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Grim Hollow Campaign Guide - 3rd Party Review
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<blockquote data-quote="Sparky McDibben" data-source="post: 9132206" data-attributes="member: 7041430"><p>Alright friends and neighbors, Sparky comin' at you again with another blisteringly spice take!!! <em>Get your blood pressure checked annually if you're over 30</em>. That advice about saved my life last week, so I wanted to pay it forward. </p><p></p><p>Alright, heavy stuff's out of the way, so let's dig into the advanced backgrounds! Chapter Six of the campaign guide is a way to have your background level up with you. I am not a huge fan of scaling backgrounds, and I am less so a fan of the fiddly way they went about it. Basically, you have a couple of background abilities, and you can add a Profession Die to those rolls (this die scales upward as you advance your background, capping out at a d10). The way they scaled it makes the Profession Die roughly analogous to your proficiency bonus (average die values approximate the proficiency bonus). I would have really preferred just giving them expertise in one or both of their background skills, personally, as that's easier to track on the character sheet. You can also gain Talents that let you add your Profession Die to other rolls in niche situations (which are also difficult to remember and harder to note on the character sheet). </p><p></p><p>The actual advancement idea isn't bad, but to my mind, is properly the place of either a party stronghold or an aligned faction. In fact, having backgrounds for the actual factions would probably have been a better implementation (something similar to Ravnica's approach, albeit with a toned-down empowerment). Tying it into Renown would have also been a good idea, but none of these are really broached, so what you're left with is a part of your character that represents their past having continual, fiddly, and hard-to-remember impacts on the character's present. </p><p></p><p>I personally hate this and no thanks. </p><p></p><p>Alright, now we move onto the Geography of Etharis. This is a breakdown by region of the major areas of the continent. Before I get into it, though, check out this gorgeous two-page spread:</p><p style="text-align: center"><img src="https://i.imgur.com/W1xL7Gv.png" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" /></p> <p style="text-align: center"><img src="https://i.imgur.com/2y9TSSC.png" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" /></p> <p style="text-align: center"><em>Sir, this is a Wendy's....</em></p><p></p><p>The art here goes a long way, in my mind to making the lore usable. It's evocative, thematic, and consistent with imagery and style. Well done on the art direction.</p><p></p><p>Alright, as for the actual lore, we get several main regions:</p><p></p><ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"><p style="text-align: left">The Burach Empire - This is basically the Empire from <em>Warhammer Fantasy</em>; humanocentric, crumbling under constant assaults, and fallen on hard times. They used to have a super-awesome divinely-fueled Emperor, and now they've got a 12-year-old kid. They need some help. (They're the knights-and-cannons bunch in the art above)</p> </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"><p style="text-align: left">The Ostoyan Empire - Originally breakaway remnants of the Burach Empire, these guys are now basically Ravenloft. They're run by vampires, and hordes of the undead are battling to besiege the Burachs. Not great. (They're the vamp-daddies in the art above)</p> </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"><p style="text-align: left">Charneault Kingdom - Magical elf kingdom meets fantasy France.</p> </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"><p style="text-align: left">The Valikan Clans - Fantasy vikings; regional threats include magical forest fires and crazy druids who worship the World Serpent</p> </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"><p style="text-align: left">The Castinellan Provinces - Fantasy post-Reconquista Spain. Everybody here loves wine and warfare. Includes the fantasy Inquisition--</p> </li> </ul> <p style="text-align: center"><img src="https://media0.giphy.com/media/CLrEXbY34xfPi/200.gif" alt="spanish time GIF" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" /></p> <p style="text-align: center"><em>Not quite</em></p> <p style="text-align: center"></p> <p style="text-align: center"><img src="https://media1.giphy.com/media/OrinMajURuDgKFD8UC/200.gif" alt="Wot Wheel Of Time GIF by Amazon Prime Video" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" /></p> <p style="text-align: center"><a href="https://wot.fandom.com/wiki/Children_of_the_Light" target="_blank"><em>There we go</em></a></p> <ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"><p style="text-align: left">City of Morencia - Fantasy Venice. Doesn't really have a good built-in regional conflict.