplaying game using the Powered by the Apocalypse ruleset: Avatar Legends. The Kickstarter for the book has pulled in $6 million to date, and there’s still a couple weeks left at the time of this writing. 

And there’s a Quickstart you can sign up for to preview the game. Which is the focus of this review.

What It Is

The Quickstart is a single PDF of 55 pages with 7 pregenerated characters, loose character creation rules, and a short adventure. It previews the rules, with the final product having more character options. The PDF is fairly bare bones, with no bookmarks, table of contents, index, or hyperlinks. It has full colour artwork that looks like production stills from the show. No artist is credited with the credits reading “all art courtesy of Viacom.” (This might make the book fairly affordable for Magpie, if they don’t have to pay artists, as art is one of the most expensive parts of making an RPG book.)

As mentioned, the Quickstart is story focused and “Powered by the Apocalypse”, the ruleset created for the Apocalypse World game. It uses 2d6 (with d6 being the only die) with a 7+ being a soft success. A “yes, and…” or “yes, but…” Meanwhile, a 10+ is a full success, where’s no penalty or even a bonus.This means you have a 58% chance of success that goes up to 72.23 with a +1 which feels okay. Even odds seem good on paper, but in play failing that often isn’t fun. However, it is only a 16.67% of a full success where there’s no complication (or 27.78% with a +1). This does mean three quarters of the times you roll, something not good might happen. 

There are four Stats in the game: Creativity, Focus, Harmony, and Passion. These have a bonus ranging from -1 to +2 in the Quickstart, but I imagine you might be able to raise and lower some even more in the full rules.

There are no “classes” in the game, and instead there are playbooks: story focused roles with unique abilities. (Y’know, like classes…) There are six playbooks in the quickplay and ten listed in the main book with more being unlocked through stretch goals. Playbooks have names such as Guardian, Hammer, Icon, Idealist, Pillar, Prodigy, and Successor. Each has their own two opposing principles locked in, which I don’t particularly like but would be a super easy house rule to customize.

The quickstart also details the world and focuses on five time periods where the game can be set: Kyoshi’s Era, Roku’s Era, the 100 Years War, Aang’s Era, and Korra’s Era. Or the eras of the main shows plus the eras of the previous two Avatars.

The Good

The Quickstart and system really focuses on roleplaying and emphasises that you must describe your character’s action rather than just declare the rules being used. This is a story and imagination game that really wants you to put yourself in the shoes of your character. 

When you create a party, the group picks a focus. This is your main quest, giving the party a reason to be together. This is great and I wish more RPGs would emphasize this rather than just assuming the disparate player characters will work together or that every player will know to make a party member that works well in the group.

One of the main mechanics is “Balance”, which ties into your character’s two principals as determined by your playbook. This is both mechanically interesting and a neat roleplaying element. Characters have two opposing philosophical components—such as Care vs. Force or Tradition vs. Progress—and each has a path of numerical bonus and penalties. As you move towards Forgiveness and gain bonuses with that principal you move away from Action and have penalties to act according to that principal. This is a really neat way to reflect the conflicting emotions and goals of characters in the world as well as the desire to “bring balance to the world” and “center yourself.” While also giving players a meaty roleplaying hook. 

It’s a nifty little mechanic, that also means as an encounter progresses you get both stronger and weaker as you become more unbalanced, as you can use the numerical bonus from your principal rather than one of your Stats. You’re at your most dangerous and badass with a +3 when you’re also the closest to being taken out of the fight being losing your balance altogether. The risk/reward aspect to moving further off center is really appealing. 

It’s also the easy way to defeat enemies: when someone moves too far down their path they “lose their balance” and are effectively removed from combat. And because making someone lose their balance takes four or five successful moves, it is often much faster than wearing down their fatigue.

Combat is freeform, and you are given complete freedom to describe your actions based on your character’s fighting style. The difference between using waterbending to make whips, an earthbender using metal cords, or a nonbender using a physical leather whip is entirely cosmetic. (There’s not even really rules for “whip.”) And because none of the four statistics are directly related to physical skill, you can be a frail diplomat or nerdy scholar and still contribute equally to battle, using your Focus to persuade enemies to stand down. 

