REVIEW: FALL OF THE FREE RIM

 

 

 

PREAMBLE: THE NEW FRONTIER

Drifting Gunslingers and ruthless bounty hunters, lawless frontier towns and put-upon sheriffs, cattle drives and bank robberies, cotton plantations and railway magnates, ranches and wanted posters, and an indigenous people fighting a losing battle against an encroaching, foreign civilisation come to bring their idea of law and order to a land yet unclaimed.

If you have read or watched any Western, you've likely stumbled upon a combination of or all of the above described tropes, characters and scenarios in one degree or another. The Western as a genre had an immense impact on media that cannot be understated – a good amount of modern literary archetypes, conventions and settings that we recognise as standard today find its codification here, frequently rubbing shoulders and overlapping also with Japanese Samurai movies - Seven Samurai inspiring The Magnificent Seven, or the western novel Red Harvest inspiring the later Yojimbo which in turn gave rise to A Fistful of Dollars.

As a consequence, even by the off-chance you have never, never watched a Western before, by sheer cultural osmosis, adoption of tropes, pastiches and countless imitations and descendants over the decades, you'll be able to recognise the archetypes.

It is an inherently romantic genre – as in, it romanticises a specific time period of history, conjures painterly landscape under the red dusk, instils wonder and wanderlust, a very specific kind of desirable fantasy, that of a lone wanderer armed only with his wits, a a gun and his own sense of right and wrong in the endless wilderness, where lawful civilisation is but a distant suggestion, and reality often bloody, but earnest and rewarding, if you have but the vim and vigour to conquer it.

That is not to say that people that made Westerns were blind to its reality. There is a lot of blood in the business of the expanding frontier, systemic racism and oppression, mass displacement of indigenous populations, inter-class conflicts, and the list goes on.

These days, the Western is seldom seen in its classic image of simple good vs. bad, but more of a revisionist style: gritty, full of hypocrisies and constantly wrestling with the tropes of old and the historic realities that have now become, if not common knowledge, at least much more accessible. But the spirit survives, tenaciously, and it has led to many a cross-cultivation of genres. The Weird Western for example, spices up its frontier with the subtly or blatantly supernatural, the Space Western has its desperados race across the stars and alien planets, Cattle Punk slaps a steam engine on everything, not just the locomotive, and so on.

So, this time around, we're doing something a little different. Fall of the Free Rim is a yet to be released point-crawl setting, designed for Shadowdark RPG and its sci-fi hack DarkSpace by Dan Kirshtein, also known as Lawful Cherry that currently has a kickstarter going for its first print-run.

I was given a pre-release copy by the author for review, and have to adjust the usual review a little for that – for you see, the pre-release copy does not feature any of the artwork, maps or final layout which I would usually also discuss as part of my review.

Some of the artwork that is going to be in the finished product has been showcased on the kickstarter page, however, and it is pretty gorgeous. We're getting colour on this one, too. Cult of ChromaDark represents - but you know how I roll at this point.

Art is one thing. What about the actual, written content?

Let's dig in.

PART I: OVERVIEW & MECHANICS

Fall of the Free Rim begins with a brief history of the moon Oster, described as the only inhabitable planet in the Free Rim. Its an okay place to live. Its surface is a blasted heath of dust and crags, while a twisted jungle grows in the caverns below, born of a mould-infested meteor1 that impacted the planet long ago and held within itself an ancient, semi-sentient alien super weapon.

From this subterranean jungle crawled forth an insectoid species that would speed-run evolution over the next few thousand years into the reptilian Kinkari, who'd become the chosen of the dormant super weapon and be granted extraordinary powers, chalked up to the planet itself looking out for the kinkari.

Meanwhile, on planet Earth, there's a trillionaire that ain't doing so hot2– an alien disease is afflicting one Santiago Alada, who in his mad fear of death, counselled a seer who prophetised him his rescue lying in a strange crystal found somewhere on the rim of space.

