Under a Crooked Moon

 Well, I had a bit of a splurge today on 3rd party D&D content.

Having been entranced by the animated trailer, I decided to just grab the Crooked Moon set on D&D Beyond. I've actually been kind of obsessing over Legends of Avantris' next big project (which just broke some crowdfunding records,) Neon Odyssey, which is a huge 5.5e overhaul to go full space opera (something I've really been wanting as a more committed alternative to Spelljammer) but I'm always really into horror elements in D&D, and while I've enjoyed Ravenloft: Horrors Within, the 5.5 update to Ravenloft unfortunately has a huge amount of overlap with Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, and while the new stuff in the book is great, there's also a lot of stuff that's only tweaked or just fully reprinted.

Crooked Moon provides a new campaign setting - which, honestly, is the part I'm least likely to actually use, as I tend to prefer doing stuff in my own homebrew settings - but also has a ton of new subclasses, species, feats, backgrounds, and monsters.

What has pleasantly surprised me, though, in its focus on Folk Horror, is a particular focus on a kind of Americana. There's for sure plenty here you could use for a more traditional European Folk Horror, but there are elements here that recall the aesthetic of the United States in that 1880s-1930s era that feels oddly homey to me (no, I'm not a hundred years old, but I grew up in a house built in 1896 down the street from a little Main Street-like area that still looks a bit like it did at the turn of the 20th Century).

As a few examples:

There's a Bard subclass themed entirely around Hobo culture from the 1930s, including inscribing things with Hobo Code, the ability to create a magic bindle that works like a Heward's Handy Haversack, and summoning a ghost train to give you and your party a ride across the battlefield.

There's also a Rogue subclass themed around gambling (which I feel gives it a bit of a Wild West vibe) in which you can set two of your Sneak Attack dice aside to roll for extra bonus effects (and you can also fight with a magical deck of cards).

There's also a high-level boss monster (who can also be a Warlock patron) that looks like a big, monstrous clown balloon like something out of Over the Garden Wall.

And, of course, there's a legendary ghost train you can fight (it's only CR 4, but then, the Phantom Train in FFVI comes pretty early on in that game too).

The two volumes aren't cheap even in digital form, but they're also pretty hefty, and I've only really skimmed it so far.

One of the coolest ideas in it is that, at least for the non-legendary monsters, every one of them has a secret weakness. It's sort of up to the DM to determine how easy it is to figure out that weakness, but the weaknesses can really transform a battle. For example, there's an undead ferryman who sails around in a coffin (which can go over land as well as water,) and if you pay his toll, he'll immediately be charmed by you and offer you and others a ride.

In terms of presentation, the art here is just as good if not even more ambitious than stuff WotC publishes. Now, sure, that's superficial, and I haven't delved super deep into how balanced and well-designed everything is.

Still, my initial look over the subclasses and species options leads me to conclude that, while some might lean toward being over-designed a bit, they have really solid concepts, basically without exception. There's a Wizard subclass that lets you play a real (esoteric) alchemist, which would be 100% perfect for members of a specific faction in my homebrew world.

While I'll certainly go through the specifics of its Druskenvald setting, I'm mainly thinking of how I can pillage this all for my own setting. My setting, Sarkon, has a bit of a technologically anachronistic feel to it because of an insane rate of progress (basically compressing the real world's technological developments from, like 1750 to 2000 into the span of forty or fifty years,) but there are regions that really work perfectly with this stuff, particularly one area that is meant to feel like the American West, and while a lot of that Western genre focuses a lot on the initial expansion, I do think there's a lot of interesting stuff to be set in that Dust Bowl-era West as well (I was a big fan of Carnivale way back in the day).

It'll likely be a while before I get to really implement this stuff in a game I run, as my current campaign is super-high-level and has a ton of epic stuff the party needs to get through before we can conclude the story (I'm trying to hold myself to no more than 6 months at level 19 and 6 months at level 20, but we'll see).

But given that I've been itching to get back to my homebrew world, and that I always love spooky vibes, I think I can get a ton out of these books.

(I also have a futuristic version of my setting that the Neon Odyssey books will serve well, so if I like what I use out of this, I'll probably get those if and when they go on D&D Beyond.)