Review: Acid Death Fantasy

Is Luke Gearing too powerful? Perhaps. Luke’s latest book for the Melesonnia Art Council is Acid Death Fantasy, and it’s kind of hot. A setting book for the award winning Troika. Luke asks the question, “can you distill a setting down to a list of backgrounds, a list of monsters, and a really boss cover?” Let’s find out!

This book describes a fantasy world reminiscent of Dune, Dark Sun, Carcosa, or your other favourite fantasy desert pastiche. A short introduction, a little over a page of text, sketches the world for the reader. It’s enough to give you a sense of what’s going on: there is an opulent mega-city, smaller sultanates orbiting it, water is rare, nomads stalk the desert, there is a jungle full of sentient apes, lizard men, rotting giant mecha, basically all the good stuff.

All the Troika backgrounds help shape the world. Some are brief moments of specificity, like the Coated Man, a knight of sorts, doomed to an early death while covered in a sheet of plastic armour. Others hint at the nature of world, like the Refugee of the Past, a person waking up in this post-apocalypse. Many will help shape your particular game or campaign, like the Deposed Sultan, whose possessions included an adversary, and the title of one of The Thousand Sultanates. Almost all the backgrounds ask questions of the player in a way I think is both simple and useful when starting an open ended game.

In the monster’s section we learn of a world where Freshwater Grub’s plot grand schemes and criminal enterprise, giant worms like in Dune travel the desert, Warflock stalk the desert committing banditry with laser guns, and the husks of great ruined mecha mark the land. Once again the world is detailed in broad strokes, sometimes with strange specifics, sometimes with elements that are very open ended.

But then it all ends! A small list of things to do with this setting and a simple sultanate generator and we are done. I would have liked to have seen the map of the setting described more, like the hex map of Carcosa. More random tables to flesh out hte setting, perhaps. But the approach he took is clearly purposeful, mirroring that of Troika itself.

David Hoskins’ art in this book is really great. I wish like Troika proper all the backgrounds were illustrated! I would would have loved to see art for a Coated Man, Dune Rider, or Narrowman Nomad, to name a few. The same can be said of the monsters. This is a terse book, so more art would help flesh out some of the details of the setting, though perhaps that would calcify things that were meant to be up to the GM to think about.

This book was £26 to my door—that’s like a million Canadian dollars. Honestly, for 36 Monsters and 36 Backgrounds it feels like a lot of cash. Right? But, it’s a full colour hardback book. And it’s good—hard to put a price on that. I mean, at this point I would get anything Luke makes. He’s a safe bet. I enjoyed reading this book. Now I have got to play!