DISCLAIMER: I receieved a sample PDF version of this deck and the attached GM guide booklet in return for an honest review. Adjustments may be made to the final product before publication.
Marginal Worlds is the first TTRPG product from the creators of the Maniculum podcast, Zoey Franznick and Mac Boyle.
(The Maniculum is dedicated to retelling strange tales from Medieval literature then harvesting them for RPG ideas. I heartily recommend it, particularly if you like other great podcasts such as Weird Medieval Guys, What the Folklore, Fictoplasm or the Appendix N Book Club.)
Marginal Worlds presents 50 system neutral magical items in the form of a deck of cards. The cards are for player use. A separate pdf/booklet is provided for GMs, this gives expanded information about the items, including rules advice, different options for how they work and the possible consequences of using them. There’s a few other goodies as well, including notes from a party of adventurers who inhabit the marginal world itself.
Each card provides a one paragraph description of a magical item, a picture of it, and usually an accompanying quote from a Medieval bestiary, tale or medical text. Each item is either lifted straight from the pages of Medieval literature or created by riffing on them. I do mean pages literally by the way; some of the items are gamified versions of Medieval marginalia, (weird doodles made in illuminated manuscripts, Google them if you haven’t heard of them before, they’re a trip).
The cards are marked with icons, (a bit like Magic: The Gathering or Pokemon cards), these icons indicate if an item is rare, sentient, powerful, cursed, or has been given a D&D 5e write-up in one of the apoendices.
Items include the Axe of the Green Knight, Helpful Pot of Mouse, Roaming Shell, Donestre-Tears Ink, Howling Helmet, Amphisbaena Cloak, and Drunken Awl.
First off, this is a great concept and right up my street. A lot of modern fantasy set in supposedly Medieval worlds lacks even a tenth of the mind-boggling weirdness of the real Middle Ages. I’ve written books seeking to redress that balance and I’m always delighted to see other creators doing the same.
This approach of drawing from history works particularly well for artefacts. Magic items perform two main functions in RPGs – power ups and plot hooks. Power ups grant new abilities such as invisibility, or bonuses to rolls e.g. to hit. Plot hooks send the player characters off on new quests, reveal new lore, present fresh problems for the player characters to deal with or opportunities for them to gain some advantage. (Cursed items may provide debuffs instead of power-ups, but are a great source of plot hooks.) A good magic item does both of course. So, I particularly appreciate the way the items in Marginal Worlds have more texture and history than the standard +1 Sword of Frost that you see in video games and D&D. Reading a card from this deck may reveal the existence of a bizarre nation of demi-human beings, allude to the deeds of a brutal hero or unlucky saint, or shed light on dubious but effective medical practices. These items absolutely drip with personality. (And occasionally blood.)
Let’s take the example of the Fire-Hen Arrows. They’re basically just slightly volatile arrows that do extra fire damage. Anyone who’s played D&D, or almost any fantasy RPG, or practically any CRPG ever, is familiar with weapons that do elemental damage. But instead of being enchanted by a wizard or something, these arrows are fletched with feathers from chickens that come from a far off land. Anyone who grabs one of these chickens will catch fire and burn to death. Now you don’t just have fire arrows, you potentially have a quest to the land of the lethal inferno-chickens. (And the lingering question of exactly how those feathers were harvested.)
Let’s look at a few more cards in detail.
The Staff of Panotios. A staff covered in large ears, it channels the powers of the giant-eared Panotios people, (Panotii), – granting excellent hearing, a summonable invisible ear and even a miraculous cure for deafness. (One item I wish was real.) It’s delightfully weird, hints at a wider world of strangeness and has multiple uses which encourage players to be creative, overall an ideal magic item.
Mellified Man. It’s like a really good health potion that cures just about anything! Just one tiny snag, it’s made by slowly mummifying a human in honey, (beginning while they’re alive). A roll is required to choke down this cannibalistic, candied treat. (Yes, this was a real idea in Medieval medicine, though I don’t recall learning if it was ever actually done.) This would certainly make for a nicely gruesome macguffin that the player characters have to track down to either cure themselves of some horrible ailment, or acquire for a mysterious patron.
(Almost as grisly are the deadly sling-bullets made of brains, from Irish mythology.)
