REVIEW: AETHERDARK - THE RING

 

 

PREAMBLE: SPELLJAMMER – WEIRD SHIPS, WEIRDER MONSTERS & PTOLEMAIC CRYSTAL SPHERES

Remember Disney's Treasure Planet? It came out at the beginning of this here millennium, in the year of our lord 2002., Little ol' me was obsessed with it as a kid. The concept of old ships sailing through a fantastical, wild space on solar winds, space pirates with mechanical multi-functional limbs, weird alien sailors ranging from the low-key eldritch to the slightly anthropomorphic all wrapped up in a solarpunk/18^th-century aesthetic was just cool. Reading Edge Chronicles by Paul Stewart and Chris Riddel as a kid growing up ensured a a fascination and love for sailing ships and the ideas of exploring unknown vasts, endless oceans and stranger skies that have a strangle-hold on my brain to this day.

So, when I, as young adult around the mid-2010s first learned about Spelljammer, you can only imagine how absolutely stoked I was. Weird magic knights in magic space, vaulting over meteors haunted by many-eyed sphere tyrants, fighting asteroid-jumping spiders, chasing star-born dragons and navigating the phlogiston between crystal-sphere encased worlds? Shiver me space-timbers, I was taken with it all immediately. It was one of the greatest things I've ever read in my life! Surely, it had to be immensely popular when it came out?

Well, not so much.

The original Spelljammer sold a pittance compared to the Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk and Dragonlance box-sets and books, and while it can count over twenty published books to its name, and did survive into the modern times, behind-the-scenes stuff at TSR and then later WotC resulted in some casual tie-ins and shout-outs throughout the editions, but no real major publications until 2022, when WoTC made an attempt at bringing Spelljammer back... with results that might be considered mixed, at best.

Ironically, Spelljammer sold more copies that Planescape, D&Ds other red-headed step-child, but the latter had arguably a little more of a known cult-following. Both settings deal, in their core-function, with the same issue: providing an adventurous method to link all the settings and cosmologies of D&D together. Spelljammer did it with the phlogiston, the crystal spheres encasing individual setting worlds, and the titular space-sailers, Planescape used the city of Sigil and its network of infinite portals. Both settings deal with far more out there ancestries, weird folk and stranger creatures than even the by then well-known beholder and mindflayer – the neogi, asteroid spider and infinity vine come to mind... as well as the dreaded honking space clowns...

Both settings also featured absurd and unique architectures – Planescape had the gothic-punk aesthetic of Sigil as provided by the unique art-style of Tony DiTerlizzi - who also happened to shape my childhood with the Spiderwick Chronicles – and Spelljammer had the itular ships themselves, with each ancestry and spacefolk being provided with unique and absurdly cool looking ships, modelled not just after the classic galleons of the Age of Sail, but after both mundane and fantastical fauna, such as the neogi deathspider with its segmented grappling legs, the moth-like elven man-o-war, or the dwarven citadel, which are just giant asteroids or mountains carved into a massive fortress with some magical engines slapped onto them. I love them all, dearly, and revel in their weirdness.

But the inherent weirdness and planetary romance/space fantasy feel simply did not catch on as much with a wider audience as the more contemporary fantasy provided by Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms or Dragonlance.. There were other reasons, but covering those would extend what is to be a mere preamble into a twenty page essay, and I really gotta get to the main part of all this.

It's been now almost four years since WotC's last attempt at a Spelljammer product hit the shelves and with their shift instead toward their upcoming new Dark Sun publications, I have my doubts we'll see any further updates concerning the realms of Wildspace in the near future.

Luckily for us, there's a guy out there who seems to love Spelljammer just as much as I do.

Aetherdark – The Ring by Micah Abresch is a part of the greater Aetherdark line of books, which provide rules for Shadowdark RPG for space fantasy adventures, modular ship building, space combat and crew management. The Ring focuses the titular expanse of seven worlds and their colonies within the astral sea, their conflicts, relations and accords with one another and other dangers out within the vastness of the cold, dark night. It's a sizeable little book at around 222 pages, so we'll be here for a while. Good thing I brought a compass.

Drink up, me hearties, yo ho.

PART I: COVER, MAP & INTERIORS

The art in Aetherdark – The Ring is more on the sparse end, focusing mainly on maps, ship diagrams and on a small selection of example depictions of a featured world's inhabitants. Its all B&W art and pretty well done, I really like the amount of detail and uniqueness each little huddle of space elves and their fellows possess. There's no art for any of the monsters and foes the book includes , unfortunately, though the few The Ring adds fall more under armed militias, faction agents and rivalling aethership crewmembers, all of which are of the same stock as their respective world's main inhabitants.

The maps and diagrams are the real star of the show here – the initial hexmap of Ringspace and The Ring itself are fairly straightforward – a part of me wishes they had a bit more of that Age of Sailing vibe, with some wild space tiny space sea monsters and the like – but function over form is much appreciated here. 

 

You'll notice a bit of an oddity: hexes of Ringspace are “merely” 336 miles wide, yet often host multiple entire planets – the explanation for this little phenomenon may be found in the core Aetherdark book:

“In the astral sea, the endless aether is deep, a bottomless expanse of unreality. Reality flattens that out, potential depth becoming a vast expanse. Looking like a star from a distance, as a ship closes in, a world begins to fuzz at the edges, rather than sharpening into the hard planes of a star.

Once you are within a dozen or so miles, the world grows, becoming a vast expanse of aethereal mist, hundreds of miles across. As you slide through this veil, you enter a vast world, though it looked the size of a star in the void.” (Aetherdark, p. 163)

In short, the worlds of Aetherdark are essentially suspended in their own, fuzzier version of the Ptolemaic crystal sphere cosmological model. The explanation could be handled a little clearer, and if you only happen to purchase The Ring without any other Aetherdark books, you're likely to be left stumped yourself.

The ship diagrams scattered throughout the book are a most welcome addition, and an effort was made to make them all look distinguished from one another, though none so far reach the more outrageous and bizarre standards set by the original spelljammer. You'll find more of those back in the core Aetherdark book, however.

Otherwise, The Ring follows the standard layout you can expect from most 3rd-party Shadowdark books: its clean, its functional, but you're not going to find anything avant-garde: A5 format, black and white, with a fat-trimmed writing style that focuses on the essential details.

PART II: THE RING AND THE TREATY

 

Wonder and Imperialism go hand-in-hand in almost every story set during the Age of Sail and The Ring does not shy away from it.The Seven Worlds of the Ring are but a hair's breadth away from calamity, rebellion and war when you start up an Aetherdark game.

The Treaty serves as an encompassing law that each of the Ringspace worlds subscribes to, and may primarily serve as a tool for the GM to bring conflict to the players or serve as a hook for adventures and is, as such, left deliberately vague in its specifics. The two examples listed, Privateering and Aethership Ownership, may serve not only as a nice bit of adventure hooks for crawlers intending to hoist the black flag, but also serves as a bit of a balm in case they, somehow, lose their own aethership... or serve as a point of conflict, should they happen to capture a ship of their own and its former owner is now hunting them down with a re-assessor fleet or two. I like it, and the encouragement to come up with your own bans and variations of the Treaty can give a creative GM all sorts of leeway for interesting scenarios.

PART III: THE WORLDS OF RINGSPACE

Now, we're digging into the main part of this cornucopia. The Ring is composed of seven worlds, each about as different as they come. Each of the seven worlds provides different core conflicts, adventure hooks, carousing events, factions, ancestries to draw on and a load of tables for unique mutations, cult patrons, events and more.

Each world section also gives you a brief and succinct summation of a world's general culture, clothing and mannerisms, their industrial and trade focuses, and unique background table. There's a lot to cover here, and I'll try to give each world equal attention:

First, there's Rogue Navidem, your wretched hive of scum and villainy atop a lone, sunless chunk of rock, separated into a rich upper city and a nest of toxic tunnels, turrets and troublemakers, with its main export being spell-bottles crafted from the very toxic, arcane effluvia that drowns the lower parts of the asteroid.