The Bad

I dislike limiting the eras you can play to the five established eras. Not when you could play Kuruk, the Water Tribe Avatar, or Yangchen, who was the previous air nomad Avatar. Or the era of an invented Avatar, such as the second or third Avatar. It’d be awesome to start a game far in the past when Avatars were not well known, and not reveal who the Avatar is until a few sessions and present it as this weird thing where somehow this person can bend multiple elements and no one is sure why. Or this person is hearing voices and think they’re crazy until they discover it is Wan the first Avatar. Heck, it would have been interesting to play an alternate Airbender that was chosen instead of Aang to show how they might have reacted differently at the start of the 100 Years War, fleeing and trying to train while escaping the initial onslaught of the war.

Scope is weird. The game provides four “scopes” for you to describe how broad the focus of your campaign will be. If it’s a narrowly focused or broad and world spanning. Four is unnecessary and tying it to the elements feels like unnecessary symmetry. And you could argue Air Nomad scope is larger than Ba Sing Se. It’s just a little awkward.

The freeform combat is a huge feature/bug. It allows the players to create their own waterbending or earthbending techniques, but also requires people to think of them rather than pull from a list, which might be challenging for everyone who isn’t familiar with the show or the limits imposed. And it’s often too easy for people to get wacky, or think of a technique that narratively should be more effective than just the one fatigue it might inflict. It also makes things feel samey: the earthbender that takes sand and shapes it into obsidian (glass bending) and creates darts and needles is just as effective and mechanically identical as the player that says “I hit them with a rock. Advance and attack with strike technique.” There’s not even an Inspiration or Story Point system for the GM to use to reward exceptional roleplaying and description.

And because the game is so rules light, there’s practically no rules for exploration based encounters. There’s moves for social encounters, but for environmental or exploration encounters you can either Rely on Your Skills and Training or Push Your Luck. You’re pretty much doing the same thing all the time (determined by the higher of your two stats) and if you don’t have a decent bonus to Focus or Passion you’re out of luck. 

Like many “rules lite” story games, there’s paradoxically a lot of jargon. The book says things like “take +1 forward” versus “take +1 ongoing” rather than just saying “you gain +1 to your next roll.” It saves something 10 characters at the expense of simplicity and plain language. It’s needless and a barrier to comprehension and play. 

As mentioned, you can defeat enemies by wearing down their fatigue or knocking them off balance. But it always seems better to knock them off balance than beat them down. This is neat as it encourages you to engage with the philosophy of your opponent and argue against them, defeating them with words, but subtly encourages you not to perform the dramatic martial arts fights the series is known for. And if everyone isn’t focusing fire on affecting either balance or fatigue it just gets harder. It also doesn’t reflect fanatics like Azula or Zaheer who can’t be influenced or swayed. 

The Ugly

This is not a simple or intuitive game. I’ve read the Quickstart several times, and each time I find some aspect I had missed or misinterpreted. Like many games, it does need to be played to be appreciated, but finding time to play isn’t always easy and devoting a rare evening of gaming to a very different game is a high price. Especially one like this where you might need two or three sessions to really grok the subtleties of play.  

I’m sure the learning curve is much lower for people who have played Powered by the Apocalypse games before, but I don’t know what percentage of the 50,000 backers and other people who will pick-up the game in stories will know that ruleset. 

The GM advice in running the game recommends you target loved ones if the adventure gets stuck. I really dislike this advice, as it leads to players avoiding having loved ones who only end up being used as plot hooks and as motivation when they dare to veer off the plot. It’s mentioned a little too casually for my liking, 

The map accompanying the adventure is a joke. I hope this is not a sign of what art in the book not supplied by Viacom will look like…

It doesn’t sound like you’ll be able to play the Avatar. They’re not included in the Quickstart and are described as legendary figures in the full rules. NPC characters. And the rules imply no character can bend more than one element. So… it’s an Avatar game where the Avatar is a GM PC. That’s just bad. There’s no shortage of other roleplaying games where one player is playing an exceptional character (like Cubical 7’s Doctor Who roleplaying game) but a method is found to balance that character against the others. 

There’s a typo in character pregens. Aniki has a +1 to creativity instead of a -1, which is a huge oversight. Mistakes like that always wave a big red flag for me. Tyops happne but in a character sheet this error feels more egregious and raises concerns. If you can’t trust the numbers on the sheet, what can you trust? 

The Moment of Balance mechanic feels like an “I win button.” I’m not sure why everyone doesn’t just immediately use theirs at the start of each encounter, especially as there doesn’t seem to be a limit. (Which makes the exclusion of the Avatar even more weird, as the Avatar State is their Moment of Balance.)

Characters seem exceptionally squishy. Everyone has 5 fatigue, but someone like Wenli the hammer can burn three of those to use Overwhelm. If they roll a 10 on attack, they’ll burn through all of their fatigue in a single turn. Then they need to move onto Conditions, which adds this weird element where everyone who is beaten up and near unconscious is Angry and Afraid and Guilty and Insecure all at the same time.

The rules say you can clear 3 fatigue by resting overnight, or more in better locations. Or 5 after a week of resting anywhere. Which is an odd statement when two nights sleeping outside on rocks would heal six. Not that you’ll need to as you can just use the Comfort & Support task to fully heal between fights. Or why it is even necessary to make four or five Harmony rolls to Comfort & Support as needless busywork when you could just have fatigue heal after 5 minutes.

The Awesome

There are tips on naming your character, with suggestions based on their heritage, so there are typical Earth Kingdom and Fire Nation names. 

I rather like the distinction between Conditions and Statuses, with the latter being what I would normally call conditions. Conditions are these neat small penalties to certain Moves you can check in place of taking damage (or to use certain moves). Because they’re a penalty to certain actions, it encourages you not to act in certain ways, which fits the associated emotion. The mechanics incentivize both the roleplaying and the actions the character takes. And removing a condition can be done by performing an in-character action. 

Final Thoughts

This is a hard product and game to recommend. The world is exciting and cool and the actual game encourages a nice story focused experience that encourages roleplaying and shared narrative. But the rules themselves feel unintuitive, as if deliberately designed to be as un-D&D as possible. Which is fine for games for people who dislike Dungeons & Dragons, and good for indie games that want to set themselves apart from the mainstream, but is an awkward choice for general audiences and an RPG that is currently the most successful tabletop RPG ever on Kickstarter (beating Strongholds & Streaming by Matt Coville which only raised $2.1 million; heck, even Reaper Bones 1 only raised $3.4 million). 

It’s the kind of game where you really need two or three sessions to really get a handle on the game and start playing it efficiently. Which is good for a dense game where you want to play an extended campaign, but is awkward for a game that might work best as a one-shot or as a short mini-campaign between longer games with a preferred system. I can’t think of many people who will want to make Avatar Legends their primary game of choice. 

At first it seems like a good all-ages RPG since you can diplomacize rather than use violence, and can’t make a bad character. Where you’re encouraged to roleplay and be imaginative while also talking out problems with bad guys that reveal their motives. Especially as getting started is fairly quick and easy, with few choices that slow down play. But I’m uncertain how easy it will be for young kids to retain the jargon as well as learn the lengthy names of Moves and assorted options rather than a simpler action resolution mechanic.

It’s also an Avatar game where the Avatar doesn’t play a key role in the story, which is a very curious decision. It’s like making a Buffy the Vampire Slayer game where no one can be the Slayer, a Star Wars game where you can’t play a Jedi, or a Star Trek game where the GM always runs the captain.

But with a skilled GM who is familiar with the system (perhaps from watching a few streamed games) and can take the player’s described actions and assign moves behind the scenes, this game should still be able to run fairly smoothly.

Probably.

Shameless Plugs

If you liked this article, you can support me and encourage future reviews. My disposable income—which is necessary to buy RPG products—is entirely dependent on my PDF sales.

