After a year’s wait, the Legend in the Mist, Son of Oak’s “rustic fantasy” roleplaying game, physical product finally arrived. I had Kickstarted the full thing after looking through the Quickstart last year. Since then, my game group has been kicking the tires on Legend in the Mist, since the PDFs dropped last fall, but this past week the physical copies finally arrived. So were they worth the wait?

WordPress has been a bit quicky on multiple images in galleries, so to see the pictures, you might want to pop over to The Black Campbell Review over on Substack.

My box set arrived with the two core books (with optional dust covers), the Hearts of Ravensdale campaign and setting book, GM screen, a pack of maps and tokens, the Action Grimoire, the “river pebble” dice (d12s set up as d6s) and dry-erase theme cards for creating characters, as well as a dozen or so premade characters sheets for the campaign.

The cardboard on the box is high quality and made of good stock, and of course, covered in the excellent artwork from the books. Binding on the books is excellent, and paper and print quality is likewise. The core books and Ravensdale are hard cover, while the Action Grimoire is softcover — however the adhesive quality on the binding is superb. Even the cover sheets on the material are gorgeous and printed on premium stock. The character sheets and theme cards, and the “status/tag leaves” are coated for dry erase use — a handy thing with the system’s creating and “burning” of tags and statuses. We used them this Thursday, and they do the job as they are supposed to. The theme cards I suspect would be more useful for short campaigns or games where the players will be changing their tags and the like frequently.

Most likely, players will wan to create their own characters, but the character pack comes with pre-generated roles. Like the rest of the game materials, SoO really went all out: instead of single sheet character profiles, they are two-page, folding profiles with full artwork, and coated for dry erase use. They include a short “how to play” and example actions for the characters.

The resin “water pebble” dice are in nice pastel colors with a figure are the 6. I have the acorn dice coming next week — did I need them? No, but so far the production quality on this game has been so good, I feel like rewarding the Son of Oak for their efforts. (I bought a set of their acorn d6s, and they are adorable and really lean into the “rustic” flavor.)

The GM screen is on heavy stock and the material is highly useful. With a bit of imagination and creativity, you could probably run the game without any referring to the books, as they give a slew of examples of how to use their tag system for consequences on failure.

If you want a first impression review of the system, you can find it here. So far, our paytests have showed LitM to be quick and easy to play, and it encourages more storytelling and role-playing beats than other fantasy systems. That said, the use of tags and statuses can be a bit of a learning curve, and this ties into character creation. Nearly all of the players leaned heavily on having a lot of tags in their core competencies — this system’s equivalent of min-maxing — and they would frequently find themselves left short on other important skills.

The Heats of Ravensdale setting is well realized, with plenty of places to adventure, more theme kits and challenges that can be used for adventures outside of the setting. (I’ve running a 800s Viking campaign, right now; we’re pulling from it for material.) I haven’t really gone through the book, yet; but from a physical production side — it’s a (rustically?) fantastic product.

So, is Legend in the Mist worth it? Unreservedly, yes. In this case, the whole Ravensdale Bundle runs about $200. Compared to the core books for Dungeons & Dragons, it’s a steal for everything you get.