Fantasy Holidays, Vol. 2: Monstrous & Wicked is the second in a series of PDFs from Top Fashion Games. Written by Dave Woodrum, the product comes in at 9 pages, including the cover and one blank page. The cover, designed by the author as it is in all the other TF Games products, depicts lightning crackling against a blue sky (with odd black grid lines) against a field of a soft plaid. There is no interior art. The odd black gridlines in the sky and the choice of a plaid field for the cover, even if the latter connects it with its predecessor, Fantasy Holidays, Vol. 1, reduced the cover's effectiveness for me. Despite the cover's simplicity, it does connect with the topic at hand -- days of ill omen and holidays for monsters -- at least in a loose way.
Again, like other Top Fashion Games products produced around the end of this summer, this volume has its layout and editing issues, specifically choices in paragraphing, awkward spacing, ragged right margins, and the ubiquitous blank page at the end of the PDF. There are also some minor problems with editing ("Though quite vampires are often less social...," for instance, or the frequent lack of commas where needed) that gave me the impression of a hastily composed product. I hate to mention the same problems each time I review a product, but I feel that it's important to cover them, at least briefly. All these products were designed at the same time, so it's not a surprise that they should suffer from the same problems. C'est la vie.
The holidays themselves are frequently quite evocative and some of them gave me ideas for adventures right away. For instance, Blessed Slaughter functions like a little crusade where some villages send their male youths into the forests and surrounding wilds to demand the surrender of "evil-looking" creatures, regardless of actual evil intent or behavior. PCs passing through a village celebrating the Blessed Slaughter could find it to be quite the moral dilemma -- is it right to kill goblins just because they're goblins? Can you pre-emptively kill orc youths to prevent future evil? Does evil always look evil? This is the sort of inspiring material I was hoping to see in Fantasy Holidays, Vol. 1 that I didn't really get. I also rather liked Dusk of the Web and Gathering of Snakes -- I like the idea that on certain nights of the year, some types of creatures come out of hiding to terrorize the innocent -- particularly when they're combined with foul rituals to serve evil gods. It's got a whole Night on Bald Mountain/witches' sabbath (as in Goethe's Faust or Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown") feel to it that really gets my creative juices flowing. I also liked the Wind of Whispering Spirits, even if it felt a little bit like a midwinter version of Halloween.
Some of the other holidays are a little less useful or too similar to each other to be really useful (and, admittedly, this is a problem with Dusk of the Web and Gathering of Snakes, too). Black Binding, Festival of Dragons, and the Ritual of Drums are all essentially monstrous conferences, where the monsters get together and chat (I thought of the meeting of the Five Families at the end of the first Godfather movie right away). One holiday of the sort was probably enough -- three begins to feel like the author's lacking inspiration. I had a similar issue with the decision to list Fairy Fall and Fairy Rain as two holidays. It would have been more effective in my mind to list the older one (Fairy Rain) as part of the newer one's description and include an entirely different holiday in its stead. As it is, it feels like the author is padding out the project to meet a minimum page length. Finally, the holiday of Goblin's Bluff, when orcs and hobgoblins treat goblins like piñatas, made me laugh out loud; it was simply too silly. If the goblins in the festival were changed to halflings, I think it would have some promise as a situation for a campaign; otherwise, it has a Three Stooges feel to it that turned me off right away.
The content here is definitely improved over the first offering in the series, but the editing and layout, as well as the presence of holidays that are essentially modified versions of other holidays in the PDF, tend to reduce its usefulness in my mind.
Score: 3
