Let’s read through and annotate my PDF copy of the Western Reaches, the first major content release from the latest Kickstarter. The GM’s book is more interesting to me, but it’s not out yet.
Key
(++) Love it
(+) Like it
(-) Meh
(x) Dislike it
(+) Front cover. The art is the same black-and-white pen-and-ink drawing style that Shadowdark is famous for. The cover of the player’s book is half of a complete image that is only visible once this book and its GM’s book sibling are placed side by side. Sadly, I don’t have that book.
(+) The map of the western reaches. All of the Cursed Scroll regions have been shoved together in an incongruent map that, I suspect, is less than 100 miles from top to bottom. Despite its small size (and minimal keying, if the Cursed Scrolls are any indication), it should provide plenty of fertile soil for GMs to run games.
(-) Nonsensical neighboring terrain. In the north, we have Fantasy Scandinavia. In the south, we have the Sahara. It doesn’t really make sense, but players are unlikely to notice. Why should I? What is this, some kinda Western Reaches?
(+) Forward. Kelsey Dionne (the book’s author, designer, layout artist, and perhaps the greatest lesbian ever) gives a brief glimpse into the type of world this book covers. It’s a vast, unknown region full of people and mysteries. What’s not to love!
(+) What are the Western Reaches? A less thematic and more mechanical breakdown of the book. Establishes the terminology of the Player’s Guide to the Western Reaches (PGWR) and the Game Master’s Guide to the Western Reaches (GMWR). I will be using this terminology myself throughout this readthrough.
Overview
(-) What everyone knows: 10 things that may or may not be true. Some fundamental (if not generic) information about the realms. Astonishingly generic, actually.
(-) Life in the Reaches. Another shockingly vanilla presentation of Generic Fantasyland. I see what Kelsey is doing: She’s leaving things general enough to fit in your own adventure modules. This is very OSR, and not necessarily a negative. This is an “unopinionated” campaign setting.
Another West Marches-style product I backed many years ago (and have only the beta PDFs in hand) is the Dragonwilds. I also find the Dragonwilds to be extremely generic, so maybe it’s more of a feature than a bug.
Characters
(+) Expanded race options. The existing races from the core Shadowdark book have been expanded: Instead of a single paragraph detailing their racial abilities, we now get that, plus some population information, their racial origins, a name generator, and a trinket generator.
(++) Half-Elf Ancestry. This is a lovely addition to the racial options, with a very compelling racial ability called Adaptable. Finally, Humans have competition for the best ancestry in the game.
(+) Kobold ancestry. Another new one. These little guys can either get +1 to spellcasting checks, or begin each session with a Luck token. Is this something you choose once at character creation, or alter session to session?
(+) New classes: The Green Knight, the Kyzian Archer, the Monk of Yag-Kesh, the Necromancer, Roustabout, and Seer. Overall, they seem to have a strong flavor and fill in the remaining gaps in the player class options. I could see my players being very excited to play these.
(++) Special callout to the Roustabout class, because it doesn’t fit a particular niche of normal class design. It’s very much a “catch-all” class, in that it’s very general with the potential for a lot of amazing talent rolls down the line. Very powerful in the hands of an experienced player, and probably something I would play.
(+) Collected backgrounds. All of the backgrounds have been rearranged according to terrain type, rather than appearing in each Cursed Scroll.
(+) Factions. A single spread contains all the info and tables you need to make and manage your own unique factions.
(++) Example factions. Some example factions that exist in the WR. It gives a kind of alternative progression track, so that in addition to XP, players can gain Standing with factions. This unlocks additional mechanical benefits, or even alternative ways to earn XP. The book also lists how each faction is viewed by each of the 5 major cities in the region. These often take the form of quest hooks. Bonus points for the pirate faction.
Gear
(+) The list of available gear has grown mightily since Shadowdark first released in 2023. It’s good that we finally have a complete catalog of all available gear. It’s a simple quality-of-life improvement, but an important one.
(+) Gear qualities. Maybe I wasn’t aware, but the Devastating and Obsidian qualities are quite interesting and good.
(+) Mounts. While they were mentioned briefly in the Cursed Scrolls before, here are some proper rules for the care and feeding of a mount. They can even level up, and they have their own personality table.
Magic
(+) I won’t be spending much time in this section, since individual spell analysis is often a slow and herculean task that I don’t enjoy. Suffice to say, there are many new spells, and they seem to be good.
Gods and Patrons
(+) We get a lot more information on the gods, who were described in just a paragraph or two in the core rulebook. Now, each god(ess) gets its own tenets and an “in the reaches” quarter-page section that describes who worships them, and how they are viewed by regular folk. Best of all, it includes tables for Spell Penance, Holy Days, and a Prayer Generator.
(+) Patrons are beings that are sometimes gods, but can be any unusually powerful being in the world. Generally, they’re used as Warlock patrons, but not always. It’s a strange mix of real-world gods like Odin, and other beings like a giant ooze, or a talking wolf’s head with six eyes.
Gameplay
(+) Hex Crawling. The rules for hex crawling have been rewritten yet again (the last major rewrite was for the Jungle Cursed Scroll). This time, procedures have been expanded for more general use. Overall, it remains simpler than other systems, but is veering in the direction of “too complex for me to use.” Fortunately, I simply built my own campaign tool that tracks all of this stuff digitally.
(++) Carousing and Downtime. These rules “fixed” my biggest problem with Shadowdark carousing when I first saw them in Cursed Scroll #6. Unlike other versions of D&D whose endgame turns into domain management, Shadowdark makes an effort to preserve the dungeon-crawling-centric focus of the game.
(++) Bastions. Here is something I didn’t expect to find in this book, let alone enjoy. Compared to 5E’s underbaked and underwhelming bastions, Shadowdark’s are very good. They provide another gold sink for the endgame, though I would love to simply hand a level 1 party a ruined Keep (or several) and let them decide how to fix it up.
Additional idea: Now we finally have a use for all of those ruins scattered across the map: They are all potential bases for the party to repair and reinforce.
(+) Warbands. A fairly substantial 6 pages of rules for managing warbands and resolving sieges. There still are no rules for domain management, other than paying your warbands their required wages. The math seems a little fiddly, but not overly complicated. A spreadsheet could handle this stuff easily. In general, I liked these rules more than I thought, having suffered greatly at the hands of Alexander Macris.
Overall, I am very pleased with this expansion to the core Shadowdark rules. I can’t wait for the real meat and potatoes that surely await in the GMWR. If the Cursed Scrolls are any indication, there’s sure to be a lot of info on the various hex crawls.
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