</p> </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"><p style="text-align: left">City of Liesech - Fantasy no-friggin'-clue. City run by a bunch of secret vampires, waging war with a sickness-spreading aberration in the harbour. Lots of doctors, no cures.</p> </li> </ul><p>I'm not going to go into the lore as a deep dive. There's some decent bits in there, but because this review is already too in-depth, and this chapter is 72 pages long. Instead I'm going to give y'all my high level thoughts on it.</p><p></p><p>My main problem with these constructions is that they omit a lot of the actually interesting stuff about the places they're based on. For example, in real-world Spain, there were tons of complicated internal factors that gave rise to the real-life Inquisition, and the personalities involved are <em>fascinating</em>. Torquemada still lived in a monk's cell even as he ordered men and women burnt alive. These are big, complex stories that have way too much humanity to them to be easily boiled down to "Inquisitors bad because an angel told them so." Also, how you gonna have fantasy Spain with no bullfights? No Basques? No Moorish artefacts like at Granada? It takes a beautiful and tragic tapestry of <em>vastly interesting stories</em> and flattens it to a one-dimensional trope. </p><p></p><p>Ew. It feels like if you look hard enough you can see where the serial numbers still show. </p><p></p><p>However....</p><p></p><p>They're trying to give you a bunch of places to play in, where you can fill in the blanks. This is, after all, largely a similar approach to what Kobold Press does. I think KP does it better, mind you, but it's the same process. So I can cut them <strong>a little</strong> slack on paint-by-numbers fantasy Europe because they're trying to create a grand scope. Besides, there are some noteworthy pieces in the lore here. The Charneault kingdom has an interesting fusion of elven and Arthurian tropes, some fun toyetic elements like creepy supernatural mists, and evocative local villains in the Dark Elves (not drow - these guys are more like a subfaction of elves). Liesech is caught between two horrible sets of monsters deploying some of the worst weapons imaginable against each other. The dead city below Ostoya is interesting and I want to know what's down there.</p><p></p><p>However....</p><p></p><p>They largely don't do a good job communicating "HERE IS THE ADVENTURE" to the DM. This is largely because they're talking out both sides of their mouths. They want players to pick up this book (more sales, so here's where the transformations are), and DMs (<em>more </em>more sales, so here's where the lore is). But because of that, they have to elide or obfuscate the adventure material. See here:</p><p></p><p style="text-align: center"><img src="https://i.imgur.com/lV4KXkg.png" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" /></p> <p style="text-align: center"></p><p>That's trying to tell the DM "Hey, those creepy plague doctors? They're working for the weird aberration that started the plague, bro." But they can't come out and say that because spoilers. I <em>hate</em> this crap. I am buying this book for usable adventure hooks, <em>not guesswork.</em> I do enough of that when I figure out my monthly budget. Either make the book DM-centric, or firewall one section away from the players. Slap a big ol' spoiler warning over that nonsense, so I can quickly reference the material I need to prep an adventure. Oy veh!</p><p></p><p>And that would be my last problem with this lore. </p><p></p><p>However.....</p><p></p><p>OK, the conflicts. We need to talk about these, because it ties into the flattening of actual history I mentioned earlier. There's one, maybe two per area; Morencia and Castinellan don't really have any. Moreover, they feel...flat? Like, the Valikan Clans have some internal conflicts because some of them are working for these crazy human-sacrificing druids, causing them to go raiding constantly. But Vikings went a-viking because they needed stuff to live on. They didn't do it on a lark, or to be cool, and that seems to be the general vibe of these guys. Some of them are also into slavery, both as an economic incentive and because they need someone to give to the crazy druids. And that doesn't give me much to work with except, "Vikings show up and go RAWR!" That works once or twice, but after that? Gets old fast. There's no depth to the conflict, because there's no depth to the cultures, either. There's just not much to work with here. </p><p></p><p>Alright, that's enough kvetching from me. I give the lore an overall 5/10 - it's better than nothing, and it's a decent-ish base to start from. But I was hoping to be impressed here, and this section didn't do that.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Sparky McDibben, post: 9132206, member: 7041430"] Alright friends and neighbors, Sparky comin' at you again with another blisteringly spice take!!! [I]Get your blood pressure checked annually if you're over 30[/I]. That advice about saved my life last week, so I wanted to pay it forward. Alright, heavy stuff's out of the way, so let's dig into the advanced backgrounds! Chapter Six of the campaign guide is a way to have your background level up with you. I am not a huge fan of scaling backgrounds, and I am less so a fan of the fiddly way they went about it. Basically, you have a couple of background abilities, and you can add a Profession Die to those rolls (this die scales upward as you advance your background, capping out at a d10). The way they scaled it makes the Profession Die roughly analogous to your proficiency bonus (average die values approximate the proficiency bonus). I would have really preferred just giving them expertise in one or both of their background skills, personally, as that's easier to track on the character sheet. You can also gain Talents that let you add your Profession Die to other rolls in niche situations (which are also difficult to remember and harder to note on the character sheet). The actual advancement idea isn't bad, but to my mind, is properly the place of either a party stronghold or an aligned faction. In fact, having backgrounds for the actual factions would probably have been a better implementation (something similar to Ravnica's approach, albeit with a toned-down empowerment). Tying it into Renown would have also been a good idea, but none of these are really broached, so what you're left with is a part of your character that represents their past having continual, fiddly, and hard-to-remember impacts on the character's present. I personally hate this and no thanks. Alright, now we move onto the Geography of Etharis. This is a breakdown by region of the major areas of the continent. Before I get into it, though, check out this gorgeous two-page spread: [CENTER][IMG]https://i.imgur.com/W1xL7Gv.png[/IMG] [IMG]https://i.imgur.com/2y9TSSC.png[/IMG] [I]Sir, this is a Wendy's....[/I][/CENTER] The art here goes a long way, in my mind to making the lore usable. It's evocative, thematic, and consistent with imagery and style. Well done on the art direction. Alright, as for the actual lore, we get several main regions: [LIST] [*][LEFT]The Burach Empire - This is basically the Empire from [I]Warhammer Fantasy[/I]; humanocentric, crumbling under constant assaults, and fallen on hard times. They used to have a super-awesome divinely-fueled Emperor, and now they've got a 12-year-old kid. They need some help. (They're the knights-and-cannons bunch in the art above)[/LEFT] [*][LEFT]The Ostoyan Empire - Originally breakaway remnants of the Burach Empire, these guys are now basically Ravenloft. They're run by vampires, and hordes of the undead are battling to besiege the Burachs. Not great. (They're the vamp-daddies in the art above)[/LEFT] [*][LEFT]Charneault Kingdom - Magical elf kingdom meets fantasy France.[/LEFT] [*][LEFT]The Valikan Clans - Fantasy vikings; regional threats include magical forest fires and crazy druids who worship the World Serpent[/LEFT] [*][LEFT]The Castinellan Provinces - Fantasy post-Reconquista Spain. Everybody here loves wine and warfare. Includes the fantasy Inquisition--[/LEFT] [/LIST] [CENTER][IMG alt="spanish time GIF"]https://media0.giphy.com/media/CLrEXbY34xfPi/200.gif[/IMG] [I]Not quite[/I] [IMG alt="Wot Wheel Of Time GIF by Amazon Prime Video"]https://media1.giphy.com/media/OrinMajURuDgKFD8UC/200.gif[/IMG] [URL='https://wot.fandom.com/wiki/Children_of_the_Light'][I]There we go[/I][/URL][/CENTER] [LIST] [*][LEFT]City of Morencia - Fantasy Venice. Doesn't really have a good built-in regional conflict.[/LEFT] [*][LEFT]City of Liesech - Fantasy no-friggin'-clue. City run by a bunch of secret vampires, waging war with a sickness-spreading aberration in the harbour. Lots of doctors, no cures.[/LEFT] [/LIST] I'm not going to go into the lore as a deep dive. There's some decent bits in there, but because this review is already too in-depth, and this chapter is 72 pages long. Instead I'm going to give y'all my high level thoughts on it. My main problem with these constructions is that they omit a lot of the actually interesting stuff about the places they're based on. For example, in real-world Spain, there were tons of complicated internal factors that gave rise to the real-life Inquisition, and the personalities involved are [I]fascinating[/I]. Torquemada still lived in a monk's cell even as he ordered men and women burnt alive. These are big, complex stories that have way too much humanity to them to be easily boiled down to "Inquisitors bad because an angel told them so." Also, how you gonna have fantasy Spain with no bullfights? No Basques? No Moorish artefacts like at Granada? It takes a beautiful and tragic tapestry of [I]vastly interesting stories[/I] and flattens it to a one-dimensional trope. Ew. It feels like if you look hard enough you can see where the serial numbers still show. However.... They're trying to give you a bunch of places to play in, where you can fill in the blanks. This is, after all, largely a similar approach to what Kobold Press does. I think KP does it better, mind you, but it's the same process. So I can cut them [B]a little[/B] slack on paint-by-numbers fantasy Europe because they're trying to create a grand scope. Besides, there are some noteworthy pieces in the lore here. The Charneault kingdom has an interesting fusion of elven and Arthurian tropes, some fun toyetic elements like creepy supernatural mists, and evocative local villains in the Dark Elves (not drow - these guys are more like a subfaction of elves). Liesech is caught between two horrible sets of monsters deploying some of the worst weapons imaginable against each other. The dead city below Ostoya is interesting and I want to know what's down there. However.... They largely don't do a good job communicating "HERE IS THE ADVENTURE" to the DM. This is largely because they're talking out both sides of their mouths. They want players to pick up this book (more sales, so here's where the transformations are), and DMs ([I]more [/I]more sales, so here's where the lore is). But because of that, they have to elide or obfuscate the adventure material. See here: [CENTER][IMG]https://i.imgur.com/lV4KXkg.png[/IMG] [/CENTER] That's trying to tell the DM "Hey, those creepy plague doctors? They're working for the weird aberration that started the plague, bro." But they can't come out and say that because spoilers. I [I]hate[/I] this crap. I am buying this book for usable adventure hooks, [I]not guesswork.[/I] I do enough of that when I figure out my monthly budget. Either make the book DM-centric, or firewall one section away from the players. Slap a big ol' spoiler warning over that nonsense, so I can quickly reference the material I need to prep an adventure. Oy veh! And that would be my last problem with this lore. However..... OK, the conflicts. We need to talk about these, because it ties into the flattening of actual history I mentioned earlier. There's one, maybe two per area; Morencia and Castinellan don't really have any. Moreover, they feel...flat? Like, the Valikan Clans have some internal conflicts because some of them are working for these crazy human-sacrificing druids, causing them to go raiding constantly. But Vikings went a-viking because they needed stuff to live on. They didn't do it on a lark, or to be cool, and that seems to be the general vibe of these guys. Some of them are also into slavery, both as an economic incentive and because they need someone to give to the crazy druids. And that doesn't give me much to work with except, "Vikings show up and go RAWR!" That works once or twice, but after that? Gets old fast. There's no depth to the conflict, because there's no depth to the cultures, either. There's just not much to work with here. Alright, that's enough kvetching from me. I give the lore an overall 5/10 - it's better than nothing, and it's a decent-ish base to start from. But I was hoping to be impressed here, and this section didn't do that. [/QUOTE]
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