Grim Hollow Campaign Guide - 3rd Party Review

[Sparky McDibben]

Well, folks, it's your old pal, Sparky! I had to take a while off from reviews, mostly due to three clowns and a municipal judge. But never fear! I have RETURNED!!!*

So on my last review for Weird Wastelands, distinguished colleague and poster on these fine forums Libertad mentioned that they wanted to see Grim Hollow get tackled by somebody. So I mustered forth all my powers of analytical might and gazed into the whirling chaos of Ghostfire Gaming's flagship project and what I saw there left me...

Well, look, it's complicated. There are some genuinely good and interesting things in here, and they play with some really compelling ideas that I think are lifted from some of my favorite fiction ever. But there are some definite downsides, too. I'm reviewing the Grim Hollow Campaign Guide; other interested parties may want to take a look at the Monster Grimoire, or Player's Guide from the same publisher.

So we're gonna do a chapter-by-chapter walkthrough of this work. I want to look primarily at:

• New mechanics - Are they interesting, flavorful, and evocative? Do the mechanics clearly unbalance play? Do they give the DM or player options to create interesting choices?
• Lore - It's a setting book, so how's the lore? Does it offer a lot of conflicts? Are they well-written, with interesting and nuanced characters? Is there clear guidance for the DM trying to craft a game out of these conflicts?
• GM advice / adventures - There's some advice in the back of the book for running dark fantasy and a few small adventures to get you going.

These three things are going to be the primary criteria I judge the work on, because those three criteria are what I want in a campaign setting.

But first, let's talk themes, and let's talk about some general (smaller) issues with the work.

The idea of Grim Hollow (and I don't know where the phrase "Grim Hollow" comes from; this world is explicitly called Etharis) is that it lets you play a "dark fantasy" game. The primary touchstones here seem to be Warhammer and the Witcher line of books and games (we're not talking about the TV show, mostly because I don't want to engage with how toxic that discussion got). The world is dark both literally and figuratively - the second page literally says, "For most people, there is no safety outside the radius of a torch's glow." Adventures are dark, and frequently have a morally ambivalent feel to them; devil's bargains abound. It's grimdark.

I want to call out that this setting is very much not in my wheelhouse. I love dark settings - I'm running a Cyberpunk RED game now and loving it. But grimdark storytelling prizes struggle over meaning. It doesn't necessarily matter what you're struggling against, just that you're struggling. In punk stories, it matters why the world is the way that it is. You might not be able to change the world (neither grimdark nor punk stories really let anyone "save the world"), but punk stories will let you save yourself, and sometimes the people you love. To me, grimdark is just punk that missed the point.

I say that to highlight my own biases; I'm going to work around these as much as possible, but I wanted y'all to be aware of them before I launch into the full review.

Secondly, there are some issues with spelling and layout in the book. Ordinarily, I don't like to play a grammar teacher. But holy crap, when I see multiple words misspelled in the same sentence, it pulls me out of the setting a bit. Yes, this is a pedantic note. Thank you for noticing. But unfortunately, if you're going to charge me money for a book, someone had better have taken a run at spelling, layout, and font choices! Inconsistent use of capitalization for some words, inconsistent bolding within some chapters, section break bars at the top of the page in a way that just looks wrong, and really way too many spelling errors. ght

Ultimately, none of these are make-or-break for me, but they might be for you, and I felt like they needed a callout.

And now, without any more gilding the lily, and with no more ado, let's get cracking! The Grim Hollow Campaign Guide is a chonky 300 pages (PDF version, purchased for $24.99 on drivethrurpg.com), with a total value of 8.3 cents per page. It kicks off with an introduction thanking their backers on Kickstarter (always thoughtful and appreciated!), and launches right into the central tenets of gaming in Etharis:

• Darkness and Obscurity - The world is darkened both naturally and supernaturally (remember this tenet when we get to races!)
• The Land is Dangerous - Civilizations dot the land as "islands of light" in a sea of darkness, so travel is hard and people are suspicious of outsiders
• A Lost Pantheon - The gods are dead, and their remaining lieutenants (archdemons and arch Seraphs) twist the divine power they are imbued with to their own purposes
• A Sickening Plague - Sickness is rampant, but there's a particularly nasty one called the Weeping Pox that takes significant power / effort to cure
• Fear of the Arcane - Everybody hates spellcasters, and there's a full-on inquisition to hunt them down
• Glimmers of Hope - Small deeds can have outsized impacts, and goodness of any scale is worth celebrating

At least one of those (the second one) is actually included in the DMG as a core tenet for any D&D world, but the rest make for an interesting take on a standard world. "No gods" as core worldbuilding gimmick has been around since at least Midnight in 3rd edition, but it's nice to see a fresh take on old material. It's also nice to see them call out that heroism and hope are earned, not assumed. However, that concludes the first chapter of the Grim Hollow Campaign Guide!

Next time, we'll get into the races and the multi-century history of Etharis with Chapter 2: Races of Etharis! See you then!

*from federal witness protection

 

[Sparky McDibben]

Alright, folks! Time to dig into the history of Etharis and it's racial composition! Chapter 2: Races of Etharis is seven pages long, and introduces the main races of the world:

• Humans
• Elves
• Dwarves
• Half-Orcs
• Half-Elves
• Dragonborn
• Gnomes
• Halflings

Of those eight races, you'll note that five of them have darkvision. So when they say this world is a "dark" fantasy, clearly they are only referring to what happens after sixty feet.

The history is basically thus:

1) Everyone but humans are chilling out, just vibing.
2) Humans show up, and, like the monkeys we are, start hurling crap all over everything ("crap" here referring to a nigh-genocidal purge)
3) Elves fall back to their ancient forest kingdom, eventually making peace
4) Dwarves and gnomes fend off the human advance around the last remaining dwarven citadel, inventing adamantine and artillery in the processs
5) Dragonborn get their home wiped out, and have a somewhat nomadic existence
6) Halflings cut a deal with humans and collaborate with them to avoid extinction
7) Humans found the Burach Empire (It's got two dots over the u).

There's a lot more to this that gets covered in the geography chapter, but it's a fairly standard Warhammer-style setup. It's not (quite) a carbon-copy, and not much interesting is done with the various races. I can see why - elves in Dragon Age are a bit of a shock vs regular Tolkien-esque elves, for example. But the lack of an interesting fresh spin on these heritages feels like a missed opportunity to set this world apart from its peers. There's also no mechanical differentiation from standard 5E races, and I think that's a major missed opportunity, as well. Show me how elves are isolated and tragic - "I get a wizard cantrip!" from base 5E doesn't really do the trick.

At this point, though, we hit Chapter 3: Advanced Weapons. This is 16 pages long, and amounts to an additional set of weapon options for martials. Advanced weapons are so difficult to master that you don't get proficiency with them until level 3 (if you already have proficiency with all martial weapons). There are nine of them, each with a variety of properties (seriously, so many properties). There are eight new weapon properties included:

• Blackpowder: Audible out to 300 feet when discharged, and cannot be fired when the powder's wet (needs a short rest to dry out)
• Brutal: Brutal critical as a weapon property
• Cumbersome: You have to use Strength for both attack and damage rolls (this only gets applied to ranged weapons)
• Guard: It's the reaction attack from Sentinel, but it does no damage
• Momentum: If you move 20' in a straight line before making an attack, you can upgrade the damage die to the one specified by this property
• Repeater: If you take the attack action with this weapon, you can make another attack as a bonus action, but don't get your ability score modifier to the damage of that bonus action attack.
• Swift: If you miss, your next attack against the same target with this weapon has advantage
• Scatter: Your weapon becomes an AoE

Look, if you're inventing a weapon property, my first question is, "Does this apply to several weapons? Or just one?" And indeed, when we check the weapons, we see that Brutal, Guard, Momentum, and Swift all apply to only one weapon each. Cumbersome and Scatter only apply to two. Cavalry Hammer actually gets a property (Armour Piercing) that isn't explained at all. I don't want to tell people that they can't make a shotgun in their games. But I don't think that creating a bunch of new properties is the way to go here. I'd prefer it if all the new rules for a shotgun appear in the shotgun entry and the shotgun itself gained the Special property.

There are also several kinds of special ammunition detailed here, all of which really feel like they should be magic or alchemical items and not in the weapons chapter. Incendiary adds +1d4 fire damage, and silvered ammunition bypasses resistance to non-magical weapon damage, for example. I'm not sure if you can grab these from anywhere, but the effects are a little underwhelming.

