Filippo Franco
First of all our thanks to Acheron Books for having made us Ducaconti, that is for having sent us a beautiful Brancalonia bundle in order to write this review. Brancalonia was one of the first projects we carefully followed with No Dice Unrolled. We spread the rumor on 18th February 2020, then we published an interview with the Creative Director Mauro Longo. We read the quickstart full of enthusiasm and hope, writing a preview. We’ve been waiting for a year and a half but now the time has come to write the Brancalonia review. Not simply to explain what it is, but rather to tell you how it is! Has it kept the high expectations we had?
Although you might find it repetitive, for review purposes I have to briefly explain what Brancalonia is. It’s a D&D5e setting that paints an unheroic, picaresque and roguish world that quotes, collects, and mixes references from contemporary Italian fiction and over a hundred works of Italian fantasy tradition, pop culture, and collective imagery. The setting the whole story unfolds is the Kingdom, a peninsula casually shaped like a (inverted) boot and casually full of references, jokes and cameos of Italian literature, cinema and pop culture. Players are asked to play the low-class scoundrels who are usually not mentioned in the great epic tales, but are the undisputed protagonists of the worst stories in the worst taverns of the worst neighborhoods of each city.
Let’s Start Big!
The protagonists may be low-league heroes, but the Brancalonia project has proved to be an epic-level success. In fact the Kickstarter campaign reached the funding threshold in half an hour and, over time, almost 3,300 people have donated over €190,000 which made it possible to create not only the basic manual, but also a first expansion module, the Macaronicon, and many other physical objects that we will show you in our beautiful Ducaconte bundle. The two manuals are available for purchasing on Acheron Books site at 39€ each.
But above all Brancalonia overshadowed 2021’s national achievments such as the victory at the European football championships, the many golds at the Olympics and Paralympics, the triumph at the Eurovision Song Contest. This is because Brancalonia entered the nominations of 4 categories of the famous and highly coveted ENnies Awards, placing itself in each of them! First time that an Italian product gets a gold!
So with Italian pride and with great satisfaction for all those who worked on it and for the community, here is the palmares of Brancalonia:
- Best electronic book – Gold
- Best Writing – Silver
- and Best Setting – Silver
- Product of the Year – Silver
An excellent presentation in view of the most coveted prizes in the playful multiverse, which will arrive at the end of the year, the NDU Awards!
The Ducaconte, a.k.a. the Galactic Megabundle
The cornerstone of the physical material on Brancalonia are the two manuals, identical in their physical characteristics and layout. They are both hardcover, in color, excellently paginated, most pages with two-column portions and others with one column and insights on the side. The predominant colors are red and black, with various shades of scroll-like colors in the background. The visual impact and readability of these two manuals are truly optimal. We will talk about the maps and images that further embellish the pages later.
After the manuals there is the Game Master screen , in three horizontal colored sides, with a splendid illustration by Lorenzo Nuti on the front. By the same author there are also two posters depicting the covers of the manuals and,talking about splendid illustrations, in the bundle there are the A2-sized map of the Kingdom in bloody version and 8 maps of the main cities of the Kingdom signed by Fabio Porfidia. And since there is never enough art of a certain level, there is the Brancalonia artbook. An A5-sized softcover booklet of about fifty pages that collects the drawings of Lorenzo Nuti and other artists who participated in the creation of Brancalonia.
Last but not least the Daily Jinx, number 0 a newspaper-like a collection of material presented with great cheerfulness, which over time has seen the release of other issues..
I can only emphasize the extreme quality of all the materials. From the manufacturing point of view, a great job has been done and I find the value for money very attractive. In fact, not only the evaluative copy arrived in the editorial office: it was impossible to resist the temptation and we took other copies!
The Men (and the Style) that Made It Happen
Before going into the long road that will be this review of Brancalonia, I would like to give credit to all those who contributed to this work, but the names are really many. Brancalonia was born thanks to the collaboration of various signatures, many of them authors of anthologies already published by Acheron Books. At least the important merit of the promoters of the spaghetti fantasy, the creators of Zappa and Spada, the creatives of Ignoranza Eroica, the game experts of Epic Party Games and mostly Mauro Longo.
