Neverland: A Fantasy Role-Playing Setting

Title: Neverland: A Fantasy Role-Playing Setting

Price: $19.99 (PDF), $34.99 (Hardcover)

Publisher/Year: Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2020

Author(s): Andrew Kolb, Katie Gould, Daniel D. Fox

DriveThruRPG Link

Rating: 3/5

EXPLORE THE ISLE OF MISCHIEF & MYSTERY: Many have heard of the island of Neverland. Stories of pirates, mermaids and Peter Pan are told by parents around the world to send their children off to a happy, dreaming sleep. But, it’s been a long time since the Darlings first flew to Neverland and a new story is about to be told. Your own.

This 171 page booklet details the island of Neverland, from Peter Pan, and it’s 26 hexes, politics, and creatures. Pretty strong usability support a deadly, yet recognizably whimsical/twisted place. It falls down on both evocative descriptions and Adventure Motivation, the later of which is essentially handed by an adventure generator. I think I’m terrible at reviewing campaign settings, but, really, if its organized as a hex crawl then what’s the difference? If I wanted to run a darker Peter Pan themed game then this is worthwhile with substantially more usability than your typical fluff-based campaign setting.

Not that there’s anything wrong with fluff. I like it too, but I don’t think it’s very reviewable. Thus the focus on this thing as a hex crawl. And, in fact, it’s organized as a hex crawl, making it substantially more usable than most settings. It has about 26 hexes, all with something going on in them, and about half or so with some kind of dungeon/lair in it. The last forty or so pages of this book are fiction, so you’re getting about 140 pages of actual content, most of which are new monsters. 

The very first content page of the book gives a general overview of what’s going on in Neverland, organized by the group/faction. This is GREAT. It’s a large book, with a lot going on. Having a one page summary orients the DM to what’s going on and gets their framing together. Now, when they look over a hex that talk about spiders they have more context in to which to place the information; their allies, enemies, goals, etc. Providing context, up front, is a great tool to get the DM s mind in the right place for the follow up information to come. Disney does it with their line queues. You could even think of the “room name” or a keyed encounter doing the same thing. 11 (text) or 11: Library or 11: Spooky Library or 11: Gloom-filled Library might be thought of as various ways to present a key to a DM, with, as it should be obvious, degrees of orienting the DM to the coming content. 

The hexes themselves are laid out one to a page. You get a short little description of a couple of paragraphs, few sentences, a map showing it in context to other hexes, a little isometric art view, and note of some window dressing of what happens in the next during the twice a day “the chimes” go off, as well as about four or five tables to generate content for the hex. Hex travel time is covered up front, each hex being 2 miles, taking four hours to cross as dense jungle … which solves most of the problems of “what can i see in the next hex.” Encounters can be dense, with things generally rolled once an hour or so in a hex, with some significant variation to that timeline through a specific mechanic mentioned. Still, good service of hex travel and encounter generation.

The creatures have a good lore section each, mostly just a tacked on sentence, that is GREAT! Undead dwarves need to be turned face down to keep them from re-rising, for example. This sort of brief hit specificity is present all throughout the setting. Oracular portents, etc, get the same treatment. It’s consistently done at a pretty high level and that creates a campaign setting that FEELS like a place, because of the specificity, but doesn’t feel overwhelming to run … for the most part. The setting comes alive and you are, I think, excited to run it with the possibilities. And the darker twists, like what actually happens to the kids that come to neverland, are generally present throughout, making this a good setting for role-playing. 

There are also, however, numerous misses in the adventure/hex crawl. Cross-references are non-existent. This means that when a hex encounter tells you that you find the dungeon/lair in that hex then you must then dig through the book to find the page it is on. SOME of that can be handled by the Table of Contents, but a simple cross-ref would have worked better. Plus, “the farmer” and “the gatehouse keeper” seems like they could an explicitly cross-ref, given their lack of inclusion in the ToC, yes? Not the end of the world, but not great.

Monsters/creatures, also get some piss poor descriptions. For all their great “one sentence lore” inclusion they essentially have no descriptions at all. Maybe a brief illustration, but the first line of nearly every monster entry in every product should be some visceral description for the DM to use on the players, or inspire the DM when the players encounter the creature. Not here; there’s essentially none. And that lack of evocative description spills over in to the locations, encounters, etc. While the general setting details are present for how Neverland works, the locations themselves are presented in a very fact-based manner [using bullets, so the information is quite easy to find in most cases. This thing is, but for the cross-references, a triumph of organization and ease of use.] But facts themselves do not inspire.

And, of course, it’s really a setting, so there are no real adventures. There’s a table for generating some ideas, as well as another one with about twenty more specific ideas. But, it feels … empty? As if everyone in Neverland is simply repeating the same things and going through the motions. Go find X for Y, or keep an eye on Z and report back to A. The lack of specificity in the room keys is also an explicitly decision the designer made and I don’t think a good one. 