Naturally, Alada Jr., scrambles up an army of desperate humans with promises of a better life and freedom and off they go, on a merry mayflower expedition to colonise, plumb and strip-mine the planet of Oster in search for a cure for our poor trillionaire and naturally, come into conflict with the native Kinkari in the process3.

Cue the chaos. 

 To add to the Space Western feel, Fall of the Free Rim comes with a Quickdraw mechanic to simulate duels and shoot-outs: two characters in a quickdraw duel roll to hit with advantage at the same time. Any hit is treated as a critical hit, a critical hit is a double critical and two 20s on both d20s? Death. The winner of the duel is whoever is either struck dead or dealt the most damage.In case both duelists survive, initiative is resolved as normal, with both duelists placed at the top of the round. 

Its a fun little gimmick, and  I appreciate it being here. How exactly it meshes with the various DarkSpace classes, I am  uncertain, for core SD, the Fighter and Rogue are going to excel here.

We are also given a table full of rumours for each faction to seed some hooks and motivations for the PCs. And speaking of factions...

PART II: FACTIONS AND KEY NPCS

Alada Corp, the Kinkari and the town of Chokehaven form the core faction triangle on Oster, hating one another with impunity and promising no ending in which one will not wipe out the other.

Each faction has its end goal for Oster and has their progress for it tied to rough tiers of play for the player characters – at Level 1, every faction is currently in the middle of setting-up, allowing the PCs to interact with and make a first impression for themselves. Around Level 3, the faction will attempt to make a major step forward, at Level 5, they will make a play for their endgame, all of which lead into the Undergarden, and involve some unspeakable horrors to be unleashed upon Oster and, potentially, the galaxy beyond.

There is, technically, a fourth faction in the form of the Ferals, which are tied to the big secret kept by the Kinkari, but they have no goal in of themselves.

Alada Corp is your standard, xenophobic, corrupt sci-fi mega-corp. They are here to colonise and plumb Oster of all its resources, are responsible for the sudden mass migration of humans to Oster, sparked the conflict with the Kinkari and are, overall, about as shagnasty as you can imagine it to be. There are some individuals who work for them that have second-guesses about if they are doing the right thing, but are in too deep to do anything about it, but overall, they are an expansionist, human-centric monolith. So, eat the rich.

The Kinkari are, naturally, a little miffed about the space-colonialism and are the other extreme monolith of a faction due to their hive-mind, and are unanimous in their desire to see Alada Corp wiped off the face of Oster, and Chokehaven, by extension, likely as well, since their previous chief, who had been building some rapport with Chokehaven, was murdered. One of their shamans is responsible for the existence of the Feral, having kidnapped humans from Chokehaven and surroundings to brainwash them into mad cannon-fodder to harass the town with.

Lastly, Chokehaven forms the middle-ground between the two, being not in direct and open conflict with either faction, but facing their own internal problems in the shape of a burgeoning dwarven gang propping itself up as a new miner's guild.

Each faction is given additional life through a variety of NPCs that are deeply intertwined with its ongoing goals: aforementioned trillionair and his charismatic, but deeply ambitious and cruel son for the Corporation, the shamans and chieftains of the Kinkari, each with their own grudges, strife and manipulations, and the people of Chokehaven, from its put-upon, torn-between extremes Marshall, the criminal and vengeful Cole, and the strange , poncho-clad L1-LE Units that aim to protect Chokehaven from ferals.

They all have their own believes, plans and secrets, that overlap or steer their respective faction goals. There are not many surprises with them – the Marshal, the trillionaire, the haunted engineer, the kinkari, they all fall into some form of sci-fi or western archetype that you have seen before, and shouldn't be too difficult to run as a GM.

PART III: OSTER

Fall of the Free Rim's point-crawl consists of ten locations, central of which being the town of Chokehaven, which will likely serve as any party's main hub while adventuring within the free Frontier.

The town has a few small adventure opportunities attached to its various shops and buildings: a road-side hotel has its staff infested with alien parasites, and a bounty hunter ominously greets the party in the saloon. It has the standard accoutrements of any frontier town and comes with a cast of colourful NPCs that breathe some life into it.

