I wanted to like this book. Visually, it’s beautiful and unsettling, and conceptually, it’s interesting. But my main issue is the "cryptic" writing—which does succeed in evoking certain sensory feelings, yet becomes highly repetitive and poorly written once you get through a few passages. The writing is bad because it’s pompous without actually saying much. At times, it even feels like meaningless AI-generated slop.
Perhaps my biggest problem is that even though it occasionally sparks the GM’s creativity to build out the world, it demands far too much work. The author doesn’t help—they get in the way: there are no treasure tables, nothing interesting is happening, no faction dynamics, and the dungeons are grotesque museums with no cohesive gameable ideas. The GM has to insert everything that gives these grotesque visions any functional, playable structure.
As a result, the book comes off like an art project a teenager might have written in school—without much coherence or sense of game design. For example: one dungeon features an intriguingly described wheel, but the text ends by saying turning it does nothing. Imagine that multiplied across almost every dungeon. It’s frustrating.
That said, if you have the time, you can piece together a world with some semblance of sense—but it will take time. Compared to much smarter and less pretentious materials designed for actual play, like those from Dolmenwood, this book, in my opinion, ends up as little more than an attempt at edgy art that fails to fulfill its purpose as a real roleplaying game.
