Currently on sale until the end of April for $5.50 and despite this review, I recommend you take advantage of the sale (heck, do the bundle), because you’re getting your money’s worth at this price point.

Another setting. This one is a tad different from the others & that will come later, because Adamant Crown belongs to the setting of Soulblight, one of the oldest, if not the oldest bespoke Shadowdark settings.

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Up front, I’m going to start with this disclaimer:
I know the author. We routinely talk & advise one another while promoting the work of the other. Laurin is slowly becoming Shadowdark’s hedge wizard in the same vein as Alan Moore. They even have the same beard. This is to say, I may come across harsher with this review because of our friendship & my genuine desire to see Soulblight get the love & praise it deserves. And while, I own just about everything Soulblight & have played in an Adamant Crown campaign (that fell apart due to people), I do think there are some issues holding Adamant Crown back from being “this is the default SD setting now”.

Also, there are no affiliate links.

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What is Soulblight?

If you are not familiar, Soulblight began its development during Shadowdark’s beta. Adamant Crown is within the same world, but doesn’t require you to own the original to use it. (I would recommend it along with Champions of Lothorian.) We’ll address that later.

The original setting takes place in a Persian/Sumerian analogue where the great rulers face an onslaught of demonic invaders bringing their diseased blankets in the form of corruption, or soul blight. Which is in and of itself, a mechanic that carries across settings including Adamant Crown.

It starts with the following phrase:

“Seven sundered. Struck deep down into the deepest depths of the earth.”

With this opening line, we are introduced to the ephemeral writing of Laurin-David Weggens. Much of the style permeates Soulblight setting books. It’s both evocative & intangible like a lucid nightmare or a bit of undigested beef. What I mean is that writing gives you an idea of a direction, but it’s not fully-formed. It’s hazy & dreamlike. It provides ample direction & gets you champing at the bit, but it doesn’t provide easy answers per se. It leaves room for a GM to interpret Lotharian as their own through its sheer prose – like a negligee.

This is both a selling point for some (like myself) and a detractor for others. It also suffers from a little verbosity since English is a second language, but I also think that’s okay when the intention is to introduce a more writerly style to the prose. This is writing where you can tell the author’s personality, warts & all.

Along comes Adamant Crown…

… and it shifts the analogue to Arthurian & standard German dark fairy tale fantasy. It doesn’t lose the underlying themes or mechanics (the Soulblight, the Sovereigns, or how the realm changes based on character actions), but reinterprets them from the core setting to this one. This is also a bit unique in that it’s not necessarily the same time period for the Soulblight setting unlike what you see from those Beach Mages who set everything around a single content from sword pirates, to the bear-fxxker city, to the city where everyone in power is ugly & wears a mask, or to the jungle dinosaurs. It’s all relatively the same time-line so they can unite events & history. Adamant Crown & Soulblight don’t adhere to that structure..

Again, we start with a bit of prose:

“Eight dove in the dark to face the Lord below and provided victorious, in spite of their fears and feeble souls.”

As such, you have the first signs of the cyclical nature of this setting (re: theme – history repeats itself) & a few context clues as to the campaign built into this setting book – establishing who the new lord of the region is now that he has passed.

Like many Cursed Scrolls, you have a hex map & some random encounters for them. The random encounters are varied, but a little lacking in action. There are also rumor tables to associate with the region & this is kind of where my issues with the layout & organization begin. I want to focus on the writing first, so I’ll leave the layout to a separate section later, because again, I consider most of this personal pet peeves that don’t matter much to the average consumer.

One thing I will point out though is that 9 pt font is too small for any commercial product.

Introduction

This explains the story of the current setting & could be read to the players. The king is dead. People want the crown. The Sovereign (re: wrecking balls of change) has been defeated by 8 palatines (virtuous knights) but the land is scarred by soulblight and the region barely survived it. Will those corrupt seeds bloom again, or will a new age of enlightenment & virtue reign supreme if the crown is seized by the right person.

It mentions you may want to have the Soulblight setting book to get the most out of this one, but it’s not necessary. And having played it, it’s true. However, what’s not mentioned is that you probably also want Champions for the pyromancer that it has spells for. I get that it’s expanding on another product already out, but a little guidance here would have been appreciated. It will show up in the spell section, but by then, it’s a little too late.