I have a number of PDF products on the DMs Guild website. Including Who’s Doomed, a book of 5e stat blocks of darklords for the classic version of the Ravenloft campaign setting. Which is a huge passion product but also really handy for anyone who wants actual darklord statistics. If it continues to sell, I might add some of the new darklords to the product. There’s also the companion product Allies Against the Night, which takes classic Ravenloft heroes and makes them into sidekicks (based on the rules from Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything).

Others include the Blood Hunter Expanded, my bundle of my Ravenloft books, the Tactician class, Rod of Seven Parts, Traps, Diseases, Legendary Monsters, and a book of Variant Rules. Phew.

Additionally, the revision of my book, Jester David’s How-To Guide to Fantasy Worldbuilding is on DriveThurRPG, available for purchase as a PDF or Print on Demand! (And now in colour!) The book is a compilation of my worldbuilding blog series, but all the entries have been updated, edited, and expanded to almost two-hundred pages of advice on making your own fantasy world.

Plus, I have T-shirts available for sale over on TeePublic! The art of which can also be put on cloth masks.

Review: Cyberpunk Red

This game is based on the Cyberpunk rules and setting first published by R. Talsorian Games in 1988 and updated as Cyberpunk 2020 two years later. Cyberpunk Red uses their in-house Interlock game system, which was used for the original and has been slightly tweaked in the intervening 30-plus years. Slightly.

Cyberpunk Red is named in honour of the video game studio CD Projekt Red, which licensed the world and related characters for the video game Cyberpunk 2077, released in November 2020. 

Basically, Cyberpunk Red is inspired by the video game that was inspired by their tabletop game. 

Despite this, Cyberpunk Red doesn’t take place in 2020 or 2077 but 2045. In the first edition of the game, the year was 2013 (25 years in the future), and so this book also takes place 25 years from now. However, it doesn’t alter the previous timeline: instead of moving all the events ahead thirty-odd years it advanceds that fictional history, presenting an alternate 2020.

What It Is

Cyberpunk Red is a hefty 455-page full colour hardcover book available in many game stores and web retailers, the R.Talsorian webstore, and Amazon. The PDF is available on DriveThruRPG Sadly, it doesn’t look like purchasing the physical book comes with a free PDF, even if done on the official store. 

The game uses the Interlock game system, where characters have STATs and a series of Skills (each ranging from 1 to 10). When making a check you add the STAT and a potential Skill then roll a d10, comparing the total to a Difficulty Value. Characters advance by increasing their Skills, while STATS and derived abilities (like health) largely remain the same. 

There’s a few ways of making characters. Rather than rolling randomly for each of your STATS you can pick an array from a table, or roll to pick an array. Each character has a Role, which is a little like a class, and offers a unique Skill. Each role also has a Lifepath, which is a series of tables that you roll on in succession to create a backstory.

The Good

The art in the book is amazing. This is still a small publisher and not a Wizards of the Coast (or even a Paizo), so limited art is to be expected. There are many pages of just text. But the art that is present is excellent. I’m uncertain if this was concept art created for the video game and borrowed by  R. Talsorian Games (in the same way I’m positive the Witcher RPG borrows Gwent card art) or if they just tapped similar artists to the video game. But the source is irrelevant as there’s some truly beautiful pieces, which set the tone of the world and the look of its inhabitants. It’s a nice looking product.

The game also knows the tone it wants for the world and sticks with it. There’s a consistency of presentation that comes with an established and well known world. And with the writers not having conflicting ideas over what the game should be or the type story told in this setting. It’s not fighting against itself to be both serious and gonzo, or a frolicking adventure in a grimdark world. There’s also a consistent voice throughout the book. It’s slightly informal compared to most modern RPGs (being slightly more akin to the conversational prose of AD&D rulebooks or even Paladium) but much less intrusive with fewer editorial commentaries. 

The book has a nice clean presentation that is simple but distinct and professional. The sidebars standout and the tables are eye-catching. You can make an argument for a more texture page background, but other people will be happy with the clean, white pages that are uncluttered and easy to reference. The sidebars are also nicely visible: distinct yet subtle. The tables are a little blocky plain though, which is really only apparent because there’s so many of them. 