Snail Talisman. This artefact allows you to summon a Leaping Snail, which is a great inclusion for anyone who enjoys Medieval marginalia – scholars of Medieval manuscripts have long been baffled by the number of illustrations of snails, many of them in pitched battle with knights. The D&D write-up of the Leaping Snail makes it a pretty devastating opponent for a low-level party, (high AC, brutal leaping attack with added poison), unless they can box it in somehow. Another Medieval meme, this time of warrior rabbits, inspired a similar item in this deck – Rod of the Rabbit. (Stop giggling at the back there.)
Curadmír: Cauldron of the Hero’s Portion. I like this item because it’s useless in combat, therefore it implies a setting where the player characters are doing more than dungeon crawling. Its power is that at certain times it becomes a source of infinite pork stew, enough to give everyone present a portion. But each person who dips a ladle into the cauldron gets a portion equivalent to their honour. I can see lots of opportunities for political manoeuvring and skullduggery with this item.
- Using it to test the worthiness of a newly encountered NPC.
- Smuggling in pork to bulk out your ally’s portion, thus improving their reputation.
- Secretly swapping your portion with someone who was judged more honourable than you. Or swapping two NPCs’ portions to see if you can start trouble.
- Catching the villain who’s been swapping portions!
- Demonstrating the treachery of the Wicked Duke to the king by serving the cauldron up at a royal banquet and watching as the Duke is judged wanting and serves himself up a bowl of flavourless greasewater.
- Proving that the poor orphan in your care is the chieftain’s son and heir returned to her, because why else would he receive a portion as large as the chieftain’s own?
- And, of course, in a game of Pendragon you could use this item to visibly track Glory and Virtues for the player knights and their rivals in court.
The appendices add some of what I’d call bonus content –
- Expanded effect tables for a couple of items – The Stone Harper and The Bragaful.
- D&D 5e stats for most of the items. (Perhaps it would be better to say, “advice on making these items compatible with D&D”. The item descriptions aren’t actually laid out as they would be in a dedicated D&D book. Some entries simply say something like “use this spell to simulate the item’s effect”. Others go into more detail, laying out specific bonuses and damage dice.)
- Advice on making deals with faeries and how to complicate your players’ lives if they’re foolhardy enough to try using the fey-summoning item to call up a faerie noble. My favourite Appendix! The fey are not to be messed with. And it includes a fun little table of weird things faeries may ask for as payment for their services.
History buffs, and the merely curious, will also appreciate the glossary, which gives a little bit of information about the various real world “tomes” and objects which inspired the magic items of Marginal Worlds.
Soojin Paek who, like Zoe Franznick, worked on the award-winning video game Pentiment, is the artist for this project. The artwork on the cards and in the GM’s guide has that almost cartoony style typical of Medieval marginalia. It’s very appealing, even cute. I’m a fan. Ironically, it might not fit gritty fantasy games which people imagine are more realistic. (Historical accuracy doesn’t always mean historical verisimilitude.)
A couple of layout quibbles.
- The items are divided into three broad categories artefacts, clothes and weapons. In the deck sample pdf, these categories are in the following order – clothes, weapons, artefacts. In the GM’s guide they’re in the order – artefacts, clothes, weapons. This does make it trickier to cross reference between the two pdfs. With physical copies this would be irrelevant of course, because cards can be shuffled however you like. (And, as noted above, this could be changed in the final version.)
- I see why the D&D 5e write-ups were separated off into an appendix – this product is intended to stand on its own feet as a system neutral resource usable for any RPG. But this does mean that to get the full information on an item to use it in D&D, you would have to cross reference the cards document with two different parts of the GM booklet. Which would be quite a lot of scrolling.
Minor quibbles aside, I enjoyed reading through this deck of Medieval madness. Despite already having the sample PDFs I’m tempted to back the Kickstarter so I can get hold of physical copies of the cards.
Perhaps more importantly.
- I want to show this deck to my friends and to other GMs at my local RPG club. Because I know it’ll make them laugh, and wince and get excited about the possibilities it opens up. And because I want to see what they’d do with it.
- After going through it all myself, I’ve had a bunch of ideas for quests, situations and complications to throw at my players.
If you’d like to know more, here’s a link to the creators’ promo video. https://rb.gy/tixyhp
If you think you might like to support the Kickstarter yourself then follow the link below.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/themaniculumpodcast/marginal-worlds-magic-item-expansion-pack
Wandering Fantasy 