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Gackling Moon
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
May 25, 2024
Very decent, with fantastic minimalist presentation. Overall rpg content is very hit and miss - some areas and concepts are fascinating, whereas others feel like they were created by arbitrarily slapping notable adjectives and common nouns together. Any section where Goblins are mentioned feels like an immediate quality dip compared to the rest of the book, especially the rare passages where it feels like the description takes the tone of someone who hasn't realised culture has advanced since 2012. I don't think it was as fantastic as Stuart's other works, but it's still better than most fantasy ttrpg settings.
September 22, 2024
I regret backing this book. I’d heard so many good things about the author’s previous work, and was encouraged to help kickstart this new rpg setting / art book. It promised to be both a usable setting and a work of strange fiction, weird lands, and fantastic ideas. I believe it fails (sometimes incredibly) at both.
The book is so dense with ideas and yet each idea feels like an empty room. It lacks almost any function as a game setting for the casual GM, and as a plain work of fiction it’s too dry to be perused with any real enjoyment. It’s like reading a 500-page Wikipedia article written about your 4-year-old’s imaginary friend, or a medical school thesis on an idea your brother-in-law had while stoned - a slog for empty calories.
Often while reading, I got a feeling as though they ran out of time making the book: There are typos, grammatical errors, a lack of communication between the prose and illustration, and a layout that rivals “ongoing rtf doc of random ideas” for readability.
The art in the book is fantastic but feels so separate from the writing; it rarely feels like it’s enhancing or elucidating the prose, rather showing some tiny, unconnected aspect of the world that, though mostly unusable in a GMing sense, is fascinating and provocative. The prose and illustrations sometimes felt like two separate takes on an idea were shuffled together almost randomly, with the hope that one would inform the other. Actually, I’d prefer an expanded art book of the illustrations to what they came up with here: The art is more evocative than the writing IMO, because the writing often feels like a random word generator set to “hipster gonzo” while the pictures suggest so much more of each locale with so much less space taken.
The formatting is the most god awful trash formatting. It was like reading House of Leaves if House of Leaves was a book report on House of Leaves written by a bored maniac with zero experience in UX design. Words are crammed onto pages to the point of challenging basic structural integrity, pouring over onto new pages with no care for form or function. Just constant blocks of words strangled together into half-poetic ghettoes of paragraphs. A textbook of vomit organized in neat rows, pointing at nothing. Flipping a page is a harrowing venture - you might smack face first into a wall of text so thick you want to give up on the spot.
The IDEAS though. I WANT to like this book based on the strange and intriguing IDEAS. But I eventually found that to be impossible: the book is a collection of suggestions and gestures at fantastical (sometimes wonderful!) ideas, amounting often to little more than a shrug at what’s possible. As a GM, I not only wonder “how do I run this?” but also “what do I even run? What actually matters? How is this gameable?” For a system-agnostic setting to be usable for a GM, I believe it needs to create a balance of powers in conversation around a central doctrine of laws or physics. I can add the antagonists, the mechanics, the stat blocks - but I NEED to have a world where limitations (of law, society, magic, physics…) are clear so that each choice and consequence need not feel like a surprise twist or random outcome.
As a work of fiction, the ideas are so out there and so poorly connected that they feel like a basket of deus ex machina rescued from the scrap heap - so gonzo, so untethered to a central reality or law that it felt impossible to feel any dramatic stakes, or the outline of where the tension of restriction might provide the seeds of a plot or quest.
I’d love to read someone’s analysis of this book, or watch a liveplay of the setting. CAN it work? Am I the limiting factor here? I want to love and champion incredible swings at fantastic fiction like this, but I feel Gackling Moon is a whiff and inevitably unworthy of that devotion of time and brain space.
The book is so dense with ideas and yet each idea feels like an empty room. It lacks almost any function as a game setting for the casual GM, and as a plain work of fiction it’s too dry to be perused with any real enjoyment. It’s like reading a 500-page Wikipedia article written about your 4-year-old’s imaginary friend, or a medical school thesis on an idea your brother-in-law had while stoned - a slog for empty calories.
Often while reading, I got a feeling as though they ran out of time making the book: There are typos, grammatical errors, a lack of communication between the prose and illustration, and a layout that rivals “ongoing rtf doc of random ideas” for readability.
The art in the book is fantastic but feels so separate from the writing; it rarely feels like it’s enhancing or elucidating the prose, rather showing some tiny, unconnected aspect of the world that, though mostly unusable in a GMing sense, is fascinating and provocative. The prose and illustrations sometimes felt like two separate takes on an idea were shuffled together almost randomly, with the hope that one would inform the other. Actually, I’d prefer an expanded art book of the illustrations to what they came up with here: The art is more evocative than the writing IMO, because the writing often feels like a random word generator set to “hipster gonzo” while the pictures suggest so much more of each locale with so much less space taken.
The formatting is the most god awful trash formatting. It was like reading House of Leaves if House of Leaves was a book report on House of Leaves written by a bored maniac with zero experience in UX design. Words are crammed onto pages to the point of challenging basic structural integrity, pouring over onto new pages with no care for form or function. Just constant blocks of words strangled together into half-poetic ghettoes of paragraphs. A textbook of vomit organized in neat rows, pointing at nothing. Flipping a page is a harrowing venture - you might smack face first into a wall of text so thick you want to give up on the spot.
The IDEAS though. I WANT to like this book based on the strange and intriguing IDEAS. But I eventually found that to be impossible: the book is a collection of suggestions and gestures at fantastical (sometimes wonderful!) ideas, amounting often to little more than a shrug at what’s possible. As a GM, I not only wonder “how do I run this?” but also “what do I even run? What actually matters? How is this gameable?” For a system-agnostic setting to be usable for a GM, I believe it needs to create a balance of powers in conversation around a central doctrine of laws or physics. I can add the antagonists, the mechanics, the stat blocks - but I NEED to have a world where limitations (of law, society, magic, physics…) are clear so that each choice and consequence need not feel like a surprise twist or random outcome.
As a work of fiction, the ideas are so out there and so poorly connected that they feel like a basket of deus ex machina rescued from the scrap heap - so gonzo, so untethered to a central reality or law that it felt impossible to feel any dramatic stakes, or the outline of where the tension of restriction might provide the seeds of a plot or quest.
I’d love to read someone’s analysis of this book, or watch a liveplay of the setting. CAN it work? Am I the limiting factor here? I want to love and champion incredible swings at fantastic fiction like this, but I feel Gackling Moon is a whiff and inevitably unworthy of that devotion of time and brain space.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews