Village Backdrop: Macrimei 2.0

This expanded version of RSP’s Village Backdrop-series is 13 pages long, 1 page front cover, 2 pages of advertisement, 1 page editorial/ToC, 1 page SRD and 1 page back cover, leaving us with 7 pages of content, so let’s take a look at the settlement!

Know then, young prince, that in the days of yore, when Atlantis had first sunken into the seas, there was a place called Macrimei, situated amid windswept hills in colder climes, where ruins howl of ages long past, its populace descendants of a once glorious culture, now reduced to a state that is but a shade of their former glory; a place where once towers of ivory pierced the sky, everything looks as though a certain Cimmerian’s sandaled feet had cut a swath through the landscape. Into this desolation came the wizard Anazturex with his own private little army of henchmen, dubbed after the strange local deity “Soryan”, his Sons of Soryan. It’s been years under this small magocratic rule, and nowadays, everyone is barred from the red obelisk where Soryan’s supposedly worshiped, as the wizard’s tower watches over a village born in ruins.

It is rumored in town, that one day a strange silvery child appeared and subsequently vanished…and the wizard’s tower has an odd tendency to disappear for weeks on end, only to suddenly reappear…but to what ends, no one knows. Oh, and in case you are not too keen on the reveal of the nature of the wizard, an alternative is provided as a designer’s suggestion…kudos for going the extra-mile!

Now, the lore and flavor, the writing – is top tier. The expanded version also provides new material in pretty compelling ways. To be more precise, we get the usual expansion pertaining the surrounding locality, the law of the land, customs, etc. Dressing in particular has been properly expanded: For example, the dressing/event table, which has been extended to 20 entries…but the pdf goes beyond that, providing some smaller sub-dressing suggestions for visits to certain keyed locales. The 2.0-version also features well-written fluff-only write-ups for NPCS, 5 to be more specific…but there are also less pleasant things to report: The original did sport a full settlement statblock, which was cut in a puzzling decision – and the same goes for the two perfectly serviceable statblocks featured in the original. The artifact, the Orb of Soryan is still here, but is now presented in plain text as opposed to in its own sidebar – which is just an aesthetic decision I wasn’t too keen on. Having its CL etc. on the next column, separated from the write up, also rather disappointed me.

Conclusion:

Editing and formatting are top-notch, I didn’t notice any glitches. Layout adheres to RSP’s smooth, printer-friendly two-column standard and the pdf comes with full bookmarks as well as a gorgeous map, of which you can, as always, download high-res jpegs if you join RSP’s patreon. The pdf comes in two versions, with one being optimized for screen-use and one to be printed out.

In case my ample allusions to the genre-classics were not ample clue: This village is a perfect bow before the tropes of Swords & Sorcery, a village dripping flavor and atmosphere out of every pore; just as useful in a post-apocalyptic scenario, Macrimei is a fantastic village that manages to evoke the primal sense of the ancient, of decay and ages long past with panache and prose so concise and dense, you feel like you could cut it. While it could just as well be tinted through the shades of high fantasy, unlike most sojourns of PFRPG into the genre, I’d strongly advise against that, for this village backdrop GETS what makes Sword & Sorcery so amazing – it’s neither flowery prose, nor the themes…it’s the room for growth, for question-marks, the precarious balance of blanks and filled-in information, the tone.

I seriously LOVE John Bennett’s Macrimei. But the 2.0-revision left me remarkably cold regarding its new material – it primarily provides some minor quality of life improvements, but cutting of perfectly fine material strikes me as strange. If you already have Macrimei’s original iteration, I’d strongly suggest skipping this one; in fact, depending on how you value stats vs. fluff, you might consider the original to be the better choice. Don’t get me wrong: The flavor is still fantastic, and I really liked the new fluff-stuff as well, but as a whole, I expected more from this. My final verdict can’t exceed 3.5 stars, rounded up due to in dubio pro reo, and because I can’t bring myself to round down for it.

You can get this pdf here on OBS!

The original version can be found here!

You can support Raging Swan Press here on patreon.

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Endzeitgeist out.

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