Devlienne is a small, harsh feudal world populated by orcs and protected by an arcane barrier that prevents the influence of extraplanar entities. Its empire all but exterminated the wilderness to make way for farmland to supply its cities. Their society is split into two castes: warrior-nobility and serfs, the former numbering in the thousands, the latter in the millions.

Solaria is less a functioning world and more a spiteful ball of rock and sand under the perpetual light of seventeen suns, whose population is far behind most other worlds of Ringspace, having just about reached bronze-age level of metallurgy and technology.

The Jungle is a region of steamy void inhabited by six enormous space-critters, one of which, the Long-Bison, serves as the homeworld of the Bisonians, who populate the inside of its maw. 

 

Isolated from the rest of the Ring and without much in the way of advanced technology, the Bisonians struggle for respect and recognition amongst the worlds bound by the Treaty.

The Ichor Mines are the drifting corpse of a god – some hydra-like, worm-beast tangled into a giant knot, whose insides are being mined for its precious ichor and bone – all while the danger looms that said Dead God may not, in fact, be entirely dead.

Calrivi is a world trapped between light and shadow, two unmoving stars of brightest radiance and light-eating darkness, where only a thin strip of gloaming twilight is liveable. Around a thousand years ago, it was conquered by an immortal dwarf emperor, who named the entire planet after himself and seeks to expand across the rest of the astral realm. Little success on that front, however.

Finally, Volpith 4 is a world inhabited only by the crazy, as their planet is part of a system that gets swiss-cheesed on the regular by a giant, energy-bolt throwing ruby that drifts at its centre. The inhabitants of Volpith 4, gnomes, are ruled by a plethora of cults to various dark, intoxicating powers, demons and other beings, and the whims of the Ruby, whom they believe has an inherent dislike of anything resembling aetherships or outside contact in general. At least your cranky neighbour can't throw neighbourhood-blasting bolts of power.

Each of these worlds is incredibly unique and creative in their conception, come with a wide range of hooks and conflicts, many of which breach the confinement of their system and can affect others: Navidem, as the greatest power and trade hub of the Ring is resented by most other worlds for their mercantile control over much of Ringspace and are threatened with labour revolts, the Dead God of the Ichor Mines awakening could threaten the whole of the seven worlds, Devlienner noble scions take in droves to the astral sea to earn their respect as warriors and take up piracy to do so, Solarian colonization threatens a holy war between the gods, as the Solarians tear down temples of old to make way for their own houses of worship – each world brings its own share of problems both on an interplanetar, as well as local scale to throw at your players.

Not to mention, each world also comes with its own carousal tables, both for your PCs and for your aethership crew, tables for treasures and art pieces, new magical items, unique ships and the local constabulary forces as enemies to take on, tables for backgrounds and even unique spells and cultic powers available to natives of certain worlds.

It all serves to breathe proper life and uniqueness to each world of the Ring, and I really like the effort put into the various hooks and overall framework approach to each world.

However, there are also some things to criticise.

The worlds of the Ring do suffer of a lack of detail in some areas, mainly when it comes to factions and potential NPCs for the PCs to encounter. You'll receive many name-drops of mob bosses, noble houses and the like, but the book constrains itself mainly to naming them as the local rulers, without much detail into their operations or goals.

Rogue Navidem, for example, has five Notable Rulers, but their motives and personalities are left unexplored, beyond some small breadcrumbs.

 

Duke Dalosh here serves as an example: She is very wealthy and a mostly idle socialite who is more interested in throwing lush parties. It gives me an archetype to work with, but not much in the way of an intriguing character. Most other Rulers of Navidem and other characters mentioned across Ringspace fall under the same caveat, if they have any noticeable ones, at all. There are, sadly, also no major astral pirate crews or other rogue organisations listed that could serve as potential unaffiliated factions or antagonists. Rogue Navidem mentions a pirate guild, but is just that, a mention without detail.

Further, while there are plenty of rumours to be had, especially in Rogue Navidem, which, from the way it is designed as a trade , is likely the world your crew will always return to, there are no unique random encounter tables for any of the seven worlds.

While there are random events for aethership travels to be found in the core Aetherdark book, the lack of planet-specific encounters is a void you'll have to fill by yourself, and the random encounters found in the core Shadowdark RPG Rules won't be enough to really fill that caveat. Its especially noticeable considering the truly wild amount of tables you receive otherwise, from backgrounds to carousing events and the multiplicity of unique ships and goods to be found on each planet.

It also carries over into the Bestiary, which is sorely lacking. No space clowns, thankfully, but at most you'll only receive a handful of humanoid foes drafted from the world's native population as potential enemies to throw at your party, alongside their ships. Which is fine for space ship battles, but I feel a little cheated at not seeing any unique spawns of the Dead God, or the intestinal parasites of the Long-Bison.

The Aetherdark core book has a small selection of astral beasts, but they number at most a dozen, with the majority of that Bestiary also being humanoid pirates and aether crews. You do receive some mounts as fauna, and there are some fun ones like a giant tarantula spider or elephant-sized tortoises, along with some more mutation tables, but they do not quite scratch that same itch.

Its a bit of a natural consequence in the attempt of trying to fit seven whole planets/worlds/regions as adventure locations into one book, and the framework approach justifies some of the deliberate vagueness, but when you go out of your way to delve into the weird and space fantasy especially, a little more specificity is warranted. It's a tough line to walk, and The Ring does manage to walk it most of the time, but it makes these fumbles all the more noticeable.

PART IV: THE COLONIES

The Colonies follow the framework-design set-up earlier by the core worlds, and are mainly supported by the core Aetherdark rulebook. You'll sense a small pattern here, and I'll address it at the end of this review. The colonies are all explicitly stated to be under a constant state of rebellion, and should thus be prime adventure locations and conflict-zones for an Aetherdark campaign, and the book does a fine job of addressing how the various Ring powers interact out here. Usually, a world will have multiple colonies of multiple different Ring worlds, and the book goes out of its way to detail the three major processes of colonization each undertakes. The Navidem, for example, favour more subtle yokes than the likes of the Devlienner:

 

With over twenty colonised worlds, all of different colony combinations, it serves to set up quite the party of conflicts between the vastly different cultures. In addition, there are several worlds yet to-be colonized and sometimes ignorant of the mere existence of the Astral Sea, while the powers of the Ring squabble over who will get to pitch their first claim. Lovely. 

PART V: RINGSPACE MOUNTS, TRADE GOODS, SHIPS AND DISTANT WORLDS

The last bit of the book mainly concerns itself with aforementioned mounts, trade goods to be ferried and found across the colonies, new ships to acquire and where upon the various worlds they are built and distributed, along with empty tables to list additional ancestries and worlds to incorporate from different 3rd-party and 1st-party lines. Its a neat idea that further hammers home the framework-design this book embraces and serves as a neat little end to the book as a whole. 

PART VII: CONCLUSION

 I like The Ring. Its space fantasy and planetary romance at its finest, with some really unique ideas for its worlds, plenty of adventure hooks and well-placed conflicts unique to each. It fully embraces the weirdness that comes when crossing the streams of fantasy and soft sci-fi. It suffers some penalties when it comes to the lack of a greater bestiary and random encounters for each locale, and, in the end, I wouldn't say it is something you can simply acquire as a stand-alone and play just with the core Shadowdark Rulebook. You will need the Aetherdark Core book to make sense of most additional rulings and how the various space battles work, along with some of the tables required to roll up the colonised worlds. 

But if you are a fan of Spelljammer, planetary romance and gonzo in general, I'd say this book is just right for you. It makes some small fumbles, but as a framework setting it will give you a lot of options to provide fun space-sailing adventures for your players. 

Hell, it even comes with its own Third-Party License, and I might just take advantage of that myself. I have a whole damn planetary romance setting I envisioned during the Shadowdark Beta-Days on the backburner, and this might just give me the excuse to start working on it again. 