And then there’s the supplemental tables. These are wedged in to the back section of the book, but not the VERY end of the book. AT the very end they would have been easy to flip to and find, in a print version. And some, like, what is the creature in the hex doing and why, are critically important to locate quickly during the game. These sorts of tables should be at the end, beginning, middle … someplace they are easy to locate during play.

Finally, the notion of themes. Going Home, What it Means, Parents. Themes from Peter Pan, the book. This is mentioned in one brief paragraph at the beginning. This could have been strengthened quite a bit with some examples, or, even, examples in the individual NC”s, creatures, or hexes/locations. That would have made the thing MUCH stronger and, even, I think, solved some of the “what do we do now” syndrome that the generic adventure generator tries to solve.

I don’t usually review settings, but, this is more hex crawl with a strong setting element, some hybrid of the two, perhaps. More cohesive than a normal hex crawl but less specific in the actual adventure possibilities. It’s a great work and, brining your own ideas for adventure, could be the basis for a great campaign. But, as a stand alone resource for a hex crawl it leaves too much to be desired. 

OZ: A Fantasy Role-Playing Setting

Title: OZ: A Fantasy Role-Playing Setting

Price: $19.99 (PDF), $34.99 (Hardcover)

Publisher/Year: Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2022

Author(s): Andrew Kolb, Katie Gould, Daniel D. Fox, Carmen Maren, Julie Hurdiss, Holly Swayne, Sierra S. Stanton

DriveThruRPG Link

Rating: 3.5/5

As a child, I was a huge (huge) fan of the Oz books by L. Frank Baum. If you only know Oz from the movie The Wizard of Oz, or the musical/movie/reboot Wicked, you may be surprised to learn that around the turn of the 20th century, Baum wrote fourteen Oz books, at the rate of about one per year, all set in a fantasy early-modern setting filled with a range of strange and wondrous beasts and characters. After he finished writing them, the series was taken up by another author, Ruth Plumly Thompson, and continued for more than a dozen new books. All in all, there are about 40 Oz books with several side books (like Queen Zixi of Ix) and nearly all of them are available at Project Gutenberg. I’ve probably read like 30 of them.

Recently, the copyright on these turn-of-the-20th-century novels expired, opening the door for even more creators to work in this setting. Andrew Kolb created a beautiful book called Oz: A Fantasy Role-Playing Setting that fully fleshes out the Emerald City into an early-modern urban fantasy pointcrawl. It was wonderful and interesting to read, and the setting is fantastic. The hardback book is beautiful, and definitely worth getting in print, and widely available. (In addition to Oz, Kolb has also written and illustrated setting books for Neverland and Wonderland). And soon, I’ll be starting a campaign in Oz!

The setting of Oz is wonderfully unique; clearly a fantasy setting, but long pre-Tolkien, influenced by fairy tales and by the writer’s idea of modernism and what modern America was like. That means that in addition to magic, there are scams, disinformation, mechanical marvels, people of all types living together, and arguments about forms of life and forms of government, the role of the military, and many other issues that resonate strongly with modern life. Further to that, as I realized when thinking about the setting, Oz is ruled by a canonically trans person (Ozma, who was raised as the boy Tip until she discovered her true self and fairy magic), and gender roles are much less constrained than in Tolkien’s fantasy world. Baum indeed was married to Maud Gage, the daughter of a noted suffragist and women’s rights activist, Matilda Joslyn Gage, who also campaigned for Native American rights and abolition, and was in general a pretty cool person.

Another great feature of Oz as a setting is that, like other older settings, there is a long tradition of lore to draw from, if you so choose. Here, for example, is the terrifyingly comprehensive Oz Timeline site. There are comic books. There are podcasts. There is everything your heart could desire. You want to know what the A-B-Sea Serpent looks like? There are several different versions.

The cover of the book says it’s compatible with 5e. However, if you are used to playing 5e, as I am, this book is somewhat baffling, for a few reasons:

• There’s little guidance about how to create a player character in terms of backgrounds or races that might be suitable. With the new 2024 rules, that is even more true.
• The monsters use stat blocks that are in a (very) non-standard format and lacking some familiar elements like challenge ratings. Many DMs will need some help interpreting and running these monsters.
• It is taken as read that the players will make their own adventure, in a sandboxy sort of way; but many 5e players and DMs don’t really know how to do that.

Thus Oz really lies in this nameless valley between OSR and 5e – OSR in vibe, ostensibly 5e. You could play it using Shadowdark rules (which also exist in that valley) or Old School Essentials rules (which are D&D Basic/Expert rules from 1981, and squarely OSR), but I thought I would write about running it in 5e, which its author seems to have intended – although not to to the point of really spelling it out. Please feel free to comment with your own ideas, especially if you’ve also run an adventure or campaign in this setting.

