My Skyshadow Isles campaign, after over five years, is finally winding down. The highest-level PC is level 17, they have saved the world from being ended via demonic locust swarm, and they're gearing up now to fight the Last Guardian, the only real remaining supernatural "boss-level" threat. The player kingdoms and domains are growing and they'll persist for as long as I'm alive at least, but the adventurers are looking for fresh pastures in the same world. That's going to be in the Next Campaign(tm), the Shattered Valley. It's in the same world, the world of Coldlight, but literally on the other side. My pitch for this is "more Greek themed overland West Marches", with the map loosely based on the Shenandoah Valley. I thought for a moment about just straight-up using one of the old Avalon Hill Civil War board games for it, but I instead went with hand-drawn again. Still, it's a big ole' hexmap with lots of semi-abandoned poleis and and wildlands, a huge tentpole kilodungeon (The Dawnlight Spire), a ruined chaotic half-nuked megacity, and several bespoke handmade dungeons of decent size (~100 rooms). Lots of domain potential, questing beasts, and of course unlockable new player races and classes if they don't screw the pooch (they will screw the pooch). That's not all needed, though, and I've also already seeded a LOT of adventure sites around for fun and profit. You really don't need to do a lot of work for a long-term campaign. 
  Currently seeded premade Adventure Sites:
Labyrinth of the Scarlett Minotaur?
Shrine of the Small God
Fountain of Bec
Vault of Kadish
Temple of Hypnos
Slug House
Tower in the Lake
Pit of the Red Wyrm
Arena Amilia
Calid Cryo-Caves
Stables of Zothay
Wailing Tower
Sausages of the Devil Swine
In the Name of the Principle?
Isles of the Dead (Sent to me but as of yet unpublished by Scott M.)
  As you can see, there's already about 50+ sessions of gameplay right there in the seeded dungeons, not even counting hexploration, random encounters, and my own added dungeons. Given I only run 5-6 sessions a month, this is a good year set already. Make your own list, by all means. Use stuff like Adventure Sites I or Adventure Sites II, or a NAP or Delightful Dungeons. These are all free, too. 
  If there's more interest in AARs I can start adding them here, but either way, it's an exciting season. We'll be kicking off the campaign with a gauntlet, that one will get published...

​An “expedition” by Richard Ruane, level-unspecified
Written for “OSR Fantasy Games”
  Oh hey, I recognize this art style. I remember the adventure that had it sucked. Christmas non-adventure more accurately? This thing isn’t promising to be much better, designed to be a vertical pamphlet product (so a single page, one-sided) without a map or credited playtesters but with an extra artist credit. Whew boy. There’s also a couple different bespoke fonts being used while the actual flow of information is more than a little confusing thanks to the desire to make something that folds. We are awash upon a veritable sea of red flags. In we go…
  Our story is reasonably standard, just your typical airship-owned-by-a-half-demon-half-god-queen-pirate-gets-smote-by-the-gods-into-the-high-mountainside-and-the-active-fire-elemental-engines-aboard-melt-the-glacier-sending-it-soon-hurtling-into-the-void. Workable, certainly, and a cromulent excuse for a time-sensitive adventure site when the players get involved. Unfortunately, all this very workable information is presented in a nonstandard manner that actively obstructs understanding and use. There’s treasure to gather while fighting ghost-zombies, but the random event table is pretty crummy and the treasure is nearly abstracted. PLUS THERE IS NO MAP.
  Okay. Center thyself, oh ye reviewer, for thy plight is thine own fault. What I liked was the basic setup, it’s dynamic and interesting. Some of the magic items, those are nice…a magic sword of ice that does a ton of extra damage to fire critters, demons, and undead but is hunted by winged sisters, that’s a good mixture of quest item plus useful item. There are PokeBalls of storm mephitis, good, and a heart that heals but curses, nice. Some of the treasures are Bryce-bait with good descriptions, but the gold amounts are pretty chintzy for actual old-school D&D. Still there’s potential there.
  …which, to discuss what can be improved most of all, is all wasted because YOU SHOULD PROVIDE A MAP. Now look, I know it’s a hard situation to map, “crashed 4-deck airship on top of glacier over a bottomless pit” isn’t a search that’s going to lead you to a handy Dyson Logos map to steal. And you can kind of imagine the situation yourself. Unfortunately, your imagined scene isn’t going to be mine, which matters a lot when you have multiple decks with an event that can cause a full-on zombie mass attack, plus a pitch-and-fall table, plus each deck having multiple rooms. I can sketch all of that myself, I guess, but then I’m doing all the work, and so you haven’t given me a helpful product, YOU HAVE GIVEN ME A HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT. BAD MODULE, NO COOKIE. Also there are tons of “XdY Loot Things (Zgp each)”, which once again is homework. This is more reasonable in the random encounter table but don’t do that in the keys. The first mate has 1d4 bound nude corpses and 1d6 erotic paintings? Miss me with that crap, bruh, give me a concrete set of numbers.