Past that, we get several new feats! Blackpowder Expert, for example, lets you ignore the loading property on blackpowder weapons, and also lets you make attacks of opportunity when someone moves within 10' of you (so it's like a mashup of Crossbow Expert and Sentinel!). Nocturnal gives you an extra 60' of darkvision (really undercutting the "dark" in "dark fantasy"), and then you have a couple of kind-of-interesting ones like Witch Hunter.

Past that, we get into the 10 new spells in this book. And....well, it's a mixed bag. There's a couple of cantrips that feel like remixed versions of PHB cantrips (holy word, for example, is an attack cantrip, deals 1d8 radiant damage, and reduces a target's speed by 10 feet - so it's like sacred flame crossed with ray of frost). There's spells that reference mechanics we haven't been introduced to (dazing blast causes the target to become dazed, but there's no language to reference the dazed condition introduced in the next chapter, which caused me some confusion). And then there's greater animate dead. This spell has had me full-on conspiracy boarding for like an hour, y'all. It says "Choose a
corpse, or a number of corpses, within range that are equivalent [sic] the size of the creatures you are animating (the GM will determine how many corpses are required). You can animate a number of large [sic] or smaller undead creatures equalling a total challenge rating 2 or lower."

So first off, I assume that they mean large as the size category (except that's usually written as Large to avoid that very question). Secondly, what the heck does "that are equivalent the size of the creatures you are animating" mean? Of course the corpses are equal in size to what you're animating - they're what you're animating. Does it mean that you can try to animate the minotaur skeleton from the Monster Manual using a bunch of ogre skeletons? I think that's the intent, but the wording here is so poor that it has me scratching my head on all of these interpretations.

Finally, we get to the curses. Curses are potent spells that require unique components and have dreadful multi-stage effects - a slow and insidious ticking clock. Honestly, these are some of the best mechanics in the book. I genuinely love them. The idea that anyone who's sufficiently motivated can hurl dire curses at the party that can't just be removed with a single 3rd-level spell is fantastic. Curing these curses can require a willing sacrifice of one's life, twice-murdered ravens, potions brewed by hags, a wish, etc., or several of these things in conjunction. Simply fabulous work.

These can be dropped into the world on NPCs, used as the background for monster explanations (all of these curses eventually turn the sufferer into a dreadful monster), and possibly be deployed by or against the PCs.

Well done.

Alright folks, next time we'll pick up with Chapter 4: Variant Mechanics! See y'all then!!!

 

[Libertad]

I recall some of my friends giving Grim Hollow the Shadowrun Treatment: love the setting, iffy on the rules. I'm a bit in this camp, although I haven't done a deep dive on the mechanics like I usually do when reviewing books so some stuff may escape me. The Grim Hollow Player's Guide added quite a bit of new races that IMO integrate into the dark fantasy setting better than the typical 5e core races. For example, the Downcast are lesser angels who remained trapped and depowered on Etharis when their now-dead gods ventured into the world to try and impose order on it. And the Disemboided all hail from the now-vanished city of Ulmyr's Gate, , whose inhabitants are now trapped between worlds and appear like weird flickering shiny humanoids that are partially insubstantial.

 

[dave2008]

Alright, folks! Time to dig into the history of Etharis and it's racial composition! Chapter 2: Races of Etharis is seven pages long, and introduces the main races of the world:

• Humans
• Elves
• Dwarves
• Half-Orcs
• Half-Elves
• Dragonborn
• Gnomes
• Halflings

Of those eight races, you'll note that five of them have darkvision. So when they say this world is a "dark" fantasy, clearly they are only referring to what happens after sixty feet.

The history is basically thus:

1) Everyone but humans are chilling out, just vibing.
2) Humans show up, and, like the monkeys we are, start hurling crap all over everything ("crap" here referring to a nigh-genocidal purge)
3) Elves fall back to their ancient forest kingdom, eventually making peace
4) Dwarves and gnomes fend off the human advance around the last remaining dwarven citadel, inventing adamantine and artillery in the processs
5) Dragonborn get their home wiped out, and have a somewhat nomadic existence
6) Halflings cut a deal with humans and collaborate with them to avoid extinction
7) Humans found the Burach Empire (It's got two dots over the u).