Micah is currently also conducting a kickstarter for more Aetherdark Zines, all of which have some phenomenal vibes and artwork, courtesy of Jeri Honeywell, who I've worked with in the past and who has done some spectacular work on the bestiary in Aetherdark core. 

 https://aetherdark.com/collections/all

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/abresch/distant-worlds?ref=creator_tab 

 

REVIEW: THE REALM

 

 

  

 

 

 PREAMBLE: THE STANDARD EUROPEAN MEDIEVAL FANTASY SETTING (or S.E.M.F.S.)

The shining knight on horseback charging with his lance held tight at the great fire-breathing dragon. The mysterious stranger seated in the corner of the tavern. The wicked sorceress chucking lightning bolts from atop her castle ruin. The army of faceless, monstrous goons assailing the last bastion of good as the night's rain cascades down upon them, mingling mud and blood, while lightning bolts crack the skies to illuminate ten-thousand pikes, spears, blades and wicked axes. Green dales and thatch-roof villages, always with a tavern just by the road, goblins in the forest, trolls under bridges, a sort-of-but-not-quite feudal society with either more upward and downward social mobility than sound plausible, or so rigidly stratified and divided  you'd think you stumbled the middle of Imperial Britain during its invasion of India.  

You know 'em, you might love 'em, you might roll your eyes at 'em, but the S.E.M.F.S.s have been a staple of fantasy for almost a century now, and despite the occasional dip into the weird and somewhat esoteric (or, you know, non-European) direction. And here's the thing, I it has its virtues - above them all, familiarity: 

At this point in time, in the year of our lord 2026 with an entire generation of people literally being born, growing up under and having their brains rewired in ways our neolithic forefathers couldn't ever have unga'd, with knowledge and pop culture literally at our fingertips, I'm fairly certain everybody within TTRPGs knows what a knight is. 
Everybody knows that a tavern is where all adventures may begin and where all gossip is being traded, if you spot a suspiciously grumpy old man with a big hat, you know him to be a wizard, if you hear a nation described as an empire, you can be sure that it is not only evil, but likely Roman in aesthetic, if you come across a barbarian horde, they will be always down to fight, bronze-muscled, long-haired and bearded and follow a might-makes-right philosophy. 
You hear the word "Northman"; you immediately picture a viking with stylish, if historically inaccurate horned helmet. 
The rare travellers from the distant, mysterious East will always carry curved blades, obsessed with honour (personal or clan-based), and be mixed martial art masters.
Nebulous ancient ruins of bygone, highly magic civilisations practically honeycomb the landscape. 
Elves will always be eking out an isolated, long-lived and ponderous existence, be arrogant and nature-bound. Dwarves will be hard-working, gruff, stubborn, love alcohol and be obsessed with mining and metallurgy. Halflings will be friendly, country-folk-like, fancying food more than adventure, but capable of great things when push comes to shove. 
There will be a dark lord or demon king or evil sorcerer living in a dark keep, commanding hordes of minions, undead, orcs, goblins and what-not, usually seated on the east of the map. 

 I could go on, but I believe you get the gist. The tropes and short-cuts of the S.E.M.F.S. are so well-worn, chances are you can travel it on auto-pilot. Its been lampooned, parodied, deconstructed, reconstructed, played straight and subverted, sometimes well, sometimes lazily. Diana Wynne Jones' Tourist's Guide to Fantasy-Land has to be one of my favourites when it comes to parody, Westeros of A Song of Ice and Fire is another when it comes to deconstructing it. 
And chances are, the first time you set down to write your own fantasy world, at least half above-mentioned clichés somehow wormed their way into its foundations. 

The second-biggest virtue of it, I'd argue, is that in this mire of tropes and short-cuts, there exists a cauldron of neutrality that practically lets you lob any adventure, dungeon and magic item into it with little concern for aesthetic or tonal cohesion. 

Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean that every S.E.M.F.S. is made exactly the same - there are all sorts of different spices involved - but I'd argue after almost a century, it takes some genuine effort to make something from its standard foundation that truly stands out from the rest of its peers. 

Nor does it mean that just because the setting is perceived as neutral, the tropes and clichés employed are as well. The Other comes freely shipped with it - and depending on what tropes the author chooses to highlight or imply as civilised, good or moral visual indicators, behaviours, cultures and actions and what not, intentionally or otherwise, can be quite revealing. 

Today, we are looking at The Ironhaven Chronicles: The Realm, written, designed and published by Sean Patrick Fannon and Portalis Publishing. It holds 92 pages to its name and promises a complete, deeply-detailed setting for epic adventure, with new ancestries, classes, spells, a new, deep cosmology and new monsters to add to your bestiary. That's a lot of ground to cover in under 100 pages, so let's give it a go. 

I. COVER AND INTERIOR ARTWORK 

I have to talk about the cover. 

Its ugly. 

I know, thou shalt not judge a book by its cover alone, especially in the relative indie-space, but we do judge by first impressions, and I have to say, more than anything, it reminds me of the title splashes and advertisements of some generic mobile app fantasy game that claims itself free-to-play, but requires some in-game resource to play for a limited time per day and stocks loot-boxes and energy-refills in real-money-only in-app purchases. The poses look strange, every surface shines like an oiled up plastic doll held under a flashlight, and the way it is composed, it looks more like somebody took a half-dozen individual character art pieces and jammed them all together into one big pile. I don't know, but if I were a casual potential buyer, just looking at this would turn me off and cause me to look for others. It doesn't help that the character designs are awfully generic as well, much like those of aforementioned mobile fantasy games. 

Otherwise, the interior of the book mostly uses stock art and a combination black & white and colour art pieces of individual  characters and small scenic snippets. The choice of art styles varies rather wildly, however - you get gritty black-and-white adventurers that would feel at home in an AD&D book right next to bright, colourful 80s-Anime elves. The contrast is jarring, suffice to say.

Now there is never anything wrong with using stock art or public domain art, but the choice of individual artwork definitely matters. If you are trying to give your product an identity on a budget, you have to carefully curate your choice of interior art to effectively communicate what you can't or don't have the room to do with your written word. Black-and-white sketchy, gritty, boiled-leather wearing adventurers fighting grotesque monsters literally paint a wildly different world than brighty coloured anime-heroes with pastel-coloured hairs and big smiles while whirling fiery lances and hadokens. Both at the same time? A bit schizophrenic.  

Alright, enough waffling about art.

 II. INTRODUCTION 

Something to be noted about this book, it is heavy on the quotes. Not as in quotes from in-universe characters or literature, but instead, quotes from a number of pop culture media that form the backbone of just about any nerd's list of familiar works1:

Following that, we do not get a fanfare and yellow scrolling text, summarising the entire backstory of the feature in around a minute, but we get the next-best thing: a rough idea of what the overall aesthetics and setting-feel are supposed to be through a small introductory snippet: 

 

Alright, I can't exactly tell you yet what the gemstone all mean in the cosmic sense, but I will assume that the red and black ones are tied to evil, while silver, blue, green and purple are considered good. Cosmic forces colour-coded for your convenience! The term "epic action cinema fantasy" does leave me a bit stumped, as I am not sure Shadowdark RPG is the best system if you wish to invoke that specific kind of feel for your game. Sure, SD is fairly quick-paced, the light-timer keeps your players usually on their toes and with the relative low HP and comparatively high-lethality2, but epic cinema action is more Draw Steel or 5e's flavour.

We also receive a list of resources and recommended 1st- and 3rd-party supplements to work hand-in-hand with this setting book and I gotta say, I do like that. Its a bit of free advertising for creators other than yourself and it can help a potential GM of solving the decision paralysis they face whenever they wish to slaughter out a setting book before stuffing it with various other adventures and supplements from their catalogue. Gives a bit of cohesion to it all. 