Chapter 1: The Kingdom of Marland

Ancestries

Before the chapter starts there’s a bit of prose in the form of a letter. It’s worth the read. Without preamble though, we’re straight into ancestries, and we’re slapped with a very interesting one from a lore perspective in the Changeling. It’s ability is essentially a free augury so it’s about as awesome as the GM running it, but I find the implication that a changeling can be born to human couples merely because of some fey-touch that leads to the child having some sylvan blood, a lot of fun from a roleplay perspective. There are also reinterpretations of the core ancestries, a drow, dragoncursed, and giant marble skinned celestial beings known as the Tutelari (re: Goliath). In general, the Tutelari & Dragoncursed are the best, but they aren’t wildly out of balance to be the optimal choice. For me, they are good, but nothing really stands out as something I want to steal for my own campaign. It’s more, I think it solely fits here.

My problem is that this isn’t in the Character Options section. I’m not sure why it isn’t either since this is the largest variety of character options available in the book. Until this point, I’ve never really considered what should go first in a setting book much, but SD core book puts character options first. Mythic Bastionland puts character options first. In every campaign/setting book I can think of, character options almost always seem to come first. It’s like the author saying, here’s the cool shiny toys, then I’ll tell you about the world they fit into. Laying the foundation before you build the world upon it.

That’s not the case here & it’s noticeably awkward in that regards.

Cultures of Marland

These are fantastic & I kind of wish they related more to the ancestries. Like, you have 6 hill tribes including the terrifying Blemmyaes (how do you pronounce that Laurin?) who are a “headless tribe, whose faces protrude from their chests” and there are Red Caps, I mean Dark Gnomes. These 6 tribes would be enough to fill an entire campaign in this region, but you also get a beastfolk kingdom whom are being overrun by ivy as their lands fall and the drow of Nosilonydd who have a power vacuum after some drow did drow things to other drows.

Notice there is no mention of any of the ancestries. It’s an opportunity for a GM to fill that gap themselves, but it’s also a missed opportunity to really cement those ancestries so people might want to play them. Similarly, there’s no mention of how each of these cultures perceives the main conceit – acquisition of the adamant crown. That would be useful information for a GM to administer their campaign following that structure. This is also a general flaw I noticed in the book. Some things reinforce the main campaign conceit. Many things do not and appear to be injected because they are on theme & tone.

Some of the images could have been lost in order to create more room to add these missing details as well. Or add more pages. It’s fine if a setting book is long simply because the font is larger and the details are good. I would have liked more about the various cultures & how the various ancestries play into them.

Religion in Marland

A good recontextualization of the gods already built into SD with a few additions through the Lost & the Lord Below. Mainly, this is great flavor. There doesn’t really appear to be any mechanical benefits to choosing one over the other like you would with a warlock’s patron boons.

Faces of Marland

Basically, 4 pages of NPCs dripping with flavor that you should try to figure out how to use within the campaign. For instance, Bishop Royce was constantly at odds with the previous King about his meddling & how to prepare for the next coming of Chaos (because there will be a next coming), but she keeps the crown for the next “heir” to claim & respects traditions. EXCEPT when it comes to her secret, in which case, you have to get her family to turn on her to get any hint at it. Which sort of makes it less actionable at the table. This happens a few times throughout the book, but with so much content, it’s barely noticeable.

Or, there is Detleff, the Malcontent who hints at breeding experiments that led to the birth of a Tutelari. Or, there’s Duke Silas, the drug-addled aspirant & betting-odds favorite for the crown. These NPCs are basically adventure hex keys unto themselves. Several deal with the adamant crown and you wouldn’t know anything about these details if you skipped this section & that’s kind of a shame.

I also note a lack of Drow NPC. (-200 DKP.) Again, a missed opportunity to reinforce.

Factions of Marland

Again a lot of great flavor that you want to read first before running the campaign. Again, to me this is a writing organization issue, because I want my ancestries & classes to introduce me to NPCs & factions. I want to know what all of those character options are BEFORE I jump into the world. Mind you, I like the Soulblight setting because it hits a lot of happy notes for me with its writing & gothic tone.

I think there’s a lot of great creativity in it, but the organization makes it hard for me to want to pick it up & run it because I’m going to be constantly flipping back & forth for references while prepping & I’m not entirely sure where that magical piece of lore I want is referenced. And this isn’t to say flipping pages is bad, but looking for information about the Adamant Crown shouldn’t be strewn across 20 sections without 1 to point you to them at least.

Ch. 2 Character Options

There is one class – the Knight of St. Sofia. It suits the setting, it’s a little powerful. The description is sparse so you could use this class in your Warhammer 40k clone as a Sister of Mercy & it would work. The blue title/header bar doesn’t really work with this thinner font choice. It probably should be bolder and aligned differently. But I like the little quote and lore bits.

“By the angel, she had made her oath. By the virtues, she would live her life. By the sword, she would follow her duty; to the bitter end and golden triumph.”
– Epithet on the burla plinth of Dame Asmira, fallen knight of St. Sofia

To me, these little nuggets are evocative of the world & its tone. It helps the GM determine if this is for them, but the organization holds it back. Why aren’t ancestries a character option? Why does the section on ancestries tell you how to roll a character, but the character options chapter doesn’t? Why is this one class the character option? Why aren’t the character options first?

Organization of information is so important to adequate retention of information. If I want you to retain information, I need to convey it in a variety of manners that will reinforce that information for you & ensure you retain it. And there’s so much information here to retain.

Recently, Matt Damon complained in an interview about how movies suck because studios want them to repeat the plot every 3 minutes because everyone is doomscrolling through the shitty writing and the only way to get people to follow the plot is to apply directly to head.

Because a campaign/setting book is a longer text, following the rule of 3 (repeat something 3 times to reinforce it), is a good idea. But more importantly, you want to organize information for clarity.

So, why is there only 1 class? To some extent, this appears to be an issue of adhering too closely to the SD design ethos of niche protection. Or the Cursed Scroll design of 2-3 classes. But there is another way, when you have a very specific setting, you can indulge in narrowing the niche much more, similar to Mythic Bastionland’s dozens of knights. Each feels unique while reinforcing the tone of the setting. A few more classes, like a hedge wizard, briar witch, or jester could have expanded the tone & drive home the uniqueness of this setting.

Spells & Hexes

Anyway, next are spells, and there are a lot of spells for the Pyromancer, but there isn’t a pyromancer in the book. It’s in the Champions book. This is the first time you see this mentioned. I don’t understand why the class is not included here. It should be. The spell lists are appreciated to help you figure out how these can be added to the Priest & Wizard’s spell lists. There are some fun ones here like Magnetic Missile which pulls a target nearer, or Topor which acts as an enfeeblement.

Then, you’re introduced to the new mechanic of Forgotten Hexes. Any character can know & cast a hex, so long as they have a Charisma (RIZ, Z) modifier of at least 1. It provides this feeling of pagan ritual casting that is found in stories of early medieval period. While I love it, why didn’t this come up in the earlier section about the cultures & people of Marland?

This is also why I think it’s important to put the character options first. So when you review it while writing everything else, you are reminded, oh hey, I need a paganism culture maybe a sidhe or witch class as well. Reinforce the tone & flavor.

Chapter 3 – Gameplay

This section really is a mix of the campaign regarding the Adamant Crown, more information for the background about the Kingdom of Marland, & a few other new mechanics (like tourneys, rivalries, & jousting).

Unlike a 5e campaign module or a Pathfinder adventure path, Adamant Crown doesn’t describe the step-by-step story arc that you will play this campaign in. Instead, it provides you the tools and says, this is yours. No two tables will play the same campaign as a result. In fact, you could use a lot of these pieces in your own setting without the Soulblight connection.

It provides a structure for acquiring the crown (see the Bishop’s Blessing) & that character being retired.

There are some instructions for domain play, but there seems to be an oversight in how to acquire one beyond as a reward for a great service to a lord. Nor are there costs associated with building your own manor, estate, etc. But there are a load of other details such as events that can occur, landmarks on the land, and more.

There are some tables for building rivalries. Now that you have your own domain, you’ll need a good rival like the Dwarven Chaos Wizard who is an outsider who wants to win the heart of their one true love that you seem to have the heart of, and he hates you more because of a family feud and he works for the Briar Witch (why wasn’t this a class?). There is a lot to work with within these tables and even a few sample ones. I’d love another 2 pages of this stuff.

Then there is the stages of the Blight. A good analogue for this is the Tomb Crystal Poisoning. It will slowly kill your characters off with repeated exposure.

Tourneys, Melee Fights, & Jousting mechanics for medieval games. In the campaign I played in, we never got to enjoy these rules so I’m unsure how the mechanics actually work out from experience, but based upon the read, they seem straightforward & mirroring other systems in SD.

Finally, there’s the Diviner of the Chasm who operates a bit like a Warlock Patron, but can benefit anyone who engages it. It’s another fun new mechanic, but also a sort of a character option with a slight bit more.