As should be standard for the industry now (and especially for science fiction games) the book is hyperlinked throughout. All the red-coloured page references link to the appropriate page, so you’re a click away from relevant rules. Ditto the table of contents and the page numbers in the index.  

There’s a fairly detailed description of the history of the setting, with a timeline of events from 1990 to the “present” of 2045. Then it has several subsections on other historical events, like the 4th Corp War after 2021, which “ended” the Cyberpunk 2020 era and leads into the current status quo. There’s also an impressive look at the growth of Night City, even including how the city expanded, dredging and filling in certain areas of the coastline to reshape the land. (If only to explain why the real world Morrow Bay—roughly halfway between LA and San Francisco—doesn’t match Night City’s coastline.) Modern cities are hard to present, as you can’t accurately map out all the streets, but the book does a good job of presenting the major thoroughfares and the urban density. And there’s a fair amount of description on each district, including residents, gangs, and key locations. 

There’s lots of information on the setting in general. It doesn’t just go into the basics, but explores daily life. How people live, what they wear and eat, and the like. It’s a decent sourcebook for any cyberpunk style world

The Bad

It’s a little weird that they kept the original history, which is now awkwardly dated and anachronistic. In many ways, this isn’t a modern Cyberpunk world, but how we envisioned the future thirty years ago. In many ways it feels dated; it almost has this Flash Gordon retro sci-fi vibe now. Which is a feature/bug I suppose. It’s retro-cyperpunk in a pre-transhumanism way. Cyberpunk before the  total conversion cyborgs of Ghost in the Shell or Altered Carbon and cortical stacks. Or even the concept of MMOs meet pop culture of Ready Player One. 

But if keeping the alternate history aspect, why jump ahead in the timeline? Why not keep it in 2020 and embrace the anachronism? Like Tales from the Loop? Roleplaying in the ’20s that never was. Or keep going and make the setting 2077 like the game: most people who pick-up this book will likely be doing so to tell their own adventures in that setting, and having to update things thirty-two years in the future is awkward and needless. 

But not going to 2077 might also be a way to handwave away the difference between what you can do in the video game and the TTRPG. Such as being unable to hack NPCs in this game. Netrunners are still off doing their own side missions/ combats and not well integrated to the main plot events.This book at least takes steps to make them less tacked-on than prior versions (and even the playtest) as netrunning is now augmented reality, so they can still somewhat participate and aren’t trapped lying down by their deck in a VR world. But it still requires the GM to create this side aspect to most encounters for the one player to participate in that may or may not be helpful, rather than letting them hack enemies to make them blind, distracted, or inflict damage via a hack. 

This lack of innovation in what the game and its characters can do is a frustratingly common aspect of the book. It features particularly dated mechanics and game design. It’s a slap of paint on a system created in 1988 and it just feels old. So much more could have been done to make the game modern, and instead it just feels like an early 1990s RPG with modern production values. A reprint more than a new edition.

For example, the LUCK mechanic is fantastically subpar. Luck is its own STAT, with a rating from 1 to 10 like other STATS. Before a roll, you can add LUCK to a roll increasing in on a one-to-one basis, with your LUCK recharging every session. If you have a LUCK of 5 you can add a+1s to five rolls or one +5 to a single roll. Which just feels lacklustre when rolling a d10. +1 is such a small bonus (and success is binary you succeed or fail) there’s no benefit to having spent LUCK on a poor roll or a great roll. The +1 bonus literally means LUCK will be wasted and irrelevant 90% of the time. LUCK could easily have been a reroll. Or added a d6 to the check if used before and just a +1 if added after. Or had story manipulation effects, having it work like Plot Points to alter the narrative in your favour. Heck, even if the amount you exceeded the DV added to damage it would be something, so you wouldn’t feel like you wasted LUCK only to roll a 9 or 10.

LUCK is just one of the ten STATS in the game, and it’s not the only odd STAT. Movement is it’s own STAT. MOVE. Despite not being associated with any skills and not being added to any checks I can see. Why is it a STAT rather than everyone having the same MOVE or being derived from BODY or REF? Because reasons, I guess. You can use your MOVE to take Move Actions. But you can’t do anything with a Move Action other than move (not even stand up) so it seems needlessly complicated when they could just say you can move and take an Action.

There’s a TECH STAT that exists solely to be rolled with Technique Skills, like Basic Tech, First Aid, and Demolitions. (And Pick Pocket for some reason.) These could have just been INT or REF with no impact on the game; having them be REF would have allowed the engineers to be good and fixing things AND shooting as well as allowing people good at shooting to also be partially competent at fixing. This permits two character archetypes to have the option of participating in different types of encounters and scenes not focused on their speciality, as well as allowing more opportunity for PCs in smaller tables to fill party roles. Instead, Cyberpunk Red is a game of specialists that expects you to have a large table of players to fill all the roles but also have players that patiently watch and wait until their particular skill set comes into play. 

Empathy (EMP) is another odd STAT that exists for two Skills and to track your Humanity. Humanity is a derived STAT that determines how human you still are. How detached you have become from the world as a result of replacing your limbs with cybernetics. A mechanic tracking the loss of Humanity feels forced; cybernetics is such a key part of the world and game. Penalizing people for embracing the world is awkward. Like corrupting people in a fantasy world for casting magic spells. Especially as advancing in power often requires cybernetics, and most characters start with robo-parts. 

Woe to the pool Solo that rolls a 5 or 8 when assigning their STAT template and has their EMP halved in character creation. 

Humanity loss feels like a rules patch designed to prevent powergamers from loading themselves down with cybernetics, and doing that via flavour rather than a more abstract rule. (Meaning you unfortunately can’t play a character like Major Motoko Kusanagi.) Thankfully the game now acknowledges medical replacement parts don’t cause any loss of humanity—which will be necessarily given how easy it is to lose a limb to a Critical Injury.

Advancement is tied to group success and how well the players did during the mission, in addition to how well that player did playing according to their playstyle. Which is nice on paper, as the Socializer gets credit for supporting and contributing to the party’s success while the Explorer gets more points for engaging with the world and investigating. But this also means the GM is arbitrarily rating their performance. “Gee, Bonny, your role-playing just wasn’t up to snuff this week. Only 30 I.P.” 

The book only includes ten NPCs to serve as all the adversaries for a campaign. I’m really not fond of roleplaying games that skimp on enemies and rely on the GM to homebrew or tweak a small number of foes each and every week. Thankfully, NPCs don’t have many unique rules, being just collections of Skills. You can design them much like designing a PC. (Unfortunately, I didn’t see any guidelines for how many points a mook gets in their STATs or their Skill ranks.) 

The chapters are given unintuitive names. This might be fun in a physical book when you could use sticky tabs to mark appropriate sections, but is awkward A.F. when browsing bookmarks on the PDF. Not user friendly in the least. Even after some time of reading the book, finding what I wanted was a pain. RPG books are reference books and anything that slows down finding the information you need at the table is a problem.

Especially as the book is not well organized. Rules are spread out in several places and it repeats information a few times. The index is small and not particularly helpful. And not all rules are found in the chapter you might expect. If you plan on playing this game, seriously invest in some sticky index tabs and mark off key sections. 

The Ugly

There are way too many skills in the game. There are over SIXTY skills. And each character might have ranks in twenty skills. But because there’s a lot of overlap, even in a four-player table there might be a good dozen skills no one has ranks in.

This would be a problem even if all the skills were treated equally. But there’s not. There’s a wealth of skills that just have no place in the game. Lip Reading, Accounting, Library Search, Wardrobe & Style, Criminology, Cryptography, and Personal Grooming. Does there need to be a Bureaucracy AND a Business skill?  Trading AND Persuasion? Brawling AND Martial Arts? Endurance AND Resist Torture/ Drugs? First Aid AND Paramedic? And, again, Lip Reading. Lip Reading?!

Seriously. Why have a separate Paramedic Skill when any Paramedic check could just be a harder DV First Aid check?! Or require a minimum amount of ranks. It’s just needless complexity and makes the character sheets more crowded and busy.

Not only is this a ridiculous number of skills, but they’re a semi-organized mass on the character sheet. It’s a needless hurdle of the GM to memorize all sixty skills, what arbitrary subcategory they’re under, and what STAT they use. 

Meanwhile, the PC Role Abilities (i.e. class Skills) have a lot of overlap with the existing Skills. The Rockerboy Role Ability is basically the Persuasion Skill mashed with some GM fiat to determine if someone is a fan. The Medtech just gets super First Aid and Paramedic. 

Some Abilities add their Rank to skills. Like how the Nomad’s Moto Rank is added to various diving skills. Which makes sense, as the Nomad should be great at driving. Of course, to get Moto to Rank 3 and have 1 rank of Drive they must spend a total of 380 I.P. for a +4 bonus, as each Role Rank costs 3x the cost of a skill. This means a Rockerboy could spend 300 I.P and get a Drive skill of +5 in a single vehicle, being a better wheelman. Sure the Nomad can get a free car and some bonus customization options for their vehicle, but having a class feature that can be blown up or stolen is always problematic. 

Not that the Rockerboy’s Role Ability is great: it determines how big a venue they can play in and allows them to influence fans. If there’s no fans around they’re basically useless. And, you make ask, how does the Role Ability mesh with the Reputation subsystem that determines how much of rep the characters have? It doesn’t. Because that would make sense and would imply the various subsystems interacted. You can be a Rockerboy with a Charismatic Impact of Rank 2 that can play only in small local clubs (probably because you invested your I.P in Drive skills or something) but have a Reputation of 8 and are regularly featured in headlines. There’s zero reason Rockerboys and Media shouldn’t add their Role Ranks to Reputation. Or even Social Skills…

I look at the Role Abilities and just wonder what the game could have been had the system innovated a little more or looked at improvements in game design made in the past thirty years. The Rockerboy is just crying out for a bard style inspiration power, where they can motivate the group to succeed and boost their roles. A bonus on checks through motivational words.

The game is particularly lethal. Which isn’t at all surprising since it’s a game from the ’80s. Despite not being remotely related to D&D there is an OSR vibe to the game. 

When you suffer a Critical Injury (which occurs when you roll 2 or more 6s when rolling damage) you take an extra 5 damage (On top of the 12 from the double sixes. For reasons.) and roll on a table that applies penalties to you. When you’re rolling 5d6 for damage, you’ll score a Critical Injury 20% of the time, or 13% of the time with 4d6, which is pretty often. This applies a steep penalty. And being below half HP also applies penalties. 

When you’re at less than 1 HP you have a -4 to everything, and must make a Death Save at the start of each of your turns or be healed by someone else with a DV15 check. For a Death Save, you roll a single d10 and if you roll a 10 or over your BODY STAT you die. Period. Despite being in the future and being able to replace people’s hearts and spines with cybernetics, you can’t be revived after being dead for 30 seconds, and die after a single bad roll. And, unsurprisingly, healing is slow. You regain HP equal to your BODY after each day of rest. So with an “average” BODY and WILL of 5 you’ll have 35 HP and need a full week to recover. This can go down to as low as 4 days or as many as 20. 

The book has some GM advice to give players on this and the difficulty of the game: “If they can’t handle the pressure, they shouldn’t be playing Cyberpunk. Send them back to that nice role playing game with the happy elves and the singing birds.” That’s the actual text on page 389. So when your character takes a couple bad hits, gets Crit, and then dies after failing a Death Save where they had a 60% chance of failure, bringing their story arc to an end and derailing all the GM’s plans… just suck it up or go back to a game on easy mode. I almost deleted my PDF on the spot after reading that. 

The Awesome

There are fun ads throughout the book. Not real ads for real products, like other games. But ads for products and services found in Night City. It’s a neat bit of flavour that captures the feel of the world. 

