This is a pretty vast wilderness setting, ripe for exploration. The earlier companion book, Jonril: Gateway to the Sunken Lands, was designed as a hub from which expeditions depart and the prosperity of the city implied a great amount of wealth that was awaiting extraction from the jungle. And it’s true — gemstones, exotic wood, animal specimens, honey and more await explorers, as do a plethora of creature and mysterious tribal groups.

The Sunken Lands are dense, magically mutable jungle and the book basically takes the random tables of Midkemia’s city projects and applies them to a jungle hex crawl. A few bespoke locations are included in the mix, including the temple complex of the antagonistic People of the Pit (who created headless zombie thralls by feeding heads to their god), but for the most part, you’re rolling on nested tables several times to find out what exactly the players have come across. There’s a frankly massive number of possible encounters. Lots involve monsters and combat. Others are more tranquil, like encountering the peculiar species of butterflies. Oh, and the four-armed, purple ogres are just called Purples, which I love.

A lot of the richness of this book is down to its author, Rudy Kraft, who notably worked on both Griffin Mountain and Snake Pipe Hollow for Chaosium (and precious little else, alas). There isn’t quite the level of mystery or social interaction as, say Griffin Mountain, but there is more to work with here than your average hexcrawl. I really like the number of commercial activities players are offered (even if they are, you know, destructively capitalistic). Logging and mining seem like fun logistical problems in this environment, instead of a slog. And those activities will inevitably put players in contact (and at odds) with the locals. From there, hijinx. It’s a good formula.

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Longtime followers will know how much I love the Midkemia approach to cities, as laid out in Cities as a mechanical system, then presented as bespoke locations in Carse and Tulan of the Isles (all of which were later reprinted by Chaosium). Those are large cities. The idea here is to create a number of small settlements players can encounter on the road. We have a desert oasis, a smuggler’s cove, a hill fort, a trading village, a mining camp and, my favorite, a roadhouse on a forest path.

Each consists of a detailed map with keyed building and point of interest descriptions. There is also a general history. The stated intent is to create places that feel established and lived in, and I think the authors succeed nicely. This is particularly true of the roadhouse, which is the smallest settlement in the book, basically the inn, a granary, a couple farms and a small chapel hugging a well-trafficked road. But it feels well-worn. There are only a handful of people loitering about (or residing permanently at the road house as staff) and there is a strong sense of their daily lives in the brief descriptions.

Like the places it depicts, a workhorse sourcebook. I’d definitely use it.

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The book primarily details Tulan Castle, which is located at the site of Old Tulan, a settlement abandoned after the Night of Terror, a disastrous conflict between wizards. The castle has since become a habitation for monsters of many types, though they avoid the titular black tower, where the vampire mage Zorasis rules.

Dungeons were starting to get pretty sophisticated by 1981, but I gotta say, I am pretty surprised by this one. It feels extremely sensible. The castle history informs a lot of the space and it is overall a reasonable, comprehensible one. It doesn’t have a lot of the non-linear looping paths like a Jaquays dungeon, but it does embrace the idea dungeons being spaces that are continually repurposed by new inhabitants. You can feel the different histories. The monster selection seems reasonable, too. In this moment in time, you have a ton of really good and really bad dungeons on the market, so it is sort of a novelty to have one that is solidly, if unspectacularly, designed.

Extra fun: my copy is heavily scrawled by the previous owner(s), with notes on changes and the state of their session and all sorts of marginalia. I particularly enjoy how marked up the maps are. I suspect there are collectors who are horrified by this, but I find it delightful!

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That was more thoroughly covered in Heart of the Sunken Lands, which is essentially a big wilderness campaign — I unfortunately don’t own it (but if you do and you don’t want it anymore, lemme know!). I’m kind of dying to see how Midkemia handled a hex crawl!

Unfortunately, Jonril didn’t get the Chaosium treatment, which seems like a missed opportunity. This book uses elements that make it explicitly compatible with Flying Buffalo’s first Citybook, though, which I think is an interesting RPG city synergy. I also really enjoy this Richard Baker cover.

Finally, a quirk of my copy: the previous owner scrawled the word “Dead” in pencil over a number of entries. There are a lot of them, and most of them just details shops and shopkeepers, which makes me a little concerned for the moral compass of those long-ago characters.

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The book details Tulan, which, as the name implies, is spread across several connected islands. Unlike the other books, though, we also get a lot of information on the surrounding countryside as well as the nearby village of Hoxley. This is a natural step and gives you an idea of where Midkemia’s design evolution was going to go to next.

The Chaosium version has another Day Brothers cover, again depicting the mustache man, this time in an awkward pose on a dock. Taylor Overbey does good work on the interiors, particularly the detailed, pleasantly cluttered maps.

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Chaosium did a version of Carse in 1986 and its production values make it much more pleasing to use — particularly the maps of the city districts. Not my favorite Day Brothers cover — that mage looks weird and the S&M bartender is an odd choice. I quite like Marco Cardelli’s interiors, though. 

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This is Cities — the original 1979 edition, the 1983 edition that features more professional art and the 1986 third edition (which appeared in two versions, a totally generic one published by Chaosium and one with RuneQuest branding, published by Avalon Hill — this is the latter). They all consist of two parts intended as generic tools for fantasy RPGs — an encounter matrix and the character catch-up, though there is some small variation of the contents of both across the editions.

The encounters are meant to be rolled every few minutes of game time spent on the street, to simulate the bustle of the big city. This works very well and often creates compounding problems — people bumping into you, pickpockets, detours, assassination attempts and on — as a party tries to go from Point A to Point B. It takes a commitment to play like this, but I think it is worth it, potentially pulling your group in surprising directions if used judiciously.

The catch-up is a solo game to use when your character couldn’t make a session — you use these random tables to find out what they were up to while you were away, which is a fantastic, immersive gameplay tool. It ties Bushido (1979) for being, essentially, the first mechanical approach to character downtime.

I love having the opportunity to see the art evolve over time from crummy doodles to more professional work. I really enjoy Richard Becker’s work in the latter Midkemia books. Dan and David Day deliver a serious mustache on the Chaosium version (we’ll see more of that dude) while the late, great Kevin Ramos stippled his way through the interiors.

One downside to these books is the weird preoccupation in both the text and art for slave markets and seedy depictions of sex work. I’d love to see a modern take on these sorts of tables without that stuff.  

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