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:
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:
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:
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.
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.