There's a lot more to this that gets covered in the geography chapter, but it's a fairly standard Warhammer-style setup. It's not (quite) a carbon-copy, and not much interesting is done with the various races. I can see why - elves in Dragon Age are a bit of a shock vs regular Tolkien-esque elves, for example. But the lack of an interesting fresh spin on these heritages feels like a missed opportunity to set this world apart from its peers. There's also no mechanical differentiation from standard 5E races, and I think that's a major missed opportunity, as well. Show me how elves are isolated and tragic - "I get a wizard cantrip!" from base 5E doesn't really do the trick.

At this point, though, we hit Chapter 3: Advanced Weapons. This is 16 pages long, and amounts to an additional set of weapon options for martials. Advanced weapons are so difficult to master that you don't get proficiency with them until level 3 (if you already have proficiency with all martial weapons). There are nine of them, each with a variety of properties (seriously, so many properties). There are eight new weapon properties included:

• Blackpowder: Audible out to 300 feet when discharged, and cannot be fired when the powder's wet (needs a short rest to dry out)
• Brutal: Brutal critical as a weapon property
• Cumbersome: You have to use Strength for both attack and damage rolls (this only gets applied to ranged weapons)
• Guard: It's the reaction attack from Sentinel, but it does no damage
• Momentum: If you move 20' in a straight line before making an attack, you can upgrade the damage die to the one specified by this property
• Repeater: If you take the attack action with this weapon, you can make another attack as a bonus action, but don't get your ability score modifier to the damage of that bonus action attack.
• Swift: If you miss, your next attack against the same target with this weapon has advantage
• Scatter: Your weapon becomes an AoE

Look, if you're inventing a weapon property, my first question is, "Does this apply to several weapons? Or just one?" And indeed, when we check the weapons, we see that Brutal, Guard, Momentum, and Swift all apply to only one weapon each. Cumbersome and Scatter only apply to two. Cavalry Hammer actually gets a property (Armour Piercing) that isn't explained at all. I don't want to tell people that they can't make a shotgun in their games. But I don't think that creating a bunch of new properties is the way to go here. I'd prefer it if all the new rules for a shotgun appear in the shotgun entry and the shotgun itself gained the Special property.

There are also several kinds of special ammunition detailed here, all of which really feel like they should be magic or alchemical items and not in the weapons chapter. Incendiary adds +1d4 fire damage, and silvered ammunition bypasses resistance to non-magical weapon damage, for example. I'm not sure if you can grab these from anywhere, but the effects are a little underwhelming.

Past that, we get several new feats! Blackpowder Expert, for example, lets you ignore the loading property on blackpowder weapons, and also lets you make attacks of opportunity when someone moves within 10' of you (so it's like a mashup of Crossbow Expert and Sentinel!). Nocturnal gives you an extra 60' of darkvision (really undercutting the "dark" in "dark fantasy"), and then you have a couple of kind-of-interesting ones like Witch Hunter.

Past that, we get into the 10 new spells in this book. And....well, it's a mixed bag. There's a couple of cantrips that feel like remixed versions of PHB cantrips (holy word, for example, is an attack cantrip, deals 1d8 radiant damage, and reduces a target's speed by 10 feet - so it's like sacred flame crossed with ray of frost). There's spells that reference mechanics we haven't been introduced to (dazing blast causes the target to become dazed, but there's no language to reference the dazed condition introduced in the next chapter, which caused me some confusion). And then there's greater animate dead. This spell has had me full-on conspiracy boarding for like an hour, y'all. It says "Choose a
corpse, or a number of corpses, within range that are equivalent [sic] the size of the creatures you are animating (the GM will determine how many corpses are required). You can animate a number of large [sic] or smaller undead creatures equalling a total challenge rating 2 or lower."

So first off, I assume that they mean large as the size category (except that's usually written as Large to avoid that very question). Secondly, what the heck does "that are equivalent the size of the creatures you are animating" mean? Of course the corpses are equal in size to what you're animating - they're what you're animating. Does it mean that you can try to animate the minotaur skeleton from the Monster Manual using a bunch of ogre skeletons? I think that's the intent, but the wording here is so poor that it has me scratching my head on all of these interpretations.

