Review: The Crooked Moon

In October 2021, the popular tabletop RPG actual play channel Legends of Avantris began releasing episodes of their “Edge of Midnight” Dungeons & Dragons horror campaign series, with the first season of nineteen episodes concluding in May, 2022. A mini-season of four episodes released in February, 2024, followed by a second season of nine episodes running from April to July, 2024. At time of writing, Legends of Avantris has just over two and a half million YouTube subscribers. While the “Edge of Midnight” videos’ individual viewcounts peak around a half-million, most of the now thirty-two episodes hover somewhere in the tens of thousands of views. Their last video, the conclusion of the second season, states that there will be a third.

In October 2023—a year and a half after the first season concluded, but before the mini-season and the second—Avantris Entertainment (the RPG studio, merch company, and AP production team behind Legends of Avantris) launched a Kickstarter campaign for The Crooked Moon, an adaptation of “Edge of Midnight” into a lengthy adventure and sourcebook written for 5e, billed as not just ordinary horror but specifically a folk horror project. In addition to the multi-hundred page full-color hardback book, the campaign offered all manner of Kickstarter goodies: a tarot deck, a GM screen, miniature models of the major villains, digital assets for virtual tabletop programs, enamel pins, plushies, and thirteen different sets of polyhedral dice. The backer tiers ranged from a thirty-dollar PDF and sixty-five-dollar hardcover to a two-hundred-and-ninety-five-dollar deluxe set and seven-hundred-and-fifty-dollar “All In” box set. By the end of the campaign in early November, 2023, the project had raised just over four million dollars, an eye-watering sum.

By late 2024, the team had released an alpha version of The Crooked Moon to Kickstarter backers, and announced that the campaign would support two versions: one for original 5e (the 2014 release) and another for 5.5e (the 2024 edition). In late 2025, the project went out for fulfillment to backers in the United States; at time of writing, international fulfillment is ongoing.

A few weeks ago, I read The Crooked Moon for my RPG book club here in New York. While I read a lot of RPGs, both those for book club and more, The Crooked Moon held my attention in a way that others hadn’t. In part, this is due to my fascination with 5e and its third party culture, both as market research and as an anthropological window into a slice of RPG culture now somewhat removed from me (how was there a four million dollar Kickstarter campaign that I heard nothing about?). On another level, it’s an excellent case study, an examination of the work of an extremely popular and successful but still very new team, seeing how they approach and solve various problems and issues. And deep in my jealous little heart, I admit that I’m drawn to the dream of a project of such enormous scope and resources: if you had a cool four million to make a tabletop RPG book, what would you create?

Make no mistake: The Crooked Moon is ambitious. It clocks in at a gobsmacking six hundred and thirty-two pages, it covers huge swathes of territory and content, and it does it all with an extreme level of attention to detail and polish. It also kind of sucks! It falls into so many common traps and pitfalls across all levels of writing, editing, and development, it’s filled with cruft and junk, much of it proves extremely boring to read, and it only rarely delivers on its lofty promises. And yet, it has redeeming qualities! The good parts of The Crooked Moon are often striking in their quality and artistry, head and shoulders above the rest of 5e and contemporary Dungeons & Dragons, as well as many independent RPG releases. It introduces multiple genuinely new and compelling ideas—fewer of which are executed well, admittedly—but those new thoughts so often end up drowned in the familiar, the bland, and the uninspired. The quality and usefulness of the book veers wildly from chapter to chapter: where other RPG books typically demonstrate their value or lack thereof within the first few pages, The Crooked Moon kept me guessing throughout. I ran the full gamut of investment as I read, from bored to tears to mildly intrigued to genuinely engaged to hopping out of my chair with excitement. It is simultaneously just like every other 5e book, yet also unique in myriad ways. A grab-bag of a book, a kitchen-sink project with everything added, nothing left on the cutting room floor, The Crooked Moon’ s glut of content lends the book an overwhelming quality, a feeling of being buried beneath an unending tide of raw stuff. Now that I’ve finished it, though, I sort of can’t stop thinking about it. It is creatively aspirational, shockingly derivative, frequently gorgeous, horrifically disorganized, thoroughly bland, frequently tedious, highly polished, deeply inconsistent, typically painful, unintentionally hilarious, and—above all else—utterly gargantuan.

Let me be clear: as is, I would never run The Crooked Moon for one of my tables, and I would not recommend you run it for one of yours. And yet, it captures my imagination in a way other Dungeons & Dragons adventures have not. It is not well-designed, enjoyable to read, or pleasant to imagine in play, but I find it strangely compelling nonetheless. It’s tempting to compare the project to kusoge —“shit games” with cult popularity nonetheless—but The Crooked Moon is not some fumbled indie darling or retro diamond in the rough. Rather, it’s a project of massive scale and budget, the tabletop RPG equivalent of a AAA or even AAAA videogame, one that appears to be a smashing success yet falls apart the moment it’s subjected to any sort of examination. Let me try to explain.

First and foremost, The Crooked Moon flexes its budget. Every inch of a spread shines, rewarding both casual skims and close study. Graphic designer Jelke Ludolphij and lead art director Suzanne Helmigh, both experienced veterans of other high-budget third-party 5e projects, have each done exceptional work. Ludolphij manages to create a look that maximizes clean, straightforward, almost minimalist text and headers— The Crooked Moon feels more open and breathable than almost any other 5e project, save perhaps only the 5.5e Player’s Handbook —while also adhering tightly to the themes and mood of folk horror. His palette sounds boring, nearly all delicate beiges and browns, but on the page it frames and amplifies the text in a way that both soothes and complements the page. The book feels warm and weathered, but also cool and restrained. Its graphic elements bear that delicious quality of feeling simultaneously page-defining yet also invisible. Three particular favorite elements of mine include the pagination elements, the most subdued I’ve seen in a 5e project, that vary by chapter but never threaten to overwhelm; the quiet corner additions, added by hand, to the monster statblocks’ bounding boxes (which otherwise use simple default InDesign stroke options); and the added caps to bounding strokes at the top and bottom of tables, which resemble ears of wheat or frayed rope. Consistently, Ludolphij makes simple choices work well, options that would look cheap in another designer’s hands but here appear elegant. My only critiques are Ludolphij’s over-reliance on distressed Seventeenth Century-style fonts and a strong preference for centered headers—together, they create an unevenness in the classic double columns, with the smaller headers just a little too wiggly and distracting to fit smoothly. But still, these don’t sink the overall effect: an impressive harmony of hand-drawn folkloric imagery combined clean, minimalist lines, at once both smooth and rustic.

Helmigh’s contributions, too, deserve credit. The Crooked Moon includes a massive roster of artists—many of them featured in other Dungeons & Dragons projects, Magic: the Gathering cards, or similar nerd media—and spans a huge range of styles. In addition to the ubiquitous glossy-and-colorful 5e house style, the book also boasts a handful of artists more unique in their approach, and its these that produce the best work. The three standouts in particular are the jagged, energetic faux-woodcuts of Helmigh herself; the delightful, spooky, post-Cal Arts monsters of Holly “Sparrow” Lucero; and the atmospheric, apocalyptic, and many-textured work of Doomed Sarcoma. Critically, none of these three fits into the standard 5e wheelhouse, yet Helmigh deploys each so effectively that they outshine all the others, making the more ordinary villain portraits and dungeon setpieces feel like the odds one out. One perk of four million dollars, it turns out, is that unlike most third-party Dungeons & Dragons projects, you can commission each piece specifically for your book. Nowhere in The Crooked Moon will you find the sneaky Dean Spencer or grandfailure piece so common to other projects coming off Kickstarter or the DM’s Guild. While the sheer quantity of NPC portraits, monsters, magic items, and battle maps—each done up in dutifully saturated plastic hues—makes the book sag, Helmigh’s work as a director still impresses. Where a lesser project would end up feeling disjointed and haphazard in its look trying to bridge so many fashions and flavors, The Crooked Moon feels merely varied. By confining Sarcoma to solely individual full pages, herself to spot illustrations, and Lucero to one or the other (but nothing in between), Helmigh also manages to make the more extreme artists feel more distant, given their own space to thrive—by contrast, the blander 5e-styled pieces fill the middle, familiar pieces in familiar locations.

All this makes for a seamless, painless visual experience framed within and punctuated by intense atmosphere. The book remains bound up by 5.5e’s house style in its use of headers and typographical emphases, sadly, but within those bounds it performs consummately. On a copyediting level, too, The Crooked Moon adheres strictly and cleanly to the standards set by Wizards of the Coast. While I have my qualms with some of those choices as well, both the technical rules grammar and more open-ended descriptive text sit easily alongside any official release. In the general sphere of “high production value fancy-ass Dungeons & Dragons Kickstarter RPG books,” I’d say it’s done better than nearly all others.

