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
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment