I backed the book and started a let's read in the original thread on it before a dose of whooping cough put me on my back for two months and put paid to that project.
The book is exactly what it says on the tin. It's a campaign inspired by the bible. When I backed it, i was hoping it'd be a general guide to D&D in a biblical-era-inspired middle east. That's not what it is. The emphasis is very heavily on the biblical campaign, the setting exists only to support the campaign. Every little location in Canaan is covered extensively, but there's absolutely nothing about even large and significant cities like Tyre. Parthia is treated as one city surrounded by empty space on the map, Egypt only has a couple of locations, etc etc. Locations not relevant to the campaign are ignored - you have evocative places like the tomb of Alexander the Great marked on a map, but having no attention whatsoever paid to them in the text. The history is flaky in many places. Not just the timelines of things like the existence of Spartans or Cleopatra's death, but many smaller details stand out annoyingly for a history nerd like me - like the 'Parthian cataphract' stat block being for a horse archer when cataphracts were heavily armoured lancers often
supported by horse archers. There's near zero coverage of what the Roman, Parthian, Egyptian or even Judean societies were like, their social mores, how their religions and governments and economies worked, etc etc. It clearly seeks to immerse the player in the bible
story, not the biblical
world. For those keeping track at home,
Structurally, there's some issues with the campaign. It starts in Nineveh, but judging from the player content the great majority of PCs are assumed to be Judean, so your Nazirite or Zealot PC would have to be an expat. Some of the confrontations with the demons seem perfunctory. Naamah in Egypt in particular, while the scenario with the Gluttony demon seems like it's be really hard to run. PCs on a ship with 10 strangers who start to disappear? You'd need to run PCs with a truly exceptional level of plot immunity. And there's not really any mystery by this point - the PCs have followed all sorts of dark rumours to the ship, it's not like it'll be hard for them to spot the bad guy. The greed one looked the best to me, nice little dungeon crawl, while i like the idea of the Sloth one but it could turn very lethal very fast. If you have a few bad rolls or the party lacks area effects, or you hit this bit of the sandbox at low level, those groups of 4d4 demonic flies that each inflict a level of exhaustion unless you make a DC 16 Con save could leave you fatally weakened by the time you fight the actual demon. I'd like to have seen some of the demon encounters made bigger, placed on bigger maps, or perhaps some larger, unrelated-to-demon dungeons put in there. There's lots of small encounters that exist only to namedrop or easter-egg a bible story or personality, these eat up page space but consist of not much more than a couple of conversations and/or the PCs fighting a small group of fairly generic adversaries. This space could have been better used elaborating on the bigger encounters. A mile wide, an inch deep.
The whole crux of the campaign is the Gethsemane scene. Whether it soars or flops would be 100% dependent on how your group plays it, and the skill of the DM. It could be a really intense and non-standard campaign climax - you're supporting an ally in desperate emotional need who's being browbeaten by a gaslighting jerk rather than simply fireballing an enemy into submission. However, at the end of the day, what you're trying to support him to do is to submit to the most horrible and torturous death imaginable, so it's a bit difficult to know how it'd go. The writers seem to sense this and have you teleport off to fight the last two demons immediately after the crucifixion, but it seems rather perfunctory and tacked-on. It's as if they understood that the natural climax of the story was the crucifixion, but wanted to end on a big fight regardless, so they shoved one in there.
However, there's some good stuff here. I do like the idea of this parallel story of the demon hunt happening in the background of the more familiar biblical story and only intersecting at the end. Some of the big set-pieces are nice, some of the demon fights and the Library of Alexandria sequence, and the set-pieces about escaping prison or fighting as gladiators is a clever way to handle a campaign-ending TPK when your dice are unlucky. If you could pull off the Gethsemane scene successfully, it'd be one of those campaign moments you'd remember forever. The player material is a mixed bag, but the good is very good indeed. Where is Sticks To Snakes though? That's as biblical as you could possibly ask for in your magic spells but D&D hasn't seen it for several editions - surely this was the perfect book to bring it back in?
I do like it when the book gets a bit daring. It's not afraid to mess with history etc in the search for cool. Smuggling the Ark of the Covenant out of Jerusalem like something from a Graeme Hancock book. Changing history by potentially putting a Christian on the road to the Roman imperial throne hundreds of years before Constantine. Preserving the unicorn species! Fight demons in a deathtrap under the Great Pyramid or on top of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon! Having the PCs literally be the ones who kill John the Baptist at Salome's behest is something I would do my absolute best to bring about if I ran the campaign, it gives motivation and opportunity for redemption later. Besides, when the PCs meet Jesus, do they come clean about having killed his cousin?
(However, as
@Libertad mentioned Salome is written as very young, but what really rubbed me the wrong way is how she's portrayed as a very young temptress who levels false allegations of creepy behaviour against a much older and holy man in order to bring unjust retribution down on his head. That's ... not a good way to portray that dynamic, to put it mildly, and this should very much have been changed.)
There's problems here, some fixes required, lots of holes to fill, and you'd have to have a group who was committed to the central assumptions of the campaign. It's an unwritten expectation through the whole book that PCs will eventually become followers of Jesus, and it's a
written in-campaign assumption that Christianity Is Right. If players or DM can't buy into that, your game is going to struggle. If they can, and if the group is up to it, it could be a lot of fun and even genuinely moving in places.
Speaking as an atheist who was raised Christian but whose separation from Christianity was pretty easy and trauma-free, I'd find it ... weird. Playing a cleric of Yahweh, or having Joe across the table improvisationally roleplaying Jesus between mouthfuls of doritos. I'd cheerfully sign up to play the story (and the book had me mentally inventing PC ideas like the setting books that really grab my attention do), but the book is very reliant on everyone being on the same, Christian-centric, religious page, or at least being able to deal with it. And it's not just that non-Christians could disagree with Christians about this, it's perfectly possible that Christians could disagree with each other in-game too. After all, you''re handing power to the GM to put words in Jesus' mouth and that's not going to go down well with everyone. I think the intended audience for this was stated to be christian youth pastors etc running games for kids in their youth group, and it could work well for that (in my uneducated opinion). Regardless, a session zero is SOOOOO definitely required for this one, and it was good to see the book itself acknowledge that.
Art is generally very nice, except for the anachronistic cover. Quality is standard DTRPG print-on-demand (I think there was a higher-quality option but i missed that). There's a lot of sensible advice at the start for first-time GMs, which is a good move considering the target market. No play example though.
On the whole, flawed in places and interesting or intriguing in others. Probably not something i'd play if there was alternatives available simply because I'm not really the target market and speaking personally I'd find it odd playing D&D with real-world religions. Regardless, a mostly solid piece of work, especially for a first-time publisher. AND it came out bang on target date despite the pandemic, so kudos there.
that the pet dog stat block lets your dog heroically and tragically sacrifice itself for its master as a reaction, as a dog owner I do question whether dogs are entirely LAWFUL good... 