On the one hand, this is nice to see: as a working designer and artist, it’s gratifying that enough money can eventually buy better taste, or at least buy long-term investment property facing good taste’s general direction. On the other hand, though, this visual design success makes The Crooked Moon’ s many fumbles, blunders, and outright failures all the more frustrating. While I have good things to say about the project, I also want to emphasize: this is a book riddled with problems, huge ones, which together reduce the work to something far less than the sum of its parts.

Illustrations by Doomed Sarcoma

While others prove far more damning overall, the issue I’ll open with is simultaneously visible from the table of contents yet also took me just under halfway through to fully realize. It’s a mistake that, to my mind, stands as deeply indicative of the broader arc of The Crooked Moon as an RPG book—an unforced error born from rigid adherence to the stylistic failures of 5e, the contrasting creative demands of being both cast member and game book designer, and what feels like a total lack of development editing in terms of organization and structure.

The situation emerges like this: The Crooked Moon opens with an overview of “Druskenvald,” the book’s campaign setting. While the first run of “Edge of Midnight,” the actual play series, was set in a variation of Ravenloft, the official Dungeons & Dragons setting (Avantris’s second, after “Curse of Strahdanya,” a predecessor to “Midnight” based on the classic Curse of Strahd) the later mini-season and second season shifted to Druskenvald proper. Minute differences between Ravenloft and Druskenvald abound, but the key facts remain simple: both are pastiche Gothic horror Halloween settings; where Ravenloft leans into Hammer Horror films and pseudo-medieval trappings, however, Druskenvald incorporates elements more suited to an early-Twentieth Century world, replete with flapper dresses, banjo music, and a big black train. A flavor of Gothic less Victorian than Southern, with a palette more distinctly American than European.

After its introduction, The Crooked Moon details each of Druskenvald’s thirteen provinces. While the actual content of these writeups is largely abysmal—more on that later—what matters is that these thirteen prove highly varied from the both the central folk horror pitch and also from each other. They include a land consumed with green-tinged plague inhabited by rat-people wearing beaked plague doctor masks (“Bubonia”), underground temple-complexes built in crystal caves inhabited by quasi-Ancient Egyptian crystal scorpion-people (“Nerukhet”), and a vast desert city inhabited by stylish, ghostly calacas skeletons (“Kalero”). After the overview, the book launches into its player options, doling out the usual heaping platefuls of species, backgrounds, subclasses, feats, more feats, and spells, all of which together take up some eighty pages. Notably, of the thirteen new species, one corresponds to each of the thirteen provinces: off-brand Skaven for the plague country, spider-people for the crystal scorpion caves, and groovy, ghostly skeletons for the Día de los Muertos city. While the subclasses, spells, and feats are a little more grounded and tonally centered, these provinces and species are not. They’re colorful and weird and outlandish—the kinds of thing that certainly fits the “Elemental Plane of Halloween” vibe Druskenvald leans towards, but stray rather far, I thought, from the central folk horror premise.

Well over a hundred pages into the book, the titular adventure finally begins. Or rather, the book states it begins, but it’s another thirty-five pages of background, lore, campaign configuration, summaries, and further character options before the actual adventure content. Following a quick introductory tutorial chapter (the classic “train journey gone awry”), The Crooked Moon introduces its main campaign setting, “Wickermoor Hollow,” and its central hub town, “Wickermoor Village.”

This gave me pause. Wait, I said. Hadn’t I already read the main campaign setting, the thirteen provinces of Druskenvald?

No, it turns out, I had not. In a breathtakingly wrongheaded decision, every single part of the adventure contained in The Crooked Moon takes place not in the myriad fantastical Halloween lands described over the first forty-odd pages, but rather solely within Wickermoor Hollow.

Truth be told, on my first read, I missed this detail until I was a few chapters deep into the adventure. Only after wondering multiple times when the various quest hooks and plotlines would take the adventures out of Wickermoor and into the wider world did I return to the adventure’s sprawling opening summaries to discover that “The entirety of The Crooked Moon adventure takes place within the isolated valley known as Wickermoor Hollow,” explicitly removed from the rest of Druskenvald. After leaving the first hundred and twenty pages—everything after the lore and player-facing options—those thirteen provinces are, collectively, mentioned a grand total of three times.

On first understanding, the revelation stunned me. Why do it this way? Why include so many pages of lore and worldbuilding that, for all intents and purposes, has no effect on the main adventure? Why mention so many outlandish realms to which the adventurers never journey? And if the project absolutely needed these thirteen vestigial realms detailed, why put them first?

The answer, I suspect, lies in three distinct but equally powerful urges: first, player-facing options are a selling point for Dungeons & Dragons projects on Kickstarter. While the six original adventurers of “Edge of Midnight” comprised some unusual-looking characters, they were largely existing rules species reskinned for other purposes, most prominently a semi-undead crocodile-man (a Zombie) and an animate scarecrow (a Warforged). But a massive crowdfunder requires huge draws not just for prospective GMs but also for players, thus necessitating the thirteen species. And since Wickermoor Hollow is mostly a rather low-fantasy sort of place (the correct choice for folk horror, in my view), those thirteen distinctly fantastical species required origins, thus necessitating the provinces. Through this lens, viewing the provinces not as their own intentional locations but merely extended set-dressing for the species, the decision starts to make more sense. The species are all familiar tropes—reptile-people, humanoid gargoyles, living dolls—and so building the thirteen provinces specifically to justify the existence of the species allows each to feel more unique, cramming in various fantasy-standard traits and qualities. Needless to say, these bolted-on bonus traits (not just ghouls but icy ghouls, not just bird-people but prophetic mystical bird-people, not just demons but demons with scorpion telsons) never push The Crooked Moon’ s added species to depths beyond simple gimmicks. They feel vestigial because they are vestigial, an extra addition for Kickstarter backers rather than something more essential.

As for the placement of the thirteen provinces first (rather than relegated to an appendix, or cut entirely) here emerges the second urge: to mimick the Wizards of the Coast house style. In nearly all Wizards-produced adventures and modules, the setting background information comes first—most notably, as The Crooked Moon’ s chief reference point, in Curse of Strahd. To place the background lore somewhere else would be to violate the standards handed down from on high, and, both as a product designed to appeal to a very large but very particular audience and as a work that struggles find anything resembling its own identity, The Crooked Moon cannot do so. Avantris needed the species to sell books, needed the worlds to justify the species, and needed to follow the Wizards organization model to appease the 5e purists. And so we get forty pages of lore on places we’ll never see, never get mentioned, and do not matter in the slightest.

The third and final urge is the simplest yet also the most pernicious: one of the provinces—“Pholsense,” a realm inhabited by gargoyles, particularly the city of Cyril—actually featured in the original “Edge of Midnight” run. The version that appears in The Crooked Moon is much changed from its original Ravenloft incarnation, but it was present, so naturally it must be included for existing Avantris fans. More on this later.

Much of The Crooked Moon’ s chaotic and uneven design emerges from these competing pressures. As a project, the book scrambles to fulfill numerous contrasting—and sometimes outright conflicting—desires, creative constraints approaching from a half-dozen directions or more, all at once, across the entire work.

Nowhere do these tensions appear more clearly than in the central story of the adventure. On paper, it’s simple: an ancient evil slowly awakens in the woods, and the player characters unwittingly hasten its rise. In practice, though, it grows muddier, and the resulting tale is tangled, messy, awkward, and ugly. (Potential players be warned: spoilers abound from here on out.)

At core, there are basically two stories running through The Crooked Moon: the first follows a trio of hags (the “Vermintoll Coven”) plotting to resurrect a pair of dead gods (the “Crooked Queen” and “Horned King”), who in turn seek to usurp Druskenvald’s current rulers, a human couple named Phillip and Adela Druskenvald, who dress like extras in The Great Gatsby. The second tells the tale of six former adventurers who slowly grew corrupt and eventually turned into evil monsters (the “Fallen”), and now need some good old-fashioned slaying. These two stories do not, broadly, have anything to do with each other: the events of the hag coven’s sacrifices do not clearly impact the six mutated villains, and the teased-out histories of the six do not involve the hags, the dead gods, or the Druskenvalds. The campaign begins with the hags-and-sacrifice thread, spends six of its seven middle chapters dealing with the corrupted adventurers (with a brief hag-related sidequest in the middle), then returns to the Druskenvalds and the awakening gods for the finale.

Each of these is, broadly speaking, a mess. The tale of the Crooked Queen and the Druskenvalds proves vague and confusing in the extreme, featuring multiple instances of unspecified powers lost and gained, usurpations and counter-usurpations, deaths and resurrections, and references to nebulous sins that may both cause or be caused by ultimate forbidden evil. It simultaneously positions both its loose protagonist-allies, the Druskenvalds, and its ultimate villains, the Crooked Queen and her Horned King, as having held control of Druskenvald with near-unlimited power and then losing it. Accordingly to the capital-L Lore, Phillip Druskenvald conquered the Crooked Queen’s realm to acquire godlike power (but it happened so long ago he’s forgotten it), then much more recently the Crooked Queen has stolen away Phillip’s powers upon returning to Druskenvald after a long train ride across the planes (how she does so remains unclear), rendering him merely human. Yet also, the Horned King is born of the sin(s?) that lie in Phillip’s heart, thus implicating Phillip and Adela as the makers of their own destruction, sort of, but the Horned King was created by the Crooked Queen specifically to reclaim her realm in vengeance of Phillip (how did she do it if she was weakened?), yet Phillip gained his godlike powers because he was able to usurp the Crooked Queen in aeons bygone (which makes me wonder how he completed that conquest in the first place?), but also Phillip becomes or possibly always was(?) the Horned King himself, and on and on it goes.

The book fails to solve the twin challenges of simultaneously placing a friendly god or two on the party’s side while also positioning the party to defeat an unfriendly god or two. The stakes need to rise ever higher, but none of these gods can be able to simply wipe the party (or its foes) off the map with a blink, so their powers can’t be too strong. Yet also, events still need to proceed at a pace and the party needs to stay in the center of the action, so prophecies and revelations constantly trigger with little warning or precedent. All this creates an extremely muddy backstory with an on-the-ground situation that comes across as little more than the default: the Druskenvalds, their former powers removed via unclear means, are now effectively ordinary nobility in fancy clothes; the Crooked Queen and Horned King, slumbering and waiting to awaken, exist almost exclusively offscreen in the background. There are funny Roaring Twenties-themed good guys to give you assorted quests (though they barely manage even that), and there are spooky but conveniently vague bad guys that must be stopped by doing those quests.

The six fallen adventurers, in turn, feature a relatively clear but nauseatingly generic backstory: they were once six strangers, came together to do good, went on many adventures together, defeated one or more unspecified great evils, and seemed set for life. But, the book explains, “While these former heroes never once directly heard the seductive voice of the goat in the woods, the sin that dwelled in each of their hearts was plied by the Horned King until they brought about their own downfall one by one.” On first read, I groaned aloud.

If you haven’t already guessed it by now, let me make it clear: these six fallen heroes are the six player characters from the original “Edge of Midnight” series, now warped and turned to evil. The references to their shared backstories—friendships and betrayals, romances within and without, shared jokes and experiences—comprise a loose adaptation and translation of the events of “Edge of Midnight.” While references to former campaigns’ adventurers are nothing new in Dungeons & Dragons (just ask Melf, Maximilian, or Mordenkainen), the cast and subsequent designers of Avantris have adapted their old player characters not into heroes, but villains. The good knight has become a wicked vampire; the wise druid has been overcome by plague and blight; the healing priestess now experiments upon living humans. While this could work well enough in theory, each of the six bears the same basic individual story: they were once good, they came in contact with a powerful spirit, the spirit came to dwell within the hero (by bargain, entrapment, consumption, or simple bad luck), and the spirit overcame the hero to transform them into a monster. Each features a heroic backstory, a subsequent turn to darker things, and a larger, more fantastical being as a looming threat.

This seems as good a time as any to make one of my harshest critiques: The Crooked Moon does not appear to have an original bone in its body. Two of the Fallen—the banjo-strumming scarecrow Jericho Sticks turned to a scythe-wielding crow demon, and the spectral blue shovel-wielding orc Yorgrim turned to a spectral blue lamp-wielding wraith—are based directly on champions from Riot Games’ League of Legends (Fiddlesticks and Yorick, respectively, the latter being nearly one-to-one). The crocodile-man pirate warlock Briggsy “Kutlass” Kratch is a take on Kaptain K. Rool, from Nintendo’s Donkey Kong Country 2. Upon reading the chapter regarding the fate of Lethica Nightborne, the priestess turned to cosmically-inclined Victorian medicine, I described it to a friend as “Entering the Bloodborne Zone.”

The principal events and trappings of the main campaign, too, trade inspiration and pastiche for outright reference. The Ghostlight Express, the train upon which the player characters arrive, is the Old Black Train from Patrick McHale’s Over the Garden Wall, with a froggy conductor resembling the riverboat frogs of the same. The Horned King, when he makes his appearance, is a large black goat, described multiple times with the words “live deliciously”—a phrase lifted directly Robert Eggers’s The Witch, in which an evil black goat named Black Phillip (an incarnation of the Devil) asks the protagonist, “Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?” Indeed, even the book’s cover and central setpiece is an homage to Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man, that titan of folk horror, and several NPCs bear names taken straight from characters of the same. The list goes on: a tarot deck reading for magic items lifted from the Hickmans’ Curse of Strahd; a wizard subclass based on Hiromu Arakawa’s Full Metal Alchemist; multiple Druskenvald provinces pulled straight from Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft; the dress and crown of wildflowers from Ari Aster’s Midsommar; a recurring hare motif taken from The Wicker Man, again; and a recurring side villain borrowed wholesale from Mike Mignola’s Appalachian Hellboy line, who carries even the same name—“The Crooked Man.”

With only a scant few exceptions, the imagery, motifs, themes, and most compelling elements of The Crooked Moon are references and allusions to other works, in nearly all cases more imaginative and provocative than what Avantris has produced. The overwhelming majority of what seems to be original to the book is, with again only a handful of exceptions, painfully generic. Marius Renathyr, the knight turned vampire, leads a blood-cult abbey called “The Crimson Monastery,” whose followers worship “The Crimson Rose.” Farryn of the Greenwood, the druid satyr turned fungus monster, believes in a coming forest-prophecy event called the “Emerald Rebirth.” Wickermoor Hollow is a region where backwards villagers follow “the Old Ways” and refer to scientific scholars as “Newcomers.” When the requisite spooky circus comes to town, they’re led by an evil clown named, naturally, Chuckles.

Plainly put, all the cool parts of The Crooked Moon came from somewhere else.

Now, to be clear, all this is perfectly fine for an ordinary Dungeons & Dragons table. Matt Colville’s ancient mantra to GMs—“Take the stuff you like and put it in your game”—remains true. But a GM’s home game is not a published adventure, and certainly not a four million dollar published adventure going out to more than twenty thousand customers. For a product of such scale and caliber, and especially one with a writing team of over a dozen—including veteran hands like James Haeck, Ginny Loveday, and Brandes Stoddard—the final result ends up shockingly bland. You can guess every story beat well in advance, know everything about the NPCs with a glance, and see plot twists coming from a mile off. While obviously huge amounts of work went into the volume of details and sheer quantity of writing, the overall outline feels like a boring first draft, a placeholder—the absolute default.

What makes all of this even more bizarre is that, for the most part, Avantris planned it this way. On first read, when I realized that the six fallen heroes were the six player characters from the actual play series, the disjointed twofold structure and total lack of originality started to make sense: the original “Edge of Midnight,” I figured, played through a campaign compiled from their GM’s favorite folk horror media, which, as a mere YouTube series, didn’t need to be terribly novel. The disconnect between the hags-gods-sacrifice plotline and the fallen heroes plotline emerged, I assumed, because the latter were the adventurers who had played through the tale of the former on the show. In my mind, The Crooked Moon was basically a spruced-up release of “Edge of Midnight,” with the added bonus of the six PCs as side villains.

In a baffling twist, however, this isn’t the case. It took a fair bit of wiki-diving and episode-hopping, but in the process of writing this review I made a remarkable discovery: for the most part, “Edge of Midnight” does not feature the main characters, locations, or events of The Crooked Moon. While a handful of elements recur—the same trio of hags appears, as does an iteration of the first haunted house adventure and Phillip and Adela Druskenvald—the principal storylines are not at all the same. “Edge of Midnight” takes place in a version of one of the thirteen provinces, concerns itself with the rise of first an evil archbishop and later a ritualist witch, and features only a narrow slice of the NPCs that appear in the published book. The Crooked Queen and Horned King, the principal villains central to the story at the heart of The Crooked Moon, are not present or even mentioned. Most of what occurred in the original run of the show appears in a pair of NPC descriptions and a few table entries in a province’s section, a few hundred words at most.

Rather than the fairly predictable path of running an adventure for six player characters and then bolting those six heroes into that adventure as unrelated side villains for the published release—sloppy, maybe, but understandable—Avantris opted for the far more inexplicable path of bolting their six heroes as side villains into a new adventure, one made almost entirely from scratch. Previously, I’d assumed that the stark differences in content and tone between the colorful thirteen provinces of Druskenvald and the far more sober Wickermoor Hollow were due to Wickermoor being the central setting of the actual play, and thus a necessity to include. But no! The team at Avantris started with the outline of thirteen oddball Halloween lands, and then decided to write an adventure that had nothing to do with them. They had every chance to weave their former adventurers deeply into the story, an all-new tale to hold the six close to its heart, and instead they opted not to. That Avantris produced a book whose separate components have almost nothing to do with each other was not, as I assumed, the result of needing to include content from an actual play never designed to be published, but rather a deliberate choice.

How and why such a particular chain of decisions occurred remains a mystery. I keep searching for clues, looking for some hidden pattern or reasoning buried in The Crooked Moon’ s pages, but I have yet to find any such elucidating elements. At present, the most likely explanation I have remains the most obvious: that this was a first-time project by rookie directors armed with the budget to hire innumerable writers and endlessly expand their book, but not the experience or vision to realize when to stop.

Increasingly, I suspect those many writers were each hired for different sections. While the whole book does closely follow the broad 5e editorial style guide and individual sets of sections match in terms of structure—each adventure chapter follows the same basic structure, the thirteen provinces share the same basic subheaders, the subclasses all match, and so on—the style, content, and quality of each section varies tremendously, as do the differences in atmosphere, tone, and mood.

Take Wickermoor Village, the hub town. The settlement lands reasonably well as an exercise in ambient tone-setting, but utterly fumbles its execution as playable adventure content. Of the thirty or forty named NPCs, nearly all have not-uncompelling hooks and premises, but only a handful execute on them in a meaningful way. A cursed baker is weeks away from turning thirty-five, the same age at which her mother and grandmother died, but “How she chooses to act on that is left up to you,” and neither the curse nor its breaking are detailed; an amnesiac apothecary suffers from blackouts and lost time, but their “mysterious past and periods of lost time are left for you to use as needed,” with no followup; a barber-surgeon takes his clientele’s hair, teeth, and blood for secret rituals “to gain dominion over the townspeople who oppose the return of the Crooked Queen,” but those rituals—along with the precise clientele and victims of his rituals—go unspecified. Over and over again, The Crooked Moon presents the possibility of an exciting character and situation, but leaves it to the GM to do the work of developing that as content to play.

Quite a few villagers in Wickermoor harbor secret identities or cult loyalties, in fact. But, with only one or two exceptions, they never result in anything of consequence: in the penultimate chapter, when the cult reveals itself and begins dragging friendly NPCs to the requisite wicker man, the book presents lists of “Possible Captives” and “Possible Cultists,” but does not specify who targets whom, who sacrifices whom, or who in general conducts the cult ceremonies in any capacity. The folk of Wickermoor rarely do much of anything, really. They offer no quests, ask no favors, and need no assistance, even when (as happens with some frequency) the whole town is bewitched or ensorcelled by dark magic. The text gestures towards the possibility of conflict or competing desires—a cult non-specifically attempts to recruit the local tailor, an artist’s painting grow steadily more unhinged without elaboration—but each time the details go unsaid, or else are explicitly left to the GM to decide. There are five loose religions or philosophies described, each framed like a significant faction with purported goals and ideals, but these, too, go nowhere.

Folk horror, as a genre, hinges on differences between an old world and a new, where the customs and beliefs of otherwise-ordinary people lead them to commit horrific acts. The American grad students of Midsommar travel to rural Sweden to conduct anthropological research, to make the unknown known, and suffer terrible fates for their curiosity. The Puritan family of The Witch leave their New England colony for the wilds to live a more faithful and devout life only to run afoul of Satanic witchcraft, accusing each other of ill magic and curses as they fall victim to iniquity. Police Sergeant Howie, the Christian protagonist of The Wicker Man, is horrified to discover the inhabitants of Summerisle have returned to an ancient paganism. Just as a Gothic tale requires past misdeeds come to haunt the present, folk horror requires an older tradition to supplant and shock modernity. (In Dungeons & Dragons parlance, one might describe this conflict in terms of law versus chaos—though I leave it to you to decide which is which.) Where supernatural horror and dark fantasy can conjure nightmares from the ether, folk horror needs a more human touch, a willingness of ordinary people—the eponymous folk in question—to participate in the ritual terror.

Wickermoor Village lacks these essential qualities. The sole ominous practice the party explicitly encounters—the sacrifice of a goat clad as a human—occurs at the very beginning of the adventure, an introductory setpiece with no lasting consequences. The book states that overlap exists between the more public and well-known traditions of the Old Ways and the more secretive practices of the Crooked Queen’s cult, but the details of these traditions and rituals go undefined. The Newcomers, the supposed innovators and futurists, never come into real conflict with the more traditional villagers. While the cast of Wickermoor Village feels primed for sudden horrifying folk traditions emerging, the details never arrive. Indeed, in the section concerning rumors and rituals, the book states that “There are plenty of strange happenings and rituals that the characters can stumble upon in Wickermoor Village and its surrounding areas,” but, predictably, these end up largely unspecified. Avantris provides a table of 1d20 suggestions, but they go no further than the notional: without specifics, the idea that after a funeral, “the deceased is fastened to a horse and sent off into the moors for a ‘last ride’” lacks the necessary resonance. “A public battle to the death,” fought between townsfolk “with their children strapped to their backs” sounds compelling, but without any further detail as to which villagers, which children, and for what reason the duel is fought, these ideas remain just that—ideas. Concepts for a GM to go over and develop on their own, with the hard work of preparing such situtations for play at the table left undone.

Like so much of The Crooked Moon, the villagers of Wickermoor feel like setup with no payoff. Could this cast of NPCs form the basis for evocative and unsettling folk horror? Of course. Are the necessary details provided in The Crooked Moon? Of course not. Folk horror relies on folklore —the oral and material traditions of a culture, a people, their stories and customs and houses and clothes and legends. While there is an interminable quantity of regular old fantasy lore in The Crooked Moon, and endless gestures towards the trappings of folklore, the book fails to build the requisite culture necessary for its horrific aspirations to hit home. Both folklore and horror are built on specific imagery, practices, and symbols, all of which Wickermoor Village lacks.

(While their near-total disconnect from the rest of the book ensures that it’s less of a practical issue, all of these criticisms prove equally true of the thirteen provinces of Druskenvald. Avantris provides each province the broadest of overviews of its people, places, and customs, followed by a table of 1d12 “quest hooks,” each an empty outline of an adventure without details or specifics. There are no maps beyond an illustration of all Druskenvald; the two named NPCs and handful of monsters per province receive no statblocks; the provinces get no descriptions of specific locations. Each is an outline, a set of suggestions, a notional basis for what could be an exciting Halloween region, but wholly lacking in play-ready content. Like so many other parts of The Crooked Moon, the provinces are unusable without either constant total improvisation or hours upon hours of GM preparation.)

After arriving in Wickermoor on an old black train, Phillip and Adela Druskenvald in tow, the party gets shunted to the first dungeon: a haunted old hillside manor, the Crooked House. While the content of the dungeon itself feel solid enough for the most part (a tub that drowns a bathroom in blood, a spirit board to ask a ghost lore questions, a preponderance of loose teeth), the surrounding narrative threads are overwhelming, confusing, and contradictory. The Crooked House juggles no less than three separate families (two now dead), an introduction to a recurring side-villain named the Crooked Man, the introduction and subsequent defeat of one of the three hags of the Vermintoll Coven (the ones trying to resurrect the Crooked Queen), a decades-old massacre with only spectral survivors, a voice-stealing spirit cat, the kidnapping of Phillip and Adela Druskenvald, and a child that can see ghosts. Each of these threads jostles for prominence, and details vanish in the shuffle. It’s just too much!

The structure of the adventure chapters in The Crooked Moon only causes further confusion. Each chapter begins with a high-level background and summary—noting here that the full arc of events is always plotted out ahead of time, with little room for player choice—followed by a more detailed history of the site in question, then descriptions of the key NPCs of the region and their backstories, then a quest hook for the players to chase, and only then an introduction to the adventure location in question. Rather than explicating details as players are likely to encounter them, each chapter frontloads a mountain of lore and history. While three to six pages of background doesn’t sound like much in the abstract, the chewiness of the prose and the convoluted backstories create an immense amount of details to keep track of: the Crooked House, for example, introduces fourteen NPCs over the course of its prelude, less than half of which actually appear in the house itself. While future chapters are not quite so bad (the next two introduce a mere seven or eight named NPCs apiece), this structure makes each adventure harder to use than it genuinely requires: when a keyed location mentions an NPC, for example, one needs to flip back and forth across a half-dozen pages or more to find them. The adventure locations proper assume an intimate and familiar knowledge of the details of their histories, relying on a GM’s capacity to process and convey a mountain of exposition rather than well-paced writing. By the third or fourth chapter, this grows exhausting.

