I really enjoyed reading "The Lonely Coast" by Raging Swan Games this morning. I say this with all sincerity too. It was both pleasurable and entertaining, which cannot always be said in an RPG landscape over-wrought with rules heavy supplements and overtly verbose campaign settings. I enjoy the uncluttered minimalist format inherent in RSG products too: comfortable, clear text, simple mono line art and the absence of flashy gimmicks or hyperactive cover art, yet it's still loaded with fine imaginative content and, for my money (and this one's free anyway), content is king. "The Lonely Coast" delivers quality content in spades, easily worthy of a 5 star rating. It's not error free but the tiny errors I noticed just don't detract enough to worry over.

While I've read and reviewed one other product, this one actually makes me a fan. I'm curious to read the adventures set here, such as "Retribution." However, the area also stands up alone as a great micro setting, added with ease to any world or as the starting area in a world you've not built yet. The "coast" is filled to the brim with flavor too: interesting, colorful people, mysterious places, multitudes of trouble to get into and even minor, simple political intrigue. There's easily enough here upon which to base a starting game setup in a wild and woolly frontier region, rich with ancient tribal history, pirates, thieves, monsters and more--and all elegantly done.

The product range is for levels 1-5 but several sites, a mysteriously glowing conjurer's tower, an abandoned hill fort and the ruin of a sinister abbey all have enough background for expansion to higher levels. As if that's not enough, there's a new minor monster (shadow wolves), a new minor race (half-goblins), some minor deities and plenty of solid encounters and encounter ideas. If you enjoy detailed, low-pressure, minimal prep sandbox-style games you are sure to enjoy this. One could easy sit down and just play. I highly recommend "The Lonely Coast" and I look forward to reviewing other titles in the Raging Swan library.

P.S. Even were I to use not a single word of the "The Lonely Coast" this supplement does something else highly useful: it provides a great format for designing your own campaign regions.

Download this pdf for free and you will get a taste of how great their products generally are. You are basically getting a free campaign world here. Add a little more flesh from your imagination and a few other of the Raging Swan's Products and you have a great jump off point for a hundred different journeys.

Well done!

The Introduction sets the scene: a wild coastal region that lies on the far-flung borders of a powerful kingdom, separated from the comforts of civilisation by wild seas and wilder lands. Definitely a place where adventure might be had, and the Introduction goes on to suggest ways in which this setting might feature in your campaign. Top of the list is the obvious one of being the place in which it's your characters who will be having the adventures, or indeed it could be their homeland. Alternatively, if your characters are at a higher level, perhaps the area's masters, the Lochers, have fallen into disfavour at Court and the characters might be granted the lands in their place...

The history of the area comes next, giving a good overview of the forces that have shaped the area as it is today (and with quite a few items that start spawning adventure ideas as you read through!). This moves on to a gazetteer section, mentioning some notable places (and likely travel times between them, a convenience many a DM who finds producing such estimates on demand hard should appreciate). There's a simple and clear map to show you the lay of the land as well.

If the history and location descriptions have not set your creative juices flowing, several adventure seeds are provided to start you off. There is also a list of rumours, spread them around whilst deciding which are true and what might be going on.

Appendix 1 introduces the half-goblin, a new race which will soon become familiar to those who venture into the massive Tangled Wood that covers much of the inland area. Also presented are shadow wolves, with normal wolf cunning enhanced by ancient druidic magics, and three local deities, if you favour a panoply of gods in your world with many lesser ones popular in particular areas (or you may just like these and wish to make them major deities in your world!).

Appendix 2: On The Road provides five ready-made encounters to drop into your game: each although simple is well-described and detailed, and has the potential for further development if so desired.

A neat and elegant adventure setting, with plenty for the low-level adventurer to see and do, with possibilities for brawling and some intrigue as well. The NPCs all have lives and interests of their own, you can easily imagine the Lonely Coast existing even while the focus of your game is elsewhere, it is a plausible and real place within the context of an alternate reality.

"The Lonely Coast" is a 33 page pdf.

One page front cover, 1 page back cover, 1 page OGL, 1 blank page after the front cover and 3 pages of credits. That leaves 26 pages of material.

First, we get 11 pages of beautifully written, evocative descriptions of the region, painting a rough borderland with a nice, dark old-world touch to it. It's hard to pin down exactly what makes this chapter so atmospheric, but it really draws you in.

After that, we get 2 Appendices.

The first one features the following:
- A new race, the Half-Goblin. Complete with two ready-to-use statblocks, a lore section and all necessary information to use the race. (2 pages)
- A new creature, the shadow wolf. (1 page)
- 3 new (albeit generic) gods (1 page)
- An introduction on how to read statblocks to help novice gamers (1 page)

Appendix 2 features 5 encounters for the road, all with description text, stats and everthing you need to run it. (9 pages)

Production values: The pdf contains a beautiful map of the lonely coast, 7 pieces of beautiful b/w-art and is very well-formatted. I didn't notice editing glitches, typos or the like. It should also be noted, that the pdf is very printer-friendly: If you don't print out the largely black front and back covers, you'll need next to no ink/toner.

Conclusion:
Being an introduction to the easy-to-drop-in location of Raging Swan's modules and supplement, this pdf does a remarkable job of walking the edge between ease of implementation into a given setting and conveying it's very own atmosphere.
It's b/w-art is beautiful and something to show off to your players.
Oh yeah, it's FREE. It's very hard to beat free stuff, especially if the quality is as high as in this pdf. Go check it out. I'll get back to reading the other stuff by Raging Swan.