Now, we get to the first neat and gritty of it, as the next page gives us a brief rundown of the setting's geography and main regions: in overall size, it is a small island continent "roughly the size of the U.S. state of Virginia", divided into the Northrealm, the Midrealm and the Southrealm, with the Lake Golway at its centre. Each realm is further divided up between two to three larger, organized territories such as the Imperium and Emerald League, as well as a couple of Dwarvish Clanhomes and Fae Domains. 
It is further of note that the Southrealm is united in opposition to the Northrealm, while the Midrealm is caught in-between. I'll have some things to say on the regions as a whole later on. For now, we move on. 

Next, we get a hexmap of the whole thing and I have two notes for it: I can't read the names of the places for shit, for many of them are in green or greenish letters on a green grass hex tile, and as I zoom in on the page, the whole thing turns into pixels. There is a separate map that comes with the product, that mitigates the issue somewhat, but now I gotta imagine how difficult it would be to read in print. The way how crowded the map is with landmarks and settlements doesn't help, each of which has its own, differently legible or illegible title. With how many of them there are, nearly 50, and how there are only 91 pages to this book, we'll be looking at some shorter hex-descriptions, likely, rather than full-fledged profiles. 

III. HEROES & ANCESTRIES

 

Character options are a go. First, we get a curated list of first-party and third-party classes and ancestries which are appropriate for the setting. Afterwards, we get deeper profiles of all available ancestries of the Realm, though there is not much I read here that fully stands out. Lizardfolk or Draykar take the place of our token highly-militarised culture. They also straight up just receive a Fighter's Grit Talent for STR rolls. So, just in case you want to double dip ADV, play a Draykar Fighter and practically never worry about any STR or DEX roll ever again, in addition to water-breathing. Meanwhile humans and dwarves are largely what they always are: on the rise and adaptable for the humies, isolate but happy-go-lucky drinkers and brawlers for the beardies. Well, not full-beardies: 

Cowards. Romance the bearded dwarf women or none at all, as Tolkien intended.
There is some influence from Irish culture with the Fae being a clear parallel to the Tuatha  De Danann, as the pre-human and elven civilisation that build most of the foundation of the Realm, before the migration of the other peoples to this island. Elves are, as such, spawn of fae-human mingling, though they still are perceived as more fairy than mortal. We also have cat-people in the Felarin, who are not-Tabaxi, gaining their climbing feats and natural claws, as well as half-elves, who get to roll twice on talent tables and pick which talent they want as a result. Neat. Goblins and orcs are part of the same greater class of goblinoids, with their talents unchanged. One of the first major new things this book introduces is the Ogre as a playable ancestry. They have a near reach with a +1 bonus on melee attack and damage rolls, but any and all ranged attacks have ADV against them. At LV 1, Shrek ain't making it past the first two arbalests. 
Elves and Fae also, uniquely, receive penalties when walking in regions affiliated with Ruby and Onyx. What that particularly means, we'll have to find out in the Cosmology section, but I suppose it is meant to balance out their ADV on all checks to hide in natural terrain (elves) and a free Tier 1 wizard spell and ability to use wands (fae). There is also the Winged Elf off-shoot, few in number in the realm, but able to fly at double near in outdoors only. So, neat for traveling, painfully useless within any dungeon, castle, or whatever hole most of your adventure is spent crawling through. 

Nothing here yet fully captures me. I'm not exactly appalled or fascinated by any description, more the mechanical side of things. There was the attempt at balancing out what were effectively two talents in one with some form of penalty for some of the ancestries, but these are either too severe, such as the ogre and winged elf, or too situational, such as for the fae and elf. 
Draykar, with permanent STR Grit and waterbreathing at no downsides are fundamentally broken though. 

IV. COSMOLOGY

 The cosmology section commits cardinal sin and re-attaches a Y-axis to Shadowdark's Chaotic, Neutral and Lawful gradient. Curses. Each of these three is given three further aspects which are, and I am not even attempting a joke here, just the D&D standard alignment chart from Chaotic Evil to Lawful Good again. I request to all writers of future 3rd-party Shadowdark stuff, do not do this, please. I had enough arguments over alignment to last me several lifetimes.
 In particular, I will highlight the section under Lawful labelled "Tyrannical Law": "Might makes right, the strong dominate the weak, and justice is both swift and cruel. This would be the “law” of a strong, Chaotic nation." 
Which is just Chaotic as according to Shadowdark RPG core. And doesn't add anything new.  It just conflates chaos and evil again and we are back where we fucking started. Let's move on.

The actual important part of the Cosmology of the Realm are the so-called Six Facets, each corresponding to a particular gemstone: Amethyst, Emerald, Onyx, Ruby, Sapphire and... Silver? Okay, five gemstones, one metal. The basic gist is, each of these facets corresponds to a foundational force of the world. Amethyst aligns with arcane power, Onyx with Darkness and Necromancy, Ruby with violence and chaos, and so on. Whenever a GM feels like one facet is more present than another, an effect occurs within the region, such as an Amethyst-heavy region granting ADV on all INT-based spellcasting checks, while also increasing the mishap chance. Neat idea on paper, but it readily leaps into a minefield when it comes to the alignment-based Silver, which dictates that a Lawful character gains ADV on attack and spellcasting checks, but is assigned a curse if they wield their power against someone undeserving.

So, how does this work in a region of "Tyrranical Law", which is still Lawful as according to the author's own word, but also a sign of a Chaotic nation? Is it therefor deserved to wield power against the weak? Or are we to take this as just "Good, nice law gets Silver, tyrannic regions don't"? I have to assume it is the latter, but the text doesn't go out of its way to say so. Nor does it strictly say what qualifies for a situation to have a stronger presence of a facet. Is being in a mage's tower already enough to qualify for the Amethyst power boost? Does being in the midst of a battle qualify for Ruby? Does it need to be something like a whole Chaotic nation to qualify? An influx of demons, what exactly? The book leaves it up to the GM to decide, but I wish an example was given in order to set a standard - for all but one, that is.

Onyx gets a whole couple pages dedicated to it, along with a dedicated roll to check: 

  

 So, this might give you a bit of reference on how to use the other facets, but if merely being in a lightly shaded alleyway can trigger a Darkness Event, that might as well mean a brisk walk through a park could trigger the Emerald facet's healing surge. It's weirdly... video-game-y in a sense that I can't pin down quite well. I'm not on principal opposed to magically charged background fields and the like, but it might quickly go over into a rapidity of gaining and losing debuffs and buffs based on minimal incremental changes, especially if you are playing a crew of elves or fae and necessitate a flowchart. Hypothetical situation, sure, but the thought wouldn't  really encourage me to run the facets as described. 

The table for the Darkness Event is a d100 table with 50 different events, most of which feature undead, ethereals or outsiders attacking the PCs, with some few events granting a temporary benefit or even a level up on the 100 roll. I'm not opposed to special events like this, but RAW, it means they stack with Random Encounters, and it can feel a bit ridiculous if a walk through a lightly shaded city district can suddenly drop a bloody rime walker on your skull. The chances aren't high, but the dice are well-known bastards. I'd alter this system to apply exclusively to deep night or underground areas, just to avoid such a thing. And to make sure the other facets won't trigger on just a wizard farting out a fireball at the wrong time. 

Speaking of wizards...  

 V. MAGIC & GEAR

 

Alright, the random quotes were mildly charming at first, but they're starting to get on my nerves. I'd prefer it if any quotes you choose to pepper your setting book with would actually be relevant to the fiction you attempt to communicate. Give me sayings from your in-universe sacred book. Write me a little ambiguous assumption about the nature of the world from one of your wizards or philosophers. A passage describing a culture or event from your world's history. I'd much rather read that rather than a regurgitation of quippy pop-culture citations. Anyway, spells: there are a ton of them across multiple class lists - most of them are merely the reprints from core SD, filled out further with spells from several other third-party works.Also, we get jump-scared by Freddy Mercury:

 

Sure, its about the isolation and supreme power of eternal beings, much like the Highlander quote earlier, but come on. 
There is an added caveat on how the different spellcasting classes draw their power from different facets, but there is no strict mechanics tied to it. We are also introduced to the new Mystic class, who are quasi-psionics who use CHA as their spellcasting ability. 

