Shadow Planes and Pocket Worlds is a
small PDF with bonus material for Dark Roads & Golden Hells. Like its title indicates, it presents
planar locations and mechanics for the Gamemaster perusal.
The location described is the demiplane of
Mora, the Children’s Table, a forlorn island with a surreal Brothers Grimm (nightmarish) flavor. The
place is ruled by the myriad manifestations of a chthonic female entity
imprisoned due to her crimes against children. Hags, bogeymen, harpies and
other terrors are spread accost Mora, slaving children from other worlds. The
entire demiplane can be used for an adventure or even an entire campaign, with
each location providing various ideas for quests and challenges.
Overall, Mora is excellent, and almost lyrical
in its descriptions of adventuring locations, like the Shadowbox and the Isle
of Rood. It shows what could have happened if Planescape and Ravenloft
decided to have a baby. The Children’s Table leaves you wanting more (in fact I
got the feeling that the text ends quite abruptly).
The next location is actually just a 1 page
game fiction. I’m not usually a fan of them and this one was no exception. The
fact that the fiction also reads like the introduction to a proper description
text of a Plane of Gears (that doesn’t exist in this product) doesn’t help.
The next part of the PDF presents new planar
hazards, traps and afflictions. I really liked them. The authors managed to
cleverly mix cool ideas/concepts with simple mechanics. Things like the alephs
(or the Aleph), non-Euclidian angles or even dead stone are great add-ons to
any planar (or non-planar) adventure. I also really enjoyed the various effects
taken from myths (with playable mechanics), stuff that you usually don’t see in
RPGs, like food from the Underworld, infinite pits, the fact that any oath
“sworn by the Styx” and henceforth broken has a 50% chance of cursing the
subject, or metaphysical hazards like Abstraction. These various mechanics are
in fact so damn cool that they should have appeared in Dark Roads & Golden Hells.
The new magic items are top-notch in terms of
flavor; my favorite is the cloak of
fallen feathers (although the entire idea of the remnant pearls is also awesome).
Shadow Planes and
Pocket Worlds has 2
new temples (imaginary friends and she) and 3 NPCs (Arachne, Cicerone the
Upfallen and Lady Lilliam).
This PDF is worthy because of the new demiplane
(Mora) and the planar hazards alone. You can see the magic items and the
bestiary as small bonus. The new planar stuff can be adapted to all kind of
adventures (Lovecraftian terror, Underdark, wizardly demenses and temples of
gods of the dead are just a few examples) and the various otherworldly substances
described make up for perfect relics and one-use artifacts (like a gallon with
waters of the Lethe). And all of it for just 2.99. Perfect.
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