Chapter 4 – On the Road

This is mostly hex keys & random encounters. If a typical Cursed Scroll has 13 hex keys & 20 random encounters. This is a wealth of options that increases the deadliness of the region because there are 43 hex keys, & 500 random encounters (100 per subcategory).

Like most hex keys, their value/quality is a bit of what you can make of it, but there’s a lot here to work with. For instance, there’s a dragon ossuary which obviously you need to throw a necromancer at. Or the Castle Lindmunt where the Tulari experiements are happening. Even without the campaign structure of the Adamant Crown, you can run a fantastic campaign from just these bits.

In fact, I’d wager to say, this chapter is the most valuable piece of the book for most GMs because it’s a fountain of ideas. Toss your coin in and make your wish because there’s something here for you.

Chapter 5 – Sovereign Realms

Okay… why aren’t these included alongside the Kingdom of Marland? I recognize they aren’t part of the Kingdom, but as a GM & reader, I want like material next to like material so it’s easier to come back and reference the material. The other weird part about this is that they are basically 1 page summaries that would fit in another chapter. They also seem like short-hand notes for a dungeon. “TOWER OF THORNS (awesome name), Recommended Player Level: 7-8, Hex Key: 1502… Cursed Fortress: The home of the Briar Witch was once an imperial castle meant to defend a crucial mountain pass that’d lead into the realm’s heartland.”

The imagination on display is great, but the organizational choices really put me off using it because I’m never going to remember there is this cool bit in that one chapter that’s 4 pages long for these 3 realms (are they even realms? – this is more of a dungeon). This is the common problem of the organization throughout.

After that, you have the bestiary & the collection of treasures. Which, let’s talk about that.

Chapter 7: Treasures

WHY IS THERE A GAUNTLET ADVENTURE IN THE CHAPTER ABOUT TREASURE!?
You have a 4 page chapter of realms. Just make one for the Gauntlet too.

What’s unique about this gauntlet is that it isn’t intentionally deadly. It’ll knock people unconscious, but not kill them. It’s a fun little jaunt of sneaking into a monk’s brewery to steal some exclusive ale, but not necessarily threatening in terms of potential TPKs.

And I’m going to offer this addition, a hook if you will, a witch has turned the party into mice & tasked them with retrieving Godefrey’s Golden Ale. Upon completion, she will transform the survivors back. I’d then use the Dark Gnomes, not as rivals, but a threat to identify the mice.

So who is this for?

There’s so much to love about Adamant Crown. It has so much imagination & evocative writing. There’s so much content here that you could easily run a multi-year campaign with it.

It is, however, flawed.

It takes risks & is all the better for having done so. This isn’t some hackney conversion of other IP. It’s a genuine attempt to create something original with equal parts blood & heart with a sprinkling of missteps along the way. She isn’t the prettiest girl at the school dance, but she is the one you’ll be happy you went with when the cop flashlight taps the fogged glass of your parents’ old station wagon up on Make-Out Point.

If you’re looking for a quirky medieval fantasy dark fairy tale setting with knights & a kingdom in turmoil, I got a rough diamond for you.

Thank you for making it this far. Now, I’m going to nerd out about design. You have been warned.

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Design & Layout

This layout is fun & experimental. It tries to do more than any other Shadowdark layout does to push the bar, hewing closer to Valley of Flowers & Mythic Bastionland than Shadowdark. And while the ideas and concepts behind the design are great, the execution is not. I want to focus on 3 things specifically:

1. Page layout anatomy
2. Font choices
3. Grid structure and alignment

Page Layout Anatomy

To me, it seems obvious that medieval manuscripts & SD are the style influences here.

But there is a flaw in the execution. For instance, you can see on the left page they have a red line before the edge of the paper to guide the limits of the filigree, because there was no such thing as bleed. These were done by hand, so they would often prevent printing to the edge when they could. An obvious exception being the biblical inset image that goes off the top (for the purposes of allowing Jesus to resurrect) which is symbolic.

Adamant Crown doesn’t do that & it suffers for it because you can see that the border is different widths. You can tell they were arranged piece-by-piece because they don’t fully align & overlap other elements on the page. Etc.

And while this is one of the influences, others do it better by adhering more to the basic structure of how a medieval book would have been written.

Both of these examples are very modern adaptations of the medieval manuscript, but they maintain that tone through careful curation & selection. This also comes down to page layout anatomy.