The mystic is... an okay class? It gets the D&D 5e Insight skill, basically, allowing you to discern lies from truth on an opposed CHA check, as well as a telepathic sense that grants ADV on initiative and, if focused on for a round with a DC 12 CHA check, warns you of danger ahead. Its worded just nebulously enough that it can apply to monsters, traps, magic in hiding or bird droppings from ten-hundred feet above. I'd have set a hard limit on its range (double-near, personally), so that players can't just abuse the ambiguous "ahead" to mean far or hundred feet or something. I'd also have moved it up to the Heroes & Ancestries chapter, rather than huddle it up down here by the spell lists. 

Why is this quote here. It has no relevance to spellwork and the like. These quotes are attempting to do what artwork usually should, conveying a vague, generic idea of what the setting should feel like, I guess, but are so distracting because they are impossible to disengage from their original works and have no bloody relevance to this book in question. 

When it comes to the new spells... I have issues. 

 

Why in the ever-loving hell is what amounts to a simple help action or two people working on the same task a Tier 3 spell. Are wizards and mystic hampered in their social ability that much? 

And a Tier 2 spell dealing 3d6 damage in close radius? Spells in Shadowdark RPG are kind of meant to be wild and mystical, but the new additions here sometimes range from too specific in use. An example of this would be the  Tier 4 Stone to Flesh spell that is just a worse Restoration, targeting only petrified beings and for some reason reduces you to 1 HP post de-petrification, even if you had full HP beforehand. Or the Wizard Lock spell, a Tier 2 variant of Hold Portal that is permanent and only opens for the casting wizard and anyone else they share a password with... but can still be opened with a STR check, a dispel or a knock spell. The bell-curve of spell power relevant to tier is not a gradient or exponent, it is a fluctuating, wibbly-wobbly elastic band that needed a couple more edits before getting the final pass. The inclusion of hexes in most of the spell-descriptions is also a bit of a throw-off, considering they are used right alongside the standard ranges - uniformity of design language with core SD's spell design is something to be paid attention to. 

The new gear is largely what you'd expect to find in any 2e-onward D&D book: bedrolls, bells, locks, silvered mirrors, tents, a whole list of various artisan tools which I assume will grant you advantage on any check related to work done with them. I say assume, because the author does not go into detail regarding those. Then we also have stuff like this:

Jesus bloody Christ. That's 10 XP worth. Just finding a rudimentary spyglass can pop you up from LV 1 to LV 2. There's no issue with adding some more gear and items to the regular SD list, I especially can appreciate re-introducing Hammers, after Kelsey's blasphemy of banishing them into the lower hells, but some of these prices are more 5e, rather than SD. It gets especially egregious with musical instruments: 

 Depending on your GM's roll, a cymbal may cost you more than a longsword. This is mostly quibbling details however. You can expect just about all the listed gear items to do exactly what you assume they might do. A bit of a new thing are Alchemicals and Artifices, 5-round duration potions and devices that serve to mimic a specific spell. Basically, one-time wands for Fighters and Thieves and anyone else who doesn't wield magic at their finger-tips. Devices require an INT check to use and must be repaired on a failure. I don't have anything to really say for or against them, but I'd hesitate to offer any of them for player purchase anywhere but a major capitol city or the like. 

VI. THE REALM GAZETTEER

After a lot of quibbling, we actually get to the core content of the book. The various realms, nations and cultures of The Realm, starting from the north and working our way down. Each nation receives a large blurb noting its Proper Name, Ruler, Form of Government, Key Settlements, Resources and Population Demographics, its enemies, allies and its hierarchies, before delving into its history and the individual settlements and points of interest. Each nation also receives a unique d8 & d4-based random encounter table - these however fall more along the lines of being merely monsters with no activity assigned to them. 

The nations here fall largely into what you might expect of your typical high fantasy setting to have. The Imperium are heavily inspired by the Roman Empire, the Hegemony are your standard Barbarian society, the Mercantile Union are your quasi-independent city states, the Onyx Dominion are your standard drow matriarchy,  the Emerald League are a federation of good-aligned monarchies of the human and elvish sort, and the Argent Ascendancy is your nation of paladins. Now, as said, even these rather standard concepts can all be done well. You need to put in a bit of elbow grease and consider old tropes from different angles, but it can be done.

I wish I could tell you that The Realm does anything remotely interesting with any of them.  

Let's start with the Imperium. It is the Roman Empire, but Evil(er). Its gods are capricious and cruel, corruption is rife amongst all its social strata, the emperor is a power-hungry war-monger, its highest pontifex lusts for even more power. Strength above all else. There is a strong slave system in place. The section concerning its military has more detail put into it than its Church, whose main contribution beyond the list of Gods and mention of its highly corrupt head priest is the following: 

Groovy.  None of the gatherings or festivals are named. As for the actual cities and points of interests of the Imperium, well... 

 

If you are expecting details concerning its districts, I am afraid to disappoint you, as they are reduced to keywords and one point of interest for each. Said points of interests (P.o.I. from here on out) are largely just fairly generic descriptions of what you'd expect such a P.o.I. to have. The Arboretum above sure has some interesting plants and trees from across the realm and beyond, but that's where it stops. I'm not exactly sure what a GM would use this for on its own. The other P.o.I.s on the next page all follow a similar pattern, describing a function, but not exactly providing much, if anything in terms of conflicts or, well, interests that would be relevant to the PCs:    

 

There could have been multiple bullet points to each of these, describing something that is happening behind the scenes or is currently affecting the P.o.I. in question. The Banking Guild House could provide for an interesting heist scenario, if I knew anything else about it besides that it had secure vaults. The Colosseum sure is Colosseing. The City Watch Outposts are arguably the most useful, because they at least tell me that there are two squads of guards per district. This brief section of the book covers the entirety of the capitol of one of the major nations of the Realm and it is basically an assortment of random districts and P.o.I.s that feel like they were rolled up on a chart with nothing of actual interest associated with them.

On a second look, there is actually something else to be miffed about. Those district keywords? They are from another third-party supplement. In order to make sense of them or for them to be of any use, you actually need to buy and own the Player's Companion 3rd-party product. Cool. 

The lesser cities have it even worse: 

 

This is all they get on average. Once every six or so entries, you get a P.o.I. with something actually happening in it that could be used as an adventure hook. Otherwise, these are just generic locations after generic locations, whose entire descriptions add nothing more that you couldn't already guess from their name. Its a pattern that follows through the entire rest of the book, for each and every nation.  

Me too, Daemon Engine, me too. 
The author makes a point to write that there is a deliberate lack of detail with some locations in order to facilitate GM creativity. When I read that, I believed I would be given some fruitful voids, not a bunch of graveyards. 

 

The Hegemony, despite being a chaotic barbarian nation does not fare much better when it comes to detail or exciting things happening. Most you can hope for, is a higher chance of a random encounter happening to you should you be a foreigner in their cities.  Their society is structured around a war-thing, because of course it is, and every single one of its inhabitants are happy to go to war at a moment's notice, because of course they are. You have to wonder why they haven't wiped each other out, Thing or no. The biggest conflict you'll find in the Hegemony is some dwarven priests wondering if they are not too restraint when it comes to serving their gods in pillaging and burning the landscape. The mold is broken by a single settlement: 

 

They have a single P.o.I. that could be of interest, in the form of a Railroad-esque community of farms on the town outskirts that shelters escaped slaves and allows them rest and food, before sending them south.  But there is no further conflict applied here. No treacherous community members thinking of selling them back to the Empire, no imperial agents scouting the area for escaped slaves, nothing. 

I should also note, that there are no real factions found so far. Nor are there any actual, written out NPCs. The Realm, despite its promise of "epic high action cinema fantasy", is remarkably static. The only NPC I vaguely remember is the emperor. Not his actual name, mind you, I just remember he is an evil emperor. 