Rat Queens Vol. 4: High Fantasies

Title: Rat Queens Vol. 4: High Fantasies

ISBN: 9781632158994

Price: $14.99

Publisher/Year: Image, 2017

Artist: Owen Gieni

Writer: Kurtis Wiebe

Rating: 3.5/5

The Rat Queens are finally back! And in attempt to save the comic from a controversial series of events, creator Kurtis J. Wiebe attempted a, sort of, reboot. Rat Queens is a raunchy, comedic series that features adventurers Hannah, Dee, Violet, and Betty, in a mock Dungeons & Dragons world. In the first two volumes of this comic series, our four main adventurers (sort of) saved their home of Palisade from the spawn of N’rygoth, an ancient god who Dee once worshipped, albeit destroying much of Palisade in the process, while the third saw Hannah’s storyline diverge from the others as she attempted to rescue her step-father after he was arrested by the Mage University that she'd attended. We’ve learned a lot about these characters, their backstories, their personality quirks, their hopes and fears, and some of the past volumes really delved deeply into hard-hitting issues… and then there’s this volume. 

To give those who don’t know some insight into the controversy surrounding Rat Queens, we have to go back to the very first volume. Originally the artwork for the series was done by Roc Upchurch, a comic veteran, who (in my opinion) captured the series and the characters the best. Unfortunately, Upchurch proved to be a bit of an asshole. He was involved in some domestic violence, and was quickly taken off the Rat Queens project, and rightly so. In his place came Stjepan Šejíc and then Tess Fowler… neither of which did a really good job at capturing the feel and look of Rat Queens. Fowler eventually left after allegations that Wiebe was trying to bring Upchurch back, and it seemed like Rat Queens was doomed. This latest volume of Rat Queens, the fourth in the series, is illustrated by Owen Gieni, who, of all the replacement artists, does the best job at capturing Upchurch’s original design and style. And in fact, the artwork is at it’s best here since Upchurch’s original style. Unfortunately, the artwork was my favorite part of this volume.

Volume 4 kind of picks up in a weird place. It almost ignores the ending of volume 3, despite there being hints that relate back to the first three volumes - for example Palisade is still a mess and some of it’s denizens have become worshippers of N’yrgoth. Wiebe has addressed fans and stated that the new volume is tied to the others, and that we’ll have everything answered in time, so I guess we’ll just need to be a little patient before the dots get connected for us. While it was good jumping back into these characters, nothing… really… happened in volume 4. There wasn’t any character development, there weren’t any subplots, there was hardly a story. It was mostly just the Rat Queens (including their new Queen, Braga, the fan favorite transgender orc warrior) questing and drinking. Volume 4 is definitely not the strongest volume in this series. My personal favorite is the second, The Far Reaching Tentacles of N’rygoth. But it’s good to have the Rat Queens back, and hopefully this means we’ll see more of them in the future, and delve some more into their individual characters. 

Funko Pops - My Story of Collecting

In October 2010, my eldest sister gave me the start that would become an obsession for me in the form of Batman and Robin bobblehead figures.

That same year for Christmas, he gave me an entire set of Star Wars figures from the same company, Funko.

Lightsaber not part of the Christmas gift.

Something that my loyal readers may or may not have already deduced is that I have a bad habit of picking up things to collect. From comic books, action figures, trade paperbacks, tabletop role playing games, collectible card games and the like, I have an obsession with collecting... for better or for worse.

I would look all over town for new Pops for my collection. At one point, I obtained a credit card from Hot Topic just so that I would be able to get exclusive Pops easier (in my opinion at the time). To get an idea of how bad my obsession is, please feel free to take a look at my photo album on Facebook to see.

Initially, I tried to limit myself to specific types based on the things that I follow and collect. I was wanting to stay primarily with Star Wars, but that went off the rails real quickly.

Back before there were shared exclusives that could easily be purchased at local stores, you would actually have to go to specific events to obtain them. I remember going to Emerald City Comic Con one year with one of the goals to acquire the Luke Skywalker and Han Solo in Stormtrooper  Pops. They originally sold for $20 each, which I gladly paid.

ECCC Exclusives from 2011

While attending comic cons, I would occasionally bring Pops to have people sign them. My favorite was when I had "Weird Al" Yankovic sign the exclusive Pop I had of him in his costume for the Fat video.