  Ergo, best use case here is to print it out, fold it neatly into the trifold pattern, and SHOVE IT BACK TO WRITER RICHARD RUANE TO FINISH THE THING. It’s okay as a story prompt, but there’s so much highly bespoke setting assumption riding along with the setup that it’s going to require work to adapt it to your own setting. So, once again, homework.
  Final Rating? */***** with a note that it genuinely could be a three-star product if it was finished by a writer that wanted to make a usable adventure, not an evocative object d’art/story prompt. 

​A dungeon by Matt Jackson, low-level
Written for White Box FMAG
  Hey, it’s Matt Jackson, cool. Of all the freebie-map-scriveners widely known online, Mr. Jackson draws by far the cutesiest maps, trending simple and direct. I didn’t realize the man also had released a PWYW adventure on itch.io, but it came up, so here I am looking at it. With nine pages for eight rooms, with generous margins, heavy font, and plenty of cute illustrations, Ardwick here is almost exactly what I’d expected visually. I appreciate the somewhat off-wall choice of “White Box FMAG” for the game system, but I’m sure its convertible. The whole thing is written conversationally, almost casually, with some excesses like skeletons as “skellies” likely to be a bridge too far for some readers. It’s very cute and written with a charming sincerity, though. 
  Our story here won’t win any awards for originality, but it works. Father Ardwyck (yes, his name is spelled differently from the title) is a nice village priest, falls in love (or at least, in lust) with a girl in his congregation, which is against the rules of this evidently Catholic-ish faith. She refuses him, he murders her, she curses him with her dying breath, he goes mad and raises the dead to protect her body…a tale as old as time. Apparently, the village gave up breaking into the church for a few decades but now the headsman is paying your murderous group of well-armed vagabonds to break in and “clear out the problem”. Okay, standard enough, but once you meander into the well-illustrated little linear chapel you’re not going to be minding going through the classic tropes of “fight undead”, “mess with traps”, and “figure out statues”. All standard D&D.
  I’ll dispense with what I liked about the art first: I liked the art. The composition of the “trio of enemies” setup means its probably AI, but at least the prompts were smart. Map at least looks really nice. The statues-to-monkey-with are well designed and good for several minutes of fun. Magic items are all creative if underpowered.
  …but what can be improved obviously first and foremost would be making those magic items less underpowered. And the statues more impactful. And the dangers in general more dangerous. All of that would be better. My only hesitation here is the on the other side, which is about undead defenses. Are undead difficult to turn in FMAG? Because you better hope the undead get turned at low levels here, because the vast majority of them are impossible to damage without magic or silver weapons. Whoops. This is low level, right? There’s a single silver knife here, I hope you’re okay with that being your only method of hurting the ghouls and the spellcaster. The map, while pretty, is also very linear without being very interesting, so that’s something that could be done better. Copyediting errors in titles and names here and there too. Pity.
  I reckon your best use case is to make it a haunted chapel to bump into in a village during your campaign. Magic items can also be raided, to limited effect.
  Final Rating? */***** with a desperate desire to make it one star higher, I really didn’t hate any part of this and it’s well-meaning as the day is long, there’s just not a lot of there, there. Alas. 

   A fortnight ago, I explored current Epic Fantasy in the form of Michael J. Sullivan’s popular Age of Myth. I enjoyed that book more than the review really showed, but in the end I found it both less epic and less fantastical than I’d want in epic fantasy. Why not instead try a book that’s been enthusiastically recommended to me? The hardback of A Cold and Mortal Spring was offered for borrowing by said friend but it was on sale for Kindle and I’m a weirdo who likes my e-reader, so I purchased it myself and dove right in.
  First off, a note on genre. As our extremely loud (and inaccurate) cover shows, this fantasy novel is in the ill-defined subgenre called “Flintlock Fantasy”, which means we have guns present. While that’s an immediate turn from what I think of as the “fantasy purist” tradition (Lord of the Rings on through the 70’s and 80’s Silver Age on down to Song of Ice and Fire), having guns mixed with your magic is a long tradition as well, something Jack Vance would approve of. Sure, Conan wouldn’t deal with a musket but Howard’s Solomon Kane suffered not a witch to live with a gun in his hand and buckle on his hat. This one here isn’t real-history-but-with-magic, this is full-up secondary world fiction, just know there will be ranks of musket-wielding soldiers here. And there will be soldiers, too, this is classed as Military Fantasy, which is shortened to MilF. I’d critique that abbreviation but I’m friends with the Fantasy Adventure Gaming crowd so…anyway, on to the book.