I am getting more and more grumpy as I read through this.The Fey Domains and Clanhomes are so far little more than isolated pockets of... well, high elf and mountain dwarf towns. That's all I can say about them. 

The Midrealm "technically" has some factions in the form of  the Seven Houses found in the Gisellan Hinterlands, along with some implied form of political intrigue between them.

 

Short-hand, each house holds sway over a different enterprise or greater resource in the Hinterlands and is tied to one town in particular. We are only given the head of each house, as in, we are given a name, but nothing about who they are, what defines them, or even how they try to vie for the top. There are no fruitful voids here, only yawning holes. Worst of all, I am genuinely struggling to pay attention as I read through the book because there is nothing yet that I couldn't have rolled up with a random table of nouns, verbs and adjectives yet. I look back to the cover of the book. Its mobile fantasy ad visage haunts my dreams. 

I saunter over into the Onyx Dominion. They are drow who do drow things. I get stumped, momentarily, by a passage in one of the spiderly divine profiles:

 Anyone who uses "buxom" as an adverb should have their writing license revoked. 

We meet our first actual NPC profiles 55 pages deep into this 91 page book in the Mercantile Union section. 

 

Great, we finally have some actual movers and shakers to work with. I wish we had had similar details for any of the previous realms as well. I could actually use these three NPCs to compete with one another and form reasonable quest hooks for PCs. 

 

Off to the Emerald League, where- 

 

...Nope. I am done. I cannot take another one of these sorts of descriptions anymore. We're moving on.  

VII. BESTIARY & MAGIC ITEMS

Positive things: the bestiary has a serviceable amount of monsters and foes, divided up by nation. We also get some hazards and weather phenomena here, which I think would've been better served under the respective gazetteer sections or have their own, separate chapter. 

We get different type of Legionnaires, boarmen, druids and slave-catchers. Some monsters receive a martial talent, rolling a STR or DEX check against a set DC as part of an attack in a similar vein to spellcasters rolling their spellcasting checks to add different effects to their attacks. Neat spin, but clunky. I would've simply made it a STR check or DEX check without an attack roll, and simply treat it as a martial "spellcasting" check, instead of doing two-steps.
The statblocks themselves run into the repeat offender of LVs and HP values not being in tune with SD standard protocol, and often break across pages.  But once again, nothing else really stands out, except for the Crimson Cartel, which is a cult of enforcers and assassins sworn to a goddess of murder and said to be the most dangerous and powerful criminal organisation in all the realm.
Why weren't they mentioned and focused on in the Gazetteer?

Magic items are  so and so. They do engage largely with the new Facet feature of the cosmology, with some items becoming stronger depending on if a Lawful or specific-facet aligned creature/class is using them, but the claim that they could be added to any other SD game outside the Realm is questionable at best. 

VIII. APPENDICES

The appendices consist of a listing of all the gods mentioned in the Realm Gazetteer, a couple new class titles and an overview of the nine rivers that flow out from the central lake out to the ocean, or vice-versa due to some magic alteration. This could have been a lot more interesting if it was mentioned in any part of the gazetteer beforehand how it affects trade, warfare and other conflicts between the various nations. Instead, it is banished to the back of the book like a literal afterthought.  

IX. CONCLUSION 

 

I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Instead, imagine the following, if you would: 

You find yourself quite peckish one fine evening. You  are not in the mood to cook for yourself, so you hit the town. There's a restaurant that's been around for decades, whose kitchen prides itself on its chefs who've been around for an equally long time. They are a bit old-fashioned, but you don't necessarily mind that. You go in with certain expectations: traditional cuisine, nothing too exciting, but made with passion and experience. You don't look at the menu, you know what you can get in this place. So you ask the waiter simply to surprise you, and contently await what the kitchen has in store for you. 

Then you are served a bowl of plain old oatmeal for 20 bucks. 
And you know what? It sure fucking is. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/573054/the-ironhaven-chronicles-the-realm

 

 1 At least, any nerd born up to 2005, round-about. I'm fairly certain most of the people turning 18 or 19 this year are not really into Firefly any more. Or Joss Whedon in general. 

2 Relative and Comparatively being the key words here. SD has a bit of an overblown reputation of being super-deadly. Sure, low level PCs are more quick to bit it than most D&D PCs, but even then, combat is more often than not a last-resort state, and by the time you hit LV 3, which happens quicker than you might think, the lethality drops off massively. Mostly because the players know not to stick their heads into the very obviously trapped gargoyle mouth. 
Most of the time. 

 

 

REVIEW: MICE OF LEGEND - PERILS OF PORTAL LAKE SETTING GUIDE

PREAMBLE: ART ALONE DOES NOT THE PRODUCT MAKE

Every so often, I prowl the streets of Kickstarter to look at all sorts of crowdfunded RPG products. Shadowdark RPG has experienced a true flood of them, and something they often share, is some incredibly gorgeous artwork, from cover to back. Black and White art, with some greyscale here and there for the most part, but sometimes I get to come into the enjoyment of colour. Many of their authors and designers try to, after all, capture the feeling of the original Shadowdark Book and have something of a unified appearance, allowing multiple 3rd-party products to homogonize with one another and the core rulebook on your shelf or in your hand.

This isn't anything too new. 5E's 3rd-party scene did something similar with the way their designers chose to layout their books and the way they handled the artwork: vibrant, colourful, often a faux-painter-esque artstyle that brings to mind the interiors of the first 5e-books. Hell, I can't think of all too many 3rd-party books that do not try to at least style themselves with homogeny with its 1st-party counterpart in mind.

But I found, on my walks, that the content of these gorgeously illustrated Shadowdark books was often, far too often, actually, lacking: I'm talking 10-room dungeons with only 2 rooms worth of interactive content between them, hexcrawls that had too much crawl and a little too little hex, litanies of classes and spells that were poorly or not at all balanced and were designed more with 5e in mind, rather than the actual SD-System, the list goes on. Yet, they were often highly successful in their backing and they succeeded, I think, in no small part because they pushed their gorgeous artwork. Art can communicate a vibe and atmosphere far more efficient than any paragraph of poetic, purple prose pontificates could hope for. Dark Sun and Planescape wouldn't have remained in our consciousness for so long if it weren't for their unique atmospheres conveyed by the artwork of Gerald Brom and Tony DiTerlizzi, respectively.

But art alone does not the product make. Tied to the wrong product, be that adventure, be that campaign book, be that a class and bestiary supplement or what have you, it only serves to briefly cover up the flimsy framework, the unsteady foundational mechanics, hole-riddled design choices and questionable, if not down-right bad writing. Scathingly hot take, I know.

Today we are looking at Mice of Legend: Perils of Portal Lake , a Setting Guide for the Mice of Legends Setting, originally designed for OSRIC and AD&D 1e, converted to Shadowdark RPG, written by Paul Hoeffer and published by Alchemy Press. It also calls itself a Campaign Guide at times, and promises to provide the foundation, setting, lore, factions and player options to support an entire campaign. It is a bit on the short end at around 50 pages, so that's a big promise to make.

It should also be noted, that there exists an entire campaign adventure path that spans the entire region that is being presented here.

I am a sucker for Redwall and Redwall adjacent-things. Must be something about being from Germany, we got a big thing for fables and anthropomorphized barn and forest animals doing adventurous stuff. Time to dive in.

I. INTRODUCTION: MOUSE-SIZED BITES

 

The art goes hard. In general, the booklet has some very beautiful illustrations that perfectly sit between the fantastical, the whimsical and adorable. It scratches the Redwall-itch in just the right way.  

We do not start out with a map in this one, but dive straight into the introduction. Instead of a sweeping history or background on the setting itself, we get a swift synopsis of the setting's premise and main hook:

 

The adjective "myth-haunted" is a really nice descriptor and sets up some large expectations. The synopsis is short and to the point: a powerful relic was stolen from the realm of mortals and carried off into the mouse realm. The party is tasked to cross over, transformed into mouse-versions of themselves and retrieve this relic before it can cast both worlds into doom and destruction. 

