Review: "The Crooked Moon," the third-party folk horror adventure that raised $4m on Kickstarter

Hello!

I wrote a pretty long and in-depth review on my blog of The Crooked Moon,, the massive new folk horror project by Legends of Avantris, the actual play channel. (You might know them from their many actual play shows, or their animated shortform video snippets.)

The Crooked Moon raised a little over four million dollars on Kickstarter a couple years ago, and in general has been acclaimed by many bloggers, YouTubers, and influencers, plus the many, many loyal Avantris fans out there. Certainly, the book is very large and filled with expensive illustrations.

But—to spoil the review a little—I think it mostly is not very good. There are a lot of reasons for this, but in general the book skews towards linear, uninteractive setpieces, on-rails sequences with little room for deviation, and events just sort of occurring as the chapters demand rather than due to any clear chain of causality or decisions made by the players. The player-facing options and isolated bits of DM content (monsters, items, spells, etc.) are middling-to-good, but they're poorly integrated into the whole of the adventure. Overall, there are just a lot of odd and unhelpful decisions made in terms of organization, structure, and information design. It's a tough read.

Let me know you think! You can read my review here.