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The Crooked Moon Hardcover Book
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
September 27, 2025
It’s a dangerous place…and even if you don’t survive, it doesn’t mean your adventure has ended…
The Crooked Moon: Folk Horror in 5E by Legends of Avantris is a nice new take of a ravenloft style horror game…along with the various elements you need to create characters…
To be clear…this is primarily a campaign setting but a majority of it is a campaign that would be run for a group. There are elements of the different counties and regions that you can throw at your players, but its main value is as an introductory campaign…
Fortunately there are many new options…depending on if the players wish to do something more along the vibe…or maybe it’s not event their choice…and theyll find themselves transformed by their new surroundings…
This embraces the fifth edition dnd rules but offers some new races and class variants to use…along with several new backgrounds, feats, and other paraphernalia that might entice foolish players to give this a try…
The art and maps in this book are wonderful and go well with the written material…
If you have a group that would be up for trying this as a campaign (or you have an idea for how to use this as a brief sojourn for your players), then I definitely suggest checking this out…
All manner of appropriate horrors and creations lie in way…from the monstrous to the undead to the created…
The Crooked Moon: Folk Horror in 5E by Legends of Avantris is a nice new take of a ravenloft style horror game…along with the various elements you need to create characters…
To be clear…this is primarily a campaign setting but a majority of it is a campaign that would be run for a group. There are elements of the different counties and regions that you can throw at your players, but its main value is as an introductory campaign…
Fortunately there are many new options…depending on if the players wish to do something more along the vibe…or maybe it’s not event their choice…and theyll find themselves transformed by their new surroundings…
This embraces the fifth edition dnd rules but offers some new races and class variants to use…along with several new backgrounds, feats, and other paraphernalia that might entice foolish players to give this a try…
The art and maps in this book are wonderful and go well with the written material…
If you have a group that would be up for trying this as a campaign (or you have an idea for how to use this as a brief sojourn for your players), then I definitely suggest checking this out…
All manner of appropriate horrors and creations lie in way…from the monstrous to the undead to the created…
April 15, 2026
This was a VERY interesting purchase for me, because, to be absolutely frank, I don't like D&D. I find it to be a terribly limiting system and an overly-accommodating world. Every player "Class" is just an aesthetic veneer draped atop a skeleton of "Here's how much damage you do in combat", and the sheer inundation of magic and the bizarre are too common-place to illicit any wonder (Is anything mysterious, fantastic or surprising when you can be an angelic being living next door to a half-dragon, and buy apples from an orcish druid that grows the apples out of thin air using magic? Why does anyone need to BUY food when anyone could learn 'goodberry' at first level if they bothered to become a druid? Do people take their clothing to the stream to wash them, or do they just cast prestidigitation as a cantrip?)
Heck, I hadn't even really heard of 'Legends of Avantris', the creators of Crooked Moon. I bought this book solely because it had a great kickstarter campaign and looked spooky, and I like spooky fantasy things.
So, with all of my preconceived dispositions towards D&D laid out on the table, what do I think of this book?
"This is a THICK book!" was my very first impression. It is hundreds of pages, large, and dense. It is good quality, and looks great, with fantastic presentation and art all throughout.
But what's IN this book?
There's a chapter that covers the concept of 'Crooked Moon', that being the setting of 'Druskenvald', an 'afterlife' plain of existence, representing a place the dead might possibly go to be reborn into a new life. The actual mechanics of this 'being reborn' are both specific and vague; there's a train that CAN bring souls to Druskenvald, but souls can also just show up on their own. They MIGHT be reborn as one of thirteen different species native to Druskenvald's thirteen provinces (more on this later), or they might just come as they once were. You COULD pop into existence as a fully grown adult, but maybe you also could be 'born' as a child in this new world, with no memory of who you once were. It's left deliberately open, I think, to serve however you and your players might require.
Druskenvald's thirteen provinces are notably distinct (The book even says that the weather, climate, and topography are unique from one another as if by magic, though a more critical reader might liken their mis-matched nature more to the lazy map-making of an MMO's zones). Each represents some kind of spooky fantasy theme. A few fit in very well with the 'Folk Horror' premise that the book is predicated on. There's a harvest land full of the spookiest fields of wheat and corn (and where 'scarecrow people' dwell), there's a nasty plagueland filled with rat-folk, and a spooky forest with evil tree people. To my eyes however, a few of the provinces seem out of theme. There's an underground spider-people kingdom that absolutely smacks of World of Warcraft's Nerubian empire, a victorian-steampunk london-land of industrialist werewolves (who have the curious curse of needing to maintain balance in their lives, or a big, two-head wolf dog comes and gets them. Huh?), as well as a frosted battle-scarred battle-land, and a kingdom of owl-people that like to stargaze. The entries for every zone are a mere few pages, containing a brief description, naming a few NPC's, and then introducing ten 'adventure hook' ideas.