As you can tell from the FB photo album, I still collect these... but have become very selective. When I originally started collecting, I was living by myself in a 1 bedroom apartment. I had room to display them... but soon I ran out of room to display them all and I began packing some away in storage bins to keep them safe. When I eventually moved in early 2016, I had room to store these totes in a garage. Unfortunately, after so many years of collecting, I had to make the decision to actually rent a storage space to keep my growing collection. The new storage also included my comic books and actions figures as well, but the bulk of what was being store seemed like they were Funko Pops.

From November 2018, before being moved into storage.

It didn't take too long before 2 things happened after moving my collection to storage:

1. The rent for the storage unit was raised to a level I felt was overpriced for the size of the unit I was renting. This unit was a 5' x 10' unit and the location was not the best place nor was it maintained very well... IMHO.
2. The collection was getting bigger than the space I had available.

Fortunately, I was able to find a larger storage unit for around the same price I was already paying, and it was not only much closer to my home, but also a brand new location that was established during Covid. Easier to get to and a better maintained site. The downside to this was that it now gives me an excuse to expand my collecting habits... and I have been going on more action figure hunts since moving to the new unit.

Over the years, I have thought about the reasons why I actually collect so much. When I was a child, I had collections of Star Wars and G.I. Joe action figures that I loved... so I don't feel it was for lack of having toys. My parents also supported my love of comic books by not only giving me subscriptions to some of my favorite titles, but also gave me the opportunities to work to earn money so I could continue to grow the collection. They also supported by growing interest in role playing games and gave me my first Advanced Dungeons & Dragons book for Christmas one year.

The same book that I received as a gift is still in my collection to this day.

When I worked at The Book Bin, I learned that books would not only keep a value, but it would increase over time for several. I knew this was true about comic books, and later realized the same about action figures. When I first got into collectible card games like Magic the Gathering, I knew the single cards had value, but I don't think I appreciated them as much as I had comic books because I sold my collections a few times at a considerable loss for what I put into them and based on the actual value of each of them at the time. I started collecting Magic the Gathering again when Wizards of the Coast announce they were doing a Dungeons & Dragons set. I am still collecting, but also continue to play.

All of that and I think I finally landed on a primary reason for my collection obsessions. They have value that can be harnessed in a time of need. There were a few times over the years where I was out of work and needed to find a way to get money. I was able to sell parts of my various collections to help with that. I have made some very poor financial decisions in my life, and I don't know that I will have enough money saved to be able to actually retire from working, so my collections have become a kind of safety net.

While I don't have any idea of how much money is invested in my comic book, role playing game, action figure or collectible card game collections, the Funko app gives me a glimpse into how much that collection is valued at based on the current market.

It should be noted that not all Pops in the collection have a value in the app for whatever reason.

A Game of Thrones Vol 2

Title: A Game of Thrones Vol 2

ISBN: 9780440423225

Price: $26.00

Publisher/Year: Dynamite, 2013

Artist: Tommy Patterson

Writer: George R. R. Martin, Daniel Abraham

Collects: A Game of Thrones #7-12



Rating: 4/5

The second graphic novel adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones series picks up where the first one left off. Here we find Lord Eddard Stark’s bastard son, Jon Snow, coming to grips with life serving on the Wall, whilst Lord Stark himself does his best to respectfully serve as the Hand of King Robert Baratheon in King’s Landing, even though he may not be in total agreement with his liege. We also see the developing marriage of Daenerys Targaryen and her brute of a husband, Khal Drogo, as well as picking up with the ever-charming Tyrion Lannister as he attempts to convince Lady Catelyn Stark that he did not cripple one of her sons. There’s also the ever-looming threat of what wintry terrors lay waiting in the background of the larger story.

Firstly, this is a fun book to pick up. It’s interesting to see the artwork on show, depicting characters imagined a million different ways in the heads of a million different people. Whilst drawing on the hugely popular TV show’s visual interpretation of the characters, Patterson’s artwork has a charm and warmth all of its own. It makes the story a pleasure to read, especially considering some of the heavy, lengthy, weighted-down dialogue that is used at certain points.

Adapting such a ridiculously popular modern-day phenomenon is no mean feat, and this graphic novel could so easily have been bogged down by expectation and overkill. Luckily Abraham’s version manages to avoid these pitfalls, becoming another effective point of attack for the Game of Thrones brand. The story here is brilliantly paced. Staying true to the source material, the book manages to cover all of the depth of Martin’s original work, yet keeps the narrative fluid and progressing at all times. Accompanied by fantastically assured artwork by Patterson, the story just feels tonally right.

A perfect read for fans of the original Martin works or the HBO series, this graphic novel is fully respectful to what has gone before it, yet manages to be its own beast in the process. It isn’t as grueling or time-consuming a read as the original books, but it still manages to cover certain plot points and background stories that have been overlooked by the TV series. I, for one, am eagerly awaiting the next instalment of this graphic novel set, and hope that it continues to keep the high standards set by Abraham’s adaptation.