Finally, we get to the curses. Curses are potent spells that require unique components and have dreadful multi-stage effects - a slow and insidious ticking clock. Honestly, these are some of the best mechanics in the book. I genuinely love them. The idea that anyone who's sufficiently motivated can hurl dire curses at the party that can't just be removed with a single 3rd-level spell is fantastic. Curing these curses can require a willing sacrifice of one's life, twice-murdered ravens, potions brewed by hags, a wish, etc., or several of these things in conjunction. Simply fabulous work.

These can be dropped into the world on NPCs, used as the background for monster explanations (all of these curses eventually turn the sufferer into a dreadful monster), and possibly be deployed by or against the PCs.

Well done.

Alright folks, next time we'll pick up with Chapter 4: Variant Mechanics! See y'all then!!!

That curse mechanic does sound interesting. I might pick it up just for that!

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

And what about the new PC races. They are enoughly original and interesting, original and different but not too bizarre.

This setting should be in D&DBeyond.

 

[Sparky McDibben]

I recall some of my friends giving Grim Hollow the Shadowrun Treatment: love the setting, iffy on the rules. I'm a bit in this camp, although I haven't done a deep dive on the mechanics like I usually do when reviewing books so some stuff may escape me.

If anything, I'm heading in the other direction. I really like some of the mechanics so far, but the world seems a bit flat. Then again, for a player's first introduction to Warhammer Etharis, it's probably new to them. So it works well enough.

That curse mechanic does sound interesting. I might pick it up just for that!

Glad I could help! There's six curses, each that create decently high CR monsters you could use in a campaign. Roving curse-breakers sounds like a great campaign framework!

And what about the new PC races. They are enoughly original and interesting, original and different but not too bizarre.

This setting should be in D&DBeyond.

Regrettably, I'm reviewing the Grim Hollow Campaign Guide which has no new races. I believe (per Libertad's comment above) that those are in the Player's Guide. Depending on how this gets received, I may pick that up.

Next up is a bit of weirdness. According to the table of contents, "Variant Mechanics" is a chapter consisting of one page, but it doesn't have a clean break or a chapter heading, so it looks like an addendum to advanced weaponry when you're reading it.

This page introduces five new variant rules for this world:

• When you heal from unconsciousness, you are incapacitated until the end of your next turn (this objectively sucks from a player's perspective; if you want your PCs to stay off the death gate, I'd suggest limiting their number of death saves to two or one)
• When you fail a concentration check, you gain the dazed condition until the end of your next turn
• The bleeding condition means you cannot regain hit points from spells or abilities, only by completing a long rest or spending Hit Dice (this seems diegetically weird to me: are there only some swords who prevent magical healing? Is this on every slashing weapon? I like the idea but I would have renamed it "cursed" or something like that)
• The dazed condition prevents you from concentrating on spells (combined with the change above, this means you can't lose concentration on a spell and then immediately recast it - you have to wait at least a round; I really like this change)
• Dwarves and gnomes pick up some advanced weapon proficiencies at 3rd level

While I dislike the first change (not the goal, which seems to be preventing yo-yo healing, but rather the implementation), everything else is pretty solid.

I've got a kid whom I've got to help with a science fair project, but next time we're going to delve into transformations! These are an awesome part of the book that I really like, so I want to take my time reviewing them. Thanks for y'all's patience!

 

[Sparky McDibben]

Alright friends, back again! Science experiment isn't going well, but I plan to bribe the teacher anyway, so it's all good.

Moving on to chapter 5: Transformations!! This is the real promise of this book for me: how do you offer lichdom, vampirehood, or lycanthropy as an option for your players?

Well, basically you do it as a weird prestige class from 3.5.

See, in Grim Hollow, you have six basic types of transformations. You can become an aberrant horror, a fiend, a lich, a lycanthrope, a seraph (angel), or a vampire. Each one has its own set of initial prerequisites; the vampire one says you have to have fallen victim to the Sanguine Curse and gives a number of options on how that could have happened. This is good work; it builds in flexibility so a DM doesn't have to railroad a player into making their arc happen.

Each transformation has 4 levels, and each has various triggers that could advance the transformation along it. This is also good - by not making it feat-dependent or based on class levels, you don't deter or sidetrack their class progression. However, this also means these characters will be by nature much harder to kill than standard characters! Offering these options means some degree of power creep is inevitable.

Examples of what could advance a transformation might be "killing or corrupting a Seraph (angel)" for the fiend transformation, or "acquiring the strength to give birth to a more powerful version of yourself, which then consumes your old self" for the aberrant transformation. So there are some really off-beat ideas given here, which I appreciate because I can come up with the baseline level stuff on my own. Good work!

So, each transformation gives you boons and flaws. Each level of the transformation gives you access to more boons, but each one comes with a sharper flaw. At the first (transformation) level, you get all the boons associated with that level, and the flaw. For each subsequent level, you get one boon, and one flaw. This lets the designers give you the essential toolkit for being that monster right up front. For example, the lycanthrope one gives you a hybrid form, and a boost to your Strength and Constitution scores, but you also get a powerful lust for the hunt. Past that, it's basically gravy! Except you also get much nastier flaws. That lycanthrope transformation, for example, includes vulnerability to silver weapons at transformation level 2, disadvantage to all Intelligence checks at transformation level 3, and some insane impulse control issues at transformation level 4.

So what do you get for all that?

Well, let's stay with the lycanthropes for a minute. At transformation level 2, you can choose to gain resistance to non-silver, non-magical weapon damage while in your hybrid form, or hunter's mark (reflavored, but it's hunter's mark) Str mod times per long rest while in hybrid form, or the ability to turn into a specific kind of animal form. And if you're thinking, "Wow, those all sound like class abilities!" Well, then, good sir or madam, you are quite correct!!

This trend continues onwards with the next levels of that specific transformation, but the general theme is that each boon past level 1 are mostly repackaged class abilities or feat benefits. This is both good, in the sense that the designers have not risked destroying game balance, but bad, in the sense that optimizers may have a ton of new ways to get that shiny new doodad that makes their build work.

Now, some of these abilities are actually nuts. For example, the lich transformation has one where you can concentrate on two spells at once for the cost of a level of exhaustion. It also has one where all undead you create are permanently under your control. I know which one I'm picking! (It's the undead one; I'm a sucker for Army of Darkness).

But for most of them, the boons after transformation level 1 aren't offering enough to offset the increased flaw. So I could totally see a player getting to vampire level 1, and just parking it there to avoid the problems later levels will cause. That's probably a niche case, though, and honestly what they've accomplished here is impressive enough all on its own.

This is probably the high point of the book for me! When we get back, we'll discuss Chapter 6: Advanced Backgrounds!

 

[Sparky McDibben]

Alright friends and neighbors, Sparky comin' at you again with another blisteringly spice take!!! Get your blood pressure checked annually if you're over 30. That advice about saved my life last week, so I wanted to pay it forward.

Alright, heavy stuff's out of the way, so let's dig into the advanced backgrounds! Chapter Six of the campaign guide is a way to have your background level up with you. I am not a huge fan of scaling backgrounds, and I am less so a fan of the fiddly way they went about it. Basically, you have a couple of background abilities, and you can add a Profession Die to those rolls (this die scales upward as you advance your background, capping out at a d10). The way they scaled it makes the Profession Die roughly analogous to your proficiency bonus (average die values approximate the proficiency bonus). I would have really preferred just giving them expertise in one or both of their background skills, personally, as that's easier to track on the character sheet. You can also gain Talents that let you add your Profession Die to other rolls in niche situations (which are also difficult to remember and harder to note on the character sheet).

The actual advancement idea isn't bad, but to my mind, is properly the place of either a party stronghold or an aligned faction. In fact, having backgrounds for the actual factions would probably have been a better implementation (something similar to Ravnica's approach, albeit with a toned-down empowerment). Tying it into Renown would have also been a good idea, but none of these are really broached, so what you're left with is a part of your character that represents their past having continual, fiddly, and hard-to-remember impacts on the character's present.

I personally hate this and no thanks.

Alright, now we move onto the Geography of Etharis. This is a breakdown by region of the major areas of the continent. Before I get into it, though, check out this gorgeous two-page spread:

Sir, this is a Wendy's....​

The art here goes a long way, in my mind to making the lore usable. It's evocative, thematic, and consistent with imagery and style. Well done on the art direction.

Alright, as for the actual lore, we get several main regions:

• The Burach Empire - This is basically the Empire from Warhammer Fantasy; humanocentric, crumbling under constant assaults, and fallen on hard times. They used to have a super-awesome divinely-fueled Emperor, and now they've got a 12-year-old kid. They need some help. (They're the knights-and-cannons bunch in the art above)​
• The Ostoyan Empire - Originally breakaway remnants of the Burach Empire, these guys are now basically Ravenloft. They're run by vampires, and hordes of the undead are battling to besiege the Burachs. Not great. (They're the vamp-daddies in the art above)​
• Charneault Kingdom - Magical elf kingdom meets fantasy France.​
• The Valikan Clans - Fantasy vikings; regional threats include magical forest fires and crazy druids who worship the World Serpent​
• The Castinellan Provinces - Fantasy post-Reconquista Spain. Everybody here loves wine and warfare. Includes the fantasy Inquisition--​

Not quite

There we go​

• City of Morencia - Fantasy Venice. Doesn't really have a good built-in regional conflict.​
• City of Liesech - Fantasy no-friggin'-clue. City run by a bunch of secret vampires, waging war with a sickness-spreading aberration in the harbour. Lots of doctors, no cures.​

I'm not going to go into the lore as a deep dive. There's some decent bits in there, but because this review is already too in-depth, and this chapter is 72 pages long. Instead I'm going to give y'all my high level thoughts on it.

My main problem with these constructions is that they omit a lot of the actually interesting stuff about the places they're based on. For example, in real-world Spain, there were tons of complicated internal factors that gave rise to the real-life Inquisition, and the personalities involved are fascinating. Torquemada still lived in a monk's cell even as he ordered men and women burnt alive. These are big, complex stories that have way too much humanity to them to be easily boiled down to "Inquisitors bad because an angel told them so." Also, how you gonna have fantasy Spain with no bullfights? No Basques? No Moorish artefacts like at Granada? It takes a beautiful and tragic tapestry of vastly interesting stories and flattens it to a one-dimensional trope.

Ew. It feels like if you look hard enough you can see where the serial numbers still show.

However....

They're trying to give you a bunch of places to play in, where you can fill in the blanks. This is, after all, largely a similar approach to what Kobold Press does. I think KP does it better, mind you, but it's the same process. So I can cut them a little slack on paint-by-numbers fantasy Europe because they're trying to create a grand scope. Besides, there are some noteworthy pieces in the lore here. The Charneault kingdom has an interesting fusion of elven and Arthurian tropes, some fun toyetic elements like creepy supernatural mists, and evocative local villains in the Dark Elves (not drow - these guys are more like a subfaction of elves). Liesech is caught between two horrible sets of monsters deploying some of the worst weapons imaginable against each other. The dead city below Ostoya is interesting and I want to know what's down there.

However....

They largely don't do a good job communicating "HERE IS THE ADVENTURE" to the DM. This is largely because they're talking out both sides of their mouths. They want players to pick up this book (more sales, so here's where the transformations are), and DMs (more more sales, so here's where the lore is). But because of that, they have to elide or obfuscate the adventure material. See here:

​

That's trying to tell the DM "Hey, those creepy plague doctors? They're working for the weird aberration that started the plague, bro." But they can't come out and say that because spoilers. I hate this crap. I am buying this book for usable adventure hooks, not guesswork. I do enough of that when I figure out my monthly budget. Either make the book DM-centric, or firewall one section away from the players. Slap a big ol' spoiler warning over that nonsense, so I can quickly reference the material I need to prep an adventure. Oy veh!

And that would be my last problem with this lore.

However.....

OK, the conflicts. We need to talk about these, because it ties into the flattening of actual history I mentioned earlier. There's one, maybe two per area; Morencia and Castinellan don't really have any. Moreover, they feel...flat? Like, the Valikan Clans have some internal conflicts because some of them are working for these crazy human-sacrificing druids, causing them to go raiding constantly. But Vikings went a-viking because they needed stuff to live on. They didn't do it on a lark, or to be cool, and that seems to be the general vibe of these guys. Some of them are also into slavery, both as an economic incentive and because they need someone to give to the crazy druids. And that doesn't give me much to work with except, "Vikings show up and go RAWR!" That works once or twice, but after that? Gets old fast. There's no depth to the conflict, because there's no depth to the cultures, either. There's just not much to work with here.

