Review of Gackling Moon
Gackling Moon is a 203 page book by Patrick Stuart with illustrations by Tom K. Kemp.
It is divided up into roughly 12 sections. The first section deals with the Gackling Moon and it’s phases where each phase of the moon has different effects upon the people who are touched by it’s rays.
The rest of the sections deal with various locales in the Moonlands. They are:
Narcissolis
The Incoherent Isles
The Umber Woods
The Yellow Plain and the Large Goblin Collider
The Vermillion Sea
The Plain of Anesthetic Fire
The AntiGoblin Empire
The Whetstone Ridge
The Painted Plane
The Maw
Owl City, the Great Goblin Market and the Necropolis of Glass
I was going to describe each in greater detail but overall I find the names of each give a good idea of what they’re kind of about. Gackling Moon is a strange book, I’m not sure exactly how to categorize it. The best description is probably gazetteer. It’s a setting book that while not a carbon copy of your classic RPG gazetteer, feels more like one than most modern OSR stuff.
Overall, I found there to be a lack of gameable material in this book (although to be fair it never really presented itself as anything but nor did I buy it expecting different). And while it has a lot of interesting ideas and a fair density of ideas, it’s more or less describing ideas in detail rather than gameable things in detail. It does include some random tables, generally one for each locale, but they feel more like something tacked on than useful.
I don’t regret buying Gackling Moon, but it is a book I don’t think I’ll ever really reach for when I go to plan my next campaign, nor a book I’d reach for to become inspired for my next campaign.
While it does have some interesting ideas, I particularly like the Vermillion Sea and the Plain of Anesthetic Fire, the diversity of its ideas makes it somewhat disharmonious. I get that the setup of the world is that it’s supposed to be a reality bending place where each locale is warped in it’s own way but each area is so different they begin to feel so disconnected from each other that they might as well be about different isolated worlds where the sum isn’t greater than it’s parts.
In a way it’s kind of a shame to me, where I would have much preferred more of an in-depth treatment of like 3-4 of the locales, instead of including all the ones it did, where they feel more like sketches than real imagined places. They also differ a bit tonally, some are much more humorous or satirical than others, and some bend reality in more unnatural or almost fourth-wall breaking ways.
This is kind of what separates this work from other gonzo or fantastical stuff that I’ve read. The Dying Earth Jack Vance stories have a lot of weird and fantastical locales and are somewhat humorous. They also just feel more tonally uniform and different elements of the setting feel logically consistent and of the same world, even if they break the laws of our world in different ways.
Would I recommend this book to others?
If you like to read Patrick Stuarts stuff, then yes. Overall it’s an easy and engaging read. However, if you like to play Patrick Stuarts stuff, then probably not. It has some interesting ideas but the amount of legwork you’d need to do would probably be to much. I’d reach for something else.
Most of the locations are so strange and satirical in a very British humour type of way that it kind of breaks my “what is life like for the average person” rule. Where if I can’t imagine what life is like for the average person in the world, I generally find it a hard setting to run. I find if I’m having a hard time imagining this, then the players more so. And if the players are having a hard time, then there aren’t going to be very many affordances for them to grasp onto and make decisions in the world and ultimately OSR play tends to be about making interesting intelligent decisions.