This is where the book has sorely let me down, in the brevity of it's world details. Given that some of the thirteen zones don't seem at all 'folk horror-esque', I'd have much preferred a more narrowly themed, but more detailed world. What have stargazing owls got to do with Folk Horror? Tell me more about the land of Enoch, where there's creepy scarecrows!
The vast bulk of the book, covering over 300 pages, is dedicated to a full campaign, designed to take characters from level 1 all the way to 14 (or potentially 20)! Since this is clearly where most of the book's resources have been sunk, one could hope it's a banger of a campaign. As I said, I bought this book mostly for fun, rather than being a big fan of D&D, so I'm hardly the best expert to say whether or not the campaign bodes to be a good one. It LOOKS like it could be fun, being stuffed with great illustrations, lots of good organization, and has a wealth of pages covering all its details. Yet, even the campaign seems disinterested in the Crooked Moon's thirteen, specifically-themed provinces, because it doesn't take place in any of them! Instead it occurs entirely in a special, fourteenth zone, which seems to feature a tiny bit of all the rest. Do away with those silly, empty thirteen zones, and just bring some more detail to this one, say I! ...and that is, potentially, what the campaign does, so even if you don't plan on playing it, maybe it could be useful in that regard?
I WANT desperately to like this book, and have it be the siren that lures me into trying out and enjoying D&D, but in spite of its spiffy premise, it's still a hard sell. As the book itself says, horror is tough to bring to adventure fantasy. A normal human being will be terrified of little kids with scythes and scissors chasing them through a field of corn, but would a sorcerer who has fought dragons, or a battle-hardened warrior that's dueled with demons be equally challenged? Worse still I think is the fact that the players are given the option to play AS the creepy creatures! Why is a kingdom of eerie rat people going to scare you when you ARE one of the weird, plague-huffing rats? 'Wild West province' strongly features a casino run by a devil; in any other setting this would be creepy, but when the players could roll up on that casino as a bunch of imps and tieflings, seeing lucifer kicking back at the roulette wheel is just another tuesday.
The book is not wholly without promise. It's got a bestiary, item lists, new classes and spells, and I think one COULD make it work. My idea would probably be to have players establish backgrounds as all-human heroes, run them through a quick scenario in which they die, and then begin their Crooked Moon adventures proper by having them wake up in this strange new land, finding that they've transformed into doll-people, gargoyles, scarecrows, or what-have you. The eeriness would then arise from having to navigate this unfamiliar realm while also discovering dark secrets about their new selves. ...And yet, I'd still have to completely make up everything about what they're doing or where they are (unless I was running the book's campaign), because the actual setting details are so sparse, really only amounting to an inspirational mood-board.
So, there it is. I wanted to like it, and I kind of DO like it, and will enjoy having this neat-looking oddity sitting on my shelf, helping to weigh it down even more, but it has not been the fishhook I was hoping for that would make me finally want to take up the seat of being a D&D dungeonmaster. Maybe rabid fans of D&D will enjoy this much more than I, and will love being able to introduce their players to the possibility of being worgen- ah, I mean, 'curseborn', and have prestige classes with mildly spooky names.
Oh, I also got the kickstarter tier that came with a tarot card deck, and THAT was great. 10/10 for the tarot deck. Fantastic quality and fabulous art.
Heck, I hadn't even really heard of 'Legends of Avantris', the creators of Crooked Moon. I bought this book solely because it had a great kickstarter campaign and looked spooky, and I like spooky fantasy things.
So, with all of my preconceived dispositions towards D&D laid out on the table, what do I think of this book?
"This is a THICK book!" was my very first impression. It is hundreds of pages, large, and dense. It is good quality, and looks great, with fantastic presentation and art all throughout.
But what's IN this book?
There's a chapter that covers the concept of 'Crooked Moon', that being the setting of 'Druskenvald', an 'afterlife' plain of existence, representing a place the dead might possibly go to be reborn into a new life. The actual mechanics of this 'being reborn' are both specific and vague; there's a train that CAN bring souls to Druskenvald, but souls can also just show up on their own. They MIGHT be reborn as one of thirteen different species native to Druskenvald's thirteen provinces (more on this later), or they might just come as they once were. You COULD pop into existence as a fully grown adult, but maybe you also could be 'born' as a child in this new world, with no memory of who you once were. It's left deliberately open, I think, to serve however you and your players might require.
