Description
Unlock a Shadowy Archive!
DARKLY FANTASTIC MATERIAL FOR THE WORLD’S FIRST RPG
Within these dusty pages, uncover the secrets of the world—indeed, of the branches of the multiverse! Collected here are entire lost volumes of esoteric truths. Only for you, the Warlock Grimoire.
Dark revelations and wondrous testimonials of dark fantasy monsters and magic, locales and lore of Midgard:
- The very literal underbelly of the Crossroads city of Zobeck
- Miraculous and horrific details of the dead returned to life
- Oddities and revels that could come only from the courts of those twisted fey
- A shadow economy of crime thriving throughout the trade cities and merchant quarter
- Tentacled legacies of the dark gods, from the unwholesome jungles to ghoul-haunted hillsides
- Terrible truths on the ongoing practices of dread magicks
- Vivid accounts of magical disasters, badlands, and ruins
- Looming terror and majestic insights of the expansive Dragon Empire
- Visions of Yggdrasil, the World Tree, leading toward all points of the multiverse
- Even a tantalizing glimpse of the fabled City of Brass
- Plus 6 subclasses, 13 statted NPCs, 28 spells, 44 magic items, 44 monsters, and more!
The 300-page Warlock Grimoire presents the content from the first 10 issues of Warlock and includes an entire issue’s worth of new, never-before-seen lore and game elements, detailing life in the Ironcrags, recent events along the west coast of the Wasted West, the dedication and intensity of Perunalian archers, and the holy drive of the paladins of the Sun God.
Uncover the truths of dark fantasy for the Midgard campaign setting or for the worlds of your own creation!
Stephen Hurd –
So this is an interesting one to review… it’s basically the collected articles from Warlock #1 to Warlock #10. These articles expand the Midgard setting, and provide a lot of backstory, details, NPCs, monsters, player backgrounds, subclasses, magic items and even the Shade race. It’s all top notch content and gets a well deserved five stars.
The book also contains five new articles that didn’t appear in any Warlock issue, and the new content is top notch as well.
A wonderful surprise is that that’s a pretty well-done index which really helps navigate the content.
That said, there’s a few nits to pick at here.
First, it’s not clear from the listing here that this is not a “full sized” hardcover, but a pocket book size… just under 7×9 inches. I suspect it’s the same size as the Tome of Beasts pocket edition that just hit shelves, but I haven’t seen them together. This is fine since that makes it just a bit bigger than the Warlock issues, and the same art is carried through, though the layout has had some tweaks (all for the better). It does mean the font remains a bit smaller than some people may like though.
Next, the book is broken into six sections, “Lore and Storytelling”, “Adventure and Dungeoneering”, “Monsters”, “NPCs”, “Magic”, and “Player”. Unfortunately, this structure isn’t shown in the table of contents, and there’s no visible indication of the sections in the article layout. The table of contents is pretty much the opposite of the index… it’s hard to read since it’s in the same small font as the rest of the book, there’s no obvious order or structure to it, and unlike the tables of contents in the Warlock issues, the author isn’t listed. It’s better to go to the index than the table of contents. In the PDF, the ToC and Index parges are not linked, but the PDF has its own table of contents, and that one *does* have the headings. Unfortunately, the “Adventure and Dungeoneering” section is listed under the “Lore and Storytelling”. I expect they may revise the PDF to fix this though.
Lastly, two articles from Warlock issues are not included… Shawn Merwin’s “River Court Rogue’s Gallery” which has three NPCs from the River King’s court, and Dan Dillon’s “Amidst the Dust” which has a druid circle and the Vril items.
None of these nits are worth taking even a half star off though, it’s an excellent book and certainly worth buying for people who do not have the Warlock issues and are not Patreons.
Is it worth buying if you already do own the warlock issues though? That’s a trickier question. If you use the printed books, it’s almost certainly a yes. This is much easier to to pack, carry, reference, and generally deal with and I’m a lot more comfortable passing it to a player for reference. If you use the PDFs though, this boils down to one and a half issues worth of new content and a great index for the price of thee issues.
So for people who don’t have all ten Warlock issues, this is a no-brainer. For people who do and use the phyical books, this is a strong reccomend. For people who have the issues and use the PDFs, it’s a tough call… but you know you’ll but it eventually.
One last thing to mention is that once the Patreon gets to 1,111 subscribers, all back issue PDFs will be available for download by all patrons. If you primarily use PDFs and are missing some of the issues, you may be able to get most of this content by just waiting… but there’s no guarantee it will hit 1,111 patrons. I wouldn’t take the risk.