I rather like the Life Paths. There’s the basic chart that provides details like your cultural origin, personality, clothing style, family, and relationship status. And there’s additional flow charts for each Role with relevant history. A nice optional way to rapidly create a character when you have no concept (or replace one that abruptly died). These are useful even if not playing Cyberpunk Red and could be used for many futuristic settings.

The critical and fumble rules are rather neat. When you roll a 10 on the d10 you roll again and add that to the total. However, if you roll a 1 you roll again and subtract the second roll. It’s simple but potentially dramatic without being too swingy. It’s not full exploding dice.

While I’m hard on the mortality rate, the simplicity of scoring a Critical Injury when just two d6 end up as “6” is rather neat. And does make big guns extra deadly, as you’re rolling 5d6 or 6d6.

I like the range of games you can play with this system. You can do a game of nomads out on the wastes, riding between settlements or a corporate culture game with media personalities and management figures. You can be cops just as easily as criminals. You’re not locked into being the underworld netrunner and their bodyguard.

Final Thoughts

I played a little Cyberpunk Red with the Jumpstart kit when it launched, and found it okay. The skills were too dense for my liking; the GM was always struggling to pick the relevant skill. And when I invariably didn’t have the right skill there was the secondary struggle to figure out which STAT to use in its place. 

I was playing a Solo and could kick all the ass but felt bad for some other characters that ended up feeling less useful in many of the adventures. The Nomad who had to wander around being ineffectual because their car couldn’t fit into the office building. Meanwhile, it felt like I was oddly capped, having the best rifle in the game from the start and not being able to improve my gear, or my cybernetics without risking losing more of my limited Humanity. 

Had this game been released twenty years ago it would not have been out of place. (Apart from the production values, which would have been better than any other game on the market.) But now it just feels dated. Combat is lethal but oddly slow as you have to roll to attack and then compare that to a dodge roll with the Evasion skill. There’s a bunch of dissociated mechanics and subsystems that don’t connect, even when they’re dealing with the same thing. Individually tracking every shot fired for your assault rifle’s drum of 40+ rounds. No narrative manipulation mechanics. Poor balance between Roles. An incomprehensible character sheet that looks like an Excel spreadsheet. 

And there’s odd things like how almost every single character in every single piece of art is cyber augmented, and yet the game discourages you from doing so by implying body modification makes you less human. 

What makes it extra frustrating is how unnecessary some of the dated design feels. The tabletop game was designed to release alongside Cyberpunk 2077 and so many things are just better in the video game. Fewer STATS. More reason to use netrunning. A Rockerboy that’s badass with a gun and sword. No penalties for cyberware. A wide variety of different guns, with reasons to use them all. Playing a game in Night City could be fun. But if I decide to do a Cyberpunk one-shot or mini campaign I’ll likely take the world from this book and overlay a simpler ruleset, like that used by the Alien Roleplaying Game or even Eclipse Phase. That said, if you have the time and interest you could probably hack this into something quite playable. A little less of a death spiral and longer recovery period. Maybe some more plot armour health. A smaller skill list. A few tweaked Role abilities. It’d be highly doable.

Shameless Plugs

If you liked this article, you can support me and encourage future reviews. My disposable income—which is necessary to buy RPG products—is entirely dependent on my PDF sales.

I have a number of PDF products on the DMs Guild website. Including Who’s Doomed, a book of 5e stat blocks of darklords for the classic version of the Ravenloft campaign setting. Which is a huge passion product but also really handy for anyone who wants actual darklord statistics. There’s also the companion product Allies Against the Night, which takes classic Ravenloft heroes and makes them into sidekicks (based on the rules from Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything).

Others include the Blood Hunter Expanded, my bundle of my Ravenloft books, the Tactician class, Rod of Seven Parts, Traps, Diseases, Legendary Monsters, and a book of Variant Rules. Phew.

Additionally, the revision of my book, Jester David’s How-To Guide to Fantasy Worldbuilding is on DriveThurRPG, available for purchase as a PDF or Print on Demand! (And now in colour!) The book is a compilation of my worldbuilding blog series, but all the entries have been updated, edited, and expanded to almost two-hundred pages of advice on making your own fantasy world.