The Mucklands Sandbox Campaign Setting (2025) is the real centerpiece of the set. It’s a massive 434 pages exploring, hex by hex, the massive Mucklands map. There are years of adventure in this book, all arranged around emergent play (that is, players decide to do something or interact with someone and their choices and the random tables unfold a story on the fly).
The bulk of the book is divided into Regions, which are further carved up into Settlements, Sites, Points of Interest, Zones and Lairs. There is a little bit of squishiness in these categories (what is the difference between a Site and a Point of Interest again?) but for the most part the divisions are workable. All the details, along with NPCs, rumors and vibes are all laid out in prose, which is nice to read but maybe a bit harder to parse on the fly. There are three main categories for quests, too, which is helpful. Hijinks are silly, Doom and Gloom are not and Derring-Do jaunts split the difference (I like how the overall brightness of Eem tends to make the dark bits darker, but also more accessible in a way). Quests are mostly seeds or hooks that work with local features, but some have more elaborate structure, which is nice.
My favorite bits are in the back. I love the Special Quests. Two allow players to cross paths with characters and events from the Rickety Stitch comics (see tomorrow’s post). The third is an over-arching, campaign length quest to stop the resurrection of a serpent god. I love the way they approached structuring this in particular and would have welcomed a dozen more of these. To a certain degree, the Factions section, which I also thoroughly enjoy, provides this by detailing what they’re up to and what they want. I like the openness of the main wilderness guide, but these sort of narrative maps or webs are really helpful in drawing material out, especially in something so massive.
But that’s a quibble. So long as the GM reads a bit before the session, exploring the Mucklands will be smooth as mud. The slippery kind, not the getting stuck kind.