That's right, fella's, the name Portal Lake is not just an arbitrary name, you are stepping into a Portal Fantasy adventure the likes of Narnia, and you do so without the need of a magical closet or suspiciously murderous delivery truck. It is not said how your adventuring party crosses over exactly, but I'd say that can be decided by your GM or maybe it is explained later in the book. 

It also features this little blurb right beneath it: 

 

Alright, we'll have to assume then we're going to get more of a general overview of the setting in this booklet, with more in-depth stuff in individual adventure modules. Fair enough, I suppose, if you have only 50 pages to work with.  

Following that, we get four pages of explaining the mindset a Shadowdark RPG player should have when playing a Mice of Legends session. Good start, except... they largely reinforce the already existing ethos of Shadowdark RPG: encounters are largely unbalanced, slaying monsters is not the main goal but surviving is, gear items are as, if not more important that your class talents, treasure and its extraction are the main gameplay loop of the game, etc. etc. I suppose it is more aimed at players of 5e who use Shadowdark RPG as a jump-off point toward other OSR games, but four pages is a bit much. 

 

 Reading this does make me pause a bit. Then flip back to book index. I find no index for any sort of new class. I see no spell section mentioned either. I open up a tab on my browser and pull up the store page for this setting guide.

 

Says here there are new classes and spells. 

I feel a bit of dread building up inside of me. Maybe just a mistype. Can happen from time to time. 

II. CAMPAIGN AND ADVENTURES

So, we get to the campaign hooks and adventure... synopses. We get the main quest - focusing on the loss and retrieval of the Stellar Keystone in a bit of a repeat from the intro page - and the summary of the adventure modules. 

 

We are told that a proper campaign of Mice of Legends unfolds counterclockwise around the lake, going from one location to the next, all in the hunt for the Stellar Keystone. Alright, sounds more like a description for the Adventure Path, specifically, but I think that's ok to have. A bit of an overview never hurt. Unfortunately, we are not given much more. 

Side quests are also brought up and encouraged to be placed between major adventure points. I stumble upon something odd here:

 

So, I tried to find the side quests below. There was a nice little piece of artwork, but there were no side quests. I looked at the next page, and was only given a row of synopses of the author's other adventure modules. None of which are attached to this setting guide.

Either this was cut from this book entirely, or it was forgotten. Not a good look.  

III. THE WORLD OF PORTAL LAKE

We start out with some information on scale, time and distances: 

A bit confusedly worded, but I get the gist. You are walking in a greater world scaled to human size, but within structures and towns built by the paws of mice. However, your new size does not mechanically impact your overland travel - you still move at 6 mile-hexes for 8 hours a day, with walking allowing you to cross 2, being mounted lets you cross 4, etc. No changes from SD core rules, it is simply flavoured as "feeling" longer. Bit of a letdown, but alright. Fluff doesn't always need to superfluously change the core mechanics.

More regarding scale, human-sized relics are still a rarity around Portal Lake - and your standard equipment is scaled to mouse-size. No, that does not mean your mouse wields a sewing needle as a spear or similar - just a mouse-sized spear or a mouse-sized sword. Hm. Again, Redwall did this, and, in fact, many other games featuring anthropomorphic animals do this - but I think I would've liked a bit more whimsy, a bit more scavenger punk. But I can understand the want for a specific aesthetic, and a mouse in full plate still goes hard.

What I can't understand, however, are the next few pages we get concerning the entire region of Portal Lake:

 

Congratulations, you have read the entirety of the setting guide's details concerning any of its physical locations. On the next page, you get a single table listing the name of the setting's gods and their domains, in keywords. 

Yeah. That's... that's not much. I expect a setting guide of any sort that I paid actual money for to at least give me some basic gist about at least one, if not all of its towns and major locations. Getting just a table with some cultural influences is nothing that will actually hook me, as the GM, into a setting or an adventure, nor is it actually useful beyond the absolute surface notions for running a potential game in someone else's designed setting. This becomes even more egregious when taken together with this little blurb under aforementioned Gods-Table:

  

There is not a lot for me to riff off of. How does the worship of Muribelle, Deity of Fate, Storytelling and Kinship differ between Braeford and Tree Town? Are they even worshiped in both towns? What secret factions? They are not mentioned anywhere here. Am I to come up with all of that myself if I chose not to buy any of the other adventures?

Afterwards, we get to the ancestry options and how to convert your humanoid PCs to mice.
It boils down to: nothing changes about yourself, you are just a mouse now. No new talents, no unique mouse ancestry, that is simply it. Your STR is noted to be "Strong for a Mouse", so, no, you cannot wrestle cats and eagles down with your bare paws. On the mention on how new PCs are introduced after an old one died, one option is to suggest a Rector Patrick in the human world can take care of that.

No, I dot not know who he is. I assume he is in one of the other products. I have a feeling I'll be saying this a lot from here on out. 

Goblins receive slightly special treatment, by being equaled to rats instead of mice. When playing a goblin, you are instead given the option of being turned into a... gnome? 

 

Gnome mice. What are gnomish features here, exactly? Just small and diminutive? In place of Keen Senses, they get the ability to speak with all manners of burrowing animals. On that note, there is no other Mouse-Calls, Rat-Tongue or Serpent-Sssspeech mentioned in the guide so far, instead you have still the standard Common, Elvish, Dwarvish, and so on.  We also get the Vole, who however do know the languages Shrew and Vole (also known as Dwarvish?) So are Voles stand-ins for Dwarves as well? The book said before that dwarves get turned into mice. Voles get ADV vs. being knocked down or shoved. Not too shabby, reinforces their sturdiness. 

But that is, once again, it. Two whole new animal ancestries. A pity, I would've liked more in my setting guide which is meant to provide you, the GM and Player, with the fundamentals of the setting you are meant to use.  

IV. HENCHMICE & HIRELINGS

Henchmen and Hirelings are bit contentious subject in Shadowdark RPG. The game was not designed with them in mind - Kelsey Dionne said she had no plans of including any official hireling rules in the game - but enough people have made their own rules and rulings, and personally, I rather like having them around, albeit in a limited fashion. You don't want to unbalance the whole gameplay loop by having, in theory, an infinite amount of gear slots running after you, and in a game where PCs only get one action per round, you don't want to bog the rather smooth loop of crawling and combat encounters down too much either. We get a small assortment of Hirelings to choose from the below table:

We do not, however, get much more of an inclination as to what they do beyond their names. Hirelings do not always need that big of a mechanical reason, true enough: we all know what a tailor, a mason or carpenter can do, but I assume these are mainly for some sort of domain play or social play. A tailor could be useful to make you a garment for specific high-class events or disguise you to mingle with other cultures or cities, a mason can help construct walls or draw a collapsed bridge back up over its gap. But the book made specific mention of hirelings and henchmen being all but necessary for your adventures - so I would've liked some clarifications as to why. Henchmice, however, fare even worse:

 

Sounds pretty damn important, don't it? Unfortunately, there is no further information on stats, actions, or anything to further define a henchmouse. There are no statblocks, there are no suggestions such as: build a henchmouse as a LV 1 PC, or anything of the sort. I can't help but feel a bit annoyed - it seems more and more, that what I am reading is not exactly a setting book, not even a guide, more an extended preview of stuff to find in entirely separate products.  But if that were the case - why did I pay almost eight bucks for it?

V. THE MACGUFFIN: THE STELLAR KEYSTONE

 Next comes a decent amount of information about what the central MacGuffin of the setting is. The Stellar Keystone is a quintessential artifact of doom that, in the wrong hands, could spell the doom of the entire world. How exactly is not specified, but it mentions that the barriers between the mortal world and the mouse world could be rent apart. Which has to be the most adorable apocalypse of all time. Imagine the whole world being turned suddenly into a bunch of anthropomorphic mice (and rats), I suppose. We are given some rumours about it, a brief idea of its function, which is would be to create stable gateways between the planes, and that it was stolen by the Master of the Watchtower, who plans to use it as a way of summoning and transporting his armies around the region of Portal Lake almost instantly.