Outside Chokehaven, the plantation run by clones is harassed by giant bats, kinkari monuments framed by giant skulls dot the horizon and the reinked stables are struggling with some pests. Most of the adventuring to be done is closely tied to the factions – and some of the locations prevented here provide, at best, some lore and foreshadowing to future developments found in the Undergarden, but are not in of itself adventure hooks.

It is jarring that there are three out of ten total locations – one of which the players will inevitably clear at the very beginning of any campaign – which will end up as little more than set-dressing. The Undergarden itself, as presented in the document suffers similarly from being pretty underdeveloped, with only a single paragraph of actual, physical description given. The same goes for nearly every other location, too, but at least those had some bullet points with interact-able events and the like. 

For the Undergardens, we know the reasons why exactly each faction wants to go down there, but all we really get about its dangers or potential threats are that its caverns are covered in man-tall grass and moss, and that there are man-eating insects stalking it. The word “hellscape” tries to do a lot of heavy lifting for the GM that has to improvise a dungeon out of it – and as the Undergardens are essentially inaccessible by the party and most other factions until they hit LV 5, that leaves you with only 8 real locations to explore. The faction end-scenarios attached read more like the bullet-point script of a video game cutscene for the most part – something to be described to the players, with an end-combat scenario to play out:

For the Adala Corp, Santiago links up with the alien superweapon and is transformed into a David Bowie – I mean, into a Star Man and threatens to devour the whole planet.

The Kinkari find their lost shaman Juntha down here, snap him out of his funk and rid the overworld of Adala Corp with an army of resurrected Hillbeasts.

Cole and his miners detonate a bunch of explosives in their search for the “true” underground, resulting in the man-eating insects swarming the surface and forcing the PCs to fight and run for their lives.

Cole Gizzard and his mining guild also lack any sort of physical presence on the map or in Chokehaven itself. Despite him being the lead antagonist to the Chokehaven faction, his “guild” does not as much as have a base keyed out on the map or in town itself, with only some faction rumours pointing the PCs to him having a house somewhere in town.

The random encounter tables, one for each major faction region, luckily alleviate some of this emptiness, and they are all fairly dynamic and themed according to the faction that rules a region:

The Wastes are filled with carrion bugs threatening lone wanderers, groups of Kinkari making their way toward one of their monolith posts, hunters wrestling with giant centipedes and a sneering reptilian attempting to start a duel with one of the PCs.

This particular random encounter table also features a potential instant PC loss in the shape of a band of Kinkari attempting to catch the hindmost PC and subject him to the Clush'thaw, their brainwashing method of choice, and turn them into a feral. I am split on this one – I don't mind the danger it poses, but I do mind that the rest of the party does not get the chance, RAW, to intervene in the attempted kidnapping. I also mind the non-standard DCs of 13 and 14 being used here.

Chokehaven, like any frontier town, is filled with scenes straight out of a western, given a sci-fi spin: a corpsman spits on a PCs boots to challenge them to a duel, deputies call for help as ferals raid the town, a pair of robots brawl their way out of a house and into the street.

Finally, the Reach is filled with the influence of the Alada Corps, harassing the PCs for a bribe, crucified Kinkari, escaped prisoners and a corporate convoy transporting captured citizens of Chokehaven.

Each table also comes with a Wandering Entity and Bounty Hunter entry, the former of which are utterly alien, hostile wildlife throwing a wrench into whatever scene currently undergoing. 

But it does only that. Alleviate, not fix a rather small, undercooked set of locations. 

PART IV: RUIN AT RENN'S TAKE

This adventure is explicitly written to be the players' introduction to Fall of the Free Rim, focusing on the destroyed fort of Renn's Take. The PCs are contracted immediately post pod-drop on Oster's surface by Alada Corp. The objective: retrieve the AI Prodigal from its core frame and deliver it, intact, to their base at Iron's Reach for 200 credits.

I, unfortunately, do not have a map for this adventure. So I'll be left to do some guesswork and abstraction.

One of the core mechanics of this adventure is the Sound the Alarm feature: the security system is still actively in place and the open area of the base under constant surveillance by an automata atop one of the towers. Every round the party is in the outdoors, they must succeed on a party-wide DEX check, with a total average of 12 in order to not be spotted. On a failure, the alarm is sounded, an automata is dispatched to their last known location, the random encounter chance increases and some of the individual dungeon areas will be affected by the blaring siren, with its monsters shuffling about to lay in ambush for the unsuspecting party.

The dungeon is otherwise a scavenger hunt – the PCs are encouraged to stick to the shadows and cautiously make their way through the individual areas, discover clues as to the location of Prodigal, dodge roach-like alien parasites, patrolling automatons and deal with other scavengers attempting to make off with the treasures before them.

Some areas require keycards to open, found in Sci-Fi tradition on the corpses of former Corporation staff, another time, you can identify the password to a computer terminal being scrawled as graffiti on a wall. I like it, it encourages your PCs to explore the environment.

There is some wonky things, however. One of the random encounters, for example, asks for what I can only describe as a “revulsion check” in the form of a DC 12 CON, as maggots shift across the ground. On a failure... your character is forced to move back 10 ft. Why? There are no such checks for any other monster aor even location across the entire book, not even with the man-eating giant insects mentioned in the Undergarden. Nor are there any of such in SD or its Space-Hack in general. Its a weird thing to consider your PCs able to deal with alien monstrosities of any kind, but a few wiggling maggots are somehow able to force them into a momentary, minimal retreat.

A potential ally can be found in the albino kinkari Wikker, who had been kept imprisoned here by the Corporation, while Prodigal itself, trapped within its own frame, warns the PCs before attacking them. Disabling it with a successful INT check will not only secure Prodigal, but also turn off the alarm and active security throughout the base.

The players may then decide what to do with their haul – they can bring it back to Adala Corp for a full reward and 1 XP, or sell Prodigal for scrap metal in Chokehaven for half the credits and 1 XP. If Wikker is with them, they may also choose to escort him instead to the Kinkari home in the Waste for 2 XP.

There's not a lot else to be said about the adventure, honestly. Most of the areas are quickly described, with some only holding a single automaton, damaged and barely a threat. There's never an empty room, as such, but unless the PCs have some really, really bad dice rolls, there's not much that's going to be a threat here.

PART V: CONCLUSION

I don't dislike Fall of the Free Rim, but I'd hesitate to shower it with praise. With only ten locations to the setting, you've got to make certain to use each location to its fullest potential, especially if you wish to make them span a campaign from level 1 to 5. Some of them receive more focus than others, with Chokehaven and Iron's Reach being fleshed out the most, while some, such as Taparini's Stable basically become one-and-done locations after handling whatever quests are attached to them, with not much incentive to visit again.

It has potential, I like Chokehaven as a location a lot, and it is where a lot of the focus for the setting went in, and the NPCs provided are grounded in Western archetypes, but given a neat little spin that will ensure ot make them memorable – I just wish there a couple more minor locations in and around it that provided some more adventure opportunities, or that some of the lore-only locations were given some conflict for PCs to brave before getting access to the information there. As it stands currently, Fall of the Free Rim feels strangely empty, even beyond it taking place in a dust bowl moon valley. Though it currently has about the length of the average Cursed Scroll zine, it feels like it has, at best, a third of its content.

Some more time in the kitchen would have been necessary to cook up this one.

The author has some stretch goals promised on their kickstarter that promise additional adventures and a mapped out and crawl-able Undergarden. They may just add what I feel the book is lacking yet – but I leave the decision to back it up to you.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lawfulcherry/fall-of-the-free-rim-a-space-western-setting-for-darkspace

1 Starring David Duchovny, Orlando Jones, Julianne Moore and Seann William Scott and a cameo by Dan Aykroyd

2 Which is how you know its fiction.

3 Which is how you know its historic.

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.