A terrible Red King wars with an awful Queen, and together they battle into being a rigid, wrong world... and this book has everything you need to run it. (And any other place in your first, second, third, fourth or fifth edition game that might require intrigue, hidden gardens, inside-out-rooms, scheming monarchs, puzzles or beasts, liquid floors, labyrinths, growing, shrinking, duelling, broken time, Mome Raths, blasphemy, croquet, explanations for where players who missed sessions were, or the rotting arcades and parlors of a palace that was once the size of a nation.)
Zak S, game master on I Hit It With My Axe and author of the multiaward-winning Vornheim: The Complete City Kit now brings the same do-it-yourself tables-and-toolkits approach and eerie magic to an entire distorted continent.
“It’s inadequate to call A Red & Pleasant Land brilliant. With alchemist swagger, Zak takes the base matter of well-worn fantasy standards and our cheerful nerd hobbies, and makes the strangest gold.”
— China Miéville
“God this is beautiful, I love this.”
— Molly Crabapple
“It should be next to impossible to do anything original with Dracula or Alice, but Zak S demonstrates instead that it’s next to impossible for him to put out a bad game book. He trails his barbed artistic and gaming sensibilities through these two modern myths and emerges with something more than a mashup or a collage: it’s a necromantic restoration of a nightmare that never was.”
— Kenneth Hite, designer of Qelong and Night’s Black Agents
“Zak is not just imaginative, he’s bold. Which means that while he recognizes the value of fantasy traditions, he doesn’t hesitate for a moment to throw out anything that’s become tired or dull.”
— Monte Cook, author of Numenera