Mauro Longo is one of the main faces of Brancalonia and its creative director. It is the pen that has amalgamated the various contributions and above all, with its expressive quality, has contributed enormously to paint the right tone and to favor the reader’s immersion in the setting. The language of role play manuals is often standardized. If we exclude the jokes in the lighter passages, a descriptive pragmatism mostly dominates, aimed at depicting rules, places and situations with the utmost clarity. On the other hand, in scrolling through the paragraphs of Brancalonia, there is something different. Although facilitated by the general tone of the work, the phrases, supported by the citations and the lexicon, raise the general level of writing to a quality achieved by few.
Brancalonia in General
An important premise: an enormous part of the value of the product and of my review were bound to the Italian language. My Italian review is mostly based on listing funny and ingenious names, references and word puns. I can’t translate those treasures in English.
After all these preambles how does Brancalonia work? The basis, of course, is D&D5e. But it is only a base, many rules and particularities make this product quite unique and we will see it. The game, carried out by the master who takes the name of Condottiero, has limitations given by the particularity of the setting.
The characters are knaves tied in principle to certain backgrounds and alignments. Brancalonia provides advancement only up to the sixth level. Have you ever seen knaves of a certain level? No! These characters come together in gangs, called to perform criminal “jobs”, attracting the attention of the guards and the bounty hunters. For this reason all the scoundrels of the Kingdom are called Bounty Brothers and the place becomes, in the Italian version, the Kingdom of Taglia (“Taglia” is the italian word for bounty and it sounds almost like “Italia”). The lexicon, situations and rules unfold along these lines.
I want to underline once again how the presence of ad hoc rules creates an important mix between system and setting. This is a sign of quality. The system has been modified to allow you to better appreciate the setting and this interpenetration is a good and important detail.
Review of the Characters of Brancalonia
Describing the Brancalonia races in Italian was the easiest part of this review. I just made a list of the names and they triggered images and memories. For this review in English I understand that these names may not create a spark in your brain and neither will do the other names of the classes and the talents. There are humans, gifted, morgants, sylvans, marionettes (like Pinocchio), malebranches, wolfcats, non-existents and the pantegans..
Let’s talk about classes? There are new subclasses, one per class in the basic manual and another round of possibilities in the Macaronicon, along with a new class, the puppeteer. And with the puppeteer come the puppets, sinking even more deeply into Italian folklore. All those classes and subclasses work finely for creating a unique and goliardic spaghetti fantasy style.
Basic Manual and Macaronicon still share the offer of new personalities and backgrounds, new (poor) equipment and magical junk. In addition, in the basic manual there are also the brancalonian talents.
The Rules that Only Brancalonia Dares to Have
Brancalonia is not just a way to reskin the characters with goliardic spirit. There are a lot of rules that complete the offer of Spaghetti Fantasy fun. I’ve already mentioned how important is for a system to support the setting with its own rules. In this product there are many, some highly recommended, others that are optional based on the flavour you want to give to the game.
Some are fundamental for Brancalonia to be Brancalonia: the cap at the sixth level, the poor equipment, the knave’s rest, which extends the short rest to 8 hours and the long one to 7 days, the Sbraco, as the downtime is called here. There are many other options, the rollick, tavern games, the job hazards. Many ways (and many others) to customize and differentiate Brancalonia according to your needs.
Then, there are the rules for tavern brawl, iconic element of a certain Italian cinema and beyond. It is undeniable that many players love D&D for its fights. Now it is possible to smash bottles on the heads of strangers and fill them with punches. Players have many moves at their disposal and even a secret move, the Ace in the Hole, different for each class. It is a playful and well-regulated moment, with many options, few consequences and a lot of fun.
Brancalonic Guide for Masters
The manual devotes nearly twenty pages to the code of conduct, or the advice for the Game Master. It is a very important and well done part of the manual, because it provides significant details to best outline the Kingdom and its peculiarities. In addition to general explanations, there are important sources on bounties, a handy Dive Generator, and other hilarious tables to get the most out of the Kingdom …
Talking about the Kingdom…
Over 40 dense pages are dedicated to the description of the most scoundrel Kingdom in the world of role-playing games. Trying to describe something just means falling into the trap and publishing a list of names. The names … The expressions, the choices! Brancalonia might just be read for pleasure. Each Italian region is collected, distorted and narrated with interesting glimpses and suggestions for small jobs. In particular the chapter dedicated to the Forgotten Counties is graphically powerful, with entire portions of paragraphs obscured by bloodstains.
Needless to say, the quality of the monsters and recurring opponents presented in the manual is also confirmed. Another aspect that greatly enhances the very rich Italian tradition.
Review of the Jobs of Brancalonia
The adventures, or Jobs, make up another Brancalonia masterpiece. There are 6 in the basic manual and another 6 in the Macaronicon. I have not read them all, but I could not tell you anything the same because, as usual, we are spoiler-free.
As I said previously, I can’t share with non Italian readers the number of interesting quotes enriching the adventures written in the two manuals. Apart from that, the stories are funny and brillantly written. They reveal to players a lot of Italian folklore and popular tropes. They are essential to properly understand and master the Spaghetti Fantasy style.
The Daily Jinx and the Community
The bundle of the Ducaconte is completed with the nice number zero of the Daily Jinx. A real magazine, complete with absurd advertisements and hilarious blurbs, which enriches the world of Brancalonia and offers readers new information, new insights and a new adventure. In the meantime, three more issues of this periodical have come out, available on DrivethruRPG.
These products demonstrate the desire to carry on the game project in a structured way, thanks also to an important community. The immense basin from which to draw to create new content or even just jokes, memes or names has stimulated the imagination and generated a passionate and intense response from the public. On the other hand, it is asking a nation to come up with the most popular and iconic elements of what they have read, watched, listened to and experienced in the last decades of their country.
Review of the Art of Brancalonia
Such a long review allowed me to showcase many of Brancalonia‘s illustrations. I don’t think there is much to discuss about the average quality of the drawings, framed by a layout that I have already praised and of which I emphasize once again the excellent rendering and the excellent choice of the color palette.
The style chosen to visually accompany the products is in my opinion very apt. It brings to mind something already seen, including comics and illustrations in newspapers and magazines that have filled the Italian peninsula. At the same time, through slightly more medieval traits, it helps to place the setting chronologically. Everything is however harmonized, colored and finalized with great quality and modernity. I’m not exactly sure what I wrote, but certainly if you have looked at the images on this page you will have got a very good idea.
I have to quote also the maps of Fabio Porfidia. A must, quality seal. An addition of value perfectly integrated into the graphic design.
The Weight of Columbus’s Egg
I would like to add one more point to this Brancalonia review. The idea is simple and brilliant. But an idea is not enough. Once they had the epiphany, the abundance of the Italic tradition must have been a cornucopia. An inexhaustible mine of inspiration. So in some ways it was easy to tap into such a generous source to fill the manuals with brilliant content.
I would just like to point out, however, that when one takes inspiration from well known and loved fratures of a national pop culture, there is also a dark side. The love that drives us to look and become curious to see certain caricatures, to read certain names, to discover certain puns, is also accompanied by the demand that such love be repaid with content of similar level. In short, you can’t touch Bud Spencer, Roberto Benigni, Cristiano De André, Adriano Celentano, Vittorio Gassman (just to name a few) if you don’t make a quality product.
In short, the brilliant idea of Brancalonia gives me the impression of having been a double-edged sword. And the result is a double merit. On the one hand the merit of having achieved such a brilliant intuition and on the other hand having kept expectations.
Final Consideration on this Review of Brancalonia
The result of the ENnies says so. The success of the Kickstarter project says so. And the size of the community also says so. I’ve said it a bunch of times in this review: Brancalonia is one of the brightest products on the RPG landscape in recent years. A brilliant idea has been transformed into a great project with top quality from every point of view. This is confirmed by international awards. Obtained despite the English translation losing the beauty of so many phrases and puns and despite the distance from our culture of readers from other countries.
Summary Brancalonia is a superlative product. Excellently illustrated and paginated, beautifully written, full of personality and playful possibilities. It is a highly recommended purchase to enjoy fun and grungy adventures and campaigns, with surreal and very evocative characters. It is also worth buying simply for reading it, although in this case you will hardly resist taking it to a game table!
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