Beyond The Pale Review

WasabiBurger reviews Beyond the Pale by @yochaigal (me).

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This is a good review. I like how transparent they are about their expectations going in.

I read the book (thanks Yochai), and I wondered how complex it would be to run at the table. There are quite a few characters and none of them are throwaway set dressing—which is something I liked about it. I think it’s astute of the reviewer that they identified how the book’s structure really encourages reading it all the way through. I did the same thing, which I cannot say for other mystery modules and settings.

Do you plan on making anything like this again, Yochai? Specifically with the setting, themes, and Yiddish? I found the latter particularly evocative and oddly comforting. My family uses a lot of Yiddish because of our old-school German/Polish roots, so it immediately evoked a certain depth, texture, and weight to the Pale settlement. It also reminded me a little of the video game, Disco Elysium, which is unapologetic about its use of French words and pronunciation.

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I’m not sure. I think I’d like to write more in this space, but perhaps not within the RPG sphere. Maybe short stories or something. Writing that book occupied a large part of my mind for quite a while; it feels odd going back there today.

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I don’t know why, I thought Beyond the Pale was a book of monsters. After watching the reviews I’m seeing it’s actually much more than that. I’m suddenly much more interested!

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What a handsome and well-spoken young man!

Joking aside, such an incredible adventure that I’d really love to run again with no real world time constraints and seeing what players do. It feels like the kind of sandbox world that I could run a few more times and have completely different games and outcomes every time.
It’s crazy with how long this video ended up being it still felt like I only scratched the surface of the experience of running it.

My only two regrets are my mistake about missing the regional map for the players and that I didn’t listen to the bonus B2C episode on Beyond The Pale until now which has added a lot of extra context and details that would have been useful for the review.

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Great review, I really appreciate the tips for running it based on table experiences. If I run it I will definitely revisit this video.

Does anyone know if this is available digitally/in PDF? I have limited space so don’t need the digital/physical combo.

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