The adventures locations themselves, the environments and the threats they contain, are, for the most part, also just not very good. They provide innumerable instances of inescapable magic walls, villains that instantly teleport away when attacked, on-rails sequences that cannot be deviated from, and exceptions designed to stop players from doing what they’re not supposed to. Nearly all chapters are linear, brittle, and devoid of agency. Compounded by the thick mouthfuls of frontloaded lore, it makes each chapter a tangled maze, requiring constant rereads, flippings-back, and references. (Perhaps, I idly wondered, it’s a kind of meta-commentary: deeply linear play mirrored by and juxtaposed with deeply non-linear reading?)

A case study: When the party arrives in the Drowned Crossroads, a bayou-inspired swampland, to tangle with the undead-ish crocodile-sorcerer Briggsy Kratch (a.k.a. the Grinning Sinner, a.k.a. Mister Crossroads—the book can’t quite seem to decide what to call him), there’s a beat where the party meets Kratch in his swamp-shack. Precisely why this interaction occurs remains somewhat unclear: per the deeply convoluted backstory summary the chapter employs instead of an introduction, Adela Druskenvald visited Kratch to get a second opinion on a nasty prophetic dream she had, and Kratch promised her insurance against this fell doom at the cost of her wedding ring, which she accepted. But then, after Adela “had forgotten the path she took” to meet him, her arm became infected with a cursed disease that can only be dispelled with Kratch’s death and the recovery of her ring, but, of course, this disease must be kept secret from her husband, Phillip. She conveys some of this and instructs you to travel to the Crossroads, where you meet two NPCs who teach you how to play Liar’s Dice and offer some more lore, then proceed to do nothing else.

The book seems insistent that the party will want to meet with Kratch specifically in his shack. Once there, a conversation ensues, and Kratch invites the party to his riverboat casino, offering each adventurer a cursed bargain or trinket as a key: if they refuse, they cannot gain access to Kratch’s boat and make no progress (why cursed bargains or curios are required to enter a casino is never explained, but the boat cannot be boarded or even observed otherwise). If they accept, Kratch bestows his end, the boon or curio, then teleports away. If they attack Kratch, he summons a few monsters and again teleports away. If a character tries to steal extra curios, all items past their first dissolve upon leaving the shack. Each player character must gain one curio or bargain and no more, and there is nothing they can do to prevent such an acquisition from occurring. What could be a fun decision point for players to risk overreach and suffer the consequences—an appendix even includes a massive table of random curses to incur!—is hacked down to a scripted encounter. One of the most open-ended and intriguing moments of possibility, the chance to rob a cursed pirate captain or else attempt sneak aboard his haunted riverboat, ends up reduced to a setpiece conversation with no chance to alter the course of events. It’s frustrating even to read, but I cannot imagine how it must feel to play.

(Adela’s wedding ring is later found to have been in the pocket of a friendly NPC the whole time, stolen from Kratch offscreen before the adventure began.)

These sorts of botched setups and squandered possibilities keep occurring. In the blood-cult vampire monastery, it’s possible for the party to receive an invitation to meet with the vampire abbot Father Renathyr in his office at the top of a belltower. If attacked, Renathyr rings the bell to alert his monastery to the threat. When I started reading this key, I figured this would be the setup for a fun alternate boss fight: navigate Renathyr to the top of his tower, alone and isolated, but simultaneously fend off waves of minions and cultists charging up the belfry’s stairs. I imagined that the bell could be a fun tactical consideration: if you can stop Renathyr from ringing the bell, you can stop the minions from arriving, thus adding further texture and nuance to the fight. But no. If you attack Renathyr, he rings the bell and teleports away to his boss chamber.

Across the board, The Crooked Moon carries a strange allergy to maps, to physical space. While certain locations receive more detailed to-scale maps—either on the scale of dungeons, like the blood monastery or Lovecraft sanatorium, or else on the scale of settlements, like the corn-maze village or haunted cemetery—many do not, including two of the three towns outside Wickermoor Village. Regional distances often appear denoted in time, rather than space: that haunted cemetery lies “approximately half a night’s travel southeast at a Normal pace,” a centipede-infested mine is “about 8 hours of travel away from the village at a Fast pace,” and the Drowned Crossroads requires “three nights through treacherous terrain,” with no pace given. While the book ends with an overview map of Wickermoor Hollow, it’s far more of an illustration than a diagram, with the book explaining that “The map of this province [Wickermoor Hollow] is deliberately not to scale, and the details on it are not precise, which allows for flexibility in this folktale adventure.”

At various points throughout the adventure, the book simply gives up. When the party enters a corn-maze to pursue the scarecrow-demon Raum (f.k.a. Jericho Sticks, a banjo-strumming scarecrow), no map is provided, instead relying on two 1d4 tables and a sequence of successful Perception checks. If one tries to fly above the maze to get a better view, the text specifies that when “a flying creature reaches 120 feet above the ground, they are suddenly 60 feet above the ground.” In the fungus-infected forest, there is a map, but it goes unused: instead, the chapter segments the ten-odd locations into sets, with the paths and sequences between those locations within a set randomized. Towards the end of the book, there’s a dream sequence, one built by layering together the Crooked House and the nightmares of Adela Druskenvald. Rather than take the far more compelling and rich method of attempting to geographically map out a person’s dreams, however, The Crooked Moon instead defaults to an “encounter flowchart,” a linear sequence of setpieces with no variation or choice to their order or progression. When describing the nightmare, the book states that “If a creature attempts to leave a location, it finds itself moving back into the location, no matter how far or in what direction it travels.”

Periodically, The Crooked Moon offers what appears to be a choice to ally with the villains: accept the fungal blessing of the plague-beast; join Father Renathyr’s vampire blood cult; gamble with Mister Crossroads. In each case, though, these choices are either false or else end in a negation of play. Winning and losing against Kratch both result in the same boss fight with merely a buff or debuff applied; adventurers who become vampires are automatically removed from the party to become evil NPCs; accepting the blessing of the fungus-plague kills you instantly. Any possibility of unexpected or emergent play in the adventure finds itself dutifully excised.

It’s possible, I suppose, that the players on Legends of Avantris enjoy such unabashed linearity, such a forcibly guided experience. Certainly my players would not—and I doubt yours would, either.

Amid all this overwrought Dragonlance -core railroading, though, hides one unexpected bright spot: Memory’s Rest Sanatorium, home of the ultra-goth Matron Lethica Nightborne. The Bloodborne Zone. It’s really good! While it bears the same structural issues as previous chapters, requiring readers to chew through a half-dozen pages of generic lore and flavorless backstory, the actual dungeon is compelling, creepy, and well-designed. (It also opens with the weakest, and thus most charming, quest hook by far: a previously-unmentioned farmer NPC in Wickermoor explains that his unnamed cousin went to the sanatorium for health reasons and never came back, sending him only ominously-cheerful letters. The letters go unstated and the cousin is never mentioned again, but gosh if that isn’t enough motivation for our plucky heroes.)

The sanatorium itself, the main dungeon, features a sharp division between open areas, where the player characters can freely explore—they might even check themselves in as patients—and restricted areas, where the more nefarious experiments occur. The entire second floor of the sanatorium is restricted, naturally, and only from that second floor can the party access the final boss chamber, so much of the challenge is basic navigation and exploration. All over the sanatorium wait fun interactive elements for players to engage with and exploit: the nurse orderlies wear masks to hide their faces, but extra uniforms can be employed as disguises; if a fight breaks out, a lockdown initiates, but the party can break into the control room to both start lockdowns themselves or disable them entirely; the pharmacy holds unlabeled medicines with varying effects, all of which show up across the sanatorium and can be wielded by the player characters (before or after they learn the effects); the brainworm-infested surgeons pretend to be ordinary humans in the presence of visitors, so you can cow them down from a fight if you act like a confused guest or patient; the head nurse worries about Matron Lethica, and might give you a pass to explore restricted areas if you can convince her you’ll help; the memory-draining serum employed in the sanatorium has an antidote, but it requires ingredients harvested from all over the dungeon. Within the sanatorium wait hidden passageways to find, medical examinations to manipulate, secret codes to steal or decipher, imprisoned experiments to unleash, and patients to rescue. It’s all just so interactive and organic and fun—and, at just under thirty keyed rooms, more than twice the size of the next-largest dungeon in the book. In what feels like a deliberate barb to the other regions’ bosses, too, Matron Lethica does not have reflexive teleportation, instead relying on lockdown and her minions if attacked. In fact, her main laboratory (the threshold of the boss chamber) features both an obvious slow elevator and a secret teleportation orb—if the party finds the orb first, they can force Lethica to take the elevator, giving them ample time to set up for the ensuing boss fight.