Its a decent set-up, and the plan by the Big Bad Evil Dude is a simple, but solid one. 

Its just a shame we don't get anything else about him. Or the Watchtower, mentioned only in the small location table a couple of pages back.  

VI. FACTIONS

I'm sorry, what? We only get two? In your setting guide? I have to buy not just the modules, but an entirely separate supplement for the rest? 

The two factions we receive are more one-and-a-half factions, at best. The Grey Mist serve as your standard adventuring guild, divided into agents, associates and executives, who all operate in relative secrecy and may communicate with one another through special signs and symbols. We are not told or shown what these are. I suppose it is a form of Thieves' Cant. Their core goal is the retrieval of the Stellar Keystone, with most of their heroic actions in the region being more of a happy byproduct. Good enough. This kind of faction brings the Harpers from Forgotten Realms to mind can serve as a backing to any PC in their quest. A bit odd to have associates rank higher than agents, but very well. 

The next faction is, as said, not exactly a faction. Its an NPC, called only the Druid Mouse, who may appear in dire times to aid around Portal Lake and, if killed, is replaced by the next, senior-most druid mouse to become The Druid mouse. I feel like a more unique title for this esteemed  position is warranted. But yeah, this is also it. Except for a small footnote at the bottom of this page, as the Druid NPC actually has access to some unique items and spells and, as it seems, a specific class. 

 

What do you mean the class is only available in another adventure module. The setting guide would have been the perfect place to put it. You mentioned in your product description there would be extra classes available in this book.  At best, this is a severe miscommunication from creator to consumer. At worst, it is a straight up lie.  

VII. ANIMAL TO MONSTER CONVERSIONS

We come to the actual core matter of the booklet: converting your standard monsters from Shadowdark into the various animals you may encounter around Portal Lake.  Nice humanoids become mice, monstrous ones default to rats. What the hell is a lizardmouse, actually? Is it a mouse with scales? A lizard with fur? Either variation sounds terrifying, but I am disappointed there is not more variation here. Why not give the PC-ancestries a bit more variation amongst their mouse types?

We are further given guidelines for herd animals and mounts and which animals should stand in for them. We also have a section for avians and giant animals. Overall, it is fine, but I'm a bit disappointed that we're not just getting bespoke, unique statblocks here. It wouldn't need to be much, but it could've given the author and designer an opportunity to let loose a little and come up with some wacky creatures.  

VIII. RANDOM ENCOUNTERS

We get three d12 tables, detailing encounters for Roads, Woodland and Marshland. They run the gamut of wild animals, raiding rats and atmospheric events, along with some villagers and fellow travelers in need of aid. They are serviceable, but I'd have gone for d20s or d100 tables, instead. I will also note, there are no actual DC thresholds given when it comes to hazards:

 

 A proper number would be appropriate here, a DC 12 at minimum. 

IX. NEW GEAR & MAGIC ITEMS 

For the most part, I have no complaints here. We get additional armours that all fall under the category of "heavy", as they all grant disadvantage on swimming and stealth and, with one exception, require 2 or more gear slots. I'm largely ambivalent on this. It adds some variety, but I see no great reason to choose a brigandine or banded armour over a suit of plate mail, even if you may add your DEX to the former. When you're the kinda dude that struts around in plate mail, you are more likely to focus on STR and CON with your character. It is not, however, mentioned which classes have access to which kind of armour, which is a bit of an oversight.  

The new weapons are nothing too crazy. Rapiers, Helbards, Slings. The Sling has some novelty by having different damage die based on ammunition used, d6 for lead, d4 for stone. 

We also receive the option of Holy and Unholy Water as unique throwing weapons vs. undead and unholy/angelic and holy beings, respectively. They can also be used to cleanse/corrupt shrines and bodies of water. Neat! 

On the magic item side, some have a bit of a weird formatting thing going on: each Bonus and Benefit is listed as an individual point:

 

This could have used some editing and bunching together, honestly. 

I very much enjoy the magic mushroom table. They're a fun little twist on potions and are much more appropriate to the mouse fantasy. Plus, if you eat more than two at the same time, you can overdose and die of toxic shock on a Natural 1 on a DC 15 CON check: 

 X. NEW MONSTERS 

We actually do receive some bespoke monster stats, rather than just conversion tables. And you know what? They are largely fine. You have stats for various sorts of rats, you have voles, you have stats for larger beasts such as badgers and stoats. 

 

 There is some fuddly OSRIC stuff that slipped through the cracks when giving cats, our dragons in Mice of Legends, a 20% chance to receive a number of random Tier 1-3 spells and such, instead of simply deciding on two to three specific, monster-unique spells to cast, but that's minor. I love the artwork used here. Look at this ferret.

He looks so bloody smug and conceited. Excellent. 

But this largely illustrates another issue: you didn't need to rely largely on substituting and reflavouring monsters from core SD to populate your bestiary. You could have made entirely new stat blocks. That was an option and that wasn't taken - at least, not for this setting guide or, rather, this primer, for that is what this booklet ultimately is, despite the title. 

XI. CONCLUSION

I am a bit frustrated with this one. 

As a standalone setting book, it misses the mark by a long shot. There is little if anything actual usable material here, only brief, surface glimpses. More often that not, things it claims to include are straight up missing within the book.
As an introduction to a potential adventure path, it provides a basic overview, but ultimately, doesn't really do much to grab my interest enough to actually invest in the first adventure module by itself. 
As a conversion tool to play Shadowdark RPG as mice adventurers against other forest critters, I don't think it does enough to warrant your need to buy it, considering that most of the actual, bespoke character options presented here either amount to "just reflavour the following monsters as these and these animals" or requires you to buy a wholly separate adventure module or pantheon supplement. 
The art is great and carries the intended vibe just fine, but its, all in all, lacking, and doesn't justify a price of 7 and a half bucks on its own. 

You could probably run mice-adventurers in SD using this as a conversion guide. But you might as well play Mausritter then, in that case. Or just play normal Shadowdark, and tell your players to imagine that they're all playing forest critters now. 
I don't know. I feel more disappointed than angry or annoyed. If this was a free-to-download preview or quickstart guide of the whole setting, I think I'd like it just fine and cautiously check out the rest Mice of Legend has to offer. But as it is, it reads and looks more like the actual preview pages to a much larger book I have yet to open that I still paid nearly 8 bucks for just to get a glimpse of. I'd need more to warrant the price.

Suggestions for Improvement

•   More Setting for your Setting Guide. If you want to leave the detailed sections of your world and its conflicts to the individual adventure modules, fine. But do not just put in a single table with your town names and some vague culture vibes, a table full of gods with nothing but names and one and a half factions. I expect any booklet that names itself a setting guide to provide at least half a page or one paragraph, at minimum, to detail its geographical regions, its unique locations and some of the NPCs and other factions that the PCs could meet and mingle with. Do not hide all of it behind dozens of separate products. 
• Other Adventure Hooks. You have a whole page dedicated to reminding a GM to implement "Side Quests" outside the main quest - i.e., your adventure path that you are selling separately. Kindly put some of those Side Quest ideas for a GM to to riff off of, specifically written for the Portal Lake area and tie them to the locations or factions. 

But I think most important would be that you are much more clear on what this book actually functions as and what it contains. 

I went into this expecting at least a general overview of the region, activities and potential conflicts surrounding Portal Lake, with just enough for me, as a GM, to run a game without having to rely on a whole separate set of adventure modules. 
Instead, I received a three page primer of moderately useful information, at best, with conversion tables and two pages of magic items. 
With footnotes, telling me the unique character options, setting factions and other things are not available in this book. 
That is not something you put out for 7 and a half bucks. 

 https://rpg-trader.com/products/4958/mice-of-legend-campaign-guide-shadowdark