This above reference image features a standard novel layout structure with the page numbers in the running header. The running header is usually where you will see the section or chapter name of the book and is often on the top, but can appear in a Running Footer as well (especially legal documents). Because the above is a novel layout, it refers to a text column, but in something like Mythic Bastionland where there are multiple columns & images, that whole section is the Body with each subsection having it’s own unique name.

Anyway, you’ll notice that the page number & borders are all contained within the margins. Which you should probably maintain approximately a 1:1:1.5 ratio margin – meaning if you use 1 inch on the top, 1 inch on the exterior side, and 1.5 inches on the bottom. I believe Affinity defaults to 5mm/5mm/7mm which is pretty close. Valley of Flowers uses the top, side, and bottom margins for both the border & page number. Mythic Bastionland mostly uses the side and top. In both instances, they are creating the feeling & echoes of framework similar to the medieval manuscripts & establishing a consistent structure throughout the books to reinforce the tone.

Adamant Crown doesn’t really do that. Instead, it only uses the border on the title page of each section. It also pulls the Running Header/Footer into the body which you can see below in how the white background overlaps the image. It also makes the frame pointless when the images span across it. But worse, the gutter margin (the space lost due to the spine of the book) should have a similar margin to your footer (so 1.5 inches or 7mm per the above examples). Here, it’s smaller.

In the physical copy, it makes things more difficult to read just like the tiny, 9pt font.

Fonts

Speaking of fonts, the smallest font you generally want to use in an A5 is a 10pt font. Given that font sizes are not universal, this will vary, but generally speaking when it comes to most body fonts, you want the main text to be either 10pt or 11pt.

After that, you want to work within 2-3 total font families. Mythic Bastionland uses 2. Valley of Flowers also uses 2 (3 if you count the drop cap). This is a structural choice to help improve navigation & readability. Adamant Crown sometimes uses 3-4 in a single spread. It’s not bad, but it creates visual noise that slows the reader, especially with the number of image inserts.

Your main title or Header 1 should be the display or fanciest font in your book. Your subtitle or Header 2 most often than not, is just your body font at a larger size, bolded perhaps, maybe all caps. If you have a section title or Header 3, you would want to use a slightly larger size and maybe bolding, but not all caps. Again, the ratio tends to be 1:1.4. So for a 10pt font, you’d use a 14pt for the H2 and an 20-24pt font for the H1. With an A5 size manuscript, you have less space, so 2 title styles is ideal for cleanliness & easy navigation. You can see that with the Valley of Flowers example above.

Grids & Alignment

In design, everything should be aligned to a grid, even if the aesthetic is total chaos. Johan Nohr had a great thread up on X before abandoning it (and I sadly didn’t save it) explaining his process of creating a grid & choosing his fonts in order to ensure that the Mork Borg chaos made sense & were easy to read. It was a response to this analysis from Explorer’s Design where he noticed that despite the seeming anarchy of each page, they flowed relatively well. The point being, it improves readability. A hex map without hexes & unaligned tables, make reading harder for your GM – the person you want to invest in the setting.

When you build the grid first, you can also test various font combinations and structures so that you can determine if you like the way something looks or maintains an aesthetic you are after or not before you get too deep into the layout & realize, oh shit, that design choice I made 3 days ago causes problems and now I have to redo everything.

You can easily tell this isn’t the case with Adamant Crown & it’s a point of distraction even people don’t know exactly why some thing bothers them or don’t have the language to explain it. Most people want a visual consistency or balance & without an underlying grid or alignment system, it’s hard to develop that.

The padding is inconsistent. It overlaps the frame at points. The section title & page number are on the bottom, which isn’t an issue, but it is within the body frame area instead of above it, which is an issue because it causes awkward overlaps. The line-height & baseline for text don’t align across pages (see the spell section) so when you open the book & look at the spread, there are broken header bars across half a page.

Generally, some of these issues are less problematic for PDFs where people often read it by the page (although I prefer a console spread), but in a printed artifact, it becomes a point of distraction that takes the eye & attention away from the written word, which is already hard enough to read when it tends towards the smaller size or more extravagant.

All of this could be avoided by building a grid, establishing the margin structure underneath, & adhering to it. The key being adherence.

It seems like these choices were made to fit a specific page count, but honestly, with this much content, just add pages. It’s okay. I’m more receptive to a 200 page book I can read than a 140 page book I struggle with. And as much as I like Adamant Crown, I struggle with it because my designer eye is trained to notice these things & it jumps out to me. I kind of want to redo it.

But it also has color. It color codes items, etc. That brings me so much joy.