  Bottom line up front, this is a first-rate novel. Thoroughly entertaining, five stars, top-flight imaginative worldbuilding and action and intrigue, you won’t want to put it down. Spoilers will happen after this point, so if you’re adverse to them, stop now and go read this thing. I’ll wait for you.
  A Cold and Mortal Spring starts us off with a wonderful bang, with a young noble captain investigating a farming village overtaken by the Lotus, an addictive magical plant that farms the humans who eat it and turns them into obsessive gluttons. A zombie trope, with aspects of magical cursing and of course myths of real-world lotus, too, along with fears of plague. Our young captain Aethal (ÆÞal, I see you, Old English) is saved by his sentient flintlock rifle, Gun, and the loyalty of his troops. Wonderfully compelling start that feels very authentic to a 1700’s world with all the character dialogue and behavior. Grounding us like this makes for a much more epic and fantastical story than the ostensibly “epic fantasy” I reviewed before.
  Here though I must pause and render one of my two main critiques against this novel. There is no map given in the front page. This, my dear friends, is a sin for a fantasy novel. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien labored painfully as an amateur cartographer to give us Middle-earth, illustrated by hand, despite being no visual artist. In this era of free mapmaking software and ubiquitous scanners, you can give us a map. A picture is worth a thousand words but a map? One hundred thousand. Let this be an indicator of how much I enjoyed this book, it is good enough that I did not deduct a star for lack of map, which is normally automatic.
  I note this now because after the start we are thrust into the world of the Kingdom’s politics swiftly, and these are well-written politics. The kingdom occupies the last remaining livable continent on a world ravaged by Wishes from a mystical Well, granted once per human soul, with all the wonderment and strangeness that would result from that crucial bit of worldbuilding. The Well’s continent is a the Dark Continent, poisoned by centuries of wishes, and the old Empire’s continent is eaten wholly by the Lotus. Thus the kingdom here is the last civilized fortress of humanity, obsessively prepared over three centuries of exile for the reemergence of Lotus. I cannot speak highly enough of how well this is all built up, but of course people are people and nobody except for our protagonist is going to let a little looming apocalypse get in the way of political scrambling. A single honorable man in charge, with a few loyal retainers, set against corruption and petty feuds while mustering the resources of the last civilization against the end of all sentient life? Good.
  Here I must add my second critique, and while it isn’t fatal, if not controlled over the course of the series it may yet grow into a cancer. The church of the setting is controlled by a Cynical Corrupt Fanatic Pope who nihilistically believes that all life should end because it is tainted. This is a tired, tired, trope my friends. Other church leaders are shown to be kind and helpful, so not all is lost, but much hinges on the actual existence of this world’s God. There’s a danger of “evil religion as pap for the masses”, which if true in-world will undermine a lot of the mythic resonance being built up here. Tread with care.  
  We’re past the spoiler warning but I still won’t go further into describing the rest of the novel, there are twists and turns and swordfights and duels and secrets to uncover, it’s all very good. I will be reading further myself (the second book in the series has only recently come out), as this really does scratch the epic fantasy itch. Huggins is an impressive craftsman and it makes me want to check out his other series as well. It’s good to see that adventure in fantasy is not yet dead, and gives me hope that the genre may even recover from the doldrums of the late aughts and teens. 

A mission by Porter ''Cornylius'' Botterud, LL4
Written for Lancer
  Okay, Lancer, I think I have your measure by now. You’re going to be overwritten (twenty-five pages here for a one-shot), weirdly concerned with soap opera themes, and your battlemaps are going to suck. On the plus side your default format is clean, readable, and at least sanely organized. You’re going to be the very softest of Sci-fi on the Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness, and you’re going to have writers fond of referencing other third-party products in their insular little community. As a good norm, you’re going to credit playtesters, artist(s), and editor. Basically these things are Pathfinder in Space Days of Our Lives, with a single nod to themes and how they highlight relevant social issues of the day (this one’s day was 2023). Plot is an ironclad railroad. I get what’s going on.
  In this adventure we have a looooooooooot of words devoted to describing something that I’m pretty sure you would get as an identical output if you fed ChatGPT the entirety of TVTropes and then entered the prompt “Gravity mishap on isolated research asteroid opens portal to a Dark Dimension”.  Maybe the love story where one scientist is trying to recover his lost spouse is slightly new, but I’m pretty sure I’ve seen this episode a few times before. It’s a bog standard investigation plot interrupted thrice for arena-style mech combat. Onboard the space station. How high are these ceilings typically, anyway? Anyway, there’s a lot of drama resolution and mechanically-determined social rolls that wind up to a minor bonus potentially in the five-page, four-stage final boss fight. Which, please note, you are bound and determined to get to because no other outcome than the super-duper bossfight is allowed to occur.
  Okay, I’ll be cheap and say to start that what I liked was the format. It’s clear, uses color strategically without being overwhelming, and avoids the temptation to muck up its pages with unattractive scrapped-together art. Whitespace is no crime. I also liked the clear enthusiasm for the final boss fight, the author makes it a dynamic multi-stage set-piece with clear markers for each phase change and radically different attacks and defenses each time, telegraphed reasonably well. There’s also an admirable exotic weapon reward that makes sense based on the story. I like the setup for either one-shot or campaign integration, although I would never integrate a railroad into my own campaign.
  But oh, what can be improved. The first two fights are not just railroads without consequences, but their initial setups are extremely contrived because a certain number of mech fights are expected in a Lancer adventure. The amount of effort expended in conversations and interactions that are ultimately meaningless due to the tight railroading is dismaying, so I guess the improvement there is “let your players have an effect on the plot”. The maps are also abysmal, both in artistic (non)appeal and in tactical interest. If your game is mostly concerned with getting into mech fights, make the mech fights interesting.
  I reckon the best use case for this is to inflict it upon your players. They signed up to play Lancer, that means they want to be railroaded from meaningless fight to meaningless fight while enjoying a semi-interactive set of NPC drama cutscenes in between. This is perfect for that desire, no notes.
  Final Rating? */***** because while it’s a perfectly executed ideal, it’s a bad ideal that should not be sought. Shame on you. Just invest in model trains.

A one-page-dungeon by Marten ''Madzar'' Zarel level nill
Written for Copper Glog
  Have I spoken about Goblin Punch/Arnold K in this space before? There’s a little set of OSR bloggers from the wild early days of the movement, like Patrick Stuart and Skerples, who didn’t much prize playing games, but they loved writing about settings for games. I have my opinions about the values of their game products, but what these fellows were great at was making entertaining acid-trip quick-hit blog posts. Goblin Punch was this, but more, and the dude did seem to actually play games using his weird little hack called the Glog system. Superb writer, worth checking out. Sometimes he’d toss out even weirder systems though, like “copper glog” which is all about coinflips as chance resolution. Some poor fan took his thought experiment seriously and this thing is what results.
  You don’t need to work very hard to understand the plot of this one-pager. There’s this discarded giant boot, you see, that’s inhabited by goblins and holds an ogre deeper inside. The ogre has captured your princess. You are sent by a yellow exclamation point to go rescue said princess, enjoy your pointcrawl in the abstracted environment. The monsters to fight all have scribbly little illustrations.
  Won’t have to go too long here on what I liked, there’s a moderately charming bit where the ogre actually has stockpiled six princesses so far at his house, so you can leave with a princess swarm. Cute. Many monsters have little motive tags, like “sleepy and bored”, that give you direction for how to run them.
  It’s honestly difficult to figure out what can be improved once we get past the initial coinflip-RPG system being chosen, that crushing lack of complexity is felt when all challenges are just simple little fights or magical-tea-party storygame resolutions. The more imaginative bits, like goblin-herded giant fleas and a giant earwig, are harmed by the lack of systematic complexity. There are other problems that basically start requiring us to use multiple coins or coinflips to make bigger tables work, like the 4-entry random encounter table that just bites the bullet and makes a d4 using binary (00, 01, 10, 11). You’re kicking against the shackles here, and the shackles are pretty self-imposed. Art is yucky, goblin’s genitals aren’t needed thanks.
  The best use case here is as an educational product showing why you don’t take high-concept blog thought experiments seriously. I cannot conceive of even the bored theoretical shipwreck survivors with a single penny actually playing this for fun, the zinc in the penny is better used as an inefficient suicide capsule.
  Final Rating? */***** with an admiring nod if all this is a pointed rebuttal to the very notion of “Copper Glog”. Sadly, I don’t think it is…

​   We were talking about epic fantasy recently and I realized I’ve got a bit of a gap in reading “recent” epic fantasy outside of either indie things personally recommended to me or established authors I’ve enjoyed before like Correia (great), Feist (middle-brow but fun), Akers (criminally under-exposed) or Sanderson (fallen off, not interested anymore). I asked around a bit for recommendations for a good mainstream exemplar and Michael J Sullivan kept coming up. He’s extremely popular and I’ve certainly seen his covers in places but nothing about them screamed “buy me” and so I never checked him out.
   Well, now I’ve checked him out in Age of Myth, the first novel in a five-book series, published in 2016. If you want the bottom line up front…it’s good, 4 stars, well worth spending time on, would read the next book, etc. The detailed review that follows contains spoilers so if you want to avoid those and check it out yourself, you’ll probably enjoy the read.
   First off, a note about how these novels get published; Sullivan is working with a Big Five publisher for this series, but that’s not how he started and his model isn’t traditional at all. He writes all of a particular series before publishing the first book, so trilogies at first, and a five-book series this time around. This model requires patience, a steady income not reliant on immediate book sales, and a strong editorial/beta reading team to ensure heavy feedback early. The benefits of the model, to quote the author’s own forward, are that the story is sure to be resolved, and that fans don’t have to worry about a random bus leaving them George RR Martin’d. Worth it if you can do it, imo. This also feeds into Sullivan’s funding model, which seems to be starting with Kickstarters for his books, raising both funds for publication and publicity for his funds. Smart and independent model. Also, probably not viable for any author without a significant publicity base beforehand, but don’t begrudge the man his success.
  Age of Myth is set thousands of years before Sullivan’s first trilogies, in a primitive time where elves rule the known world, worshipped by inconsistently primitive Stone Age humans and shunned by dwarves who live to the south. The series’ ostensible main story is about humans killing a single elf, elves retaliating with genocide, and humans along with elf defectors defeating the Standard Issue Debauched High Elf Caste. All a reasonably standard setup for fantasy, but the worldbuilding is conveyed in a confident, clear voice and the initial setup with the human Not!Scotsman semi-accidentally killing the elf is great. Then the novel pivots and Sullivan tells the story he’d really interested in telling.
  All that previous stuff? Background. In the foreground is an extremely close story about a local village, starring the widow of the village’s old chief. The novel takes its time and looks through the eyes of Persphone at the characters of the village (okay, clan town really). She loves them, and that warm love is remarkably well conveyed in the text, even as she has to struggle with the dangers of the whole elfs-trying-to-genocide-humanity situation (don’t worry, the elves are casual about it) and a man-eating demon bear in the woods. It’s an intimate character story with a lot of local politics, and at least for most of the novel it is quite good. Its only towards the end that things become a little uneven.
  I do have a couple issues with dialogue and especially naming over the course of the novel. The first line uttered in our epic fantasy yarn? “Hey”. Followed by “okay”, “yeah”, and a whole host of other casual and contemporary word choices. Names are also wildly uneven. The village of Persphone also has a Sarah, an Iver, a Reglan, a Maeve, a Brin, a Gifford, and a Suri, just for an example. Not only are these real names from a variety of different backgrounds, but they also have a weird set of sounds to be mixed together. Both of these issues are surface-level nits but they point to a certain pedestrian lens that fights the epic ambitions of scale. Which is a pity, because I like the windowpane prose in general.
   Thankfully, magic is spared this modernism. Magic (called “The Art” by elves) is magical and often undefined, nobody casts Fireball or discusses Investiture. While talk of a demon in the villain bear is a red herring, ancient trees talk to mystics and auguries are performed by burning bones, yielding riddles that have to be followed to thwart disaster, along of course with heroic actions of daring and courage. This is how fantasy should be, and I’d forgive a thousand “okays” for that strong fundamental respect of the Old Rules.
  Sadly, the stumble at the end of the novel is about the people, not the trappings. In the end the biggest issue is that the Goodies and the Baddies shake out into All Good and All Bad, with the suspicious new chief falling to outright villainy while the old hag gets absolved of all wrongdoing by being a wronged victim in turn. Simple good-and-bad isn’t the worst sin, but the morality is extremely recent; powerful older men bad, all women but one good, young men good if crippled, escaped slave, sexy elf, or infatuated with old woman. All the expected dynamics of 1999, without granting any of the traditional power figures paths to redemption. Everyone good is well-written, with moral qualities actually extant and not just assumed due to identities. Their victories are satisfying. It’s just less mythic and more contemporary than epic fantasy that resonates with a timeless quality really should have.
   Fun read though.