A show of creativity. Intriguing scenario, cool plots and well-developed NPCs. It is possible to play for years in Redwater Valley.

The funniest part has been the character creation and the set-up. When it's time to run the game, its many problems come up. The teaching move, wich is mandatory to a certain degree, is bland and boring: on the 7-9 the MC has to come up with some problem. There are next to zero examples and being the move mandatory for every member of the party, you can exhaust problematic and interesting situation quite often. The publishing part gets repetitive soon too, and it's not well structured. One of my player, with an actual Ph.D and first hand experience in academia, was able to give us good input to spice things up.

As a PhD who left academia in disgust, I couldn't stop laughing at this game, and my friends from university can't wait to play it. It's the kind of rule book that is so fun to read you'll enjoy it even if you don't actually play it. I'm a bit unconvinced by the idea of making the character teachers in different department, the one time I've seen it played it basically led to only one player actually playing at any one time, which might be fine in principle but not my cup of tea. I think it can easily be hacked to make it more team-based though, probably making the players grad students sharing an advisor or part of the same research group.

This is a really fantastic product. It inculdes well-written and detailed setting, but more importantly it showcases a fabulous cast of fully fleshed out villains. This could be a simple encountered dropped into your existing campaing, but it also could be the seed of an entire campaign arc in itself.

It is detailed, complete, well-edited and extremely well written.

I just finished my PhD, and I was worried this game was going to hit a little too close to home. Not the case! Running the game, I found it incredibly cathartic to sic a demonic Internal Review Board (IRB) on the players' professors, forcing them to publish or perish, and making fun of their meager salaries as adjunct faculty.

My only complaint (and it's a minor one) is that a lot of the special rules work specifically on NPCs, and my players kept trying to pull them on each other. There wasn't a lot of guidance there, although it was easy enough to improvise.

In our first game, one character summoned dead students to fill out another professor's class that was in danger of being canceled due to low enrollment, and the Paraveterinary Department building pulled itself out of its foundations and tried to breed with the Department of Life and Death building (which was completely filled with a multi-limbed amoeba that kept absorbing undergraduates and trying to claim lead author status on everyone else's academic papers).

Brillaint game. I'm glad this sort of thing exists (as much as I'm glad I have friends that enjoyed playing it with me).

Great starting city, and free! I used it as the setting for a city-based campaign and it got great response from my players. I didn't mind that the document was short/brief, because we easily flesched out many other aspects of the city through roleplay. Our group had soon explored the starting adventure fronts, so knowing that the content from certain death was good, I bought "den of theives" which adds and "expansion" adventure front to the city. In both cases I think the NPCs were the highlight. They were imaginative and embraced by my players. The Burrows of the city were disctinctive and had great concepts, although the city quickly swelled in size (from midsize town to metropolis), as my group and I added more and more locations. I would love to see more Overton realated content in the future! You should definately downlowed it as you have nothing to lose, and I suspect if you give it a try you will quickly want to explore the "den of theives."

It is a fact you cannot expect much from a 18-page free setting but I still had the expectation at least it had a map of the area to explore. The descriptions are vague and all the burden of the development falls over the DM who only receives some ideas to develop adventures inside the setting. I am giving 3 out of 5 stars only because it is a free download. There is no way I pay for something similar to this.

Hands down, this is one of the best game pdfsI have read so far this year. I would give it six stars if I could.

The books contains a broad strokes description of a campaign area, with several dungeon areas, several adventurer-appropriate organizations, and a dozen or so NPCs with drives and motives to change the word, challenge the PCS, or cause enough problems to get their attention. The campaign world is not static... change is coming and unless the PCs get in front of it, they'll get swept away by it.

Though written for Dungeon World, I could easily see running this with D&D, Pathfinder or just about any other fantasy rpg system that isn't too outside the mainstream. And the campaign area is written in broad enough strokes that you could - with a bit of pushing and cutting - fit it in an existing campaign world so long as you have a long river valley and some nearby wilderness.

I found this pdf to be well written, easy to read, well illustrated. I enjoyed that the design is clean and easy, the illustrations added to the text instead of being overly indulgent, and there were no annoying style choices (gutter designs, page watermarking, border curliques) that distracted and wasted my ink.

I would recommend this book to anyone interested in a new fantasy campaign and anyone who is a fan of Dungeon World. I will keep an eye on this publisher for future material.