Over and over again, I found myself impressed and delighted by the sanatorium. Is a spooky Victorian hospital with Lovecraftian cosmic horrors lurking just out of sight terribly original? No. It’s basically just the Research Hall from Bloodborne’ s “The Old Hunters” DLC (with a monster borrowed from Bram Stoker and Ken Russell, the “White Worm”). But at the same time, the execution is so crisp and fun that I don’t mind, and I doubt my players would, either. The final boss fight even features two unique elements—a smaller wizard boss riding on the back a big beefy monster boss, and arrays of pressurized pipes filled with acid goo—that put it head and shoulders above the rest of The Crooked Moon’ s fights. Frankly, it’s baffling that this chapter received such a higher level of interactivity, dynamic potential, and open-ended problem-solving in its adventure design compared to the rest. It was here, reading the sanatorium, that I started to suspect these chapters got doled out to individual writers and then brought together at the end, because the differences feel too stark to have come from the same pen. To whichever of the innumerable writers hired for The Crooked Moon created Memory’s Rest Sanatorium: excellent work, I salute you. Please keep writing adventures like this. In the world of 5e, it seems they’re sorely needed.

Other than the structural issues common to all chapters, my one genuine criticism of the sanatorium is the same criticism I have of many of the rest of the adventure chapters, and indeed most other parts of the book: it’s not really folk horror.

While sanatoriums do feature prominently in horror media, those works are not folk horror, but rather Gothic horror. Memory, grief, psychological trauma, the depths of the human mind, beings from beyond the stars—none of these are staples of folk horror, because none of them have anything to do with folklore. Bloodborne manages the shift from the Gothic horror of religion and hauntings to the cosmic horror of insignificance and aliens by linking them with through-lines of forbidden knowledge, violatory rituals, and physical transformation, but none of those are folk horror. I’m not opposed to each of the six Fallen playing its hand at a different flavor of horror, but those need to tie into the core of folklore. I could, with some imagination, see a world in which the sanatorium works itself into the folkways and traditions of Wickermoor Hollow, but The Crooked Moon doesn’t take the time to do so. In fact, with her social isolation, wielding of alchemical science, and institutional structures, the adventure positions Matron Lethica far more in line with the order and progress of Phillip and Adela Druskenvald—an outlook on life which should, by rights, be opposed to the Crooked Queen. After all, it’s a rural farmer, the epitome of folk, who asks the party to investigate the sanatorium. But, unfortunately, this thread goes unexplored.

Of the six Fallen’s chapters, only one comes close to folk horror: Foxwillow, a farm town haunted by Raum, the aforementioned secret-eating scarecrow demon hiding in a corn maze. The set dressing is present and the area feels folksy, leaning into the “rural town full of secrets” vibe, but the demon is not well-worked into the folklore and traditions. That he’s summoned by villagers hiding dark secrets who start to murder each other—rather than, say, summoned by villagers performing an age-old ceremony of giving up secrets to a demon—again falls closer to Gothic horror than folk. A sister murdering her half-brother for her mother’s affair is a family play, a morality tale, more a haunted psychodrama than something concerned with people bringing their traditions to bear.

The other five come no closer: Briggsy Kratch and the Drowned Crossroads make a gesture, but they too end up more concerned with the sins of dead men than customs and rituals; the blood-cultists of vampire Abbot Marius Renathyr burn heretics, but do so according to institutional orthodoxy within the rule of the Crimson Monastery, an explicitly new innovation separate from the rest of Wickermoor; Maidenmist Cemetery, the haunted graveyard of Yorgrim the Gravedigger, feels like nothing so much as a kludge of Dark Souls level designs, replete with lighting beacons and a boss door; Hartsblight Forest, the fungus-plagued wood of satyr druid Farryn of the Greenwood, opens with an encounter of other ominous satyr druids, but they’re contextless, with no ordinary people to support them; and Memory’s Rest Sanatorium, of course, is a hotbed of mad science and cosmic tentacles, not traditional customs and practices.

If we expand the lens of The Crooked Moon to—like Ravenloft—include Gothic horror more generally, many more begin to fit the mold: the sanatorium, certainly, as a matron literally confronts past misdeeds with follies of science; likewise the blood monastery, as a knight covers up and papers over his past sins with religious obsession and hunger; the fungus forest, too, with a druid turning to magic to revive her dead lover and in turn being corrupted herself. The Dark Souls graveyard bears little resemblance to Gothic horror in its narrative beyond a loose theme of memory, but very much so does in its general aesthetic of a haunted cemetery; the crocodile swamp struggles, but still features a dead man coming back in vengeance against an evil wizard who made a pact with the devil, so we’ll give it a pass. Colorful, Dungeons & Dragons-infused Gothic horror, certainly, more vibrant and varied than most of Ravenloft, but still, reasonably Gothic. The Fallen’s stories deal in descents into corruption, isolation warping former heroes, and ghosts of the past both figurative and literal: classic Gothic.

But, of course, The Crooked Moon doesn’t bill itself as Gothic horror, but folk horror. Its front matter acknowledges that the book “draws inspiration from the wide umbrella of works encompassed by the Folk Horror Chain, as well as elements of other horror subgenres such as Gothic Horror, Body Horror, Cosmic Horror, and more,” but still—the cover says “Folk Horror Roleplaying,” not “Folk Horror and Other Horror Subgenre Roleplaying.”

The “chain” Avantris invokes is a creation of novelist and musician Adam Scovell, who, in his treatise Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange, describes folk horror as being defined by four key elements chained together: landscape (typically hostile), isolation (social moreso than physical), skewed morality (trending nastily), and a happening or summoning (supernatural or otherwise). Setting aside the fact that effectively zero of the adventure locations and threats in The Crooked Moon actually hit all four of these, Scovell’s assessment of the genre and definition are not reliably accurate.

In a media studies question like this, the usefulness of a definition lies in two basic factors: its ability to include those works that we already intuitively or culturally understand as broadly fitting into the defined category, and its ability to exclude those works which we already understand as generally not fitting into the defined category. Definitions find value as lenses for viewing fringe cases, those works and qualities that lie along the edges of better-understood categories. We already understand that The Wicker Man, The Witch, and Over the Garden Wall are folk horror, and we already know that The Exorcist, Alien, and Saw are, while horrific and frightening, not folk horror. The job of the definition, then, is to provide a set of boundaries that include everything that fits in the category and exclude everything outside the category, thus allowing us to examine the less certain edge cases with renewed accuracy and insight.

On the question of exclusion, Scovell’s definitions prove too broad. Take, for example, the journey through the Mines of Moria, from The Lord of the Rings: we have landscape (the Misty Mountains, Caradhras, and the mines themselves), isolation (the Fellowship enters alone, the way sealed behind them), skewed morality (evil goblins everywhere), and a happening or summoning (the Balrog). Or, alternatively, Luke Skywalker’s visit to Yoda on Dagobah in The Empire Strikes Back: landscape (the swamps of Dagobah), isolation (Dagobah is very remote), skewed morality (Yoda is a weird little frog guy who doesn’t care about what Luke thinks he should), and a summon or happening (Yoda pulls the X-Wing from the swamp). I would not describe either of these as folk horror—nor, I suspect, would Scovell, or, for that matter, Avantris—but they fit Scovell’s definitions anyways. They suggest a definition too broad, one incapable of excluding things which we recognize as not folk horror.

On inclusion, Scovell’s chain also cuts off works that fit well inside the auspices of folk horror. Take, for example, Shirley Jackson’s landmark 1948 short story, “The Lottery,” well-known for traumatizing middle-schoolers everywhere. “The Lottery” is an essential piece of folk horror. In a piece for the Irish Times, Bernice Murphy, a professor of English at Trinity College Dublin focusing on popular fiction (especially horror), describes Jackson’s short story as “arguably the most influential North American folk horror text,” going on to say that “the story gains much of its power from the contrast between the entirely matter-of-fact way with which the lottery is carried out and the act of communal savagery it facilitates.” (Murphy also edited a 2005 collection of criticism on Jackson’s work, Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy.) While “The Lottery” does indeed feature skewed morality and a significant happening, per the folk horror chain, it does not clearly feature significant landscape or isolation. The unnamed village of “The Lottery”—modeled on Bennington, Vermont, where Jackson was living at the time—is small, sure, and presumably rather insular, but the story references other towns and villages nearby (ones that are said to have done away with the lottery), and there is no sense of the folk of the village being cut off from the world at large. Likewise, while Jackson intentionally sets her tale in high summer, June 27th, the physical stage of the story is simple: the action takes place in the town square, “between the post office and the bank.” Both the prose and the characters reference the changing of the seasons—Jackson opens with rich green grass and flowers “blossoming profusely,” and a village elder invokes a saying, “‘Lottery in June, corn heavy soon’”—but the actual landscape itself is not hostile, nor even particularly noteworthy. “The Lottery” is horrific not because of its land or its solitude, but because, as Murphy argues, it presents ordinary people committing extraordinary acts, ones that they treat as commonplace despite being deeply cruel and bloodthirsty. Folk horror is a social horror, a horror of people and their beliefs, one reliant on culture, customs, and rituals. That when written down or shot on camera these usually appear in rural farm towns is an incidental byproduct of the genre, not a requirement.

Scovell’s folk horror chain stands at once too broad, admitting all manner of spooky fantasy setpieces, and too narrow, excluding foundational pieces of the genre. Because Avantris chose to rely on Scovell’s work—citing him directly—very little of The Crooked Moon comes across as truly horrific, and certainly not folk horror. Bloody and vicious, sure, and filled with references to works that circle closer to the mark, but almost nothing genuinely lands in its own right. Wicker men and circles of stones alone do not folk horror make.

Even the sheer fact that Wickermoor Village hosts an explicitly secret cult, in some sense, defies the fundamentals of folk horror. The murderous Swedes of Midsommar operate more or less in the open, as do the pagan folk of Summerisle. Even the eponymous witch of The Witch is not truly secret so much as merely out of sight (it’s not like the Puritan family doesn’t know she’s out there). If Avantris wanted to create a genuinely folkloric horror, the ordinary people of Wickermoor would need to participate in the terror, and do so as a simple matter of course. A few of the unspecified random tables of events could be interpreted in this light, but none of the specific events of the main story do. Indeed, in the lead-up to the finale, the villagers find themselves being kidnapped by their secretly-evil neighbors (a bog-standard Dungeons & Dragons cult plot point) rather than participating in a traditional happening themselves (a far more folkloric terror). Without the specific customs, rituals, and folkways of Wickermoor detailed, The Crooked Moon cannot invoke those customs in its monsters, setpieces, and adventures, and so is left to rely on mostly the defaults. Even the one chapter in which the party is accused of murder, a deeply convoluted plotline featuring multiple instances of disguises and body-snatching by one of the Vermintoll Coven hags, the accusations result from supernatural bewitching rather than earnest belief. Witch hunts stand as a classic form of folk horror—see Michael Reeves’s Witchfinder General and Piers Haggard’s The Blood on Satan’s Claw, both of which Scovell cites repeatedly—but The Crooked Moon uses the accusations to create a stealthy escape sequence rather than any sort of trial or social conflict. What could be a compelling moment of culturally-sanctioned terror ends up instead reduced to merely an action setpiece. Again and again, The Crooked Moon gestures towards folk horror and borrows its set dressing, but misses the thematic core of the genre. It’s very frustrating.

More galling still, The Crooked Moon includes a novel set of structures that, on paper, feel like they should prove invaluable for delivering elements of folk horror: “fateweaving.” Presented just before the adventure begins (after the loredump, but preceding the first chapter), the book describes fateweaving as “an optional framework to intertwine the characters’ individual stories throughout the adventure,” a sort of individualized meta-structure. Each player chooses one thread for their character (or has one chosen for them) and follows that thread through the main tale. Each includes an overall goal (complete the ritual, discover the source of the visions, destroy the doppelganger), some options for personalization (the nature of past experiments, the symptoms of an incurable disease, the demon that owns one’s soul), a prescribed starting scene (a family member confiding a secret, an invitation to a secret society, a dream of a mysterious tree), and then a series of additions to existing scenes, characters, and areas within the rest of the adventure, solely of interest to the character’s thread of fate. There are thirteen threads in total, each with five of these additions: for example, the Thread of Rejuvenation (which concerns itself with the natural world), describes a character having a specific foreshadowing vision in a specific room of the Crooked House; meanwhile, the Thread of Liberation (involving a character having lost or bargained away their soul to a demon) dictates that Briggsy Kratch’s riverboat casino holds a special set of magic playing cards to find. Little story threads for characters and players to chase, designed to convey the classic recurring individual-character storyline of many television shows and RPG actual plays—a personalized, serialized C-plot, running mostly in the background, culminating in a big climax.

Structurally, the fateweaving threads are messy, at once both too prescriptive in their details yet still underdeveloped. They tie to The Crooked Moon’s thirteen player character backgrounds (each quick and mostly lovely), one recommended thread per background, but with only a handful of scenes per thread, they’re so minor as to likely be forgotten. In a few cases, a player character might have two or three scenes at the beginning of the adventure and one or two at the end, but none in the middle. While the presented endings to each thread vary wildly—ranging from starting a kind of localized apocalyptic rapture to discovering that the character is a time-traveler to spiritually merging with one or more monsters—none of them are terribly folkloric in nature. I expected, hoped, that these threads would bind players to the rituals and customs of Wickermoor Hollow, giving them specific practices and details to latch onto and in turn discover horrors within, but they don’t. If anything, the threads are nearly always heavily supernatural in nature, disconnected from the material realia of the Hollow and the ways of its people, resulting in adventurers that feel, if anything, even less connected to the world. They present a very intriguing concept, a structural framework that could, in better hands, result in some extremely satisfying personalized plotlines, but they don’t. Fateweaving is a veneer, a layer on top of the main adventure, but adds little of substance.

Like so much of The Crooked Moon, though, it didn’t need to be this way. Character-specific threads woven into an adventure are plausible and valuable, and underexplored territory in adventures. Most examinations of this kind of character–narrative structure emerge as outgrowths of rulesets rather than adventures: Grant Howitt’s Eat the Reich, for example, or its predecessor, John Harper’s Lady Blackbird, both of which include specific rosters of existing characters to choose from. But something like fateweaving—a structure, a role, built into the adventure and required for play—still holds tremendous potential in sandbox adventure design. If instead of totally distinct narratives, the thirteen threads in The Crooked Moon had centered around, say, each of the campaign’s main villains and threats, they could have proven far more present and valuable, not least as means with which to familiarize the players with the folkways of Wickermoor Hollow. That they don’t manage this, or even really make an attempt to do so, speaks again to the underdevelopment of the book’s central setting and theme.

The other elements that feel most ripe for weaving into folklore are the book’s many monsters, of which there are over fifty, plus nearly twenty individual legendary monsters and a dozen player character familiars. While most feel like hastily-reflavored Halloween variations on stock Monster Manual entries (Not a yeti but an “Alpengrendel,” not a shambling mound but a “Bayou Beast,” not a scarecrow but a “Pumpkin Head”), one of The Crooked Moon’ s distinguishing features is that each of these monsters possesses a secret weakness. Both described in a monster’s text entry and appearing in their statblock, a given weakness varies in both efficacy and ease of discovery, but each can significantly sway a fight, in some cases ending it before it begins.

As I read these entries, I noticed an odd pattern: the boss monsters’ weaknesses, both those of the main adventure and the optional post-game boss rush, are mostly terrible; the common monsters’ weaknesses, though, those appearing throughout The Crooked Moon, are mostly very good. For the main boss monsters, nearly all boil down to “Shout at this boss about their backstory crimes.” (That so many of these monsters are resituated characters from the original “Edge of Midnight” campaign makes the requisite lore-learning feel, shall we say, rather indulgent.) The optional post-game bosses prove a little better, but still forgettable—multiple weaknesses, for example, involve little more than writing specific words on an object to wield against the boss. The main adventure’s bosses’ weaknesses usually get at least gestured towards throughout the chapter by NPCs or environmental cues; the post-game bosses’ are not, instead left entirely to the GM to arrange.

Likewise, the common monsters’ weaknesses are mostly not communicated to players explicitly, adding more work to the GM’s plate. (Except! again! the Bloodborne sanatorium, which does feature numerous clues pointing to its monsters’ weaknesses! More kudos!) Despite this, the weaknesses themselves prove extremely fun and exploitable, with many being the sort of thing clever players can intuit, guess, or figure out via experimentation. For example, if you run across a swarm of evil pigeons, you can confuse them by handing them a letter to deliver; bewitching carnival spirits that tell stories are sorely weakened by reciting the morals of their stories before they finish their tales; Lovecraftian aliens turn out to be immunodeficient to earthly diseases; phantom funeral hearses cannot detect living creatures that hold their breath; and undead ferrymen stop fighting and offer one free boat ride if you pay them three coppers. While the actual implementation into 5.5e rules language feels clunky, they’re all clear enough to run more or less just off the text, with the precise effects figured out on the fly. Taken as a whole, these secrets stand as genuinely fun and interactive in a way that surpasses the monster design of nearly all other monsters in 5e, and indeed even the monsters found in many well-regarded old-school bestiaries. They’re clever and thematic, significant enough to provide a huge advantage without ending fights immediately, and simple enough to exploit yet still require a degree of preparation. Overall, the monster weaknesses are excellent, among the best I’ve seen.

What’s odd is that many of these secrets feel strikingly folkloric in their style, almost fairy-tale, and a few even allude to broader cultural knowledge: at one point in the adventure, an undead ferryman arrives with two copper coins sewn over his eyes and another on his forehead, but the other ferrymen in the adventure do not present such adornment, and no NPC or environment ever mentions this three-coin payment. Swarms of ghostlings cannot cross over iron, and their monster entry even specifies that this is why graveyards are surrounded by iron fences—a fantastic little piece of aesthetics-as-retroactive-worldbuilding—but again, nowhere else mentions this restriction. Gobblegeists, creatures like giant draconic turkeys, are repelled by seven-pointed stars: their entry states that followers of the Old Ways carry seven-pointed stars for specifically this purpose, but none of the followers of the Old Ways the party meets carry such stars, nor do any of their holy places bear one. While many other monsters feature simpler, less obviously folkloric weaknesses, even the blandest and most mechanistic could easily be imagined in the context of traditional custom.

The book does provide a set of rules for discovering a monster’s secret, spending so much time and making so many checks, but these rules depend on “sources,” which once more end up left to the GM’s discretion. The book offers suggestions such as well-versed sages, knowledgeable locals, and libraries, but again, it’s difficult to say exactly which of the many NPCs qualify as sages and locals for which monsters, and across the whole of the adventure, The Crooked Moon features about three libraries total. Besides, as any player can tell you, rolling to mechanistically “discover” a secret is far less compelling than actually discovering that secret in the wild with your own wits.

To be honest, it feels like whoever wrote the monsters strove to create creatures that could be woven into the folklore and culture of Wickermoor Hollow (and did a more than decent job doing so), but the rest of the writers either did not have the monster details while they wrote their sections, or else the monster writer’s work was simply ignored.

After the monsters comes a string of appendices, all of which smack of the stretch goal: powerful scaling magic items, the ones drawn by Adela Druskenvald at campaign start via tarot cards, powerful but mostly forgettable; cursed magic items, which grow more deleterious the more you use them and thus prove mostly pretty fun; potions, each with an enhanced version, a sort of “Greater Healing Potion”-esque upgrade, inoffensive yet unambitious; and a table of one hundred and fifty-six curses (for the major and minor arcana of a tarot deck, upright and reversed), which strike a pleasant balance of silly and debilitating. In general, most of these appendices feel marginally sharper and more polished than the variations one might expect in an ordinary Dungeon Master’s Guide, but not by much. They’re fine, good enough, decent work—though this places them, it ought to be said, a fair sight better than most of the preceding chapters.

While their overall quality is higher than the adventure, neither the appendices nor the monsters escape the overall issue of the book as a whole: disconnect. Muddy and unclear vision. A lack of direction. The Crooked Moon feels less like a single coherent project than a patchwork of designs, a semi-random compilation of ideas, rules, and content strung together only loosely. I have mentioned so many elements already: the thirteen provinces, the myriad player options, the central story of the Druskenvalds and the Crooked Queen, the six Fallen, the individual adventure locations, Wickermoor Hollow and Village, the monsters both legendary and ordinary, the appendices, and more besides. None of these fit cleanly together. The sections retain strong editorial and visual styles, but those are largely concerned with technical unification—making sure the chapters go in the right order and that the pages look similar—rather than creative direction. In terms of design, story, tone, theme, genre, and voice, the individual parts of The Crooked Moon just do not align.

How exactly a project on the scale of The Crooked Moon ends up this confused and disorganized remains mysterious. I’d hoped that the ending would provide some elucidation, but no such luck: once you slay the final Fallen, the adventure swerves to a shoehorned-in carnival section featuring Chuckles the Clown and various silly games (another stretch goal), and from there the campaign moves totally on rails. You fall through the linear series of dream-sequence setpieces about Adela Druskenvald’s fears, then fight two strikingly samey sequential hilltop-sacrifice battles, both featuring prominent elements taken directly from The Wicker Man, down to the names of the NPCs. Naturally, Adela burns to death in the wicker man and cannot be saved by any means.

From there, it’s a rush through another linear setpiece sequence following Phillip’s trail as he flees to the Crooked Queen’s tomb-tree, with justification for his doing so provided only in little post-hoc notes and journals. (Boxed read-aloud text states that “It is obvious that Phillip was attempting some form of resurrection ritual” to bring back Adela, though I admit if the book hadn’t outright told me this I am not sure I’d have figured it out.) Once you reach the tomb-tree, Phillip naturally transforms into the Horned King—who, remember, is just Black Phillip, the goat from The Witch, with a third eye and bat wings.

Once you defeat him, there’s an odd beat where suddenly the book requires a final sacrifice to banish the Queen, offering possible sacrifice suggestions such as “anything of great personal value to the character: a cherished item, a piece (or person) of their past, or even a part of themselves (reducing an ability score by 2, giving up a class feature, etc.).” Then, players roll dice to determine if their sacrifices are acceptable; they can also commit suicide to automatically succeed. If too many sacrifices fail, the Horned King resurrects and the players lose without recourse. It’s a bizarre and feeble attempt at some kind of thematic ending, and without diegetic reasons for the sacrifice or even the vaguest hinting from past characters, it feels totally arbitrary.

As the finale to a sprawling campaign, the battle against the Horned King and ensuing sacrifice fails both to unify what came before or make significant deviations from the expected path. For a genre known for protagonists either succumbing to the horror (as in The Wicker Man or Witchfinder General) or else joining that horror (as in The Witch or Midsommar), The Crooked Moon offers neither: Phillip transforming into the Horned King carries no weight, no emotional heft or payoff. The party never gets the chance to side with the Crooked Queen, to become crooked themselves; their goody two-shoes heroism is simply assumed. The last two chapters prove utterly predictable, completely devoid of choices to make, and culminate in railroaded jank and setpiece battles that once again pay homage to the aesthetics of folk horror without reaching any level of depth, insight, or meaning. Were it not for the faux-Americana setting, the ending could safely stand in for any other generic fantasy adventure.

Such a bland and flat finale suggests that there may indeed be no mystery to the development of The Crooked Moon. A team of actual play actors wielded a compelling concept and established merch production lines into a massively successful Kickstarter campaign, but lacked the experience or design chops to deliver on their lofty intentions. What they created instead is a book that gestures in new directions but nearly always falls back into familiar territory, leaving its most promising notions behind in favor of well-trod basics.

There’s a concept, a lens, in the game industry—I heard it first from Mary Kenney, a writer now working at CD Projekt Red—which states that the story of every game is itself the story of that game’s development. Caves of Qud, for example, involves going on a long complicated quest, alone, through endless mystical rabbitholes to deal with techno-fascists trying to take over the world, and was created mainly by just two developers over the course of more than a decade; Dishonored concerns a small band of rebels working against corrupt authoritarians after being betrayed and left for dead, and was developed by ex-staffers of studios shut down by their publishers; Dark Souls starts you caught in an endless cycle of creation and destruction that you fight back against through strength of will, and From Software is now famous for being a beacon of relative stability in an industry devastated by ongoing layoffs. (For an in-depth comparison, try playing through Psychonauts 2, a game about examining the materialized interior psyches of various people, then watch Psychodyssey, Double Fine Production’s in-house documentary series of the game’s development.) This is all a somewhat unfalsifiable notion, of course—at such wide angles, it’s difficult to prove any interpretation truly incorrect or inaccurate—but the lens remains fun and fascinating nonetheless.

While The Crooked Moon is about a lot of things, the principal recurring narrative motif is that of getting in too deep without understanding the consequences. Phillip and Adela Druskenvald stand as the most obvious facet of this thread, of course, not realizing that their actions would resurrect the Crooked Queen and Horned King, but the same is true of the Fallen, each of whom started out with noble intentions only to end up mired in dangerous messes. Nearly all characters make bargains with powers greater than they—the Fallen, the Druskenvalds, the Crooked Man, the hags of the Vermintoll Coven, and most likely even the party—and end up mutated and warped as a result. One wonders how Avantris feels, finding themselves suddenly gone from merely a very successful actual play channel to invested with four million dollars and the obligation to deliver tens of thousands of books to legions of hungry fans.

In truth, though, I find that The Crooked Moon wears its most apt metaphor right on the cover: the wicker man. A wicker man is unliving facsimile, an artificial object made in the image of the self. A wicker man is designed for destruction, consumption, a piece meant not to stand the test of time but to be set aflame and watched as it burns. A wicker man is woven together from thousands of individual strands, each tough and reliable in their own right, but ultimately stands empty, waiting to be filled. A wicker man appears impressive, but on the inside still remains hollow.

Historical wicker men were used as a means of mass religious oblation, animals and people stuffed inside and set alight, filling the emptiness with living beings. We see one on the cover without its prey, its bulk yet hollow. That the masked cultists gaze at you, the reader, perhaps offers the answer as to the victims of the wicker man’s sacrifice.