Review: Midgard Campaign Setting

There is a sense in which published campaign settings for Dungeons & Dragons need to justify their own existence.  D&D was originally designed to be a tool-kit for DMs to put together their own settings and fantasy worlds.  And, if you don't want to do that, there are probably two dozen campaign settings around that you can pick from, many of them very good and with as much detail as you could possibly want.  Off the top of my head, even if you just look at very standard Western medieval fantasy settings, you have the Forgotten Realms (the more or less default campaign setting for D&D 5th Edition), Greyhawk, Krynn/Dragonlance, Golarion (for Pathfinder), and Tal'Dorei (i.e. Matt Mercer's campaign world for Critical Role).  Any one of those will give you plenty of hooks to generate a campaign--do you need a new one?

Kobold Press's Midgard setting is not new--it first came out in a comprehensive book form in 2011, and was used in bits and pieces in their adventures and other stuff prior to that--but it is new to me.  I picked up their Tome of Beasts as part of a package deal via "Bundle of Holding," and was impressed with their stuff enough to dig in to Midgard.  They just completed a Kickstarter for a new round of Midgard materials, and I received the pre-orders last week.  While the Kickstarter campaign had more elements than just two, the core components are a Heroes Handbook for 5e (and a series of similar books for other game systems like Pathfinder) and the system-agnostic Midgard Worldbook.

I'll talk briefly about the Heroes Handbook--it is 200+ pages of high quality "crunch."  One of the complaints in some quarters about 5e is the lack of additional options beyond what was found in the Players Handbook--more races, more class choices, more spells, more magic items, etc.  Well, here you go--11 new races (plus variations on existing choices), over 40 additional subclass choices, new feats and backgrounds, some very cool magic options, lots of new spells.  Much of the new stuff is tied thematically to the Midgard setting, but not so closely that you couldn't shave off the serial numbers and repurpose it.  I haven't gone through with a fine-tooth comb to look for balance problems, but nothing jumps out at me as crazy (though, the feasibility of a centaur PC strikes me as very dependent on how the DM/group interprets the logistical problems of a horse-sized, four legged character moving in spaces designed for smaller, two legged folks).  Crunch is hard to review, but it is interesting and flavorful and there is a ton of it, which is basically all you can ask for.

The real meat of the thing, though, is the Worldbook.  One of the key ways that Midgard sets itself apart from other settings is a strong underlying theme.  Many of the settings I referenced above are "blender" settings--you take a bunch of fantasy and D&D tropes, throw them together in a blender, and get an end product.  That's not a criticism, and that can really work well and provide an easy on-ramp to the setting because the component elements are familiar.  But Midgard leans heavily into a core theme, and that theme is Central and Eastern European folklore.  Many of the different kingdoms and other political  divisions have pretty explicit real-world parallels--the Ironcrag Cantons are Switzerland, the Magdar Kingdom is Hungary, Morgau and Doresh is Romania/Transylvania, Vidim is the Grand Duchy of Vladimir (a key component of what later becomes Russia), the Septime city-states are Italy, etc.  Not everything is Central and Eastern European, as there is also a fantasy Scandinavia and fantasy Egypt.  And not all of the political entities have a one-to-one parallel--the Mharoti Empire is kind of its own thing with hints of the Seljuk and Ottoman Turks.  But, by and large, the setting is really grounded in its source material.

Using real world Expys is a love-it-or-hate-it thing, but personally I really like it, because it allows you to tap into historical material for color, without being chained to it (after all, it still is a fantasy world).  Tying it to a reference point lets you flesh out the smaller details of a place by drawing on the historical parallels.  Little things that bring a world to life, like food, can just be ported over--saying that the Magdar Kingdom loves goulash is a cool detail, and one that is much easier than having to invent a fictional cuisine.  Midgard is not the first or only D&D campaign world to do this (Golarion has many real-world parallels), but it does it effectively.

Using Central and Eastern Europe as a source gives the world a different feel.  Most fantasy settings (at least the ones in English) lean heavily on British and French sources for inspiration, such as all of the different versions of Arthurian material.  All of that is basically absent in Midgard--there is no British isles expy at all, and where France and Spain would be on the map is a wasteland left over from a magic war that unleashed Cthulhu-like entities.  Freed of some of that crutch of the familiar, Midgard feels exotic and different from other D&D settings.  But it is not so different that the bulk of the existing D&D material doesn't fit or has to be reworked.  Midgard fits comfortably within the broader world of D&D and can be "picked up and played," but is different enough that people looking for something a little newer will be satisfied.

The other place where the source material comes through is how dark the Midgard setting is.  Most people know that the original Brothers Grimm fairytales are pretty dark, and the Eastern European and Russian material is at least that dark if not moreso.  Midgard keeps all of that, playing out how those ideas and tropes would translate into a world defined by D&D high fantasy conventions.  I was particularly struck by how the section on Morgau and Doresh portrayed a land openly ruled by vampires as genuinely scary and unsettling.  Vampires are so common in fiction that I think they have lost some of their, if I may, bite.  But Midgard really leans all the way in to the implications of vampires as overlords, especially the implicit theme of sexual violence that runs through vampire mythos.  It also does a nice job of pairing that up with the implications of medieval serfdom, a topic that many fantasy worlds minimize or excise completely.  Being a serf under a lord, with only the most nominal restrictions on the lord's discretion, would be a deeply anxiety-producing and fearful existence; making the lord into a vampire just compounds and emphasizes that anxiety and fear.

Honestly, I suspect some folks will find Midgard too dark for their tastes.  Beyond the vampire kingdom, slavery is extremely common (and they don't shy away from talking about how terrible it would be to be a slave) and blood sacrifices and other dark rituals are ubiquitous and not limited to the obvious "black hat" factions.  Midgard is a place where the usually cheerful gnomes worship demonic powers as way to avoid being eaten by the Baba Yaga.  This is not Middle Earth, and there are no obvious white-knight factions and no clean good-versus evil fights.  But it is also not performatively "grimdark," and I think the fact that they are drawing on dark fairytale source material makes all of the dark stuff feel like it is a reasonable extension of the basic premises of the setting as opposed to a cheap exercise in Edge Lord-ism (though, Beldestan and the Despotate of the Ruby Sea walk close to the line).  The tone is not for everyone, but if you are looking for a high-fantasy, D&D style world with a Game of Thrones sensibility, Midgard might be exactly what you are looking for.

Beyond tone, the quality of the material in the Worldbook is very high. The book is almost 500 pages long, so there is a ton of material (though the last 80 pages or so are rules material for both 5e and Pathfinder, which is a little weird given that there are separate crunch books [Edit: based on a podcast with Wolfgang Bauer, the head of Kobold Press, the material in the Worldbook is supposed to be for NPCs only, which makes sense]).  Each major political division and city is described, but given the size of the world there is plenty of room for DMs to add their own stuff.  There are maps of each major region and of key cities, and they are gorgeous (I love RPG maps).  There really aren't any boring regions, but a couple of them really stand out.  Beside the vampire kingdoms I mentioned above, I thought the Italy-inspired Septime cities were interesting both individually and as a group, as well as the post-apocalyptic Western Wastes (along with the paranoid surviving wizard kingdom of Allain) and the weird mirror world of the Shadow Realm (especially the nature loving, heroic talking bears of the Moonlight Glades).  It's all just very well done.

I'd like to talk about one thing that Midgard does especially well, and that is its treatment of religion.  As folks who read my other stuff know, religion is something that I have a pretty serious interest in, and that bleeds over into RPGs--I almost always read the religion section of any campaign book first.  D&D religions are generally perfectly good at providing a vehicle for the cleric to have cool abilities and pretty bad at providing a religious universe that makes any sense, especially from the point of view of a regular lay believer.  Part of the problem is that the medieval world was a monotheistic one, while D&D religions are almost always polytheistic, but without a good understanding of how polytheism operates.  As a result, you end up with settings where each god or goddess functions like a completely self-contained religion in a monotheistic style, which doesn't work--why would any non-cleric, farmer types sign up exclusively for the church of the "God of Lies" or other very narrow divine portfolios?  There are of course settings that are exceptions to this general rule--Glorantha is the best example (not surprising, since it was invented by a mythology scholar), but I think the Eberron campaign setting also does a good job recognizing and avoiding this problem.

Midgard is another setting that does a good job on the religion front.  First, they make the unusual but effective choice to use gods and goddesses from real world mythology.  Thus, instead of coming up with a deity that is basically a re-skinned version of Thor, you just have Thor.  In keeping with the influences, there are Slavic deities, Roman/Greek deities, Egyptian deities, even a couple of Middle Eastern deities for the dragons (anyone up for being a follower of Baal?)  To keep the number of gods and goddesses to a reasonable number, each region, country, and city has between four and six deities that are revered in that area, with one or maybe two as the "patron" of the place.  It means that each area has a polytheistic religious system that is broad enough to make sense for ordinary believers, while still allowing for religious conflict and competing traditions.  Moreover, deities have "masks," which means that two different deities in different regions are probably different masks or versions of the same deity.  In addition to adding a real-world anthropological note (most anthropologists believe that similarities of mythology between cultures are caused by an original Indo-European root for all of them), it drastically simplifies things from a game perspective, since all of the masks provide their clerics with the same or similar abilities.  And the obvious "bad guy" deities, which are good fodder for game purposes but often hard to make sense of in in-world terms, are both very nasty but also have their own internal logic--with Marena, the Red Goddess of blood, child bearing, lust, and undeath worshiped by the vampire lords being a particular stand-out. Some people will not care about this level of detail, but I loved it and thought it added a great deal of verisimilitude and brought the setting to life for me.   A+ from me on that front.

To return to where I started, the Midgard campaign setting is one that absolutely justifies its own existence.  It is not what everyone is looking for, but it is exactly what someone is looking for--a unique, dark fantasy world in a huge, well-defined and evocative setting.  The writing is excellent, and some of the regions are simply brilliant (Morgau and Doresh, the Septimes, the Western Wastes).  It goes to near the top of my list for D&D campaign settings, and with a group that is OK with some edgy material, I think it would make for a really memorable campaign location.  Highly recommended.