Alright, that's enough kvetching from me. I give the lore an overall 5/10 - it's better than nothing, and it's a decent-ish base to start from. But I was hoping to be impressed here, and this section didn't do that.

 

[Libertad]

One thing I like with the two-page spread art is that it shows that you can have a dark fantasy setting that is still high magic in feel. It's been common for many such settings to go for the low fantasy feel where magic, nonhumans, and the like are rare, often mythical things. And while that does work, it's not necessarily the default. Shadow of the Demon Lord is another good dark fantasy setting that handles this IMO, as they were once a typical standard fantasy setting...that is suffering from an overwhelming extraplanar threat from the aforementioned demons.

I do agree in not being a fan of the scaling backgrounds. IIRC the Player's Guide did a similar thing with weapons, which have Advanced Weapons, with various weapons that are basically more powerful than the PHB ones with larger damage dice and stuff. It does suffer from a "let's make the numbers bigger, that'll be cooler!" mentality.

Ghostfire is working on a region sourcebook as their next KickStarter: the Valikan Clans, specifically. Which feels an odd choice, as I expected their first big setting expansion to focus on one of the two big empires.

I do feel ya on the flat feeling of Fantasy Spain. I have a friend who studies the history of that country, and a lot of people don't do the country justice in covering just how much neat stuff there is in its history. Then again, a lot of fantasy author's focus on neat stuff in Medieval Europe really falls off a cliff once they venture outside England/Britain, so it's a larger problem on that front.

 

[Sparky McDibben]

One thing I like with the two-page spread art is that it shows that you can have a dark fantasy setting that is still high magic in feel. It's been common for many such settings to go for the low fantasy feel where magic, nonhumans, and the like are rare, often mythical things. And while that does work, it's not necessarily the default.

An excellent callout! The book certainly feels like the world is magical, which helps it fit the 5E milieu.

Alright, y'all! We're covering two chapters today: Factions of Etharis and The Etharis Pantheon. Let's get cracking!

Factions of Etharis is five pages long (including two full page art spreads). This covers five large factions that are, essentially, the group patrons from Tasha's. We get a mages' guild, a thieves' syndicate, a mercenary company, a free trading company, and a priestly / knightly order. All of these are given a quick four-paragraph thumbnail sketch, together with some "what do they actually do," and then a couple of potential antagonistic hooks, too.

This isn't bad, but I really was hoping for some concise, easy-to-read, and easy-to-implement adventure ideas per faction. I also would have like some kind of scaling rewards for being part of those factions, so that there's a mechanism for the faction to help them.

The Etharis Pantheon, unsurprisingly, has no gods. That's because all the gods are dead, of course, but it does have a bunch of arch-angels and arch-demons, which serve the exact same function. And I mean the exact same. They provide your cleric their spells, offer omens and tidings, and can intervene on behalf of the cleric, too.

And this really is the crux of my problems with Grim Hollow. They make big, bold, awesome choices (Kill the gods! Make the world dark!) and then fail to deliver on them as a meaningful part of play. If you're going to kill the gods, then follow through. No clerics. Or maybe clerics can't get spells above spell level 3. "Priests" don't have magic, and all their power comes from their community (not in a metaphysical way, but rather as a "pillar of the community" way). The closest you can get is a celestial-patron warlock or a divine soul sorcerer. If you're going to have a dark world, come up with a way to handle darkvision. The frustration I'm feeling is entirely a product of looking at this setup and going, "Heck yeah! That looks so awesome!" and then seeing the payoff and going, "Wait, that's it?"

We also get some elemental gods and some cosmic horror entities. These are not very detailed and feel like kind of an afterthought.

Y'know what? Screw it, we're going to do three chapters tonight!

Ah! Ah! Ah!​

Chapter Nine covers Renowned Characters of Etharis! This does triple duty, highlighting 1) the kinds of stories you can tell in Etharis, 2) the kinds of characters that fit here, and 3) some NPCs for the DM to drop in. These feel a little like someone said, "Hey write me up like ten backstories for some characters, and give 'em some crossover," and then they just put those backstories into the book. I know they didn't actually do that, but that's what it feels like - scattershot.

I will, however, give them credit for making each character feel like they come from a distinct place, and that each distinct place has distinct tones attached to it. That's not easy, and well done!

Next time, we're going to hit the DM's section. See you then!