Druskenvald's thirteen provinces are notably distinct (The book even says that the weather, climate, and topography are unique from one another as if by magic, though a more critical reader might liken their mis-matched nature more to the lazy map-making of an MMO's zones). Each represents some kind of spooky fantasy theme. A few fit in very well with the 'Folk Horror' premise that the book is predicated on. There's a harvest land full of the spookiest fields of wheat and corn (and where 'scarecrow people' dwell), there's a nasty plagueland filled with rat-folk, and a spooky forest with evil tree people. To my eyes however, a few of the provinces seem out of theme. There's an underground spider-people kingdom that absolutely smacks of World of Warcraft's Nerubian empire, a victorian-steampunk london-land of industrialist werewolves (who have the curious curse of needing to maintain balance in their lives, or a big, two-head wolf dog comes and gets them. Huh?), as well as a frosted battle-scarred battle-land, and a kingdom of owl-people that like to stargaze. The entries for every zone are a mere few pages, containing a brief description, naming a few NPC's, and then introducing ten 'adventure hook' ideas.
This is where the book has sorely let me down, in the brevity of it's world details. Given that some of the thirteen zones don't seem at all 'folk horror-esque', I'd have much preferred a more narrowly themed, but more detailed world. What have stargazing owls got to do with Folk Horror? Tell me more about the land of Enoch, where there's creepy scarecrows!
The vast bulk of the book, covering over 300 pages, is dedicated to a full campaign, designed to take characters from level 1 all the way to 14 (or potentially 20)! Since this is clearly where most of the book's resources have been sunk, one could hope it's a banger of a campaign. As I said, I bought this book mostly for fun, rather than being a big fan of D&D, so I'm hardly the best expert to say whether or not the campaign bodes to be a good one. It LOOKS like it could be fun, being stuffed with great illustrations, lots of good organization, and has a wealth of pages covering all its details. Yet, even the campaign seems disinterested in the Crooked Moon's thirteen, specifically-themed provinces, because it doesn't take place in any of them! Instead it occurs entirely in a special, fourteenth zone, which seems to feature a tiny bit of all the rest. Do away with those silly, empty thirteen zones, and just bring some more detail to this one, say I! ...and that is, potentially, what the campaign does, so even if you don't plan on playing it, maybe it could be useful in that regard?
I WANT desperately to like this book, and have it be the siren that lures me into trying out and enjoying D&D, but in spite of its spiffy premise, it's still a hard sell. As the book itself says, horror is tough to bring to adventure fantasy. A normal human being will be terrified of little kids with scythes and scissors chasing them through a field of corn, but would a sorcerer who has fought dragons, or a battle-hardened warrior that's dueled with demons be equally challenged? Worse still I think is the fact that the players are given the option to play AS the creepy creatures! Why is a kingdom of eerie rat people going to scare you when you ARE one of the weird, plague-huffing rats? 'Wild West province' strongly features a casino run by a devil; in any other setting this would be creepy, but when the players could roll up on that casino as a bunch of imps and tieflings, seeing lucifer kicking back at the roulette wheel is just another tuesday.
The book is not wholly without promise. It's got a bestiary, item lists, new classes and spells, and I think one COULD make it work. My idea would probably be to have players establish backgrounds as all-human heroes, run them through a quick scenario in which they die, and then begin their Crooked Moon adventures proper by having them wake up in this strange new land, finding that they've transformed into doll-people, gargoyles, scarecrows, or what-have you. The eeriness would then arise from having to navigate this unfamiliar realm while also discovering dark secrets about their new selves. ...And yet, I'd still have to completely make up everything about what they're doing or where they are (unless I was running the book's campaign), because the actual setting details are so sparse, really only amounting to an inspirational mood-board.
So, there it is. I wanted to like it, and I kind of DO like it, and will enjoy having this neat-looking oddity sitting on my shelf, helping to weigh it down even more, but it has not been the fishhook I was hoping for that would make me finally want to take up the seat of being a D&D dungeonmaster. Maybe rabid fans of D&D will enjoy this much more than I, and will love being able to introduce their players to the possibility of being worgen- ah, I mean, 'curseborn', and have prestige classes with mildly spooky names.
Oh, I also got the kickstarter tier that came with a tarot card deck, and THAT was great. 10/10 for the tarot deck. Fantastic quality and fabulous art.
November 19, 2025
Mostly giving this a rating and review because the campaign story Mickey wrote is phenomenal. It was a delight to read.
November 18, 2025
Stupendous creativity and effort! I can't wait to run this campaign!
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews