An Appreciation — and Warning — About QELONG

Qelong is an amazing piece of RPG work. It is a rich setting, with plenty of weird dangers, conflicting factions, mysteries to unravel, and choices to be made about the plight of “others” you have no investment in.

Inside it’s mere 50 pages is an incredible amount of adventuring in a compelling and strange place.

Because it only 50 pages it is dense, with encounter tables for a dozen types of terrain, several cool NPCs, a dangerous goddess trying to escape her imprisonment, and almost two-dozen new beasts and ghosts and things for your PCs to encounter. The land itself is trying to kill you… and I can’t wait to see how my Players handle that.

But because it is so dense, to really bring all of it to the surface to the players is going to take me a good chunk of prep.

I’m rolling up encounters for each beast now, so I have stats and everything ready to go. I’m reworking some of the layout and text so it is things are clear for me.

If I have one complaint, I would have loved a longer book with a lot of the ideas and text unfolded on the page. For most of the Random Encounters, there’s simply no way I could make a random encounter roll, check the monster, and get into combat.

Moreover, the factions, how they are set up, and how they interact require plenty of thought ahead of time.

This isn’t a complaint. I’ve been wanting to run Qelong for two years now. It is why I gathered a group of players for my Lamentations game. And now my players, after piecing together clues about an inter-dimensional war in 17th Century Europe, are about to travel to another world and track down a source of Aakom in the Qelong valley to stop the invasion of Earth by Carcosa. I’m nothing but excited!

I’m just stating a fact. Qelong is awesome. And it is dense.

I think to get everything you can out of it takes some work ahead of time.